Rugby, Warwickshire

Coordinates: 52°22′N 1°16′W / 52.37°N 1.26°W / 52.37; -1.26

Rugby is a market town in Warwickshire, England, on the River Avon. The town has a population of 70,628 (2011 census) making it the second largest town in the county. The enclosing Borough of Rugby has a population of 100,500 (2011 census).

Rugby is 13 miles (21 km) east of Coventry, on the eastern edge of Warwickshire, near the borders with Northamptonshire and Leicestershire.

The town is credited with being the birthplace of rugby football.

History

Early Iron age settlement existed in the Rugby area, and a few miles outside what is now Rugby, existed a Roman settlement known as Tripontium. Rugby was originally a small Anglo-Saxon farming settlement, and was mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086 as Rocheberie. Rugby obtained a charter to hold a market in 1255, and soon developed into a small country market town.

The name's likeliest origin is Anglo-Saxon Hrōca burh or similar = "Rook fort", where Rook may be the bird or may be a man's name. Another theory is that the name is originally derived from an old Celtic name Droche-brig meaning "wild hilltop". The change to -by is because of Viking influence: there are other place names ending in -by in the area ('By' meaning town in Norwegian, Swedish and Danish even today).

Warwickshire

Warwickshire (ⁱ/ˈwɒrᵻkʃə/ or /ˈwɒrᵻkʃɪər/) is a landlocked non-metropolitan county in the West Midlands region of England. The county town is Warwick, although the largest town is Nuneaton. The county is famous for being the birthplace of William Shakespeare, George Eliot, & Aleister Crowley. Commonly used abbreviations for the county are Warks or Warwicks.

The county is divided into five districts of North Warwickshire, Nuneaton & Bedworth, Rugby, Warwick and Stratford-on-Avon. The current county boundaries were set in 1974 by the Local Government Act 1972. The historic county boundaries also included Coventry and Solihull, as well as much of Birmingham.

For Eurostat purposes it is a NUTS 3 region (code UKG13) and is one of three counties that comprise the "Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Warwickshire" NUTS 2 region.

Geography

The county is bordered by Leicestershire to the northeast, Staffordshire to the northwest, Worcestershire and the West Midlands to the west, Northamptonshire to the east and southeast, Gloucestershire to the southwest and Oxfordshire to the south. The northern tip of the county is only 3 miles (5 km) from the Derbyshire border. An average-sized English county covering an area of almost 2,000 km², it runs some 60 miles (97 km) north to south. Equivalently it extends as far north as Shrewsbury in Shropshire and as far south as Banbury in north Oxfordshire.

Warwickshire (UK Parliament constituency)

Warwickshire was a parliamentary constituency in Warwickshire in England. It returned two Members of Parliament (MPs), traditionally known as knights of the shire, to the House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom, elected by the bloc vote system.

History

Boundaries and franchise

The constituency, which seems first to have returned members to Parliament in 1293, consisted of the historic county of Warwickshire, excluding the city of Coventry which had the status of a county in its itself after 1451. (Although Warwickshire also contained the borough of Warwick and part of the borough of Tamworth, each of which elected two MPs in its own right for part of the period when Warwickshire was a constituency, these were not excluded from the county constituency, and owning property within the borough could confer a vote at the county election. This was not the case, though, for Coventry.)

As in other county constituencies the franchise between 1430 and 1832 was defined by the Forty Shilling Freeholder Act, which gave the right to vote to every man who possessed freehold property within the county valued at £2 or more per year for the purposes of land tax; it was not necessary for the freeholder to occupy his land, nor even in later years to be resident in the county at all.