Devon

The county of Devon which spanned the central third of England’s south-western peninsula owed its character in no small degree to its long northern and southern coastlines. Separated from Cornwall by the river Tamar to the west, and from Somerset and Dorset by Exmoor and the Blackdown hills to the east, its coastline on the English Channel to the south and the Irish Sea to the north was intersected by the estuaries of the rivers Exe, Teign, Dart, Tamar, Torridge and Taw, at whose mouths as well as further inland prosperous harbour towns developed. Maritime industries were, not surprisingly, crucial for the county’s medieval economy. Here, legitimate trade and shipping ventures, such as the transport of pilgrims to Santiago, went hand in hand with profitable privateering activities in the Channel, in which merchants, shipmen and local gentry all participated. The loss of the English possessions in France in the course of the 1440s and early 1450s had an impact on Devon’s fortunes, already hit by the more general economic downturn, as the loss of the English lands in Gascony led to a decline in the wine trade. Not until later in the fifteenth century did the county’s trade recover, and a new prosperity emerge as shipments of cloth increased.1 W.G. Hoskins, ‘Wealth of Med. Devon’, in Devonshire Studies. ed. Hoskins and Finberg, 233-44; English Trade in 15th Cent. ed. Power and Postan, 337-9. Albeit to a lesser extent than in Cornwall, mining also formed a part of Devon’s economy. Western Devon possessed four designated stannary districts, mainly on the moorlands of Dartmoor in the heart of the county, focused on Chagford, Ashburton, Tavistock and Plympton, while silver was mined at Bere Ferrers and Combe Martin.2 P. Claughton, ‘Silver-Lead’, in Mining before Powder, ed. Ford and Willies, Bull. Peak District Mines Hist. Soc. xii (3), 54-59; idem, ‘The Lumburn Leat’, in Archaeology of Mining and Metallurgy ed. Newman, Mining Hist. xiii (2), 35-40.

From the late thirteenth century, the leading family in the county was that of Courtenay of Okehampton, whose head was recognized by Edward III in 1335 as earl of Devon, on the strength of the Courtenays’ descent from the de Reviers earls. In the first quarter of the fifteenth century, the family’s fortunes were marred first by the incapacitation of Earl Edward (d.1419) by blindness, and then by the death in rapid succession of his two sons Sir Edward (who died in his father’s lifetime) and Hugh (d.1422), who held the earldom for less than three years. Earl Hugh’s death left as the heir his son Thomas, a boy of eight, and thus unable to fill his family’s traditional place in county society until he came of age.3 CP, iv. 324; M. Cherry, ‘Crown and Political Community, Devon’ (Univ. of Wales, Swansea Ph.D. thesis, 1981), 10-12, 174-98, 218-38; idem, ‘Struggle for Power’, in Patronage, Crown and Provinces ed. Griffiths, 123-5. Of the several other peers with concerns in Devon pre-eminent in terms of their social status were the dukes of Exeter (previously earls of Huntingdon), who had a seat at Dartington. Introduced to the county by Richard II in the 1380s, the family had been stripped of its ducal title after Henry IV’s accession, and John Holand, the first duke, had been executed in 1400 for plotting against the new King, but the conspicuous loyalty of his son and namesake saw the latter restored to the earldom of Huntingdon in 1417, and to the dukedom of Exeter in 1444. When the second John Holand died in 1447, his son and heir, Henry, was just 17 years old. Duke Henry, granted livery of his estates in 1450, proved to be a volatile and unstable character, although fortunately for the inhabitants of Devon most of his adventures took him away from the region.4 CP, v. 195-9, 205-15; M.M.N. Stansfield, ‘Holland Fam.’ (Oxf. Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1987), 80-94, 121-50, 175-256. The principal barons with landholdings in the county included the Lords Hungerford, Cobham (Sir Thomas Brooke*, recognized as such jure uxoris in 1434, who passed the title to their son Sir Edward* in 1442), Bonville of Shute and Fitzwaryn (both ennobled in 1449).5 Cherry, ‘Crown and Political Community’, 81-120.

