Newcastle-upon-Tyne

The strategic importance of the town and port of Newcastle-upon-Tyne had been recognized since Roman times, and by the early twelfth century a sizeable community had developed around the site of the Norman castle. From 1135, when the townsmen received their first charter, royal grants extended the jurisdiction of Newcastle’s merchants, and in 1213 King John granted the town to its residents to hold at an annual fee farm of £100. The wars with Scotland in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries further increased the town’s importance yet also brought closer royal scrutiny. In both 1342 and 1345 Edward III moved to suppress disputes between the town’s ruling oligarchy and other inhabitants, suspending the franchise and imposing heavy fines upon Newcastle’s leaders.1 The Commons 1386-1421, i. 545-6; Rot. Chartarum ed. Hardy, 190; R. Welford, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Gateshead, i. 110-17, 122.

One result of this crisis was the institution of an extraordinarily involved method of electing the town’s officials, with the avowed purpose of avoiding future contention in their election. In 1342 the King endorsed a method of election agreed by the burgesses. On every Monday after Michaelmas, 24 ‘of the most honourable, decent and honest brethren’ of the town’s 12 guilds, two drawn from each, were to choose four, whether of themselves or others, and these four were to choose another eight; this new 12 were to choose a further 12; these 24 were to elect the mayor; and then the mayor and 24 were to elect the bailiffs and the other officers. A new charter of 1345 slightly modified this system, replacing the 24 from the 12 guilds with the mayor and four bailiffs and seven other ‘good and discreet men’ selected by these outgoing officers.2 Welford, 114-15, 125. Despite its complexity this mode of election was to remain in place, with slight variations, into the sixteenth century. A Star Chamber decree of 1516 either re-introduced or perpetuated a very similar method, although interestingly the initiators of the process were the 24 of the guilds rather than the outgoing officers, and the mayor had no part in the election of the new officers.3 Sel. Cases Star Chamber, (Selden Soc. xxv), pp. ci-cii; The Commons 1509-58, i. 163-4. The exclusion of the mayor might be seen as a move towards greater democracy, although in other ways the 1516 system was more restricted, with the first 12 to be exclusively former mayors, sheriffs and aldermen.

After the 1340s, the next significant date in Newcastle’s constitutional development was the important charter of 1400, by which the town became the third, after Bristol and York, to be granted the status of a county. Under its terms the four bailiffs were replaced by a single sheriff who was to be chosen by 24 of ‘the fitter, discreeter, better and more honourable burgesses’. The burgesses were also to elect, as an important innovation, six aldermen, who were to act as j.p.s. Nothing was said about how the mayor or the 24 electors of the sheriff were to be chosen, and it must be presumed that choice was to be made as laid down in either 1342 or 1345. Nor was any reference made to how the aldermen were to be elected, save that the choice was vested in the ‘burgesses’.4 CChR, v. 397-8.

This important validation of Newcastle’s status came at a time of economic and commercial difficulty. Although its port was a centre of both domestic and international trade, this did not protect the townsmen from the damaging combined effects of plague and exposure to Scottish raids. By the late 1350s the townsmen were complaining in petitions to the King of so great impoverishment and depopulation that their ability to defend themselves against the Scots was imperiled.5 The Commons 1386-1421, i. 547. Eventually their successive pleas gained some measure of relief. From early in the reign of Henry IV they, together with the counties of Westmorland, Cumberland and Northumberland, gained the significant concession of successive exemptions from fifteenths and tenths.6 CPR, 1401-5, pp. 181-2, 372, 465; 1405-8, p. 411; 1408-13, p. 198; 1413-16, pp. 57, 273-4, 381; 1416-22, pp. 57, 343.

