Gloucestershire

Of average size, Gloucestershire was a fertile and relatively densely populated county. While it possessed few natural boundaries, it had three distinct and scenically varied regions. The largest, in the east, fell within the Cotswolds, hilly and sheep-farming country important for the production of wool. By contrast, the Vale of Gloucester (otherwise the Vale of the Severn) was a low-lying area well suited for the growing of grain and the making of cheese and cider. The third and smallest of these regions was the Forest of Dean in the far west of the county. Economic activities here included the mining and digging of iron ore, coal and ochre as well as the production of timber and cider. The most important industry in late medieval Gloucestershire was however the manufacture of cloth.3 N. Pevsner, Buildings of Eng.: Glos. I: The Cotswolds, 21-22; A.J. Warmington, Civil War, Interregnum and Restoration in Glos. 10; S. Rudder, New Hist. Glos. 21-38, 63; The Commons 1386-1421, i. 407-8.

Apart from various manors and other lordships – some of them part of the duchy of Lancaster – the Crown’s immediate interests in Gloucestershire included the Forest of Dean and Gloucester castle. The Forest was one of the principal royal forests in England and the revenues arising from rents and tolls levied on its mining industries were a useful source of revenue for the King. Gloucester castle, the responsibility of the sheriffs of the countyand of constables appointed during pleasure or for life, retained a military function until at least the mid fifteenth century. For most of the period under review, Henry VI’s uncle, Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, was constable of Gloucester, although in practice he exercised the office through deputies.4 VCH Glos. iv. 245-6; v. 26, 285, 326, 361; vii. 185; viii. 9-10; x. 1, 89, 291; N. Saul, Knights and Esquires, 801; R. Somerville, Duchy, i. 636, 638; CPR, 1422-9, pp. 5, 226; 1441-6, pp. 297, 460.

Owing to their extent and antiquity, the large monastic estates in Gloucestershire were of more economic significance than those of temporal lords in the later Middle Ages. Among them were the great Benedictine monasteries of Gloucester, Tewkesbury and Winchcombe and an important external institution, Westminster Abbey, but there is little evidence for the involvement of any religious house in the secular affairs of Gloucestershire. The most pre-eminent lay magnates with lands in Gloucestershire usually resided elsewhere. In the period under review, they included Richard Beauchamp, 13th earl of Warwick, his son-in-law, John Talbot, Lord Talbot and subsequently earl of Shrewsbury, and Richard, duke of York. Not only were all three of them non-resident, they all spent lengthy periods in France. Talbot and York enjoyed a good relationship. Talbot was one of the duke’s retainers and comrades-in-arms on the other side of the Channel and the godfather of his daughter Elizabeth, and there was some overlapping of their affinities in the south-west of England and the west Midlands.5 Saul, 3; VCH Glos. ii. 52; vi. 115, 238-9; vii. 15-16, 140; viii. 26-27; ix. 85; xi. 13, 49, 266; B.F. Harvey, Westminster Abbey and its Estates, 344-5; Oxf. DNB, ‘Beauchamp, Richard’; A.J. Pollard, ‘The Talbots’ (Bristol Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1968), 228, 236; SC6/850/26-30.

