Leominster

John Leland, writing in the 1530s, gave a confused and confusing account of the town of Leominster. He found it ‘meatly large’ with ‘good buyldinge of tymbar’, and remarked that it had once flourished through a clothmaking industry fed by local wool of exceptionally high quality. Yet, he continued, ‘of later dayes’ the town’s prosperity had been compromised when, after complaints by the citizens of the borough’s commercial rivals, Hereford and Worcester, its Saturday market had been moved to Friday. In this he is probably reflecting local jealousies and rivalries rather than the reality of decline, for the market had been moved as long before as the reign of Henry III. Recent architectural evidence suggests that the borough expanded throughout the fifteenth and into the sixteenth century, and the Edwardian chantry commissioners described it as ‘the greatest market town within the county of Hereford’.1 J. Leland, Itin. ed. Toulmin Smith, ii. 73-74; G.F. Townsend, Leominster, 25-26; J. and C. Hillaby, Leominster Minster, Priory and Borough c.660-1539, 245-51; The Commons 1509-58, i. 107.

If the fifteenth-century burgesses of Leominster had anything to complain about, their complaint was probably political rather than economic. The borough’s institutional development had long been constrained by the overlordship of the Benedictine abbey of Reading, to which the manor of Leominster had been granted by Henry I, and it was not until 1554, 15 years after the Dissolution, that the burgesses won a charter of incorporation. That charter claims that, ‘from time immemorial’, the borough had been governed by a bailiff and 24 burgesses, periodically elected, but there is no evidence that this body existed in the period under review here (although, given the loss of records, the possibility cannot be discounted).2 CPR, 1553-4, p. 395. This lack of institutional development makes it very difficult to describe accurately the form of the borough’s late-medieval government. Immediate responsibility rested in the hands of the priory of Leominster, an ancient cell of the abbey of Reading. The prior nominated two stewards from among his monks and two bailiffs from among the townsmen.3 Townsend, 30-31; J. Price, Leominster, 211-14. The most important of the latter was described as ‘bailiff of the abbot of Reading’s liberty of Leominster’; the other, described as the ‘town bailiff’, was subordinate and changed more regularly.4 In the 16th century the distinction was between the bailiff for the town and that for the ‘foreign’ or out-parish, which included the townships of Eaton, Ivington and Wharton: The Commons 1509-58, i. 107.

Although, even as late as Henry VI’s reign, Leominster’s government was only in an early stage of development, it had returned MPs since the time of Edward I. Returns survive for Leominster for 19 of the 22 Parliaments of the period. Twenty-one different men are recorded as having been returned, representing the borough on a total of 49 occasions. Only one of these 21, William Wykes, was returned for another constituency, sitting for Hereford in 1472. Not surprisingly, with an average of fewer than two Parliaments per MP (compared with a little over two in the period 1386-1421), multiple elections were not common. There was nothing to compare with the parliamentary career of one of the borough’s earlier MPs, William Salisbury†, returned 11 times between 1332 and 1348.5 Hillaby, 174 (where the figure is wrongly given as 12). Of the MPs of the period 1422-60, William Raves had the most impressive record, being returned on five occasions between 1420 and 1437. Of the others three (Thomas Hood, Warton and Winnesley) sat on four occasions, and as many as ten only once. Consequently, the low level of representative continuity, noticeable in the period 1386-1421, was maintained into Henry VI’s reign. Only 20 of the 38 seats were taken by experienced MPs, compared with 19 of 44 in the earlier period, a difference to be explained by the higher proportion of missing returns in this earlier period. Only in six of Henry VI’s Parliaments was the borough represented by two experienced MPs.

Within this pattern of low continuity, however, a brief period stands out as an exception. Five of the six Parliaments to which two experienced MPs were returned fell between 1427 and 1442, during which only three of the 16 known seats were filled by novices. Thereafter, however, the level of continuity fell even lower than had prevailed before 1427, although again allowance must be made for missing returns. Of the 14 known seats between 1447 and 1460 nine were filled by novices, and in the Parliaments of 1447, 1449 (Feb.) and 1450 both the MPs fall into that category. Yet, curiously, it was during this very period that the only three instances of immediate re-election occurred: Richard Brugge was re-elected in 1435, and the same two MPs were elected to the two Parliaments of 1449. None the less, since none of those who most frequently sat for the borough in the period under review here – Raves, Warton and Winnesley, all of whom were elected four or five times – were elected to consecutive assemblies, it seems either that the electors were generally loath to return men who had represented them in the previous assembly or, more probably, such men were disinclined to accept successive elections.