Below the ranks of the baronage, the wealthiest landowners in Devon were the Dynhams of Nutwell, who after the death of the unruly head of the family, Sir John, in 1427, achieved a degree of rehabilitation under his son and namesake. Yet the younger John Dynham played only a limited part in county administration, leaving the burden of local government to a group of important gentry families of somewhat lesser wealth, chief among whom were the Beaumonts, Chudleighs, Pomeroys and various cadet branches of the comital Courtenays. As the fifteenth century went on, these families of inherited wealth were increasingly joined in the ranks of the county elite by new men, members of families who made their fortunes particularly through the practice of the law. Among the most important of these were the descendants of Chief Justice Sir William Hankford (through whom the barony of Fitzwaryn passed to the Bourgchiers), and the Fortescues, a family of Courtenay clients who in the brothers Henry† and (Sir) John Fortescue*, respectively chief justices of Ireland and England, supplied two of the most prominent men of law of their generation.

The secular landowners aside, the bishopric of Exeter, which encompassed the entire south-western peninsula of England, was from 1420 to 1455 held by Edmund Lacy, a prelate committed to the care of his diocese. On his death, the cathedral chapter chose to succeed him John Hals, who belonged to a local family with ties to the Courtenay earls, but under pressure of the Neville earls of Salisbury and Warwick, then in the political ascendant, the election was set aside in favour of Salisbury’s younger son, George Neville. The county was also home to a number of religious houses, including five Cistercian abbeys, the Benedictine abbey at Tavistock, the Augustinian abbey at Hartland, and the Premonstratensian abbey at Torre, nunneries at Canonsleigh and Teignmouth, and a number of priories, as well as houses of the various orders of friars concentrated in the ports of Exeter, Dartmouth and Plymouth. Only the head of Tavistock abbey was of sufficient importance to be summoned to Parliament in his own right.

The vacuum of power left by the minority of Thomas Courtenay, earl of Devon, was filled by a group of men with close ties to Sir Walter Hungerford†, subsequently Lord Hungerford, the steward of the Household of the young King Henry VI and later treasurer of England (from 1426 to 1432). The group was headed by Sir William Bonville, backed up by his close associate (Sir) Philip Courtenay of Powderham – the earl’s cousin and Hungerford’s son-in-law. From the mid 1430s, when he formally came of age, the young earl increasingly began to assert himself in local politics, and thus before long came into open conflict with Bonville. Existing tensions between the two men were exacerbated by the government’s mishandling of the appointment of the royal steward of the duchy of Cornwall in their county, an office which for much of the 1430s had been held by Sir Philip, but which after 1437 repeatedly changed hands between the earl and Bonville. After 1450, the private quarrel between the now ennobled Bonville and the earl was drawn into the wider aristocratic conflict over the governance of the realm, as the two peers respectively associated themselves with Henry VI’s court and his successive ministers, the dukes of Suffolk and Somerset on the one hand, and the monarch’s close kinsman, Richard, duke of York, who from that date positioned himself as the administration’s chief critic. In the autumn of 1451 Earl Thomas led an armed force from Devon into Somerset, and laid siege to Bonville in Taunton castle. On this occasion he was dissuaded from his course of action by the duke of York, but the following spring it was in association with York that he once again marched his retainers east. The earl’s arrest at Dartford that February gave the county of Devon scant breathing space before, in the spring of 1454, he unleashed a fresh campaign of violence. This enterprise culminated in the autumn of 1455, when the earl occupied the city of Exeter, laid siege to Sir Philip Courtenay in Powderham castle, and conducted a series of raids on the houses of Bonville’s friends and retainers, in the course of which his sons murdered the lawyer Nicholas Radford. On 15 Dec. Bonville and Devon faced each other in a pitched, if inconclusive battle on Clyst Heath. Hearing news of events in the west the Lords in Parliament agreed to re-appoint York as Protector, and he eventually brought the disorder to an end by placing the earl of Devon under arrest. Yet peace was short-lived: Earl Thomas regained his freedom early in the new year as York’s protectorate drew to a close, and before long he once more began his sabre rattling. In April 1456 his men again occupied Exeter, but in August a powerful commission headed by the earl of Wiltshire and Chief Justice Fortescue and backed by ‘right a great fellowship’ managed to conduct an inquiry into the previous year’s disorder, and may have made an impression on the earl, whose armed campaigns now came to an end.6 R.L. Storey, End of House of Lancaster, 84-92, 99-101, 167-75; Cherry, ‘Struggle for Power’, 123-44; idem, ‘Crown and Political Community’, 218-331; H. Kleineke, ‘Exeter in the Wars of the Roses’, in The Fifteenth Cent. VII ed. Clark, 142-3, 155.

