Arundel

Following the death in 1415 of Thomas Fitzalan, earl of Arundel, the lordship of the rape of Arundel together with the eponymous honour, manor and borough passed under a settlement in tail-male to his cousin John d’Arundel, Lord Mautravers (d.1421). During the period under review it was held in succession by the latter’s son John (who proved in the Parliament of 1433, against the counter-claim of his cousin John Mowbray, duke of Norfolk, that the title ‘earl of Arundel’ should descend with ownership of Arundel castle), and from 1438 by John’s brother Earl William (d.1487). The dowager countess, Beatrice, widow of Earl Thomas, retained a substantial portion of the estate until her death in 1439.1 VCH Suss. v (1), 1-3. The west Sussex estates pertaining to the earldom were of considerable value, and the dowager’s gross income from those in the rape of Arundel amounted to £132 p.a.2 SC6/1019/23; Arundel Castle mss, A230. The earls still sometimes lived at the castle in this period, and appointed constables (most notably Richard Dallingridge*) to serve them there. In addition, many other officials were employed to run the comital household and administer the earls’ estates in the region.3 CPR, 1429-36, p. 464. The right of return of all writs and of summonses of the Exchequer within the rape pertained to the earls, who exerted influence through their law-courts, such as the court of the liberty of Arundel (known as ‘shirecourt’), and the court of the honour.

The size of the population of the town of Arundel in Henry VI’s reign can only be guessed. No more than 34 individuals had been assessed to the subsidy collected there a century before, in 1332, and a century later, in 1524, there were only 79 taxpayers, yet in the meantime the town may have been quite populous. In the period under review the earl of Arundel’s property there included numerous gardens, tofts and other plots without buildings, indicating much open land within the defences, but there were at least 133 habitable dwellings and Arundel was a centre for trade. It hosted two markets a week, where tolls were collected by the burgesses, paying a flat sum of £3 12s. p.a. to the lord;4 VCH Suss. v. 15, 19-20, 56, 61; Two Fitzalan Surveys (Suss. Rec. Soc. lxvii), 115-20. and two fairs every year, although in their case tolls were imposed directly by the lord’s officers. Trade followed the major road from Southampton to Canterbury, which used this lowest bridging point on the river Arun at the foot of the hill beneath the castle; and sometimes provisions destined for Dover were sent from Chichester by road before being transferred to boats at Arundel.5 VCH Suss. v (1), 9, 62. The townsmen were jealous of their trading interests, and when these were threatened by the people of Littlehampton, who started to construct a bridge further downstream, William Warnecamp and other of their number took prompt action to get it dismantled.

With regard to its government, Arundel never broke completely free from its lords before the nineteenth century. In the period under review there are some signs of corporate activity, such as the leasing of market tolls, and in 1454 the mayor, Thomas Esshing, and a small group of burgesses organized the collection of dues for repairs to the causeway and bridge, on which their trade depended. A borough court, held every three weeks, dealt with pleas of debt, trespass and detinue as well as the assizes of bread and ale, although by the late fifteenth century it had become fused with the court of the honour of Arundel. Elections of borough officials were conducted at an annual view of frankpledge, although as this was one of the earl’s courts it remains uncertain to what extent the elections were held independently of his estate administrators. The conduct of mayoral elections is obscure, and whether all the town’s adult male inhabitants participated is not known. Records of the elections held at Michaelmas 1473 and 1475 show that, as had happened in the fourteenth century, two men were nominated for the mayoralty, but how and by whom the choice between them was then made does not appear. Also chosen were a coroner, two constables, two ale-tasters and two under bailiffs.6 Ibid. 74-77; Arundel castle mss M24, 25 (ct. rolls 1473-4, 1475-6).

The surviving returns covered all but three of the 22 Parliaments assembled between 1422 and 1460 and provide the names of 27 MPs. Fourteen of those elected apparently only represented the borough in one Parliament each, and five more sat in just two or three. The most experienced among those elected were Richard Smith, who sat four times between 1416 and 1433, and Thomas Dusse, who was returned to as many as ten Parliaments between 1417 and 1437. Before he was elected for Arundel, William Fenningham had represented two other Sussex boroughs. There was thus a pool of experienced men from whom representatives were regularly drawn, with the consequence that in four of the 11 Parliaments between 1422 and 1437 two individuals with previous experience of the Commons were elected, and in the rest a newcomer always accompanied someone who had sat before. Furthermore, re-election to consecutive Parliaments happened five times, with Dusse being returned to four Parliaments in a row from 1423 to 1427 and then again in 1431 and 1432, and William Barber sitting in consecutive Parliaments in 1427 and 1429. Thus, for the 20 years from 1417 to 1437 the distinctive characteristic of Arundel’s representation was that of continuity. Yet this picture of stability and continuity changed after 1442. In possibly four of the eight Parliaments for which returns have survived between then and 1460 both men elected were novices; those with previous experience of the Commons filled only three of the 16 seats recorded;7 And one of those, Acton, had gained his experience for another constituency – Bletchingley. and there were no known instances of re-election.