In the fourteenth century, for want of greater resident magnates, political leadership in the county fell by default to nobles of the second rank, above all the Berkeleys whose main estates lay in Gloucestershire and north Somerset. Following the death of Thomas, 5th Lord Berkeley in 1417, however, their influence waned dramatically. Lord Thomas’s sole child was his daughter, Elizabeth, who had married the 13th earl of Warwick. She was Lord Thomas’s heir-general but an entail of 1349 barred her right to a significant part of his estates, comprising the castle and hundred of Berkeley, along with 12 manors in Gloucestershire and another in Somerset, in favour of his nearest male heir, his nephew James Berkeley. Allowing the entail to stand would have broken up Lord Thomas’s estates as a whole but, while that indecisive peer sought to bypass it in favour of his daughter, he also treated James as his heir. He never resolved his dilemma, and following his death Elizabeth and her husband seized Berkeley castle and secured interim custody of it from Henry V, so sparking the initial stages of a lengthy and famous dispute. James Berkeley, summoned to Parliament as Lord Berkeley from 1421 onwards, secured the support of Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, and the Beauchamps that of John, duke of Bedford, and there were armed skirmishes between the two sides in Gloucestershire. At length, arbitration leading to a settlement of 1425 brought this first round of feuding to an end. The settlement assigned Berkeley castle and the entailed lands to James Berkeley although he was obliged to allow the earl a life interest in seven manors comprising part of those estates. Warwick also retained ‘by the courtesy’ the extensive Lisle estates in southern England that had come to the Berkeleys through the marriage of the parents of the by now dead Elizabeth. Just winning as much of his uncle’s estates as he did put James Berkeley to considerable cost. Forced to mortgage some of his holdings, he lived on a far lesser scale than Lord Thomas (who had enjoyed the income and lifestyle of a lesser earl) and other previous Lords Berkeley, and his assessment for the subsidy of 1436 was no more than £333 p.a. in lands. As a result, he lacked both standing and influence and played little part in politics at a national or regional level. In any case, his struggles to secure the whole of the Berkeley estates, renewed after Beauchamp died in 1439, took up most of his energy until his own death in 1463. Warwick’s three daughters and heirs by Elizabeth Berkeley and their husbands – John Talbot, 1st earl of Shrewsbury, Edmund Beaufort, then earl of Dorset, and George Neville, Lord Latimer – proved no less formidable opponents than their late father. An arbitration award of 1448 failed, and in September 1451 Lord Lisle, Shrewsbury’s son by his second marriage, captured Berkeley castle and took Lord Berkeley and his sons prisoners. Less than two years later, however, the deaths of Shrewsbury and Lisle at the battle of Castillon, the final defeat of English arms in France, took much of the sting out of matters. Lord Berkeley and Talbot’s son and successor, the second earl of Shrewsbury, were able to achieve a modus vivendi marked by Berkeley’s third marriage to the new earl’s sister, Joan, in the late 1450s, and Berkeley also reached a formal reconciliation with the first earl’s widowed countess early in Edward IV’s reign. Although members of the Gloucestershire gentry participated in the dispute, essentially a struggle for land and power in the county, it does not necessarily follow that it was especially disruptive for local affairs. First, the authority and influence of the earls of Warwick and Shrewsbury far outweighed that of Berkeley, who could attract relatively few supporters but whose tenacity at least ensured the survival of the Berkeley barony, albeit in greatly reduced form. Secondly, notwithstanding the occasional skirmishing and the seizure of Berkeley castle in 1451, it did not cause serious violence in the period under review. The second stage of the quarrel, culminating in the celebrated private battle of Nibley Green, did not break out until seven years after the death of James, Lord Berkeley, in 1470.6 Saul, 3-4; Oxf. DNB, ‘Berkeley, James’; Cat. Med. Muns. Berkeley Castle ed. Wells-Furby (Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc.), i. pp. xliii-xlvi; Pollard, 238; J.H. Cooke, ‘Gt. Berkeley Law-Suit’, Trans. Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc. iii. 305-24.

Apart from these aristocratic rivalries, the troubled years of the mid fifteenth century also witnessed political unrest in the county town of Gloucester. In 1449 the townsmen attacked a manor and vineyard at nearby Highnam belonging to Reynold Boulers, abbot of Gloucester from 1437 to 1450, a figure widely hated for his association with the unpopular government and Court. No doubt to deter anyone at Gloucester who would oppose the Crown, the authorities dispatched one of the quarters of the defeated rebel leader Jack Cade there in the following year. Soon afterwards, however, the town was allegedly the scene of a plot to begin a new rebellion against the King. Among those indicted for his part in the supposed conspiracy was one of its most respected burgesses, Thomas Deerhurst, who had only recently represented the county as a knight of the shire. Although subsequently able to secure a royal pardon, he would never hold public office again.7 I.M.W. Harvey, Jack Cade, 145-6; KB27/761, rex rots. 15v, 16v; CPR, 1446-52, p. 429.