The Devon county elections were in this period invariably held in the shire court at Exeter castle. This court met once every four weeks, on a Tuesday. Frequently, this time-table left the sheriff little choice as to the date of the election after he received a writ of summons; but in spite of the injunction that the election should be held at the first county court after the receipt of the royal mandate it appears that if time permitted the sheriff held the election on the latest possible date. One reason for this delay may have been to allow the urban constituencies in the shire to hold their own elections and report the results to him on the same day. Another was the time it took for the writ to reach the sheriff. In 1447 Henry Fortescue maintained that it was not until 14 Jan. that he received the instructions issued on 14 Dec. 1446 to conduct elections to the Parliament planned to assemble at Cambridge; accordingly, he had held the elections on 31 Jan., ten days before the Lords and Commons were to meet, and 11 days after their meeting place had (possibly without his knowledge ) been moved to Bury St. Edmunds. Previously, in 1436 the need to reconcile the two writs of 29 Oct. and 10 Dec. (respectively summoning Parliament to Cambridge and Westminster), with changing events had proved beyond the sheriff’s clerk. It is uncertain whether the elections were held on 20 Nov. or 18 Dec., although the latter date seems more probable. When making his return, Sir Thomas Beaumont endorsed the earlier of the two writs with the claim that he had held the election on ‘Tuesday 18 Nov.’ (in reality, a Sunday, two days before the normal county day), while the accompanying indenture was even less plausibly dated to ‘Tuesday 28 Dec.’ (a Friday, ten days after that month’s meeting of the county court).7 C219/15/1, 4.

Returns survive for 18 of the 22 elections held between 1422 and 1460; those for 1439, 1445, 1459 and 1460 are lacking (although the names of Devon’s MPs in 1439 and 1445 are known from other sources). The returns normally took the form of an indenture recording the names of the two knights of the shire, accompanied by a schedule listing in addition those who had been returned by the county’s parliamentary boroughs. In accordance with the electoral statute of 1406, the sheriff’s indentures were counter-sealed by a number of men who had been present in the shire court. In 1407 and April 1413 several of those sealing the indenture had done so expressly in their capacity as ‘stewards’ or attorneys of greater men. In 1407 the earl of Devon, the bishop of Exeter and the dean and chapter of his cathedral church, the abbots of Buckfast, Tavistock, Buckland and Forde, the prior of Plympton, Sir John Dynham, Sir John Pomeray† and Thomas, the so-called ‘baron’ Carew, had all been so represented, while in 1413 the stewards of the earl of Devon and bishop of Exeter had been joined by those of the earl of Salisbury, the abbots of Tavistock, Buckland and Dunkeswell, of other (unnamed) lords, and even of the King himself.8 C219/10/4; 11/1. In the reign of Henry VI, the stewards of these and other magnates continued to seal the electoral indentures, but they no longer did so expressly on behalf of their masters. John Copplestone, the long-serving steward to Bishop Lacy, as well as to a number of other lords, was a regular attender at the elections, as was the earl of Devon’s under steward, William Bishop*, and in the first years of the reign Dynham’s steward, John Marshall†, was also usually present.9 H. Kleineke, ‘Dinham Fam.’ (Univ. of London Ph.D. thesis, 1998), 144, 194. Moreover, the complete absence from the ranks of the attestors of many of the leading landowners in the county lends further support to the hypothesis that they made their influence felt in other ways.

