Dartmouth

One of the principal Channel ports of western England, Dartmouth was in fact a conglomeration of three smaller settlements on the estuary of the river Dart, which even in the fifteenth century continued to be known as Clifton-Dartmouth and Hardness, and by the 1330s the population had expanded into a further suburb known as Southtown. Following the ravages of the Black Death, the population recovered fairly rapidly, and in 1377 some 683 adults were assessed for the poll tax in Dartmouth and Southtown. Central to the port’s prosperity was the wine trade with Gascony, as well as commerce with the Iberian peninsula. In the 1430s and 1440s nearly half of all Devon ships loading wine at Bordeaux originated from Dartmouth, and while the loss of Gascony in 1453 did considerable damage to the port’s trade, its vessels continued to freight substantial quantities of wine in spite of the changed political circumstances, taking it as far up the east coast of England as Hull.2 Mariner’s Mirror, lxxxiii. 278-9. From their voyages to Gascony the town’s mariners became well acquainted with the Bay of Biscay, and trade with the Iberian peninsula represented a natural extension of their ventures. Fruit and other goods from Spain and Portugal were imported in Dartmouth ships, and additional profits could be made by transporting pilgrims to the popular shrine of St. James at Compostela. Judging by the royal licences issued to ship-owners wishing to carry such passengers overseas, Dartmouth was the most important of the Devon ports as a point of embarkation, accounting for almost two-fifths of the total number of vessels licensed.3 Ibid. 283-4.

With the renewal of the French wars by Henry V, the port gained in strategic importance as the launching point of military expeditions to the continent. This also made Dartmouth a target for French raids, and the cost of maintaining its defences became a serious concern for the townsmen, who repeatedly petitioned for a royal licence to acquire communal lands that would return £20 p.a. for this purpose.4 SC8/101/5020; 107/5301; CPR, 1461-7, p. 308; The Commons 1386-1421, i. 346.

By the accession of Henry VI, Dartmouth enjoyed extensive privileges and its internal constitution was well established. The governance of the town lay principally in the hands of a mayor and two bailiffs elected annually at Michaelmas. Richard II had granted the burgesses the right to try all pleas and assizes relating to property within the liberties of the town, and to elect a coroner, and the final years of Henry VI\s reign saw the emergence of a new position in the local heirarchy, that of alderman. The first three holders of this office were prominent former mayors, and it is possible that the body of aldermen formed the nucleus of the common council that became established by the early sixteenth century.5 The Commons 1386-1421, i. 346; 1509-58, i. 68.

Demographic rather than political factors played their part in bringing about a change in the personnel of local government, as the families that had dominated Dartmouth in the reigns of Richard II and the first two Lancastrians, above all the wealthy Hawleys, began to decline or sought their fortunes elsewhere. Whereas John Hawley† (d.1408) had served as many as 14 terms as mayor between 1374 and 1401 and had represented Dartmouth in four Parliaments, his son John had been elected to the Commons 11 times, but had held the mayoralty only once. John’s son and heir Nicholas survived his father by just six years, and never held office or sat in Parliament, and on his death the family’s property passed to his sister Elizabeth, the wife of the earl of Devon’s steward, the lawyer John Copplestone*.6 The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 328-32. The demise of the Hawleys cleared the way for the rise of two younger men, John Brushford and Nicholas Stebbing, who came to dominate both the town’s government and its parliamentary representation from the later 1430s. Between 1434 and 1462 one or other of them was chosen mayor 15 times; one of them sat in six of the 11 Parliaments held between 1432 and 1455, for which the names of the Dartmouth Members are known (in 1453 both were returned); and in 1460 both were included among the town’s first aldermen.

The lordship of the borough had been granted by Edward III to Guy, Lord Bryan and his heirs, and after his death in 1390 successively passed to his grand-daughter Elizabeth (d.1437), the wife of Robert Lovell* of Rampisham, her under-age grandson Humphrey Fitzalan (d.1438), earl of Arundel, and the latter’s half-sister Avice Stafford (d.1457), the wife of James Butler, later earl of Wiltshire, who under the terms of a settlement of 1445 was allowed to retain her inheritance after her childless death. In spite of Butler’s prominence at court, there is no evidence to suggest that any of these lords played much of a part in Dartmouth’s affairs. The royal duchy of Cornwall controlled the port’s waterway through its water-bailiff, an office which under Henry V had frequently been granted to local men like John Corp†, Edmund Arnold† or William Glover†. In the reign of Henry VI, by contrast, the post went to outsiders like Henry Baret* of Dorset or Thomas Tregarthen* of Cornwall, a practice which may have played its part in bringing the holders of the office into conflict with the townsmen. In the interest of native merchants and those of Gascony, Ireland and the Channel Islands, the Commons in the Parliament of 1449-50 petitioned the King about the exactions of unaccustomed levies by the water-bailiffs, the royal searchers and controllers of the search in the ports of Fowey, Plymouth, Dartmouth and Poole, thereby successfully gaining the right to sue these officials for trespass and obtain £40 from anyone convicted of such extortion.7 PROME, xii. 146-7. While it is nowhere stated that the men of Dartmouth had themselves promoted the petition, the increasingly assertive inhabitants of the town are known to have come into conflict with the King’s officers before. In 1433 a group of 40 townsmen, including some of the most influential of the burgesses, assaulted the royal escheator, Baldwin Fulford*, who had come to seize the goods of outlaws in the town,8 H.R. Watkin, Dartmouth, 112-13. When Fulford complained to the central government the number of his assailants had grown to 400: CPR, 1429-36, p. 279. while in the mid 1440s John Brushford, nine times mayor of Dartmouth, had led an armed rabble (said to be some 400 strong) in an assault on the chancellor’s messengers who tried to serve a writ of subpoena on him.