Gloucester was the only parliamentary borough in the county during the period under review, since Bristol had become a shire in its own right, administratively separate from both Gloucestershire and Somerset, in 1373. Although far smaller than Bristol, Gloucester was one of the more important middle-ranking boroughs that returned burgesses to late medieval Parliaments. It was a centre for the iron and cloth industries in the county, for the sale and exchange of produce and for the distribution of luxury goods to the nobility and gentry. It was also an inland port with an overseas trade, although for this activity it depended on Bristol, which controlled the seaborne trade of the Severn.8 Trans. Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc. ciii. 150-1; The Commons 1386-1421, i. 407-8. Less significant but still of some consequence were two other urban settlements in the county. Cirencester in the south-east had sent burgesses to at least one fourteenth-century Parliament and would do so again in the sixteenth; Tewkesbury in the north did not become a parliamentary borough until 1610.9 The Commons 1509-58, i. 95; The Commons 1604-1629, ii. 143-5; VCH Glos. viii. 153.

A record of the names of every knight of the shire for Gloucestershire in Henry VI’s reign, save those of 1459, survives. At least 21 men sat for the county in this period, a total that would rise to 23 if both the unknown Members of 1459 were newcomers to the Commons. Like that of 1459, the returns of 1437, 1439 and 1445 are no longer extant but the fine rolls record the names of those elected in those years. With the possible exception of Sir John Barre, each of the 21 was either certainly or probably resident in Gloucestershire when standing for election. Over half of the MPs were certainly native to the county, and Sir Maurice Berkeley, John Greville, Robert Greyndore, John Langley, Thomas Pauncefoot, Nicholas Poyntz, William Tracy and the two Whittingtons in particular were from old or firmly established local families. Others, like John Butler, William Giffard and John Kemys, were of uncertain parentage or of obscure or unknown origin, while Barre, who came from Herefordshire, owed his connexion with Gloucestershire to his second marriage. It would therefore appear that the county’s more prominent landowners featured a little less significantly in its parliamentary representation than did their counterparts of 1386-1421. Well over half of the known Members of those years were from old Gloucestershire gentry families.10 The Commons 1386-1421, i. 399.

As in that earlier period, no single family dominated the representation of Gloucestershire in Henry VI’s reign,11 Ibid. although most of the 21 – however deep-rooted or recent their associations with the county – already possessed family ties with Parliament when they entered the Commons. For example, Berkeley, Thomas Brydges (the son of Giles), Thomas Mille, Pauncefoot, Poyntz, Tracy and Guy Whittington were all sons of knights of the shire for Gloucestershire, and William Whittington was Guy’s grandson. Greyndore and Thomas Young were respectively the sons of MPs for Herefordshire and Bristol. Furthermore, at least 14 of the 21 (Barre, Berkeley, Giles and Thomas Brydges, the Whittingtons, Butler, Greville, Kemys, Poyntz, Robert Stanshawe, Pauncefoot, Tracy and Young) married daughters of MPs, in six cases (Giles Brydges, Guy Whittington, Kemys, Poyntz, Stanshawe and Tracy) daughters of knights of the shire for Gloucestershire.12 Possibly Nottingham should also be included in this category. His second wife was the da. of John Cassy, either the MP or his son and namesake. By contrast, only four of the known MPs for Worcestershire in this period were certainly from families with something of a tradition of family service in Parliament or were in the process of establishing one.

Other parliamentary connexions among the 21 are also worth noting. Tracy and Pauncefoot were brothers-in-law, as were Stanshawe and Poyntz; and Berkeley, Thomas Brydges, Kemys and Mille were themselves the fathers of MPs although none of their offspring represented Gloucestershire. Kemys’s son Roger* sat with him in the Parliament of 1450, as a burgess for the Wiltshire borough of Westbury, while Stanshawe’s fellow MPs in his first Parliament, that of 1422, included his younger brother Nicholas Stanshawe*, a burgess for Appleby and already an experienced parliamentarian. Similarly, during his parliamentary career Young sat in the Commons alongside each of his three siblings, his brother, John Young*, and his half-brothers, Thomas* and William Canynges*.

