Coventry

Through the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a period of prosperity for Coventry, it was the fourth most populous city in England behind London, Bristol and York. Its population has been estimated at as many as 10,000 in the 1430s .1 R. Goddard, Ldship. and Med. Urbanisation: Coventry, 1043-1355, 294. This population may have been diminished at the end of this period. According to the pro-Yorkist source quoted below in respect of the events of Feb. 1461, in 1458-9 a ‘grete pestilence’ killed 2,627 in the city: P. Fleming, Coventry and the Wars of the Roses (Dugdale Soc. occ. pprs. l), 33. The estimate sounds improbably high. Yet, although it had returned MPs in the early years of parliamentary history, it did so only intermittently after 1306 and not at all between 1346 and 1453.2 Returns were also made to the assembly of 1353, but this was summoned as a great council rather than a Parl. The election of the burgesses was taken out of the hand of the sheriffs, and writs were directed directly to 38 boroughs, one of which was Coventry: PROME, v. 64. No convincing explanation can be adduced for this apparent anomaly, but the complexity of the city’s administrative history may have been a contributory factor. From the early twelfth century Coventry was divided between two lords: the southern part was held by the earldom of Chester (annexed to the Crown in 1246); and the northern by the city’s Benedictine priory, founded by Leofric, earl of Chester, in 1043.

This division, at least according to one interpretation, hampered Coventry’s administrative development. As early as c.1150 Ranulph de Gernon (d.1153), earl of Chester, had granted a charter to the citizens, establishing the city court, or portmote, but the consistent opposition of the priory delayed the extension of any real measure of self-government to them. Not until the 1340s was this opposition effectively overcome when royal charters gave them a guild merchant, and the right to elect annually a mayor, two bailiffs and a coroner, together with the cognizance of all pleas. The Crown’s concessions were probably designed to diminish the priory’s power, and in 1355 the prior admitted defeat, accepting a diminution in the size of the ‘Prior’s Half’ and acknowledging the franchises of the citizens.3 This standard interpretation is set out in VCH Warws. viii. 256-9.

This simplifies a complex story, and, as a long-established interpretation, it has been modified, although not overturned, by recent work.4 For recent reinterpretations: P.R. Coss, ‘Coventry before Incorporation’, Midland Hist. ii. 137-51; A. and E. Gooder, ‘Coventry before 1355’, ibid. vi. 1-38; R.H.C. Davis, Early Hist. of Coventry (Dugdale Soc. occ. pprs. xxiv). As far as it relates to parliamentary history, this standard story would help to explain why Coventry made no regular returns after 1315. The prior may have seen the election of MPs as an unwelcome expression of the citizens’ independence. What, however, it does not explain is why representation was not resumed when the citizens had won greater freedom. Perhaps the matter was out of their hands with successive sheriffs of Warwickshire not ready to depart from the established tradition that the shire town of Warwick was the only parliamentary borough in their county. Interestingly, when Coventry did eventually resume representation in 1453 it was not because the sheriff dispatched an electoral precept to the city, but because the city had been elevated to county status and so qualified to receive a writ of election directly from Chancery.

The granting of county status to the city in 1451 was the culmination of a long process. The unification of the Crown and the duchy of Lancaster on Henry IV’s accession in 1399 had brought the city closer to the centre of the political nation, for the great duchy castle of Kenilworth lay only a few miles away. Coventry’s new importance found expression by the summons of Parliament to meet there in October 1404 and a series of visits from the royal family. These visits were a burden as well as a privilege. On such occasions the citizens demonstrated both their wealth and loyalty. When Henry V came with his new queen on 15 Mar. 1421 the citizens gave them each £100 and a gold cup worth £10; and in the summer of 1434 the young Henry VI was given the same sum and a cup worth £7 2s.5 Coventry Leet Bk. ed. Harris, 34, 159-69. In addition to these gifts, the citizens provided a series of loans to the Lancastrian Kings, advancing £300 to Henry IV, 650 marks to Henry V and at least £500 to Henry VI.6 Ibid. 37-38, 60-61, 69-71, 74, 110, 124-5, 133, 172-3, 174-80, 209-14, 236-42. This excludes 500 marks lent to the dukes of Bedford and Gloucester and the earl of Warwick between 1419 and 1444: ibid. 83-85, 121, 207.

