Administrative Centre and Market Town
New Radnor when it was the county town had its own Court. The honour later passed to Presteigne. The old Town Hall is still in the village today. The town used to have its own regular markets, including a livestock market held once a week throughout the year. But this is no longer the case.
The parliamentary seat of Radnor was sometimes involved in turbulent local politics, as in 1693 when two rival families the Lewis's (Whigs) and the Harley's (Tories) met on the High Street in New Radnor and drew swords, such was the bad blood between them. One man involved, later Sir Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford and Mortimer, becoming MP, three times Speaker of the House of Commons and also Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1710 and later Lord High Treasurer, and very nearly Prime Minister. But he was to be dismissed by the Queen, imprisoned in The Tower in 1715. He died in 1724 and is buried in Brampton Bryan.
Read more about this topic: New Radnor
Famous quotes containing the words centre, market and/or town:
“To live and die amongst foreigners may seem less absurd than to live persecuted or tortured by one’s fellow countrymen.... But to emigrate is always to dismantle the centre of the world, and so to move into a lost, disoriented one of fragments.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“A sentimentalist, my dear Darlington, is a man who sees an absurd value in everything, and doesn’t know the market price of any single thing.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“Every town which we passed, if we may believe the Gazetteer, had been the residence of some great man. But though we knocked at many doors, and even made particular inquiries, we could not find that there were any now living.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)