Whatever their origins or family connexions, just two of the 21, the well-born Barre, a nephew of John Talbot, 1st earl of Shrewsbury, and Berkeley, a descendant of Maurice, Lord Berkeley (d.1326), represented the county as belted knights. Butler and William Nottingham also received knighthoods, but not until long after sitting for Gloucestershire. The minor part played by actual knights in the parliamentary representation of the county represents a marked acceleration of a trend prevalent throughout the realm by this period. While no fewer than 12 of Gloucestershire’s 26 known MPs of the period 1386-1421 were knights when returned for the county for the first or only time, the participation of actual knights in its parliamentary representation diminished as those three and a half decades progressed.13 The Commons 1386-1421, i. 400. Barre certainly fits the traditional picture of a knight, for he won his knighthood campaigning with Richard, duke of York, in France. Berkeley received his before the end of Henry V’s reign, perhaps likewise during military service overseas. There were other soldiers among the 21, since Greyndore, Guy Whittington (who may have fought at Agincourt) and Poyntz had all played some part in the Hundred Years’ War before 1422, as perhaps had Butler.

Although he also became a knight, Nottingham owed the honour to his successful career in the law. Deerhurst, Langley, Stanshawe and Young were also lawyers. Between them, they and Nottingham sat in no fewer than 13 of the 21 Parliaments of Henry VI’s reign for which the names of Gloucestershire’s MPs have survived. It is also possible that Poyntz, Mille and John Cassy were members of the legal profession (meaning that in this period lawyers filled up to 20 of the 42 documented seats) and that the unknown Members of 1459 included at least one lawyer. In stark contrast, none of the known MPs for the county in the years 1386-1421 was certainly a lawyer, and the three putative men of law among them sat in only seven of the Parliaments of that period.14 Ibid. As was typical for many of their calling, most of the lawyer MPs of Henry VI’s reign were ‘new men’ or from recently established families. Two of them, Nottingham and Young, subsequently rose to the top of their profession. The rise of the former is particularly impressive, given that he was the son of a mere weaver from Cirencester. Young was also born into trade, albeit it at a far wealthier level, as was Greville. While Nottingham chose to concentrate on his legal career, Young was involved in commerce long after entering the law, perhaps until the end of his life. As for Greville, he was the son of a wealthy and influential Cotswold wool merchant. He began his own career in trade but it is not clear how long he pursued his father’s calling. Even though involvement in commerce was a less honourable calling than the pursuit of arms, nobility and gentry were often ready to participate in potentially lucrative trading ventures, and the well-born Greyndore was a shipowner.

The wealth Young accumulated through trade and the law gave him the wherewithal to invest in land, although his acquisitions were respectable rather than spectacular. For lack of evidence, one cannot arrive at even a rough calculation of his landed wealth. As for the other MPs, even when valuations are possible these are no more than approximate. Where they exist, inquisitions post mortem provide the best evidence, although such inquisitions commonly produced underestimates. It would nevertheless appear that Berkeley, Greyndore and Barre were three of the wealthiest landowners among them. At the very least, Berkeley’s inheritance was worth £150 p.a. and Greyndore’s inquisitions post mortem valued his estates at over £136 following his death in 1443. Barre, whose wardship and marriage the Crown had sold for 600 marks, came into extensive estates in the right of his very wealthy second wife, so it is surprising to find that the subsidy returns of 1451 for his native county of Herefordshire assessed him at only £80 p.a. in lands. No official valuations of Nottingham’s estates survive although he appears to have invested much more substantially in land than did his fellow lawyer, Young. One unverifiable claim made after his death asserted that he had possessed holdings – possibly not comprising all of his estates – worth £132 p.a. at the end of his life. Yet it is clear that Nottingham, who survived until Richard III’s reign, was nowhere near that wealthy in landed terms when he stood for election in 1453, not least because the evidence for his acquisitions relates to purchases made after he had represented Gloucestershire in the Commons. Three other MPs, Greville, Langley and Tracy, are all likely to have enjoyed landed incomes of at least £100 p.a. and, if one is to believe his inquisitions post mortem, Butler owned estates worth some £70 p.a. At a lesser level, Deerhurst may have held lands with an annual value of £50 p.a. The standing of Langley as a landowner was especially hard-won, since it had fallen to him and his father before him to rebuild their family’s fortunes after the serious erosion, partly by fraud, of its estates. He possessed holdings in Shropshire, Berkshire and Oxfordshire as well as Gloucestershire, and over half the other MPs were landowners outside the latter county as well, primarily elsewhere in south-west England, the Welsh borders and the west Midlands.

