Calne

Although by the fifteenth century Calne was one of the smaller boroughs of Wiltshire, in its early history it had been a place of some importance as the site of a residence of the kings of Wessex, and twice, in 978 and 997, the location of proto-parliamentary assemblies of the Witan. On the first of these occasions, the meeting ended in tragedy, when the floor of the upper chamber where it was being held collapsed and several of those present were killed.1 VCH Wilts. xvii. 34. The evolution of the settlement at Calne into a market town probably owed much to its royal connexions. At the time of the Domesday inquiry there were at least 74 tenements held in burgage, almost two thirds of them from the King. The parish church aside, by the mid thirteenth century Calne also contained a small hospital, although in the period under review its precarious economic position became further endangered by the transfer in 1442 of part of its endowment to a chantry in Heytesbury.2 Ibid. 34, 41. Like other Wiltshire towns, Calne was a centre for the manufacture and finishing of cloth, but while its role as a focus for the trade of the large villages in its hinterland gave it a modest degree of prosperity, it remained limited in size. With a taxable population of just 150 at the time of the poll tax of 1377, it was smaller than neighbouring Cricklade and Chippenham, and out-classed by the towns of Malmesbury and Devizes. Yet, during the economic downturn of the fifteenth century Calne’s compact size and its focus on its immediate locality may have proved an asset: if the borough never experienced dramatic growth, it appears to have been equally resistant to sudden decline.3 The Commons 1386-1421, i. 688.

After the Conquest, the over-lordship of the borough had been shared between Salisbury cathedral, which controlled two thirds of the estate, and the Crown, whose interest was granted to the Cantilupe family by Henry III and then in 1274 passed to the Zouches of Harringworth. In 1415 the wardship of William, 5th Lord Zouche, a minor at the time of his father’s death, was sold along with the custody of his estates to Ralph Neville, earl of Westmorland, but Calne did not form part of this grant, for it had come into the possession of Henry IV’s queen, Joan of Navarre, presumably to guarantee the payment of the fee farm which had been granted to her as part of her dower. The queen leased the Zouche manor jointly to her steward in Wiltshire, John Bird*, and Robert Salman†, a burgess of Calne, who retained it until Lord Zouche formally came of age and had livery of his estates in 1425.4 Ibid.; CFR, xiv. 138, 159; CP, xii (2), 944.

Calne was not to be incorporated until 1685, and little is known about its government during the Middle Ages. The borough’s secular lords administered their holding through a bailiff, who also took responsibility for making Calne’s election returns. There is some evidence of the existence of a merchant guild and a guildhall, documented as early as the thirteenth century, but this body appears to have played no part in the town’s administration, and sixteenth-century attempts to claim a range of privileges proved abortive. In 1569 Elizabeth I only recognized the freedoms generally enjoyed by tenants of the ancient demesne of the Crown, including an exemption from contributing to the wages of the knights of the shire (a privilege which the men of Calne as inhabitants of a parliamentary borough possessed in any event).5 VCH Wilts. xvii. 94-100.

Calne had first returned MPs in 1295, and had regularly been represented for the remainder of Edward I’s reign. After Edward II’s accession the borough’s representation fell into abeyance, with only isolated returns recorded in the reigns of Edward III and Richard II, and it seems that on some occasions the burgesses even ignored the sheriff’s precept. The complete loss of the Wiltshire election returns for several of the Parliaments of the early fifteenth century makes it impossible to be certain, but it was apparently only after Henry V’s accession that the burgesses of Calne once more elected parliamentary representatives on a regular basis.6 The Commons 1386-1421, i. 688-9. Nothing is known of the franchise, or the way in which the elections were conducted; in 1455 the borough’s election return simply stated that the MPs had been elected ‘prout mos est’.7 C219/16/3.

For much of Henry VI’s reign, the sheriffs of Wiltshire did not seal separate indentures with the authorities of the boroughs in their county, but instead issued precepts requiring the boroughs to conduct their own elections and to communicate the outcome to the shire house. The names of the borough Members would then be compiled into a schedule along with those of their (frequently fictitious) sureties. By February 1449 the practice had changed: the borough Members were still listed in a schedule, but the sheriff now sealed separate indentures with the electors of each constituency.8 A separate indenture for a Wilts. borough for this Parliament survives only for Wootton Bassett, but it is reasonable to suppose that the sheriff followed the same procedure for each borough within his shire: C219/15/6. As Calne was not incorporated, the burgesses did not possess a common seal, so it fell to two of their number (in 1453 William Watkyns and John Everard) to counter-seal the indenture.9 C219/16/2. Clearly, the practice of returning the majority of the Wiltshire MPs in the form of an unattested schedule lent itself to malpractice, and it is thus not surprising to find periodic evidence of irregularities which may indicate tampering. Thus, in 1422 the name of Henry Bottenham (an outsider, resident in the county town of Wilton) was squeezed into an insufficient space, perhaps as an afterthought;10 C219/13/1. in February 1449 the names of both of Calne’s MPs (Stronge and Basyng) were entered into the schedule after two other names had been erased;11 C219/15/6. and in November of the same year Robert Todd was likewise added to the schedule over an erasure.12 C219/15/7. Nor were the separate borough indentures any more secure: in 1453 both names (Godwin and Wolaton) apparently replaced others that had been erased on the original indenture.13 C219/16/2.