None the less, recession placed a particular premium for the townsmen on the defence of their commercial privileges against the encroachments of their neighbours, in particular those of successive bishops of Durham. Here they suffered setbacks. Their efforts to assert control over and tax the expanding north-eastern coal trade were compromised in 1383 when Bishop John Fordham secured a royal charter licensing him to ship and sell coal from the south bank of the river Tyne. Later, in 1416, Fordham’s formidable successor, Thomas Langley, won a legal judgement against the townsmen by which they were forced to surrender a tower they had built on the southern part of the Tyne bridge. The construction of the tower had represented another attempt by the burgesses to control shipping on the Tyne; but again they found themselves repudiated.7 The Commons 1386-1421, i. 546; C.D. Liddy, Bishopric of Durham, 178, 181-6. Another area of commercial conflict lay between the town’s wool merchants and those of the staple at Calais. Here the former were forced to trade at a competitive disadvantage, offering the inferior quality wool of the northern counties against the better wool of the Midlands and south. They sought to overcome this disadvantage by suing out royal licences to export their wool direct to Flanders. In 1401 this had brought them into conflict with the merchants of the staple, who succeeded in getting some permits revoked, but by 1408 the Newcastle merchants had won modest concessions against the staplers’ monopoly.8 The Commons 1386-1421, i. 546-7.

These preoccupations of the townsmen – the protection of their commercial advantage against their ecclesiastical neighbours and of their trade in wool against the Calais staplers – are also evident in the period under review here. It witnessed a significant episode in the town’s longstanding commercial rivalry with the prior of Tynemouth’s borough of North Shields, eight miles downstream from Newcastle. On 10 July 1446 Henry VI gave the priory the customs and tolls for certain goods unloaded within the port of Tyne and other privileges which, in the view of Newcastle’s burgesses, contravened their own liberties. Although on the following 4 Jan. a local jury, largely composed of townsmen, sitting royal commissioners of inquiry (among whom were leading Newcastle men including William Hardyng and Robert Rodes), reasserted the town’s liberties and found that the priory’s illicit commercial rivalry occasioned an annual loss to Newcastle of £340, it was not these findings but rather the Act of Resumption of 1450 that extinguished the grant to the priory. Even then the respite for the townsmen was only a temporary one as the prior secured a new grant in 1463, and thereafter Newcastle’s rivalry with North Shields escalated further, resulting in a violent confrontation in the early sixteenth century.9 Hist. Northumb. viii. 289-93; Welford, i. 316-18; CPR, 1446-52, p. 40; 1461-7, pp. 310-11.

The townsmen experienced similarly mixed fortunes in their efforts to avoid selling their wool at Calais. In the Parliament of 1429 the staplers successfully petitioned that all wool should be brought to the staple, accusing the Newcastle merchants of exporting their wool to Scotland ‘in defraudyng of the kyng, or hynderyng of the commodite of his roiaune’. Two years later the ‘commons’ of the northernmost counties sought to secure a new exemption for the Newcastle merchants, claiming that, without it, their local wool would remain unsold. Although this petition was unsuccessful, no doubt because the staplers lobbied against it, the King later renewed the practice of granting occasional exemption in respect of fixed quantities of northern wool, and in 1463 their right to export this wool directly to the Low Countries was enshrined in statute.10 Welford, i. 276; PROME. x. 428-9, 469-70; xiii. 234-7; CPR, 1422-29, pp. 82, 410; 1441-6, p. 321; 1446-52, p. 207; Statutes, ii. 393.

All this took place against a backdrop of continuing recession. The fifteenth century was a time of hardship for north-east England in general, and Newcastle was not untouched by the general decline in the value of rents and volume of trade.11 A.J. Pollard, North-Eastern Eng. 30-80. Like other northern towns, such as York and Scarborough, it was probably hit by epidemics of plague in the 1430s and 1440s. From the limited evidence of rents collected by University College, Oxford, the value of property in the town appears to have decreased over the second half of the century. Newcastle’s wealth was dependent primarily on the value of its overseas trade and this too appears to have contracted during the century. The national decline in the export of wool and the particular problems facing the town’s wool merchants greatly reduced the value of Newcastle’s wool exports. Whereas between 1299 and 1399 a total of 38,000 sacks (an average of 380 sacks a year) had been shipped from Newcastle, between 1399 and 1439 only 7,932 (an average of 198 a year) left the port. Newcastle did little to keep pace with changes in trade patterns, exporting fewer than 50 woollen cloths each year during the fifteenth century, while the proportion of goods paying tunnage (valued at £1,487 in 1466 compared to £42,899 that year in London) remained small.12 A.F. Butcher, ‘Economic Change in Late-Med. Newcastle’, Northern Hist. xiv. 67-77; Newcastle-upon-Tyne Customs Accts. 1454-1500 (Surtees Soc. ccii), pp. xi-xiv. It is likely that Newcastle’s declining wealth had an impact on the status of the individuals whom the burgesses returned to the Commons during the reign of Henry VI.