While all of the 21 participated in local government to a greater or lesser extent, such landed interests in other counties ensured that several of them also did so outside Gloucestershire. At least seven were sheriff of Gloucestershire, each of them for more than one term although in most cases not until after representing the county in the Commons for the first or only time. It is not possible, owing to problems of identification, to confirm that two others, Giffard and Cassy, also held the office. Assuming he was the William Giffard pricked for the shrievalty in 1445, Giffard was sheriff before entering Parliament. Cassy, on the other hand, did not exercise his responsibilities as such until well over a decade after sitting for Gloucestershire for the last time, if he rather than a younger namesake was the John Cassy who held the shrievalty in 1469-70. Two of the sheriffs, Guy Whittington and Barre, served terms as such in Herefordshire before doing so in Gloucestershire. Whittington had already twice sat in Parliament when he first became a sheriff, while Barre began the first of his two terms as sheriff of Herefordshire while a knight of the shire for Gloucestershire. Another of the MPs, Thomas Mille, was never sheriff of the latter county but served two terms as such in Herefordshire. Like Barre, he received his initial appointment as sheriff while representing Gloucestershire in the Commons. Nine of the 21 served as escheator of Gloucestershire although, by contrast with that of sheriff, most of those who took up the office had already held it when elected for the county for the first or only time. A majority of the escheators among them were from families of lesser rank or more obscure background than those who never held the office. Greville served no fewer than four terms as such, all of them before 1422, the first before he began his parliamentary career, and he was escheator when elected to his second Parliament in 1419. Both Poyntz and Nottingham served two terms as escheator of Gloucestershire and Guy Whittington and Cassy held the office in Herefordshire as well.

The pattern of service on the commission of the peace is broadly similar to that of the MPs’ predecessors as knights of the shire in the three and a half decades immediately preceding 1422.15 Ibid. 401. All but five or six of them were j.p.s in Gloucestershire, some for decades.16 Giffard, Greyndore, Kemys, Pauncefoot and Poyntz were never on the commission of the peace and it is not certain whether the Thomas Brydges who was a j.p. for the county in the later 15th century was the MP or a namesake. Just under half of these justices did not join the commission until after sitting for the county for the first or only time but ten of those appointed to the county’s bench sat in one or more Parliaments while serving on it. Even more so than in the years 1386-1421,17 The Commons 1386-1421, i. 401. the county was in the habit of returning current members of its commission of the peace to the Commons. In only two of the 21 Parliaments of Henry VI’s reign for which the names of its knights of the shire have survived, those of 1431 and 1447, was neither of its representatives then on the bench, and both of its MPs in the Parliaments of 1422, 1423, 1427 and 1432 were j.p.s. There was likewise considerable overlap between the personnel of the bench and of parliamentary representation of Herefordshire in the period under review. Nottingham, a j.p. for Gloucestershire throughout his parliamentary career, was on the commission of the peace for over 38 years, and Giles Brydges, Langley, Mille and Young were also particularly long-serving justices. Lengthy membership of the commission of the peace did not however necessarily equate to a huge amount of activity as a j.p., since most of the MPs who held the office, including Brydges and Mille, were not members of the quorum. Those who were, Deerhurst, Langley, Nottingham, Stanshawe and Young, all lawyers, were working justices. Six of the j.p.s also held the office outside Gloucestershire. Nottingham and Young owed these appointments elsewhere to their work as justices of assize, and Barre, Berkeley, Giles Brydges and Butler to their landed interests in other counties.