The names of both of Calne’s representatives are known for 16 of the 22 Parliaments of Henry VI’s reign, but only one of them for each of the assemblies of 1423 and 1455, and gaps in the returns remain for the Parliaments of 1425, 1439, 1445 and 1460. Twenty-five men shared between them the 34 seats for which records survive. In terms of its personnel, the parliamentary representation of Calne in the reign of Henry VI, like that of several other Wiltshire boroughs, went through two distinct phases, corresponding roughly to the King’s minority and majority. In the 1420s and 1430s the borough’s electoral pattern was characterized by its relative conservatism and stability. Between 1422 and 1437 both of the borough’s MPs were directly re-elected twice, while on at least two other occasions one of them enjoyed this distinction. In total, no fewer than 14 of the 19 seats for which names are known during the King’s minority were taken by men with prior experience of the Commons. To no small degree, this was a result of the dominance of a local family, the Cricklades of Studley. Between 1426 and 1442 Thomas Cricklade and his sons John, Robert and William took a total of 11 out of 18 seats for which names are recorded, and in the core period of the family’s documented dominance between 1429 and 1437 Robert and William accounted for as many as nine of 12 seats. Nor were the Cricklades complete newcomers to Calne, for they could reasonably claim to have inherited an interest in the borough’s representation from Walter Studley*, whose sister Thomas Cricklade had married. Studley had, however, only been returned for Calne once, and in terms of the continuity in the borough’s representation that the Cricklades came to provide they inherited a tradition established by two other local men, Robert Salman and Robert Roude, who each secured repeated returns for the borough during the reigns of the first two Lancastrians.

After 1439, by contrast, none of Calne’s MPs are known to have been re-elected, and only a small proportion (five out of 15) possessed any prior parliamentary experience. None of the MPs returned in this later period represented Calne more than once. Indeed, whereas during Henry VI’s minority William and Robert Cricklade were returned for Calne four and five times respectively, and John Giles and John Justice were each returned twice, perhaps as many as 20 of the 25 men elected for Calne over the course of the reign only ever sat for the borough in a single Parliament. Nevertheless, while eight of the Calne MPs after 1439 are only known to have sat a single time,14 Philip and Robert Baynard, Comer, Dysswall, Robert Giles, Godwin, Maynard and Wolaton. if allowance is made for returns for other constituencies, a substantial number of the 25 built up impressive parliamentary careers. Seven secured election on at least two occasions,15 Basyng, Bottenham, John Cricklade, Forster, Stronge, Temys and Todd. each finding their second seat elsewhere; Justice and Russell were both elected three times; Roude and Thomas and William Cricklade four times; and Howton five. Four of the sometime MPs for Calne may with some justification be classed among the leading parliamentarians of the period. The Salisbury merchant Thomas Freeman was returned no fewer than nine times between 1432 and 1463 (mainly by his home city and its ruined precursor), as were the lawyers Robert Cricklade and John Giles, whose respective careers extended from 1422 to 1437, and 1417 to 1439. Cricklade found four of his seats in the borough from which his family took its name, while Giles was rather more promiscuous, variously sitting for Old Sarum, Marlborough, Devizes and Wilton when not elected at Calne. But it was John Whittocksmead who was undeniably the leading Commoner among the Calne MPs, gaining election to a total of 12 Parliaments between 1427 and 1472 for the cities and boroughs of Bath, Cricklade, Devizes, Downton, Salisbury and Wilton, and the county of Wiltshire. Whittocksmead was also unusual in that he had represented a borough (Bath) outside this county, although Todd, who sat for Melcombe Regis, and Forster, who represented East Grinstead, also found seats in other shires. Whittocksmead aside, Russell was the only Calne MP who went on to sit among the shire knights: the two men were returned together for Wiltshire in the troubled year of 1450 by a sheriff (Philip Baynard), who himself accompanied them to Westminster as one of the representatives for Calne. Yet, whereas Russell went on to sit for the shire a second time, in 1461, Whittocksmead returned to the ranks of the burgesses in his later Parliaments.