None the less, although the charges placed on the citizens by their new intimacy with the royal house were clearly significant, Coventry’s wealth made them fairly easy to absorb. Aside from the fact that all the loans were repaid, a large constituency could be called upon to raise the necessary sums whether as loans or gifts.7 Repayment was, however, not always easily achieved. The loans made to Hen. V were only discharged with the sale by the citizens of the magnificent ‘Iklynton Coller’, laid in pledge for repayment, to the prior of Coventry for 550 marks: Coventry Leet Bk. 60-61, 69-71. For example, over 1,100 individuals, many contributing no more than a few pence, paid towards the £107 2s. presented to the King in 1434, and nearly 800 made payments towards a loan of £100 to the Crown in 1449.8 Ibid. 160-9, 236-42. Yet, by 1451 when the city gained its new charter, the citizens had cause to feel that their support for the Crown had received inadequate reward. The only significant grants made to them had been in 1417, when they were licensed to acquire lands in mortmain to the value of £40 p.a. to support the building of the city wall, and in 1444, when their Corpus Christi fair was extended from one day to eight.9 CPR, 1416-22, p.105; CChR, vi. 38-39.

Some dissatisfaction at this lack of progress might be implied by a meeting of 58 citizens ‘of the most worthiest that at that tyme wern at home’ in St. Mary’s Hall on 10 Aug. 1445. They agreed to raise £100 to cover the cost of suing for an extension of their liberties.10 Coventry Leet Bk. 220-1. Their ambitions, however, were not to be realized by this investment, but rather by what appears from the account in the city’s Leet Book to have been a spontaneous act of royal generosity. On 21 Sept. 1451 Henry VI began a prolonged visit to Coventry. Seemingly impressed by what he found, he told the mayor and citizens, on taking his leave of them on 5 Oct., ‘And where-as ye ben nowe Baylies we will that ye be herafter Sherefes; and this we graunt to you of our own fre wille and of no speciall desire’.11 Ibid. 265. Given the citizens’ earlier efforts to secure new privileges, this denial of any ‘speciall desire’ hardly rings true. However this may be, the civic authorities seized their opportunity. On 13 Oct. the mayor called the leading citizens before him to discuss how to take best advantage of the King’s ‘grete loue and tendurnes’. A deputation of seven, including the recorder, Thomas Lyttleton, and another lawyer, Henry Boteler II, was accordingly dispatched to London to negotiate the new charter. Their mission was a successful one, for on 26 Nov. they secured a comprehensive charter of incorporation. The city of Coventry was henceforward to be a county in itself, independent of the sheriff of Warwickshire; the bailiffs, as promised by the King, were to become sheriffs, receiving all writs and orders formerly directed to the county sheriff and accounting yearly at the Exchequer.12 Ibid. 266; CChR, vi. 116-17. By a collusive action sued in the ct. of KB in Hil. term 1452, one of the city’s first sheriffs secured the enrolment of the new charter on the plea roll: KB27/763, rot. 33.

From the autumn of 1456 Coventry was the ‘geographical focus’ of Lancastrian rule, the occasional royal visit being replaced by the lengthy residences of the royal court at Coventry and Kenilworth. Thus it was that great councils were held in the city in October 1456, early in 1457 and in the summer of 1459, together, most importantly, with the Parliament of November and December 1459 in which the Yorkist lords were attainted. This move into the centre of national affairs is said to have made the citizens ‘fiercely loyal to the Lancastrians’.13 R.A. Griffiths, Hen. VI, ­777-8. Yet the court’s presence was far from an unmixed blessing. On 11 Oct. 1456, for example, there was ‘a gret affray’ there between the followers of Henry Beaufort, duke of Somerset, and the city’s watchmen in which two or three of the citizens were killed. Only the intervention of Humphrey, duke of Buckingham, saved Beaufort from the citizens’ vengeance.14 Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 164-5. The court’s unpopularity is more explicitly attested by royal signet letters, dated at Northampton on 8 Feb. 1460, which cited reports that ‘diuers of thinhabitantes of oure Cite of Couentre haue, sithe the tyme of oure departing from thens, vsed and had right vnfittyng langage ayenst oure estate and personne and in fauouring our supersticious traitours and rebelles now late in our parlement there attaincted’. This was a curious letter to direct to a city of unquestioned loyalty. And although on the following 20 Feb. the civic authorities agreed to pay for 40 men to resist the Yorkists, their adherence to Lancaster did not survive the Act of Accord of the Parliament of 1460.15 Coventry Leet Bk. 309-10. Revealingly, if an admittedly pro-Yorkist source is to be given credence, on 17 Feb. 1461 signet letters in the name of the young prince of Wales, dated at St. Albans where, on that day, the Lancastrians had won a victory, peremptorily ordered the mayor and aldermen to be ‘assystent, helping and faverable in all that ye can and may’ to three local Lancastrian loyalists, the King’s carver, (Sir) Edmund Mountfort*, (Sir) Henry Everingham* and the city’s MP of 1453, Elton. This reads as a desperate attempt to recall the city to its earlier Lancastrian allegiance. If so, it failed. When it was read before the ‘Comyns’ in St. Mary’s Hall, they were so ‘meved’ against its bearer, a priest in Everingham’s service, that they would, but for the mayor’s intervention, ‘A smytt of the prestes hed’.16 Ibid. 313; Fleming, 12-14, 34-35.