Due to the almost complete lack of local records, the internal politics and government of Newcastle are impossible to reconstruct in any detail. The names of the town’s mayors and sheriffs, however, are known from royal records and local deeds, while the aldermen are identified, albeit only fitfully, in gaol delivery rolls.13 JUST3/54/4, 6, 9, 11, 15, 17, 27. There is no evidence to illuminate the corporation’s finances.

Nothing is known of Newcastle’s sympathies during the civil war of 1459-61 and none of its MPs can be firmly identified as partisans of either York or Lancaster. The town did, however, make some modest gains from the change of regime in 1461. Not only did its merchants secure statutory protection for their right to sell wool in the Low Countries, but, on 1 Aug. 1464, the Crown granted the mayor and commonalty the neighbouring manor of Byker, forfeited by the earl of Northumberland. Later, on 26 Feb. 1467, the burgesses secured the confirmation of their charters.14 CPR, 1461-7, pp. 341, 558.

Returns survive for Newcastle in respect of 19 of the 22 Parliaments of Henry VI’s reign (those for the Parliaments of 1439, 1445 and 1460 are lost). Twenty individuals filled these seats, representing the borough on a total of 49 recorded occasions. None of them are known to have represented any other constituency. Nine of the 20 sat for the borough only once. By contrast four were returned four times or more: Rodes took as many as eight seats, Booth six, Whelpington five and Hardyng four. Rodes’s parliamentary career was probably even more noteworthy than implied by these eight recorded returns. As he is known to have been elected to eight of the nine Parliaments which met between 1429 and 1442, it is near certain that he was also an MP in that of 1439 and probable that he also sat in that of 1445 (for both of which the returns are lost).

The parliamentary careers of these four guaranteed that there was a reasonable level of continuity in the borough’s representation. In only two Parliaments – those of 1450 and 1455 – was the borough represented by two apparent novices; and in five – those of 1422, 1423, 1432, 1437 and 1453 – it was represented by two experienced MPs. In total, 22 of the 38 seats were filled by experienced MPs. Further, Rodes’s parliamentary career ensured that there were as many as ten instances of immediate re-election, and, in respect of the Parliament of 1432, both the MPs from the preceding assembly were re-elected.

As might be expected from a borough with county status, Newcastle always returned men to the Commons with strong connexions to the town itself. Yet this is not to say that the MPs were overwhelmingly drawn from its mercantile elite. Indeed, they can be divided into three categories, albeit three partially overlapping ones: seven were active merchants, namely Baxter, Bird, Medocroft, Penrith, Richardson, Swinburne and Ward; five can be described as local gentry with an interest in the town’s affairs, namely Acton, Bertram, Dalton, Papedy and Simon Weltden; and a further eight, that is, Booth, Hardyng, Hering, Heworth, Morislawe, Rodes, Richard Weltden and Whelpington, were lawyers who either originated from Newcastle or came to take a part in its affairs. This diversity helps explain the lack of continuity in the town’s representation over generations. Only four of the MPs – Acton, Dalton, Hardyng and Penrith – came from families that had provided the town with a parliamentary representative in an earlier generation, and none of them from those that did so in a later one.