All of the 21 (save, possibly, Giffard) served as ad hoc commissioners in Gloucestershire. Unlike their known predecessors of 1386-1421,18 Ibid. the majority of them did so after beginning their parliamentary careers, and the first such commissions on which Butler, Mille and Tracy were part arose from taxes that Parliaments in which they had just sat had granted the Crown. For both Butler and Tracy, the commissions in question were their first known local government appointments of any type, an illustration of their lack of administrative experience when they first entered Parliament. In short, as was the case in many other shires, such experience was not essential for prospective MPs, even if the electorate customarily returned at least one current j.p. for the county. A dozen of the 21 received appointments to ad hoc commissions outside Gloucestershire, whether because of their legal qualifications or through the interests they possessed elsewhere.19 It appears that Butler, Langley, Mille, Pauncefoot, Poyntz, Stanshawe, Tracy, William Whittington and perhaps Giffard served on commissions covering Glos. only, whether before or after they had represented the county for the first or only time. As far as the evidence goes, only Deerhurst held duchy of Lancaster office at a county and regional level before representing Gloucestershire in the Commons.

Pauncefoot was the only member of the 21 who certainly joined the royal household,20 It is not clear whether Butler is to be identified with the mid century Household esq. of that name. and it appears that Nottingham was the only MP to hold national office. By the early 1440s, Pauncefoot was one of the King’s esquires, and his connexion with the Household may have helped him to gain election to his two Parliaments, particularly that of 1447, which contained a relatively high number of royal servants among the knights of the shire. Similarly, Nottingham’s ties with the Crown are likely to have assisted his election to another ‘royalist’ Parliament, that of 1453. Although his landed estates in Gloucestershire were insignificant at that date, he was by then both the King’s attorney-general and an apprentice-at-law for the duchy of Lancaster. By virtue of his standing as a law officer, he also received an individual writ of summons to this and subsequent assemblies.

Like Nottingham, Young was one of the duchy’s apprentices-at-law when returned for Gloucestershire. Young also had an extremely important noble patron in Richard, duke of York, whose followers Barre and Giles Brydges likewise were when elected to the Parliaments of 1450 and 1455 respectively. Most of the other MPs similarly had links with one or more great lay magnates. Ecclesiastical patrons were far less prominent, an indication, perhaps, of their relative lack of involvement in the county’s secular affairs. Nottingham served the abbey of Cirencester as a bailiff some years before becoming a knight of the shire for Gloucestershire and Langley stood proxy for the abbot of the same religious house while attending his final Parliament in 1442. Another of the 21, Barre, was a steward on the estates of Thomas Spofford, bishop of Hereford, although Spofford had resigned his see by the time Barre stood for election in 1450.

The Gloucestershire constituency survey covering the three and a half decades prior to 1422 found no evidence of direct interference in parliamentary elections for Gloucestershire by magnates, whether they possessed estates in the county or not.21 The Commons 1386-1421, i. 402. While the same generally holds true for the period under review, Young must have owed much for his seat in 1460 to his links with his most important noble patron, Richard, duke of York, then in control of the government and the person of the King. Similarly, Barre’s status as a retainer of the duke was probably of significance for his return to Parliament a decade earlier and one might posit that Giles Brydges’s connexion with York assisted his election to the Parliament of 1455, given the political circumstances in which that assembly met.