It was usual for between 20 and 30 individuals to set their seals to the indentures, among them more often than not one or two of the county coroners. The indentures of 1426 and 1433 were counter-sealed by unusually low numbers of men (14 and ten respectively), while at the other end of the spectrum that of 1423 (attested by no fewer than 47 individuals), also stands out, along with those of 1427 and 1455, which had 36 and 37 seals appended. Even these greater numbers are, however, unlikely to have been representative of the true attendance at the county’s elections. In 1434, the writ instructing Bishop Lacy and the shire’s two knights in the previous Parliament, Philip Cary and Roger Champernowne, to summon some 74 individuals to take the general oath against maintenance reached the recipients too late to make the requisite proclamation by the deadline set. The commissioners thus administered the oath simply to all those who happened to be attending the county court, and on that day were able to swear in no fewer than 56 individuals (although the absentees did include four out of the six knights summoned).10 CPR, 1429-36, pp. 398-9; Reg. Lacy, i (Canterbury and York Soc. lx), 277.

The inhabitants of Devon’s parliamentary boroughs ought to have played no part in the shire elections in the county court, but some of their number, particularly the citizens of Exeter, did so from time to time. Thus, in 1423 John Hull*, the newly-elected receiver of Exeter, and Robert Vessy*, a former receiver and future mayor of the city, as well as John Coscombe and William Overton, two members of Exeter’s council of 12, sealed the sheriff’s indenture; the attestors of 1432 included both William and Thomas Cook I*, respectively the serving mayor and his brother and successor, as well as the immediate past mayor, Hull; those of 1435 the councilman and former mayor John Shillingford*, along with the serving mayor of Dartmouth, Nicholas Stebbing*; and those to the Parliament of 1437 the serving mayor of Exeter, John Cutler alias Carwithan*. Less clearly defined was the status of Exeter’s successive recorders William Wynard and Nicholas Radford, who were regular attenders at the county elections, and the county coroner John Kyrton, who attended the shire court ex officio, was also active on the city’s council. Yet other townsmen were found among the attestors for the Parliaments of 1425, 1429, 1431, 1433, February 1449 and 1453.

As far as it is possible to tell, Devon’s MPs were normally paid the standard wages of 4s. per day, and were also allowed payment for several days’ travel to and from the meeting place of Parliament – in 1442 for a total of 14 days. That year, the county’s representatives, Thomas Carminowe and Robert Hill, evidently experienced some difficulty in securing payment, and took recourse to litigation against the sheriff, William Wadham.11 H. Kleineke, ‘Payment’, Parlty. Hist. xxvi. 283-4; Parliamentarians at Law ed. Kleineke, 372.

The names of Devon’s representatives are known for all but the last two of the 22 Parliaments of Henry VI’s reign. Twenty-four individuals represented the shire in the course of the period, of whom just nine sat in Parliament only a single time. Four others (Champernowne, Cole, Courtenay and Speke) each sat twice for the shire, and a further three (Chudleigh, Copplestone and Wyse) three times. Devon’s leading parliamentarians in the period, however, were Robert Cary (who represented Devon in 12 Parliaments between 1407 and 1426), Hyndeston, who sat in each of six successive Parliaments between 1442 and 1450 (representing Exeter in 1442 and then sitting five times for the shire), and Bonville, who sat in the Commons four times between 1421 and 1427, before being summoned as a peer in 1449. It seems that the Devon electorate set some stock by prior parliamentary experience: on no fewer than seven occasions in this period was one or other of the knights of the shire directly re-elected, most notably so Hyndeston, who represented the county in five Parliaments in a row from 1445 to 1450, while Robert Cary, Chudleigh and Speke were each directly re-elected in 1426, 1431 and 1439 respectively. Moreover, only in 1433 was the county represented by two parliamentary novices, while on every other occasion at least one of its MPs had previously served in the Commons, and in eight Parliaments both Members were so qualified. Several of these men had cut their parliamentary teeth in the service of other constituencies. Carminowe had twice represented Cornwall before being returned for Devon; Boef had on three separate occasions sat for different Somerset boroughs; Austell had been elected for Wells and Somerset; and Wyse, Hyndeston and Reynell had all begun their parliamentary careers as representatives of Devon boroughs, while Radford had first sat for Lyme Regis in Dorset over a decade before being returned for his native Devon.