Dartmouth had first returned burgesses to the Commons in 1298, but was not apparently invited to do so for some time thereafter, and only began to send representatives more regularly from 1351. Nothing is known of the electoral procedure adopted either then or in the reign of Henry VI. Throughout the period the sheriff of Devon normally recorded the names of the representatives of the urban constituencies within his bailiwick in a single indenture with those of the knights of the shire, as well as in an accompanying schedule. By doing so he gave the erroneous impression that all elections had taken place on the same day at Exeter. There is, however, no reason to doubt that elections were routinely conducted locally at Dartmouth in response to a precept from the sheriff, similar to those documented at nearby Totnes.9 H.R. Watkin, Totnes Priory and Town, i. 402, 410, 413. The Dartmouth returns are unambiguous except for that of 1433, where the sheriff’s indenture names Hugh Yon as one of the borough’s MPs whereas the attached schedule lists Thomas Asshenden. On at least one occasion, in 1435, the mayor of Dartmouth, Stebbing, himself attested the county indenture, having perhaps communicated the names of the Dartmouth MPs to the sheriff in person. On two other occasions, in 1433 and January 1449, future Dartmouth Members (Walsh and Brushford) were among the witnesses to the sheriff’s return.10 C219/14/4, 5; 15/6.

The names of Dartmouth’s representatives are known for 18 out of the 22 Parliaments summoned between 1422 and 1460. No returns survive for the assemblies of 1439, 1445, 1459 and 1460. Just 16 men (if Yon took one in 1433) divided these 36 seats between them. This meant that while, as in the preceding period, just over half of the MPs recorded sat in Parliament only once, the representation of Dartmouth in Henry VI’s reign was nevertheless characterized by a high degree of continuity. Thus, a remarkable 23 of the 36 Dartmouth seats for which the Members’ names are known in this period were taken by men with prior experience of the Commons, and in seven Parliaments (those of 1422, 1429, 1435, 1442, 1449 (Feb.), 1453and 1455) both Members were so qualified. Moreover, on no fewer than nine occasions (in 1423, 1425, 1429, 1431, 1432, 1435, 1449 (Feb.), 1453 and 1455) one of the town’s representatives in the previous Parliament was directly re-elected. As far as the gaps in the records allow us to tell, only twice in this period – in 1426 and 1450 – did the burgesses return two complete novices to the Commons. The first of these instances clearly resulted from the summoning of the Parliament to the unusual, and to the ship-owners of Dartmouth commercially unattractive venue of Leicester, which forced the serving mayor, John Gayncote, to take the unusual step of returning himself. Conversely, in 1450 it was presumably political uncertainty in the aftermath of Cade’s rebellion that made it hard to find men willing to serve and necessitated the return of the outsider Stephen Ussher alongside John Brushford, a man who had served as mayor several times, but so far as we can tell had no prior experience of the Commons. This remarkable statistic owed much to the exceptional parliamentary careers of three of the men returned in this period: John Hawley, who sat in at least 12 Parliaments from 1410 to 1432 (with a run of consecutive returns from 1422 to 1432 broken only by his absence from the Leicester assembly of 1426), and Stebbing who was certainly returned five times between 1432 and 1455, and in view of the loss of several of the returns from 1439 probably also sat on other occasions. An even more notable parliamentarian was the Crown servant Thomas Gille who not only represented Dartmouth in at least six Parliaments between 1433 and 1455, but had begun his Commons’ career as a Member for Totnes in 1429, and added at least two further returns for other boroughs, to sit in a minimum of nine assemblies. Alongside these three exceptional figures there were also Asshenden, who secured election on four occasions (and probably missed out narrowly to Yon in 1433), and John Brushford, John More II and Robert Wenyngton who were each returned twice. Unusually for Devon, a county where many MPs traditionally served several urban constituencies over the course of their parliamentary careers, of Dartmouth’s MPs in the reign of Henry VI only Gille also sat for other places (Totnes in 1429 and 1445 and Barnstaple in 1450). This marked a change from the preceding period, when more than a quarter (seven out of 27) of the known MPs for the port also sat for other Devon boroughs.