The city authorities came to share the Yorkist sympathies of the ‘Comyns’. They provided £100 for soldiers to accompany Edward, earl of March, to London after the Yorkist defeat at the second battle of St. Albans, and a further £80 for 100 men to go with him to what proved to be the battle of Towton. Further, when the new King stopped in Coventry in June on his belated return to Westminster after that battle, he was given £100 and the standard cup.17 Fleming, 14-15; Coventry Leet Bk. 313, 315-16; A.P.M. Wright, ‘Relations between the King’s Govt. and Bors.’ (Oxf. Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1965), 371. Unfortunately, it is not known whom the city returned to the first of Edward IV’s Parliaments, for this might have provided an additional insight into Coventry’s Yorkist loyalties. The city’s apparent defection from Lancaster to York requires explanation. Peter Fleming has suggested two plausible explanations: first, that the inconveniences of the Lancastrian court’s periodic presence in Coventry in the late 1450s served not to build loyalty but to erode it; and second that the city found itself drawn into the political orbit of the Yorkist, Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, whose castle of Warwick lay less than ten miles away. It is instructive here that, in the crisis of 1469-71, the city appears to have sided, albeit rather equivocally, with the earl when he rose against Edward IV. Fleming shows that, in the campaign of the spring of 1471 during which the earl met his death at the battle of Barnet, Coventry provided him with at least 40 soldiers and was fined by the restored Edward IV for its temerity in doing so.18 Fleming, 9, 17-23. He might also have cited other evidence for the city’s support for the earl. Two of its leading citizens, Richard Braytoft, a former MP, and Robert Onley†, were appealed for their alleged part in the execution at Gosford Green, just outside the city, of the King’s father-in-law Earl Rivers.19 KB27/836, rot. 61d. The reception accorded to Everingham’s priest may, therefore, have been an expression of the city’s support not for the Yorkist cause in general but for the earl of Warwick in particular.

Although not among its specific provisions, the charter of 1451 brought parliamentary representation back to the city, and Coventry elected MPs in 1453 for the first time since 1346. Unfortunately, the return is torn and the name of only one of the MPs remains, and the returns of 1455 and 1459 are lost. Thus the names of only three of the MPs the city elected to the last four Parliaments of Henry VI’s reign are known, and given such a small sample it is not possible to say much about the pattern of representation. The three MPs represented the city on five recorded occasions, but the incompleteness of the record renders this a significant underestimate. Henry Boteler also sat for another constituency, for he had been earlier elected for the Wiltshire borough of Great Bedwyn to the Parliament of 1449 (Feb.). As a busy and well-connected lawyer he might have won further returns for distant boroughs, had not the enfranchisement of his native Coventry removed the need for him to search further afield. Boteler’s election in 1460, when in office as recorder, is significant, for it shows that, as soon as or almost as soon as the city recovered the franchise, it began, as a matter of course, to return this official.20 For the practice of electing the recorder in the 16th cent.: The Commons 1508-58, i. 212. Boteler, who held the office until his death, was elected to all four Parliaments in the Yorkist period for which the city’s MPs are known, and it is not improbable that he served in every Parliament from 1459, the first Parliament to meet after his election as recorder, until that of 1489, during the course of which he died.21 There is evidence that he sat in the Parl. of 1467: he was one of the Commons’ representatives in an investigation of allegations against one of the governors of the Mint, and it is unlikely that he was elected for any other constituency than Coventry. This, in turn, raises another possibility, namely that his predecessor as recorder, the famous jurist, Thomas Lyttleton, was one of the city’s MPs in the Parliaments of 1453 and 1455, but no proof has been found. Curiously, one correspondent believed both that Coventry elected MPs before its charter of 1451 and that it routinely returned its recorder. William Wayte wrote to John Paston* on 6 Oct. 1450, citing Bristol, London and Coventry as examples of constituencies represented by their recorders.22 Paston Letters, ii. 48. As a clerk to William Yelverton*, j.KB, this was an odd mistake for Wayte to make, but it does show that the omission of Coventry from the list of parliamentary boroughs was so anomalous that even the well-informed should see it as one.