As this pattern suggests, important changes in the borough’s representation took place in the course of the period, with the 1440s being something of a watershed. In the early fifteenth century, up to and including 1437, Arundel’s representation was dominated by men from the town and its immediate locality. To the 11 Parliaments from 1422 to 1437, the borough returned 13 individuals, the majority of whom were townsmen, and included a barber, a leather-worker, a chapman, a butcher, a smith and a husbandman. Most prominent among them was Warnecamp, who came from a wealthy landowning family and whose trading interests extended to cloth, wine and iron. Two of this group, John Hilly and William Fenningham, were lawyers, both of them active as attorneys in the central courts, where they received briefs from many Sussex worthies and institutions. Yet while Hilly had close connexions with Arundel (before he moved to Chichester),8 A constituency he represented in seven subsequent Parls. his colleague lived further away, at East Grinstead and Waldron. Another possible outsider was William Halle – if the man returned in 1433 has been correctly identified with the prominent landowner from Ore in east Sussex who possessed property worth £45 p.a. Only one member of this group of MPs is known to have been connected personally with the lord of the borough. He, John Cobbehay, held an administrative office on the comital estates and crossed to France with Earl John in 1434. Following the earl’s death at Beauvais a year later, Cobbehay testified at Arundel about his moveable goods shortly before serving in the Parliament assembled in October 1435; while up at Westminster he may have been expected to help sort out the affairs of his deceased lord. Just two members of this group, Hilly and Warnecamp, were ever appointed to royal commissions, the latter merely as a tax collector, and in both cases this happened only after their parliamentary service for Arundel had ended.

In the period 1442-60 the type of person generally returned by Arundel altered noticeably, and there was little continuity of representation: 15 different individuals filled 16 seats, and only Halle had been elected for this borough before. Although nine of the 15 held property in Arundel, only six of them (including a ‘woolman’, a yeoman and a chapman or mercer), may be classed as townsmen-proper. Even those who held borough offices were of higher social standing than this might suggest: Esshing, elected mayor at least three times after he served in Parliament, was described as a ‘gentleman’, and Reynold Morton, later nominated to the mayoralty, was among the six MPs who were styled ‘esquire’. Indeed, the majority of this group came from gentry families. Although some of these were Sussex-born (Apsley was a landowner at Thakeham, and the families of Erneley and Gunter lived at Sidlesham and Racton, respectively), others migrated from outside the county, even from a considerable distance. Thus Thomas Bellingham (February 1449 and 1459) came from as far away as Westmoreland, acquiring property in Arundel and its vicinity through lordship and marriage; Thomas Acton (1450), born to a Shropshire family, had married there and trained in the law before he sat in Parliament; and Thomas Combe (1460), who hailed from Kent, spent his early career in the service of one of the barons of the Exchequer.

These 15 MPs were also distinguished from the earlier group by their personal links with the lord of the borough. Lack of documentary evidence relating to the earls of Arundel and their estates sometimes renders these links speculative, but we do know that Gunter’s family had long been in the service of the Fitzalans, and he himself probably served Earl William; that Erneley became a feoffee of that earl’s widespread estates shortly after he sat for Arundel in 1447; and that Bellingham was one of the earl’s more important tenants, and a close associate of his retainers. Just a few months before the Parliament of 1450 assembled, with Acton representing Arundel, the earl had agreed to act as a trustee of the Shropshire manor of Stapleton, of which Acton’s wife was a coheir. Combe was recorded as bailiff of the earl’s liberty in the rape of Arundel within a year of his return.

Similarly, this group of Arundel’s MPs contrasted with their predecessors of the earlier fifteenth century with regard to their participation in local administration under the Crown. Acton and Combe had both been appointed to royal commissions before they sat for Arundel, the former in Shropshire, the latter in the West Country; and Combe, who had held office as escheator in Surrey and Sussex before he was an MP, later served as sheriff in the joint bailiwick. Three members of this group went on to be j.p.s,9 Bellingham and Combe in Suss., and Acton in Salop and Herefs. and this as well as other factors further accentuates the contrast between those who represented the borough before 1442 and those who did afterwards. In some instances the experience these individuals gained of the workings of the Commons was subsequently put to use not by Arundel but by other constituencies. Bellingham, Combe and Erneley went on to represent other Sussex boroughs and nine years after Acton represented this borough he was elected shire-knight for Shropshire.

Mystery surrounds the process of Arundel’s parliamentary elections. Up to and including the Parliament of 1450 the names of the borough’s MPs were simply given on schedules returned to Chancery along with the indentures naming the county’s representatives. The presence of leading men from Arundel at the county court at Chichester where they attested such indentures recording the election of the knights of the shire may suggest that they had been sent to the court to report the outcome of their borough’s elections. For instance, Hilly attested the shire indentures in 1416 and 1421, Warnecamp did likewise twice in the 1420s, Erneley in 1447 (when he was himself elected for Arundel) and Esshing in 1450. After 1450 indentures survive recording the returns for Arundel, in isolation from those for Sussex. Three such are extant for this period, relating to the Parliaments of 1453, 1459 and 1460. The first, taking the form of a certificate, merely testifies that the un-named mayor, burgesses and community of Arundel had elected Morton and Hert. The second, an indenture drawn up between Thomas Tresham*, the sheriff of Surrey and Sussex, on one part and the mayor and four named burgesses on the other, states that in response to the precept sent to the latter, they with other un-named burgesses and with the assent and consent of the community of the borough had elected as their representatives Apsley and Bellingham. Both of these returns are stated to have been made at Arundel itself. By contrast, the third, that of 1460, was an indenture drawn up at the shire court at Chichester. Once again, the sheriff was one party, the other being the mayor, six named burgesses ‘and other burgesses living in the borough’.10 C219/16/2, 5, 6.