By far the most active of these three groups in the town’s representation were the lawyers. That activity had first become marked in the second decade of the century. Of the 22 known seats between 1411 and 1421 inclusive, as many as nine were filled by the lawyers Booth, Hering and Whelpington.15 The earlier survey names only Robert Darcy I* and Whelpington as certain lawyers: The Commons 1386-1421, i. 548. However, both Booth and Hering are identified as probable ones by their service as clerks of the statute merchant, and the latter additionally by his nomination to the quorum of the important comm. issued to investigate the murder of William Heron in 1428: CPR, 1422-9, p. 467. But, in the period under review here, the lawyers came to dominate representation. Of the borough’s 34 seats from 1422 to 1453, they took 22 of them. Two of these lawyers, Rodes and Heworth, of Middle Temple and Lincoln’s Inn respectively, spent a significant amount of their time at Westminster. Heworth, for example, was governor of his Inn when elected in 1442, and it is likely that both men were ready to serve as MPs without wages. Indeed, Rodes had other motives for wanting a place in the Commons. As an apprentice-at-law he was engaged, at least in his later Parliaments, as a royal agent. In the Parliament of 1435, for example, he was among the lawyers employed in writing and engrossing the grant of the subsidy, and, in respect of the 1437 Parliament, he was rewarded for certain unspecified ‘labours on the King’s behalf’. The other lawyers – the three who sat both before and after 1422 together with Morislawe, Richard Weltden and Hardyng – were less prominent in the profession and seemingly had interests confined to the north.

The prominence of these lawyers in Newcastle’s representation probably has a two-fold explanation. One may be economic: the town’s declining trade reduced both the number and wealth of its merchants. There was, for example, no-one among the new MPs of Henry VI’s reign to rival in wealth the great merchant Robert Thornton†, who sat for the borough in four Parliaments between 1399 and 1417. This decline may explain why as many as 17 of the 26 MPs of the period 1386-1421 were merchants, compared with only seven out of 20 in the period under review here. It may also be that what remained of the town’s mercantile elite were, in general, not keen to sit in Parliament. Strikingly, the eight lawyers who represented the borough in this period served in an average of four Parliaments each. The town’s other MPs were elected to just under one and a half Parliaments each, and the seven MPs who can certainly be described as merchants managed only ten Parliaments between them.

There may, however, have been a break in this pattern in the mid-1450s. Two lawyers, Heworth and Hardyng, were returned to the Parliament of 1453; yet the four seats in the next two assemblies were taken by three prominent local merchants, Penrith, Richardson and Bird. These three men dominated town affairs more broadly during the 1450s. All three served as sheriff and in the administration of the customs and Richardson and Penrith monopolized the mayoralty from 1454 to 1460. Their elections to Parliament were perhaps a manifestation of the emergence of a new self-confident group of merchants. Even so, this does not detract from the general conclusion that Newcastle’s merchants were reluctant parliamentarians, a reluctance that was generally overcome only by a particular self-interest. Ward’s election to the Parliament of 1450, for example, appears to have been related to an action brought by several of the town’s merchants in the Exchequer. On 20 Nov., two weeks after Parliament had assembled, he appeared there to seek a rebate on customs paid on cargoes of wool lost at sea in 1446 and 1449. Similarly, Bird, whatever other motives he may have had for securing election in 1455, appeared before the barons during the second session to plead a pardon against a charge of evading customs.

The apparent reluctance of Newcastle’s merchants to spend time as MPs, perhaps because they saw parliamentary service as an unwelcome distraction from their business affairs, not only provided vacancies for local lawyers but also for local gentry. These were not, however, local gentry taking advantage of their proximity to the borough to win a parliamentary seat, rather they were men whose activity in the town’s affairs justified their elections to Parliament. Of the five who can be classified as local gentry, four held administrative office in the town (the exception was Dalton). Most notable in this regard were Edward Bertram, an illegitimate younger son of Sir John Bertram* of Bothal, 17 miles north of Newcastle, who served as both sheriff and alderman before his election to Parliament in 1435; and Laurence Acton who served four terms as mayor.