Indeed, the Leominster elite appear to have been reluctant parliamentarians. Two sources provide snapshots of the leading men of the borough. In 1434 local commissioners, county by county, returned lists into Chancery, naming those of sufficient standing to be required to take an oath not to maintain peace-breakers. The Herefordshire commissioners returned 16 Leominster men, 14 of whom appear as attestors to at least one of the borough’s parliamentary elections but only five as MPs.6 CPR, 1429-36, p. 377. The subsidy returns of 1451 present an even starker picture. Thirty-five laymen from the hundred of Leominster were assessed as having taxable incomes of 40s. or more. Of these, 17 can be identified from the election indentures as at least temporary residents of the borough, but only two of them, John Hood and Richard Brugge, are recorded as representing the borough in Parliament (two others were sons of MPs, namely Roland Winnesley and Hugh Warton).7 E179/117/64. Further, of the 12 men who attested eight or more of the surviving returns, only three – John Salisbury†, Thomas Hood and John Walker – are recorded as MPs.

It thus appears that some prominent borough families were content to let lesser members take parliamentary seats, and it is tempting to conclude that the leading townsmen attended the hustings to prevent their own election. Why else should such obscure men as Robert Baret, John Munede and William Presthevide have been returned, when much more important burgesses, like John Bradford, Thomas Strete and Thomas Knott, all regular attestors, were not? Hugh Warton’s four elections in nine years might also indicate the reluctance of others to serve. He was a local man – hailing from Wharton in the immediate neighbourhood of the borough – but, by the time he was first returned in 1426, he had found a place as a yeoman in the royal household. No doubt his presence about the King made him ready to serve without wages, and the townsmen were seemingly keen to exploit the readiness. Much the same could be said in respect of the lawyer, William Wykes, returned to the two Parliaments of 1449. Interestingly, on the second occasion, he was elected in absentia: on 30 Oct. 1449, the day of the hustings, he was in the court of King’s bench offering surety for the mayor of Hereford.

The apparent reluctance of some of the leading burgesses may have been a function of the borough’s indirect relationship with the Crown, mediated as it was through the abbey of Reading, and the long distance from which the abbey’s lordship was exercised. The latter consideration put the borough in a very different position from, say, Warwick, another ‘mediatized’ borough, for its lord was a resident with a keen interest in the borough and most of its MPs were his servants. This is not to say that Leominster’s MPs were unconnected with the abbot – Winnesley’s four elections all occurred when he was the abbot’s bailiff in the borough, and John Brugge, when elected in 1459, may already have been the abbot’s bailiff in Herefordshire – but it is unlikely that the connexion was a factor in their elections. Significantly, in the period 1386-1421, none of the borough’s MPs are known to have held office in the abbot’s local administration, and in the period under review here at least one of the MPs, John Mallyng, was in active dispute with the abbot at the time of his election.

Aside from Winnesley’s four elections to Parliament when the abbot’s bailiff, nothing worthwhile can be said about the relationship between election to Parliament and office-holding within the borough, for the names of the officers are generally unknown. Winnesley was the abbot’s bailiff for just over half the period under review, and only one other holder of that office is known, namely Thomas Lyghtfote, who served in the 1440s and is not known to have been an MP. The lesser officer, the town bailiff, was changed more frequently, but only four town bailiffs are known. Of these, only John Walker is recorded as representing the borough in Parliament, doing so some years before he was bailiff.8 The three other known town bailiffs, all like Walker identified from the election indentures, were John Bradford, bailiff in 1432, Thomas Kerver from 1442 to 1453, if not longer, and Richard Baret from at least 1460 to 1478. The last was clearly a kinsman of the MP Robert Baret, and it is possible, but unlikely, that the 1447 indenture names ‘Robert’ in error for ‘Richard’.

Even though some of the borough’s leading men appear to have been reluctant to accept election, this is not to say that the borough’s MPs were uniformly men of little account. Warton and Wykes have already been mentioned as persons of standing; Winnesley had a long career as a local lawyer and acquired a county estate by marriage; and Hugh Shirley, who may have been related to the knightly family of Shirley of Staunton Harold in Leicestershire, advanced himself significantly in the service of the house of York, ending his career as usher of the King’s chamber. Indeed, Shirley, Wykes and Winnesley were all important enough to hold county office. Wykes, who during a long career served as coroner of Herefordshire and under sheriff of both that county and Gloucestershire, did not hold these offices until after he had represented the borough, but the other two held office during their careers as Leominster MPs. For the extended term of three years, Shirley was escheator of Herefordshire between representing the borough in 1460 and 1472; and Winnesley was under sheriff of that county both before his first election in 1422 and at the time of his third election in 1432.