On other occasions, however, the return of men linked with particular lords does not prove that they owed their election to their patrons. There is no evidence, for example, that Greville’s patron, John, duke of Bedford, frequently absent in France, intervened on any occasion to secure his return. Yet Greville’s connexion with the King’s uncle may have had a bearing on his parliamentary career, since it enhanced his standing in Gloucestershire and, therefore, his prospects of becoming a knight of the shire. Even so, Bedford was not his only master, and his fellow knight of the shire in 1422 and 1423, Stanshawe, likewise served several lords. If Stanshawe’s links with any of these patrons had a bearing on his time as an MP, his ties with Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, for whom he was a counsellor, were perhaps the most significant. In the Parliament of 1422 at least, he and other Beauchamp retainers are likely to have comprised ‘the most powerful single seigneurial bloc’ in the Commons.22 J.S. Roskell, Commons of 1422, 70. While Stanshawe also managed simultaneously to serve Beauchamp’s adversary, James, Lord Berkeley, as a chief steward, it is unlikely that he owed anything to the far less influential Berkeley for his parliamentary career. Poyntz, Greville and Greyndore likewise had dealings with Berkeley although Poyntz’s association with that peer was not a typical patron-client relationship. Indeed, Berkeley was largely the dependent, since Poyntz was a creditor to whom he turned for substantial loans, arrangements that are testimony to the penury that the dispute over the Berkeley estates had reduced him. Greville, a feoffee to the use of the will of Thomas, Lord Berkley, is the only man among the MPs certainly granted an annual retainer by Lord James although not until long after his parliamentary career was over. Greyndore, another of Lord Thomas’s feoffees, received a grant of ‘Shobbenasshe Park’ near Berkeley from James Berkeley at about the time of his last Parliament but, again, it is unlikely that his links with the latter had a bearing on his parliamentary career. Mille, who took the side of the Talbots against the Berkeleys, counted Humphrey Stafford, earl of Stafford and duke of Buckingham, as well as the first earl of Shrewsbury among his patrons but it is similarly impossible to prove that either lord helped him to gain election to Parliament. The effects or extent of Stafford’s political patronage are extremely difficult to measure,23 C. Rawcliffe, Staffords, 81. while Talbot spent most of his career outside England and was not often an immediate or active presence in domestic politics. On the other hand, Mille’s election to his last Parliament in 1449 occurred during the short period when the earl of Shrewsbury was most engaged in Gloucestershire and commanded a large local following.24 Pollard, 235. Shrewsbury’s retainers also included Nottingham and Cassy, the knights of the shire in the Parliament of 1453, but the earl had already embarked on his last expedition to France several months before the summoning of this assembly. As far as the election of Nottingham is concerned, his status as the King’s attorney-general was almost certainly of greater significance than his Talbot connexion.25 Pollard posits that the Talbots must have influenced the election of Cassy and Nottingham, and that the latter may have become attorney-general through the earl of Shrewsbury’s ‘good lordship’. Yet he undermines these hypotheses with his findings that the earl did not become an important figure at Court or a leading member of the Council, and that he remained in the background of politics: Pollard, 201, 244, 245n.

Whatever the nature of their links with noble patrons, it is unlikely that any of the MPs were mere pawns of their masters. As already noted, Stanshawe was sufficiently independently-minded and adroit to serve James, Lord Berkeley, and Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, at the same time. Furthermore, some of the 21 may have had their own reasons for seeking election. Langley, for example, could have thought a seat in the Parliament of 1429 useful for advancing his own specific interests, for he was then engaged in the lengthy process of recovering lost family estates, a struggle in which he numbered a member of the peerage, Reynold, Lord Grey, among his adversaries. The earlier years of the reign also saw Sir Maurice Berkeley, Langley’s fellow MP in 1429, stand up to a social superior, in his case the formidable Joan Beauchamp, Lady Abergavenny, to whom he had lost lands he claimed as his inheritance.

Like their counterparts in Herefordshire and Worcestershire, the Gloucestershire electorate valued continuity of representation, just as it had in the period 1386-1421.26 The Commons 1386-1421, i. 399. Unless neither of the unknown knights of the shire of 1459 had sat before – whether for the county or another constituency – the only Parliament in which both MPs were newcomers was that of 1431. There was continuity in another sense, given the already noted family ties between most of the 21 and Parliament. Young enjoyed the most extensive parliamentary career of all of them. By the time of his election in the autumn of 1460, he had already sat in no fewer than ten previous Parliaments, nine of them consecutive, for his native Bristol. As far as the evidence goes, Greville was the most experienced of those MPs who appear only to have sat for Gloucestershire. A knight of the shire on at least three occasions under Henry V, he also represented the county in four of Henry VI’s Parliaments, three of them consecutive. Langley, an MP for Gloucestershire in five Parliaments, was another parliamentary veteran, while Stanshawe, Greyndore and Guy Whittington were all Members of four. Nine of the 21 represented the county just once, but they included the extremely experienced Young as well as Barre, who had already sat for his home county of Herefordshire, and Nottingham, a burgess for Gloucester in the Parliament of 1449-50. Nottingham’s fellow lawyer, Deerhurst, also sat for Gloucester, for which he was twice a parliamentary burgess before his election for Gloucestershire in 1445; and he represented the town, his birthplace, on a couple more occasions after sitting for the county for the second and last time in the Parliament of 1449-50. Greville was not alone in first sitting before 1422, since both Greyndore and Guy Whittington were knights of the shire for Gloucestershire in two Parliaments of Henry V’s reign. Butler, who represented Buckinghamshire, where part of his inheritance lay, in the Parliament of 1467, was apparently the only man among the 21 returned to the Commons after the period under review.