In the early sixteenth century it was the city’s practice to elect with the recorder one of its leading citizens, and Boteler’s fellow MP in 1460, Braytoft, master of the city’s Holy Trinity guild and a former mayor, certainly qualifies for that description. In both 1472 and 1478 Boteler was accompanied by another former mayor, John Wyldegrise†. The first of the city’s MPs, however, does not fit into this pattern. William Elton, elected, perhaps in company with Lyttleton, was a member of Henry VI’s household, then holding office as one of the serjeants of the royal hall. There is some evidence that he was a native of Coventry, but he played no part in its administration and was thus not typical of the city’s later MPs. His return is to be explained in the context of the unusually large number of household servants elected to the Parliament of 1453. A political explanation may also be adduced for Braytoft’s election to the Yorkist Parliament of 1460. In 1469, as mentioned above, he certainly numbered among the adherents of the earl of Warwick, and, although evidence is lacking, it may be that he did so earlier.

Election indentures survive for four of the Parliaments that met between 1453 and 1478. They all take the same curious form in that, although indentures, they are not specifically set out as such. Instead of the standard ‘Hec indentura’, they all begin, ‘In pleno comitatu’ (that is, in the sheriffs’ county court in the guildhall). Only in the witnessing clauses are the documents described as indentures; and only on the endorsements of the electoral writs are one of the contracting parties, the city sheriffs, identified by personal names. The other party to the indenture was the named attestors. The first indenture, for the election held on 13 Feb. 1453, is torn, and many of the attestors’ names are lost (ten names survive). The three other indentures name 25 attestors for the election of 14 Oct. 1460, 41 for that of 1 Sept. 1472 and 24 for that of 16 Dec. 1477.23 C219/16/2, 6; 17/2, 3. For an unknown reason the election of 1460 was not held until a week after Parl. had assembled: C219/16/6. These figures correspond fairly closely with those in the next series of surviving indentures in the mid sixteenth century: the seven that survive from 1542 to 1558 identify between 15 and 32 electors. Interestingly, however, while the fifteenth-century indentures imply that only those named as attestors participated in the election, the later ones imply a broader participation. The election of 1555, for example, was made by the named attestors ‘cum multis aliis civibus’.24 The Commons 1509-58, i. 212.

The relationship between the council of 24 former office-holders who elected the city’s officers (save the sheriffs) every January and those who participated in parliamentary elections was, not surprisingly, close. Of the 24 who elected the city officers in January 1460, as many as 14 went on to witness the parliamentary election of the following October; similarly, 13 of the attestors to the parliamentary election of 1 Sept. 1472 had been responsible for the election of officers in the previous January.25 Coventry Leet Bk. 307, 372-3; C219/16/6; 17/2. None the less, it is clear that there was no formal relationship between the two electoral bodies. The same could be said of the larger body of 48 composed of the 24 electors together with another 24 ‘wise and discreet men’ nominated by the mayor. The identity of the additional 24 is rarely known, but it is for 1477. Of the 24 attestors named in the parliamentary indenture of 16 Dec. of that year, five belong to the 48.26 Coventry Leet Bk. 421; C219/17/3. Clearly the electoral franchise extended beyond not only the 24 but also the 48, and it is significant here that 55 different men are named as attestors in the two indentures of 1472 and 1478. But whether, as was later to be the case, the franchise extended to all the freemen is not known.