Further, the concern of leading townsmen to avoid election did not result in the significant intrusion of outsiders. Of the 21 MPs all but one resided in the borough. The exception was Wykes, who lived at Moreton Jefferies, some 12 miles to the south-east. Interestingly, when, in 1472, more than 20 years after he had represented the borough in Parliament, he was elected for Hereford, he became the first Leominster MP ever elected for another constituency. Nor was it common, as far as the available evidence goes, for the borough’s MPs to have landed interests outside it: only six of the 21 – Wykes, Bradley, Richard Brugge, Warton, Shirley and Winnesley – are known to have held land in the county, and their holdings (excepting those Shirley held by royal grant) were confined to the near vicinity of the borough.

For the most part the MPs were local merchants and tradesmen. Given the town’s economic dependence upon the cloth trade, it is not surprising that several of the MPs should have been involved in it: the four Hoods were variously described as merchants and mercers (although William Hood was also described as a vintner), Bradley was a mercer, Mallyng, a draper or hosier, Munede, a chaloner (that is, a maker of blankets), and Crewe, a merchant, presumably in cloth. Better evidence would certainly produce other examples, for no trade or profession can be assigned to six of the MPs. Of those who made their living outside the cloth trade, Presthevide was a wax-chandler, Raves, a barber (although one with more extensive commercial interests than that modest description might generally be taken to imply), and Stodart, a butcher. Bradford was unhelpfully called, in a pardon, ‘gentleman alias husbandman’; and Walker was variously described as a yeoman and husbandman. Two, Wykes and Winnesley, were certainly lawyers, and a third, John Brugge II, may have been, the three together filling nine seats.

This, however, is the last period in which local men predominated. The chronology of the infiltration of outsiders into the borough’s representation is impossible to chart accurately because of the loss of most of the returns from the 1460s to the 1540s, but the election in 1478 of two county gentry with connexions with the royal household, Ralph Hakluyt† and Thomas Croft†, may perhaps be taken as the start of a chain of development that saw Leominster’s burgesses play a dwindling role in its representation. Of the 14 known MPs between 1529 and 1558 only seven were townsmen.9 The Commons 1509-58, i. 108.

It is debatable whether one can meaningfully speak of a town or city’s political sympathies during the mid-century struggle between York and Lancaster (in all save a handful of clear cases). Generally, the most that can be said is that there were townsmen or citizens who actively favoured one side over the other. In the case of Leominster one of its leading townsmen, Shirley, was a servant of the duke of York, and three others, Bradford, John Hood and William Hood, if one may judge from their readiness to accept the livery of the Yorkist (Sir) Walter Devereux I* in April 1456, shared Shirley’s political sympathies. Significantly, Shirley and Bradford were elected to represent the borough at elections held in the wake of York’s contentious return from Ireland in the autumn of 1450, and Shirley and William Hood to the Parliament held ten years later after the Yorkist victory at the battle of Northampton. These are the only two occasions on which wider political factors can certainly be said to have played a part in the borough’s elections, and there is probably significance in the fact that the Yorkist interest predominated. Devereux’s influence may have been important here: in 1448 he had shared with the courtier John Norris* a grant of the keeping of the estates of Reading abbey at Leominster, recently wasted ‘through the negligence and improvident governance of certain monks, late wardens of the same’.10 CPR, 1446-52, pp. 142-3. Interestingly, the elections of 1459, held immediately after the rout of the Yorkists at Ludford Bridge and very soon after Henry VI had himself been at Leominster, saw the return of a minor lawyer and a butcher, neither of whom were active Lancastrians. Only in 1453, when Thomas Monmouth was elected, might it be argued that an association with Lancaster served as a qualification for election, for he was probably a kinsman of John Monmouth*, one of the King’s serjeants-at-arms.

