Taunton

The borough, castle and manor of Taunton, owned by the diocese of Winchester, were sequestered by the Crown in 1559, on the deprivation of the Marian bishop, White, leased to Sir Francis Knollys in 1561, and returned to the see of Winchester by 1575. The borough was not incorporated in this period, and was administered by the court leet of the lord of the manor. Returns were made by the constables of the borough and the burgesses.2R. G. H. Whitty, ‘Taunton under the Tudors and Stuarts’ (London Univ. Ph.D. thesis 1938), passim; CPR, 1560-3, pp. 16, 146; CSP Dom. 1547-80, p. 159; Toulmin, Taunton, 295, 308, 311.

If Taunton sent representatives to Elizabeth’s first Parliament, their names have not survived. In 1563 the likelihood is that Knollys brought in the two Members, but in 1571 two local men were returned, a Taunton merchant (Robert Hill) and a local gentleman (Richard Blount I). The 1572 Members were Roger Hill, a local lawyer (no relation to Robert, apparently) and Blount again. After his death, Blount was replaced in 1575 by Edmund Hody, a local country gentleman. By 1584 the borough was back in the hands of the see of Winchester and from then returned at least one episcopal nominee to each Parliament. John Goldwell, who sat three times, was Bishop Cooper’s son-in-law. William Aubrey (1593), Edward Barker (1597) and Daniel Dunne (1601) were all civil lawyers holding ecclesiastical office. In 1586 Francis Bacon was probably also an episcopal nominee, Archbishop Whitgift having formerly been his tutor at Cambridge. The remaining Taunton MPs were either from local gentry families, like Alexander Pym (1584), Maurice Horner (1585), John Davidge (1593) and Edward Hext (1597), or townsmen, like Thomas Fisher II (1589), a Taunton merchant, and John Bond (1601), a schoolmaster.