Beyond question, all of Devon’s MPs in this period were qualified to represent the county: all fulfilled the requirements for election by either being resident in the shire or at least holding substantial property there, even if Austell’s principal home was in Somerset and Carminowe split his time between his houses in Devon and his native Cornwall, and many of the prominent lawyers who sat for the county spent large parts of the year at Westminster. All of them commanded the requisite wealth and status. While only five Devon MPs were ever dubbed knights (and only three of them before their first appearance as the shire’s representatives), 14 others met the required income qualification (which also applied to parliamentary service) and preferred to pay a fine rather than take up knighthood. It is unclear what income Robert Cary (whose property in Devon was valued at just £20 in 1412), his son Philip (whose fortunes were reduced by the survival of his stepmother) and Richard Holland could command, while the profits of legal practice (rather than landholdings) are likely to have more than qualified the lawyers Hyndeston and Boef. Indeed, at the upper end of the scale, the greatest of Devon’s MPs drew incomes of several hundreds of pounds a year. (Sir) Philip Courtenay and Sir William Bonville had inherited such wealth, while Sir John Speke had augmented his paternal inheritance by a marriage which brought him land providing an additional £150 p.a. The most dramatic rise in landed income was secured by Richard Hankford. Already in possession of an inheritance worth over £70 p.a., his marriage to Elizabeth Fitzwaryn brought him lands worth more than £350 p.a. and extending across nine counties.

If parliamentary experience and landed or professional wealth were qualifications that all Devon’s representatives in Henry VI’s reign had in common, in other respects it is possible to identify three distinct phases in the county’s representation over the course of the period. Until 1433, the MPs were generally men associated with a close-knit circle of inter-related families connected with Lord Hungerford and led by Sir William Bonville. Indeed, many of the seats were taken by members of these very families: Bonville’s own three returns aside, Hungerford’s son-in-law Courtenay, the latter’s half-brother James Chudleigh, and their cousin Roger Champernowne claimed five further seats before this date. These were families with established traditions of parliamentary service: three successive generations of the Cary family sat in the Commons; James Chudleigh and Richard Hankford followed their fathers into Parliament, while Sir William Bonville and Philip Courtenay had been preceded by their synonymous grandfathers. In 1435, the two county seats were taken by two lawyers: the joint stewards of the estates of the earldom. In the years that followed, lawyers and gentry of middling status became increasingly dominant among Devon’s knights of the shire – men of some substance, if less so than their predecessors in the 1420s and early 1430s, but owing their wealth to the profits of professional practice. In many instances they were connected with the Courtenay earl, albeit bound by ties of service rather than kinship. This phase in the history of Devon’s representation lasted until the eve of the earl’s military adventures in 1450, and it was his political eclipse as a consequence of his armed exploits that ushered in the final phase. This, once more, saw the county seats taken by landowners of substance, and – in 1455 – by two belted knights.

These phases in the county’s representation were also reflected in the MPs’ prior public careers. While three quarters of all Devon seats were taken by men who had at least been appointed to a royal commission prior to their election, the representatives returned during the earl’s minority had, more often than not, previously also held either the shrievalty or the escheatorship of the county. Of the 18 seats available between 1422 and 1433 five were filled by former sheriffs, three by former escheators, and two by men (Bampfield and Mules) who were serving as escheators of Devon and Cornwall at the time of their election. Hankford and Chudleigh were respectively pricked sheriffs of Devon while attending the Parliaments of 1423 and 1429. Conversely, only two of the 18 seats contested between 1435 and 1450 were claimed by former sheriffs of Devon (although Carminowe and Austell had held shrievalties elsewhere) and four by former escheators (Radford was appointed to the office while sitting in 1435). By contrast, and as might be expected in the light of the dominance of professional lawyers among the county’s MPs in the years of the earl’s ascendancy, from 1435 it became common for Devon’s representatives to be members of the county bench. No fewer than ten out of 18 seats between 1435 and 1450 were claimed by serving j.p.s, compared with just one before 1435. Of the MPs taking the four seats for which names are known after 1450, only one had served as escheator, and one other was a j.p.

