Worcestershire is a historic county of the West Midlands, bounded by Staffordshire to the north, Warwickshire to the east and north-east, Shropshire and Herefordshire to the west, and Gloucestershire to the south. Eighteenth-century surveys measured it at about thirty-five miles long and twenty-seven broad, some 540,000 acres divided into seven hundreds, with one city, ten market towns and a population of nearly 124,000, lying wholly within the diocese of Worcester. The Vale of Evesham, rich in corn and fruit, particularly pears, was already known as the granary of the surrounding region, while the Malvern Hills, rising abruptly from the Severn plain, offered the county's sole significant high ground and fed considerable flocks of sheep on their slopes.
Worcestershire's chief commodities were characteristically varied: coal, cloth, cheese, salt from the ancient brine springs at Droitwich, and both cider and perry pressed from the county's abundant orchards. The Severn, the second longest river in Britain, ran the length of the county and, together with its tributaries the Teme and the Avon, linked Worcestershire by water to a trading network extending far beyond its borders, carrying the county's produce toward Gloucester, Bristol and the sea.
Worcester Cathedral, burial place of King John, stood as the county's principal monument, while the ruined abbey at Great Malvern beneath its namesake hills, and the bell tower at Evesham, recalled a substantial monastic past largely swept away at the Dissolution. Hartlebury Castle, seat of the Bishops of Worcester since the ninth century, and the landscaped grounds at Hagley Park, laid out in the picturesque taste fashionable in the mid-eighteenth century, gave Worcestershire, for all its modest size, a notable concentration of ecclesiastical and aristocratic building set within some of the most fertile farmland in the Midlands.