Gloucestershire is a historic county of the western Midlands, bounded by Herefordshire and Monmouthshire to the west, Worcestershire to the north, Warwickshire and Oxfordshire to the east, and Wiltshire and Somerset to the south. Eighteenth-century surveys measured it at sixty-five miles long and thirty-two broad, some 800,000 acres divided among twenty-seven market towns and 280 parishes, with a population of over 162,000. Few counties were reckoned so richly provided for: antiquarian writers praised its abundance of grain, cattle, game, bacon, fish and, above all, its cider and cheese, alongside an estimated 400,000 sheep and an annual output of more than 50,000 pieces of woollen cloth.
The county divides naturally into three bands running roughly north to south: the Cotswold Hills in the east, whose close-cropped turf fed vast flocks of sheep and whose wool built the great 'wool churches' of towns such as Cirencester and Northleach; the broad, fertile Severn valley at its centre, including the celebrated Vale of Evesham on its northern edge, famous for wheat; and the Forest of Dean to the west, once a vast oak woodland whose timber was consumed in large part by the iron industry that grew up around its mineral deposits. The Severn itself, alongside tributaries such as the Windrush, Evenlode and Avon, drained the county towards the Bristol Channel.
Gloucester Cathedral, with its cloisters and the tomb of Edward II, stood as the county's principal antiquity, alongside the great abbey church at Tewkesbury and the castles of Berkeley and Sudeley. Bristol, then still substantially within the historic county before its own status grew, contributed Clifton and St Vincent's Rock as noted beauty spots above the Avon Gorge. Together this variety of hill, vale and forest gave historic Gloucestershire an unusually complete cross-section of the English rural economy within a single county boundary.