As a body, Dartmouth’s representatives were a remarkably homogenous group. As in the period from 1386 to 1421 the vast majority of the Members resided in the town or at least held property there. Of the known MPs between 1422 and 1460 only one, Ussher, who lived at nearby Totnes, was in any sense an outsider, although several others who maintained houses in Dartmouth also held property further afield. John Hawley inherited his father’s lands, worth more than £110 p.a., as had Gille whose holdings brought him over £20 p.a., while Thomas Lanoy had married the wealthy widow of John Jaycock*, whose dower included the manor of Norden as well as lands around Kingsbridge, which returned £10 a year in rent. In spite of such holdings, they and the majority of their fellows were ship-owners, entrepreneurs qualitatively different from other merchants in that their business focused primarily on the conveyance of goods and passengers, while the buying and selling of goods of their own was a subsidiary source of income. Dartmouth, as a landing place for wines from Gascony, and a point of departure for both military expeditions (particularly those designated for the keeping of the seas) and pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela, was a particular centre of the shipping industry, and it is not surprising that all but four of its MPs in this period are known to have owned vessels either outright or in partnership with others. For the medieval shipman, legitimate trade went hand in hand with periodic acts of privateering, or at least the defence of their own vessels against similar attacks by others, and most of Dartmouth’s representatives could thus lay claim to some experience of naval warfare. After selling the royal fleet built by Henry V, Henry VI and his council were forced to rely on the martial prowess of private individuals for the keeping of the seas. Dartmouth’s strategic position at the junction of the routes to Gascony and eastward into the Channel meant that it was frequently the assembly point for fleets appointed for this purpose.11 E.g. in 1442: PROME, xi. 373-5. As prominent ship-owners, many of Dartmouth’s MPs were personally called upon to participate in such expeditions: Gille, Wenyngton and John Hawley were all at one time or another entrusted with sea-keeping, the latter two in sole or joint command of their forces, and in Wenyngton’s case with unfortunate consequences. Some of the MPs also had direct experience of land warfare in France. John Hawley, Asshenden and Gayncote all joined military expeditions, and in 1450 Gille was dispatched on Earl Rivers’ aborted voyage to Gascony specifically to provide the government with ‘knowledge of the manner of the disposition of the country there’.12 M.G.A. Vale, English Gascony, 139.

Along with their common interest in the shipping industry, most of Dartmouth’s MPs belonged to the narrow elite that shared responsibility for the government of the town. Of the 16 MPs of the period, seven had held the mayoralty, and a further five had at least served as bailiff. Their multiple returns meant that of the 36 seats for which the Members’ names are known in this period 20 were taken by former mayors, and a further seven by former bailiffs. Moreover, in 1422 and 1426 one of the town’s serving bailiffs was returned, while in 1427, 1429 and 1453 the current mayors presided over their own elections. While nine seats were filled by men who had not previously held town office (over half of them accounted for by Gille who did not take up local office until the 1460s), the town’s ruling elite ensured that at least one of their number was returned to each Parliament of Henry VI’s reign.

By contrast, there is scant suggestion that the tenure of office under the Crown played much of a part in recommending a man to the Dartmouth electorate for election. Rather, it would seem that the prominent shipmen whom the borough routinely returned were the sort of men that the government liked to employ in the collection of customs, often for lengthy terms, and as members of ad hoc commissions, many of them concerned with maritime matters. As until 1453 customs and subsidies had to be re-granted by each individual Parliament, the return of serving collectors, controllers or surveyors adopted some significance in informing the work of the Commons. Thus in 1422, 1423, 1432, 1433, 1435, 1449 (Feb.), 1449 (Nov.) and 1453 Dartmouth was represented by one of the customs collectors currently serving in the port, while at least 21 of the 36 seats in this period were filled by men who had held this post at some time previously.13 In 1433 Gille was appointed customs collector during the recess after the first session of the Parl. of which he was a Member. In addition, when More was elected in 1427, he had only recently relinquished the post of controller in his home port, and he, John Hawley and Stebbing at various times held office as deputy butlers. Similarly, Brushford, Gille, John Hawley, Rede, Steven and Wenyngton all had some experience in organizing shipping for the Crown’s needs before they were first returned in the period, while Gayncote, Stebbing, Walsh and Yon gathered such experience in subsequent years (in Stebbing’s case, before his second return).

Nor were the Dartmouth seats readily available to regional magnates seeking to return their placemen to the Commons. Although some MPs had close connexions with local landowners and magnates (Gille was for many years a member of the household of Sir John Dynham of Nutwell, the Hawleys were connected with the Courtenay earls of Devon, and Ussher maintained ties with the Lords Zouche of Harringworth, feudal lords of Totnes), it is not clear that such outside influence played any part in their elections at Dartmouth. It is just possible that the return of Ussher owed something to the efforts of the earl of Devon and duke of Exeter in the crisis year of 1450 (when even the proud citizens of Exeter went so far as to consult the two magnates over their choice of Members), but no definite evidence to this effect has come to light.