The difficulty of identifying several of the more obscure Calne Members in this period renders a prosopographical analysis of the borough’s representatives difficult, but some tentative observations are possible. It is striking to note the apparent absence (even in the first half of the reign) of local cloth-men, who at that date were still dominant elsewhere in Wiltshire, for instance in Devizes. As far as it is possible to tell, only Freeman and Todd had mercantile interests, and neither of them was a local man. In their majority, Calne’s MPs were professional lawyers, or country gentry with some legal training. John Giles, clerk of the peace for Wiltshire, was one of the filacers at the Westminster court of common pleas, while Robert Baynard (a member of Lincoln’s Inn) and John Whittocksmead were numbered among the quorum of the county bench. Thomas Cricklade possessed the necessary legal qualifications to serve as a county coroner, while his sons were accredited as attorneys at Westminster. Basyng, Howton and Russell all placed their professional skills in the service of secular and ecclesiastical lords as bailiffs, stewards and receivers, and Bottenham and Justice may also have been trained in the law.

The loss of Calne’s medieval records makes it impossible to tell which, if any, of the borough’s representatives in the period under review served in local office, but it is at least possible to tell that only a minority, and mostly those returned during the second half of the reign, had some experience of office-holding under the Crown when they first secured election. Thomas Cricklade, Freeman and Whittocksmead had all been appointed to ad hoc commissions, and Justice had been a tax collector. Thomas Cricklade was serving both as a county coroner and as royal verderer in the forests of Brayton, Pewsham and Melksham when elected for Calne, and John Giles, as we have seen, was his county’s clerk of the peace. Philip Baynard and Whittocksmead had officiated as escheators of Hampshire and Wiltshire, and Whittocksmead had in addition been under sheriff and alnager, while Freeman had been controller of customs in the port of Southampton. Alone among Calne’s representatives in the period, Philip Baynard held the shrievalty, in which office he was serving when he returned himself to the Commons: his breach of the electoral statutes may have been inadvertent, for he had every reason to expect to be discharged before the Commons were due to assemble on 6 Nov. 1450, yet in response to that year’s political disturbances the appointment of new sheriffs was delayed by over a month, technically disqualifying Baynard from Membership of the Commons during the entire first session of the Parliament. Crown office aside, Freeman had held a variety of civic offices in Salisbury, while Howton and Whittocksmead had held posts as bailiffs on the estates of Cirencester and Glastonbury abbeys and of the bishop of Salisbury.

There is no sign that Lord Zouche took an interest in the representation of his borough or of direct influence on the returns by any other members of the parliamentary peerage, although several of Calne’s MPs were more or less loosely connected with the Lords Hungerford – among them Basyng, the Baynards, Howton and Wolaton. More intriguing is the possibility that Dysswall, who hailed from Weobley in Herefordshire, the seat of the duke of York’s servant (Sir) Walter Devereux I*, secured election in 1449 in the interest of the duke himself.

In terms of residential qualifications, Calne’s MPs fell into four distinct groups. The first of these comprised Members who lived or at least owned property in Calne itself (William Cricklade, Justice, Maynard, Roude and Temys) or in its hinterland, at Lackham (the Baynards) and Melksham (Whittocksmead and Wolaton), or slightly further afield at All Cannings (John Giles). A second group hailed from the north of the county, from Cricklade (John, Robert and Thomas Cricklade), Lydiard Millicent (Forster and Russell), Marston Meysey (Howton) and Brinkworth (Basyng). Members of a third group lived close enough to the shire court at Wilton to seek election when opportunity arose: they came from Wilton itself (Bottenham), Salisbury (Freeman), and the nearby village of Coombe Bissett (Robert Giles). Remarkably few of Calne’s MPs in the period were complete outsiders: Dysswall descended from the Herefordshire gentry, and Todd may have been a Southampton merchant drawn to Wiltshire by the cloth trade. Moreover, in terms of the connexion between the borough of Calne and its MPs, the location of their homes may to some extent be misleading. The list of the beneficiaries of the chantry founded by John St. Loe* in Calne’s parish church of St. Mary in 1446 suggests that a higher proportion of the borough’s MPs possessed strong local ties than might otherwise be supposed. They included, apart from the donor and his wife and the King and queen, nine past or future Calne MPs (John and Robert Cricklade, John and Robert Giles, Justice, Roude, Robert Salman, Temys and Whittocksmead), accounting between them for no fewer than 14 of the 34 seats for which the MPs are recorded in this period.16 CPR, 1441-6, p. 459; C143/450/28.