Warwickshire is a historic county of the West Midlands, its name derived from the Saxon Waeringscire, meaning a station or fortified place of soldiers. It is bounded by Staffordshire to the north, Leicestershire and Northamptonshire to the east, Gloucestershire to the south-west, and Oxfordshire to the south-east, extending some forty-seven miles in length and containing 670,000 acres, with one city, twelve market towns and a population of some 200,000. The River Avon divides the county in two: the Woodland to the north, once heavily forested but increasingly cleared and turned to tillage and pasture as its timber was consumed by the growing iron trade, and the Feldon to the south, open and arable, both halves praised for rich soil producing excellent corn and cheese.
Warwickshire's coal measures, lying in places close to the surface, fed an industry that was, by the 1770s, drawing the county steadily toward the manufacturing economy taking shape across the wider Midlands, centred on Birmingham, which though not yet formally a borough was already a byword for metalworking and small manufactured goods. The Avon itself, flowing through Rugby, Warwick and Stratford before entering Worcestershire, linked the county's market towns, while inland canal navigation was beginning, in these same years, to connect Warwickshire's rivers to a national network reaching the Mersey, Severn, Trent and Thames.
Warwick Castle, rising above the Avon and among the best-preserved medieval fortresses in England, and Kenilworth Castle nearby, once the scene of lavish entertainments for Elizabeth I, were the county's grandest antiquities, while Stratford-upon-Avon's parish church, burial place of William Shakespeare, had already begun to draw literary pilgrims by the eighteenth century. Coventry, with its ancient guildhalls and churches, and the battlefield of Edgehill, site of the first major clash of the English Civil War in 1642, gave historic Warwickshire a concentration of military, literary and architectural history unusual even among English counties.