In terms of their quality we may consider the groups of Members returned in 1453 and 1455 as equating with those who came before 1435. Both groups were made up of men of distinction in their respective walks of life. In the case of many of the landowners, that meant armed service in the French wars. While Cole was the only one of them who could claim to have participated in Henry V’s memorable campaign of 1415, Bampfield, Bonville, Carminowe, Champernowne, Chudleigh, Hacche, Hankford, Hill, Ralegh, Reynell and even the gentrified lawyer Speke had all seen military action before they first sat in Parliament. In view of Devon’s maritime character, it is not surprising that several of them (Bampfield, Chudleigh, Cole, Hacche and later Courtenay and de Vere) possessed particular experience of naval warfare, having served as keepers of the sea. Unquestionably, it was Sir Robert de Vere who could claim to be the pre-eminent campaigner among Devon’s MPs, having held several commands in Normandy, as well as the senechaussée of Guyenne before his return to the Commons. In total, half of Devon’s seats between 1422 and 1455 were thus filled by men with military experience.

The lawyers among the MPs were likewise men of some distinction within their profession. A number of them had trained at the prestigious law schools to the west of London: between 1435 and 1450 ten out of 18 seats were taken by members of Lincoln’s Inn or the Middle Temple. Two were destined for particular prominence in the profession: both Boef and Hyndeston went on to take the coif as serjeants-at-law, although further promotion to the judiciary eluded both. Of the remainder, several nevertheless established themselves as leading apprentices-at-law, their standing evident from the number of their important clients. Thus, Copplestone served as steward not only to successive bishops of Exeter, but also to the earls of Devon and Westmorland, Sir William Bourgchier (afterwards Lord Fitzwaryn), and the abbot of Buckland; Radford fulfilled similar functions in the service not only of the earl of Devon, but also of John Holand, earl of Huntingdon (and later duke of Exeter), Sir Philip Courtenay, and Elizabeth, wife of Robert Lovell*, as well as being retained by the Crown as an official apprentice-at-law to the duchy of Lancaster; and Mules was likewise retained as steward by the Hankfords. Nor were educational and cultural attainment the sole preserve of the lawyers among Devon’s MPs: Hankford had been educated at Winchester College and Oxford, and Ralegh, like Radford, owned a sizeable library, in his case combining works of literature and science with more commonplace devotional tracts.

In the polarized politics of mid fifteenth-century Devon, it is not surprising to find that a majority of the county’s representatives were naturally connected with one or other of the two principal rivals, Sir William (later Lord) Bonville and the earl of Devon. Indeed, until the complete breakdown of relations between the two peers it was not uncommon for men to maintain ties with both: Bonville himself married as his second wife the earl’s widowed aunt, and his closest associate among Devon’s MPs, Sir Philip Courtenay, was the earl’s cousin. Carminowe and de Vere were linked to Earl Thomas by ties of marriage through his uncle Sir Hugh Courtenay† of Haccombe. The association of a number of other MPs with the Courtenays dated from before 1422. Bampfield, Chudleigh, Hacche and Speke had all seen military service under Earl Hugh or his brother Sir Edward Courtenay. Later, Boef, Copplestone, Radford and Wyse served in the earldom’s administration in a variety of capacities, both before and after Earl Thomas attained full age, while Mules and Hyndeston were employed by the earl as legal counsel. Like many of the men returned during Bonville’s ascendancy in the 1420s and early 1430s, Carminowe, Champernowne and Hill shared ties of kinship with that peer, and Bampfield was among the feoffees of his estates, while Ralegh served under him in Gascony, and – in common with his parliamentary colleague, Reynell, and a number of other Bonville associates – fell victim to the depredations of the Courtenay army in the winter of 1455.