Some of the lawyers who sat for the borough were also from gentry families. Hardyng’s father, Sampson†, although from Beadnell in the distant north of the county, had represented the borough in five Parliaments, and William took over his role in the town. The two Weltdens, uncle and nephew, were the representatives of a well-established gentry family, long resident at Welton, a few miles to the west of Newcastle. Acton was from a family that had long maintained a place in both county and town, and he had served as both sheriff and mayor of Newcastle before he sat in Parliament. Further, it seems that at least one of town’s merchants was from a gentry family: Swinburne was probably a kinsman of Sir William Swinburne† (d.1404) of Capheaton, MP for Northumberland in the Parliament of 1395.

Given these family connexions, it is not surprising that there should have been some marital connexions between county and borough elites. Simon Weltden married a niece of Sir John Middleton* of Belsay (a dozen miles from Newcastle), who was the county MP in 1426 when Simon represented Newcastle. More surprisingly, Dalton, although from one of the leading borough families, married very far above his station when he took as his wife a daughter of Sir William Elmden*, a leading knight of the palatinate of Durham, and heiress to a part, albeit only a very small one, of the inheritance of the Umfravilles. Only a little less surprising is William Medocroft’s marriage. His origins are obscure, yet he too found a knight’s daughter as his wife. Her father, Sir William Carnaby† of Halton, about 18 miles from Newcastle, had represented Northumberland in 1404, and one can only speculate about how a match, seemingly as socially disadvantageous for the bride as it was advantageous for the groom, came to be made. The best guess is that Medocroft had been a servant of her second husband, Thomas Hebburn†, one of Newcastle’s urban gentry.

Of the 20 known MPs, 12 held offices as either sheriff or mayor (offices for which the list of office-holders is near-complete). Eight were mayor, all of whom also served as sheriff. Five of these were merchants, two were lawyers and one was a local gentleman. Of the eight, three were mayors before their first recorded Parliament, namely two merchants, Richardson and Ward, and the local gentleman Acton. In total only nine of the 36 seats were taken by former mayors, but, interestingly, as many as four were filled by serving ones, namely Hardyng in 1447 and 1453, Ward in 1450 and Richardson in 1459. As the shrievalty was the more junior office it was more common for a former sheriff to take a seat. Twelve of the MPs held the office, seven of them doing so before their first elections to Parliament, with 16 seats being taken by former sheriffs. The other borough offices are too poorly documented to provide any but arbitrary figures. Nine MPs are known to have been aldermen at some point in their careers, but the real figure was undoubtedly significantly higher. The same can be said for the office of coroner, a post in which only the lawyer, Booth, is known to have served, and constable of the statute merchant, an elected office known to have been held only by Medocroft. It is, however, worth remarking that only five of the MPs are not known to have held any office in the administration of the borough. Four of these were lawyers, namely Hering, Heworth, Morislawe and Richard Weltden, and the other, Dalton, one of the local gentry (if only by marriage).

As many as eight of the 20 MPs took some part in the administration of customs in Newcastle. Three of these were from the town’s mercantile elite: Bird had served as a collector of customs before his election to his only Parliament in 1455; Penrith was a former tronager and pesager when elected with Bird in 1455 and was in office as both collector and alnager when returned in 1459; and Penrith’s fellow MP in 1459, Richardson, was serving alongside him as collector. Yet, perhaps surprisingly, the town’s lawyer MPs were as prominent in the customs’ administration as were its mercantile ones. Whelpington, in the midst of his parliamentary career, served briefly as controller; Rodes was holding that office when elected to his eighth Parliament in 1442; and Richard Weltden was alnager when MP in 1450 and, during the Parliament, added the office of tronager and pesager, before later serving as collector. The other two MPs who held these offices were county gentry with a close interest in the town’s affairs: Simon Weltden served as both controller and collector, although not until after his only Parliament; and Acton was named as collector the day before he sat in his second Parliament in 1432. Acton’s appointment, together with that of Richard Weltden as alnager in 1450, implies a connexion between such nominations and parliamentary service.

