of Evesham. It then remained a royal manor until Charles I granted it to several citizens of London. In 1318 Boroughbridge was devastated by the Scots under Sir James Douglas following the Capture of Berwick upon Tweed. In 1322 the Battle of Boroughbridge took place as King Edward II overpowered Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, bringing about the end of Edward II's retaliation against those who had opposed him in the Despenser War of 1321–22. Modern From medieval times Boroughbridge was part of the parish of Aldborough in the West Riding of Yorkshire. In 1553 it became a parliamentary borough, electing two Members of Parliament to the unreformed House of Commons. It had a burgage franchise, meaning that the right to vote was tied to ownership of certain of property in the borough and had fewer than 100 qualified voters by the time it was abolished in the Reform Act of 1832. It was a pocket borough under the control of the Dukes of Newcastle. Augustus FitzRoy, who was Prime Minister as the 3rd Duke of Grafton, was elected MP for Boroughbridge in 1756 but never sat for the borough, preferring to represent Bury St Edmunds, where he had also been elected. Boroughbridge was an important stage for stagecoaches because of its position on the Great North Road midway between London and Edinburgh. An advertisement in the Edinburgh Courant for 1754 reads: Boroughbridge became a separate civil parish in 1866. In 1938 the civil parish absorbed the parishes of Aldborough and Minskip. In 1945 the bridge carrying the A1 road over the River Ure collapsed under the weight of a heavy vehicle carrying an 80-ton steel mill roll housing from Sheffield to Falkirk. The incident interrupted the main transport route for a short time and the army installed a Bailey bridge until repairs were completed. In 1974 Boroughbridge was transferred from the West Riding to the new county of North Yorkshire. In 2011 the town's sewage works, which serves a population of ten thousand, was upgraded, with the old bar screens, which had reached the end of their working life, being replaced with modern wire-mesh drum screens able to screen out an increasingly large amount of undesirable waste and also filter grit and fat, thus decreasing the load on the plant. They were designed to meet the plant's stringent outfall requirements as set out by the Environment Agency. The settling and