Elections of Gloucestershire’s knights of the shire took place at Gloucester. In the great majority of the cases where dates are available, the county court met on a Monday but, according to the dating on the indentures of return, the elections to the Parliaments of 1449-50 and 1450 occurred on a Tuesday. The indenture of 1453, moreover, bears the date ‘Monday 13 Feb.’ although 13 Feb. fell on a Tuesday that year. Scribal error provides the readiest explanation for these discrepancies. Most of the surviving returns take the form of joint indentures for Gloucestershire and Gloucester, in which several burgesses of the town are included among the attestors. There was a separate indenture for Gloucester in 1423, an innovation dropped immediately after that election but readopted by 1449 at the latest. Thereafter, separate indentures became the norm. The number of named attestors listed in the extant indentures varies from as few as 16 in 1450 to as many as 187 in 1427. The elections of 1429 (81 attestors) and 1433 (116) were also well attended, while ‘many others’ besides the named witnessed those of 1435 and 1442. Returns listing a particularly large number of attestors might represent roll calls of the whole county court.27 M. McKisack, Parlty. Repn. English Bors. 57. They might also indicate a contested election although this is impossible to prove in the case of Gloucestershire. Seventeen of the 21 themselves attested one or more elections for the county within the period under review, and it is no surprise, given the then political circumstances, to find the strongly Lancastrian Thomas Mille participating in that of 1453 and the Yorkist Giles Brydges in that of 1460. Yet the involvement of those at the head of the gentry, the belted knights, was limited to say the least, since they feature in just five of the surviving indentures. Only those of 1422 and 1427 include two knights; all the others list just one.

Whether contested or not, the political circumstances in which some elections were held appear to have had a bearing on their outcomes. As already noted, their connexions with the Crown are likely to have assisted the return of Pauncefoot to the Parliament of 1447 and of Nottingham to that of 1453, and it is necessary to view the elections of the three Yorkists, Barre, Giles Brydges and Young, to those of 1450, 1455 and 1460 respectively, in the light of political circumstances. It is also worth noting that Brydges’s fellow knight of the shire in 1455, William Whittington, may have come to identify with the Yorkist cause by this date, and that the other MP of 1460, Thomas Brydges, was, like his father Giles, one of York’s annuitants.

There is no record of the activities in the Commons of any of the MPs as knights of the shire for Gloucestershire. While Young famously and dramatically spoke out on behalf of York in the Parliament of 1450-1, he was then sitting for Bristol. One can only speculate about the part that the county’s MPs may have played when the Commons came to deal with matters of particular relevance to it. For example, in the successive Parliaments of 1427, 1429 and 1431 the Commons drew up petitions about the activities of Welshmen and others who were disrupting navigation on the Severn, to the great detriment of those in Gloucestershire, Worcestershire and the marches of Wales who depended on free passage on the river for their livelihoods. It is feasible, although impossible to prove, that the knights of the shire for Gloucestershire in those assemblies played a part in composing or promoting these petitions. Furthermore, Greville’s mercantile background may have given him a particular interest in the petition submitted in the Parliament of 1427, while Langley, a lawyer, presumably possessed the qualifications to contribute to the drawing up of the petition in that of 1429.