The only evidence to illuminate the mode of election in Leominster, as for most boroughs, comes in the form of the electoral indentures established by statute in 1406. Twenty-nine of these indentures survive for the borough between 1407 and 1478 (although one of them, that of 1410, is too badly damaged to interpret sensibly). They take two main forms. Most commonly, they were an indenture drawn up between the bailiff of the abbot of Reading’s liberty, on one part, and named attestors, on the other. The other main form was an indenture between the county sheriff, on the one part, and named electors, headed by the abbot’s bailiff, on the other.11 The indentures for the Parls. of 1426 and 1449 (Nov.) between the sheriff, on the one hand, and the abbot’s bailiff, on the other, witnessing that certain named attestors had made the election, may be taken as a variant of this second form. Both forms were used interchangeably, and there can be no doubt that the elections they witness were conducted in the same way. The sheriff sent a precept to the abbot’s bailiff instructing him to hold an election and certify the result at the next county court, and the abbot’s bailiff then convened the hustings.12 The sheriff’s precept survives for the Parl. of 1467. On that occasion no indenture was drawn up, the burgesses simply endorsing the precept with the names of the MPs: C219/17/1. When this election was so certified the sheriff either simply returned into Chancery what he had received, namely an indenture between the abbot’s bailiff and the attestors, or went to the trouble of drawing up a new indenture between himself, on one part, and the bailiff and electors, on the other.

There are, however, some indentures that suggest that, on occasion, it was the town’s rather than the abbot’s bailiff who played the central role. The indenture for the election of 1450 was between the town bailiff and named attestors, and those for the elections of 1432, 1453, 1460 and 1478 were between the county sheriff and attestors headed by the town rather than the abbey bailiff. It is also worth observing that, in the indentures of 1437, 1442 and 1447, all of which were drawn up between the abbey bailiff and the attestors, the town bailiff, designated as such, is named as the first attestor. Interestingly, the first indenture to assign the town bailiff the function of returning officer was that of 1432, when the abbey bailiff, Winnesley, was elected. It may be that the new form was designed to disguise either the reality or appearance that Winnesley had presided over his own return, although, if so, it was not used in 1442 when he was again elected (nor on the occasions of his two earlier elections in 1422 and 1427). Another possible explanation is that, because he was under sheriff in 1432, it was considered inappropriate that the sheriff should seal the indenture with his own subordinate. On later occasions, however, no such difficulty presented itself. The town bailiff either headed the attestors in an indenture drawn up with the sheriff or, as in 1450, indented with the attestors himself, and it may be that he was coming to replace the bailiff of the abbot’s liberty as the returning officer. Of the indentures of 1450 and after, only in that of 1472 is the abbot’s bailiff a party.

The chief value of the indentures lies in the evidence they provide of electoral participation. Anomalously, one indenture clearly implies that the election was made by a very small delegation of burgesses. On 26 Oct. 1472 five ‘Elisores’, headed by Richard Brugge, are said to have elected Hugh Shirley, father of the abbot’s bailiff, Thomas Shirley, who conducted the election, and John Baret†.13 C219/17/2. Either this indenture gives a false impression or on this occasion the usual process was abandoned, for most of the indentures make quite clear that others besides those named in the indenture participated in the election. The election indenture of 2 Sept. 1429, for example, was said to have been made by the 13 named attestors ‘et omnes alii burgenses Burgi’, and other indentures employ a similar form of words.14 C219/14/1.

There can be no doubt that attestors named in each indenture were only a selection of those present at the hustings. It is, however, worth noting that the number named was far from random. Fourteen of the 29 legible returns name 12 (excluding the abbot’s bailiff in those indentures when he is named at the head of the attestors), including eight of nine between 1419 and 1427. This raises the question of whether these 12 are to be identified as some sort of common council. If so, it was a council of rapidly changing membership. The eight returns between 1419 and 1427 (excluding that of 1422) name 38 separate men, 15 of whom appear only once. More likely it was the convention to name 12 of the most prominent burgesses present rather than the members of any formal body. The highest number of attestors named was 26 in the indenture of 1422.15 C219/13/1. Occasionally there appears to have been a relationship between the attestors and those returned, most notably in 1453 when Walter Hood’s election was attested by three other Hoods, two former MPs, Thomas and John, and one future one, William.16 C219/16/2.

Leominster’s representation presents few aspects of interest. Its leading townsmen appear, in general, to have been reluctant parliamentarians; none the less, in the reign of Henry VI the town’s representation remained in the hands of its residents. Indeed, it did so to a greater extent than in the county’s other parliamentary borough, Hereford, yet the later trajectory of the two boroughs was to be very different. The townsmen of Leominster surrendered their electoral independence, while the citizens of Hereford reasserted theirs.