Given the connexions between the county gentry and the borough elite, it is not surprising to find that as many as seven of the 20 MPs held office in county administration. By far the most notable in this regard was Hardyng, who, after representing Newcastle in the first of his four Parliaments, served a term as sheriff of Northumberland. His election as mayor of Newcastle at Michaelmas 1445 meant that he briefly had the unique distinction of serving as both town mayor and county sheriff, a combination of offices that would have been unthinkable in other shires.16 Parallel examples are rare: one is provided by Roger Eyton*, who was both sheriff of Salop and bailiff of Shrewsbury in 1449-50. The other overlaps between the personnel of county office-holding and the borough’s representation are more commonplace. Both Acton and Bertram, who, like Hardyng, can be accounted among the county gentry, served terms as escheator. Acton was appointed soon after sitting for Newcastle in the Parliament of 1431 and was in office when again elected as an MP in 1432; and Bertram twice held the office both before and after representing the town in Parliament. Legal qualifications explain the appointment of both Rodes and Whelpington to the same office: Rodes was, like Acton before him, the serving escheator when returned for Newcastle to the Parliaments of 1435 and 1437; and Whelpington was appointed after the end of his parliamentary career. It was also from the lawyers that the borough MPs who also served on the county bench were drawn: Rodes was named to the bench soon after the seventh of his eight recorded Parliaments; Richard Weltden was a j.p. between his two Parliaments; and Whelpington after his last one. One of the MPs was a Northumberland coroner: Simon Weltden was in office when elected for the borough in 1426.

The county office-holding of the MPs was not restricted to Northumberland. Heworth was an important enough lawyer to be appointed as under sheriff of London, an office he held shortly before he was first elected for Newcastle in 1442; and on a more modest level Richard Weltden had briefly served as clerk of the peace in the North Riding of Yorkshire before his first election in 1450. More significantly, both Heworth and Whelpington were appointed as j.p.s in the bishop of Durham’s liberty of Norhamshire and Islandshire in north Northumberland. Whelpington was not appointed until after the end of his parliamentary career but Heworth was a j.p. there under Bishop Neville when returned three times between 1442 and 1453.

The indentures for the county elections provide further evidence of the overlap between the Newcastle elite and the county gentry. As many as nine of the 20 Newcastle MPs attested at least one county election with Simon Weltden attesting either eight or nine and Edward Bertram five.

These activities, both office-holding in the town and the witnessing of county elections, were expressions of the MPs’ landholdings in the county. Nine of them are known to have had such holdings not only in the near vicinity of Newcastle but also further afield. Hardyng held the manor of Beadnall, some 50 miles to the north, and Heworth owned property even further away in Berwick-upon-Tweed. At least three others – Acton, with a manor at Shilbottle, Hering, with property at Howick, and Medocroft, whose wife held the manor of Newton-by-the-Sea – also had lands in the north of the county. Other of the MPs were landholders across the river Tyne in the palatinate of Durham. Booth’s parliamentary career was probably over by the time he acquired the manor of Whickham, five miles from Newcastle, but both Rodes and Dalton had lands in the palatinate when they sat in Parliament.

There is no firm evidence that parliamentary elections in the town came under any pressure from outsiders, such as the Percy earls of Northumberland, the Neville family or the bishop of Durham, although there may be one instance when such pressure was exerted. Although Richard Weltden had strong connexions in the town, his election to the politically-contentious Parliament of 1450 may have owed much to his place in the service of the Nevilles.

