Beverley

Coordinates: 53°50′42″N 0°25′37″W / 53.845°N 0.427°W / 53.845; -0.427

Beverley is a market town, civil parish and the county town of the East Riding of Yorkshire, England. The town is noted for Beverley Minster, Beverley Westwood, North Bar (a 15th-century gate) and Beverley Racecourse. Its namesake serves as the origins for the cities of Beverly, Massachusetts, and, in turn, Beverly Hills in California.

The town was originally known as Inderawuda and was founded around 700 AD by Saint John of Beverley during the time of the Anglian kingdom of Northumbria. After a period of Viking control, it passed to the Cerdic dynasty, a period during which it gained prominence in terms of religious importance in Great Britain. It continued to grow especially under the Normans when its trading industry was first established. A place of pilgrimage throughout the Middle Ages due to its founder, it eventually became a notable wool-trading town. Beverley was once the tenth-largest town in England, as well as one of the richest, because of its wool and the pilgrims who came to venerate its founding saint, John of Beverley. After the Reformation, the regional stature of Beverley was much reduced.

Beverley (borough)

Coordinates: 53°47′38″N 0°24′58″W / 53.794°N 0.416°W / 53.794; -0.416

Beverley was a local government district and borough of Humberside, England, from 1974 to 1996.

It was formed on 1 April 1974 by the merger of the previous borough of Beverley, with Beverley Rural District and Haltemprice Urban District. Its name was formally changed by the council to East Yorkshire Borough of Beverley in 1981.

On 1 April 1996, Humberside was abolished along with the borough, and the area become part of a unitary East Riding of Yorkshire.

References

Beverley (UK Parliament constituency)

Beverley has been the name of a parliamentary constituency in the East Riding of Yorkshire for three separate periods. From medieval times until 1869, it was a parliamentary borough, consisting solely of the market town of Beverley, which returned two Members of Parliament to the House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom.

The name was revived for a single-member county constituency created in 1950, but abolished in 1955, and again between the 1983 and 1997 general elections, after which the Beverley constituency was largely incorporated into the new Beverley and Holderness constituency.

History

The Parliamentary Borough

Beverley was first represented in the Model Parliament of 1295, but after 1306 it did not elect members again until 1563. Thereafter it maintained two members continuously until being disfranchised in 1870. The borough consisted of the three parishes of the town of Beverley, and by 1831 had a population of 7,432 and 1,928 houses. The right of election was vested not in the population as a whole, but in the freemen of the borough, whether resident or not; at the contested election of 1826, 2,276 votes were cast. The town was of a sufficient size for the borough to retain its two members in the Great Reform Act of 1832, although its boundaries were slightly extended to include some outlying fringes, increasing the population by roughly 800.