Other MPs maintained ties with the Holands of Dartington. Richard Holland was said to be of ‘amicitia’ with John, earl of Huntingdon, in whose land transactions both Hill and Hacche were involved at various points; Speke was one of his feudal tenants; and Carminowe served him in his capacity as admiral of England. Closer was the tie that bound Sir Robert de Vere to Henry Holand, duke of Exeter, whom he served as chamberlain, and to whom he undoubtedly owed his election in 1455. Of rather less importance with regard to the parliamentary representation of Devon was Thomas Montagu, earl of Salisbury, under whose captaincy Champernowne fought in France and whose sister Hankford married. It was primarily the body of lawyers who possessed ties with the region’s spiritual peers. Copplestone and Hyndeston were employed by Bishop Lacy, and the former also amassed a range of stewardships of local religious houses. Austell served John Stafford, bishop of Bath and Wells and later archbishop of Canterbury, and the King’s secretary Thomas Bekynton, Stafford’s successor at Wells.

Interestingly, rather less pronounced was the influence of the house of Lancaster itself. Hankford alone had seen armed service in Henry V’s own retinue, and Cole and Hill both served in France under Thomas Beaufort, duke of Exeter, although only Cole sat in Parliament in the duke’s lifetime. Knighted on the eve of Henry VI’s coronation in England, Courtenay served on the King’s expedition of 1430 for his crowning in France, and Bonville and Wyse joined the company which in 1445 brought Queen Margaret to England, but only Wyse is known to have worn the livery of the royal household. Nor can this state of affairs be explained entirely by the dominance of the duchy of Cornwall (for much of Henry VI’s reign vested in the King himself) as the conduit of royal patronage in the region. Just three of Devon’s MPs held duchy offices, albeit all of them among the most important posts: Sir William Bonville and (Sir) Philip Courtenay both served as stewards of Cornwall, while John Copplestone successively held the offices of receiver-general, steward of the duchy estates and warden of the stannaries.

While it is impossible to know how regularly Devon’s MPs attended the Commons, it is clear that at several points in the 1450s one or other of them was certainly absent from the House for a prolonged period of time. Thus, during the Christmas prorogation of the Parliament of 1453 Walter Ralegh was placed under arrest in the context of a dispute with a Flemish merchant. This made him, along with the Speaker Thomas Thorpe* (who had been imprisoned at the duke of York’s behest), the subject of a petition by the Commons for their release under parliamentary privilege, but it seems that Ralegh did not regain his freedom until after the dissolution, and was thus absent for the entire spring session of 1454. Equally, in late 1455 Sir Philip Courtenay was missing from the deliberations of the Commons, as he found himself under siege by the earl of Devon’s forces in his mansion at Powderham on the Exe estuary.

The two knights of the shire aside, Devon also sent representatives from six (and after the enfranchisement of Plymouth in 1440 seven) boroughs to the Commons. While the prosperous ports of Exeter and Dartmouth preserved their electoral independence and chose to be represented by their own leading men throughout Henry VI’s reign, the lesser ports of Barnstaple and Plymouth and the smaller seigneurial boroughs of Plympton Erle, Tavistock and Totnes regularly provided seats for members of the local gentry. Even the earl of Devon’s pocket borough of Plympton was, however, normally free from direct lordly intervention. Yet, exceptionally, during the political crisis of 1449-50 no fewer than ten Devon borough seats in the three Parliaments of those years were taken by demonstrable Courtenay clients. The highest concentration of such partisans appeared in the Parliament of 1449 (Nov.), when five seats were taken by the earl’s men.12 The comital clients returned for Devon boroughs in 1449 (Feb.) were Richard Fortescue* (Plympton) and Adam Cokkes* (Totnes); in 1449 (Nov.) Thomas Welywrought* and John Brigham* (Plymouth), Robert Hilling* (Plympton), Henry Denbold* (Tavistock), and John Hobbes* (Totnes); in 1450 John Radford* (Plymouth), Hilling (Plympton), and Hobbes (Totnes).