Newcastle’s parliamentary elections took place in the guildhall, always on a Wednesday, the day established for the meeting of the county court by the charter of 1400. They were overseen by the town’s sheriff, who returned the election indenture to Chancery. Nothing is known directly of the mode of election but the indentures allow certain inferences to be drawn. The 16 surviving legible indentures dating between the first of them, that for the Parliament of 1407, and that for the Parliament of 1431 all name 12 attestors, occasionally described as ‘probi homines burgenses’. This was, however, far from a stable body. Of the 66 men named in these 16 indentures as many as 23 were named only once. Further, there was a marked turnover even in respect of indentures dated closely together: in the indentures of 21 Oct. 1422 and 23 Sept. 1423, for example, only four names are common to both lists.17 C219/13/1, 2. Since these two elections were held during a single mayoralty, it is clear that the 12 attestors do not represent some sort of formal council serving an annual term. The 12 were, however, drawn from among the leading burgesses, and some names occur with a marked frequency, with both the great merchant, Robert Thornton, and John del Wall† appearing on ten of the 16 lists. The most likely conclusion is that the 12 were an ad hoc body nominated to make the election by a wider body of townsmen. Indeed, one indenture, that of 7 Nov. 1414, specifically describes the 12 as ‘nominated’ to make the election, and other indentures describe the 12 as making the election ‘with the consent of the whole community’.18 C219/11/4; 12/3, 4; 13/1, 3. It is likely that the 12 were chosen by the same sort of involved system that created the electoral body for the town’s officers.

This system of nomination broke down after 1431, perhaps in response to the statute of 1429-30 that established the 40s. freehold franchise in respect of county elections. There was a steady rise in the number of attestors named. The indenture of 1432 names 17, and, although the next indenture (that of 1433), reverts to 12, there is a marked and steady increase thereafter, culminating in the naming of as many as 70 in 1450. In the four fully legible indentures dating from after 1450, the number falls back to 23 named in the 1472 indenture and 44 in that for the Parliament of 1478. Whatever the fluctuations, there can be no doubt that some townsmen of modest rank were now being drawn into the electoral process. One of the attestors to the election of 22 Jan. 1449 is described as a ‘walker’; a ‘kilnman’ and ‘collier’ appear in that of 29 Oct. 1449; and a ‘skinner’, ‘mason’ and ‘smith’ in the long indenture of 1450.19 C219/15/6, 7; 16/1. On this evidence there can be no doubt that, at least in respect of the election of MPs, there was a move towards greater democracy in the period under review here.

Of the 20 MPs all but five or six appear as an attestor in at least one of the surviving indentures. The exceptions are three of the lawyers, Hering, Heworth and Rodes, along with two of the local gentry, Dalton and Papedy. Another lawyer, Richard Weltden, is the doubtful case: it may be that he attested his own return to the Parliament of 1450 but perhaps the attestor was his putative father. The remaining 14 are named between them as attestors on as many as 64 occasions. Three are named with particular frequency: Whelpington attested 12 elections, Booth nine and Swinburne eight. It was rare for someone to attest their own election. In the period from 1407 to 1478 there are only three certain instances, namely Richard Dalton on 12 Apr. 1413, Hardyng, then mayor, on 1 Feb. 1447 and Ward, also then mayor, on 30 Sept. 1450 (with Weltden as a doubtful case at the same hustings). This irregularity in 1450, together with the naming of as many as 70 attestors, suggests that these hustings, perhaps uniquely in the period covered by the indentures, witnessed a contested election, but, if so, there is no evidence to provide a context. The next indenture, that for the Parliament of 1453, presents another unusual feature in that one of the elected, Hardyng, is noted as present at the hustings, and the other, the London lawyer, Heworth, as absent.20 C219/16/2.

Drawing the contrast between the representation of Newcastle in the periods 1386-1421 and 1422-61, there are two related developments, namely a significant rise in the proportion of the town’s seats filled by lawyers and a fall in the number and individual wealth of the merchants returned. The explanation probably lies in the town’s declining trade, but it is noteworthy that this shift from merchant to lawyer as the principal element among the town’s MPs was achieved without any loss of electoral independence. Representation remained exclusively in the hands of those with an intimate interest in the town’s affairs, and this was to remain the case into later periods. In the late sixteenth century the town had ‘a record of virtually unassailable independence in parliamentary elections’.21 The Commons 1558-1603, i. 221.