Bridgnorth

The economic fortunes and internal government of Bridgnorth in the fifteenth century are difficult to describe. By the early sixteenth century its economy, heavily dependent on the cloth trade, appears to have been in decline – in the 1530s John Leland, who was inclined to take the gloomy view, described the town as decayed – but it is difficult to say when that decline began.1 The Commons 1509-58, i. 174-5. Judging by the strong local element the borough maintained in its parliamentary representation during Henry VI’s reign, the wealth of its leading family, the Hordes, and the part played in county administration by some of its residents, its decline was then still in the future.

The loss of nearly all the borough records in 1646 (when the Royalists burnt part of the town) makes its internal government similarly obscure, although some light is cast by the survival of a leet book containing records from the mid fifteenth century onwards. This shows that two bailiffs were elected annually on the feast of St. Matthew (21 Sept.) by a group of 12 burgesses. How these 12 were selected does not appear, although it seems that before 1444 a greater number of the burgesses participated. The election of 1444, the second to be noted in the leet book, was made by the 12 along with 11 named others.2 Salop Archs., Bridgnorth bor. recs., ct. leet bk. BB/F//1/1/1, f. 55. By the end of the 15th cent. the bailiffs were joined in the governance of the town by a council of 24: HMC 10th Rep. IV, 425. It may be that the electors of 1444 were that body; if so, this is the earliest evidence of its existence. If, however, the body deputed to elect the bailiffs was contracting, the number of burgesses was expanding. In 1443, when the leet book began, there were 64 burgesses, who, along with their male children, comprised the freedom. New burgesses were elected each year, usually only about five, but in 1449-50 as many as 18. The freedom was thus a growing body, another sign, perhaps, that Bridgnorth was not yet in decline.3 Bridgnorth ct. leet bk. f. 4. The privileges attached to that body and the corporation they composed also increased in the period under review here. On 21 May 1446 the burgesses obtained a comprehensive grant of rights from the Crown. In part, this merely codified the liberties they held under charters of 1215 and 1227, such as freedom of toll throughout the realm and exclusion from the jurisdiction of the county sheriff, but it also gave them new powers of self-government. The bailiffs were endowed with the powers of j.p.s and escheators within the limits of the town, and the burgesses were to have the right to appoint their own coroner.4 CChR, vi. 64-66, 70-71.

The MPs for Bridgnorth are known for 19 of the 22 Parliaments of the period, as is one of its MPs for the Parliament of 1439. Seventeen men filled these 39 seats, between them representing the borough on 56 occasions, giving an average of over three returns per Member, higher than prevailed in most constituencies. This figure is largely a function of the parliamentary careers of Richard Blike, Richard Horde (both of whom represented the borough on ten occasions), and Richard Parlour, returned to nine Parliaments. Horde’s ten elections came in a period of only 18 years (1414-32), and Parlour’s nine in just a year longer (1414-33), although Blike’s parliamentary career was less intense, lasting from 1429 to 1459.

Only three of the 17 sat for other constituencies. Richard Horde’s son, Thomas, sat for Shropshire on at least four occasions between 1455 and 1472, by which time he had become a man of much greater standing than the young lawyer who had sat for Bridgnorth in the 1440s. Thomas Mayne, a carpet-bagger in respect of both the constituencies he represented, sat for the Staffordshire borough of Newcastle-under-Lyme; and John Lawley, who was local to Shropshire if not to Bridgnorth, sat for two Wiltshire boroughs as a servant of his kinsman, John Wenlock*.

The representation of the borough was notable in the period 1386-1421 for the number of immediate re-elections, largely due to the parliamentary career of William Palmer†, who sat in every Parliament for which a return survives between 1388 (Feb.) and 1401. The pattern was maintained in the period under review here, with Palmer’s role taken by Blike, elected to six successive assemblies from 1432 to 1442 (and perhaps seven if he was one of the un-recorded MPs of 1445). In total there were 11 instances of immediate re-election in Henry VI’s reign, although, surprisingly, on no occasion was the borough represented by the two men who had sat for it in the previous assembly – in contrast to the four such instances in the earlier period. In these circumstances, it is not surprising to find that, in both periods, the borough sent to Parliament a large proportion of experienced MPs. Between 1422 and 1460, two-thirds of the seats were taken by such men, the same proportions as had prevailed in the earlier period. Only twice – in the successive assemblies of 1429 and 1431 – was Bridgnorth represented by two novices; but on as many as eight occasions both men returned had previous experience of the Commons.

The 17 MPs, with one exception, can be divided into two categories: those who were primarily or exclusively resident in the borough, and those who came from the ranks of the minor gentry resident in its near-environs and who had an interest, albeit an intermittent one, in its affairs. If the MPs are to be defined only in relation to their standing at the moment they were first elected for the borough, nine – Bruyn, Cardmaker, Green, the two Hordes, Lyney, Merwall, Parlour and Persons – fall into this first category, although two of these, Thomas Horde and John Bruyn, became important figures in the county. Of these nine, trades can be assigned only to three: Cardmaker was a barker, Persons a mercer, and Lyney a vintner. As a group they are more clearly identified by their place in the town’s administration. As many as seven of them are known to have served at least one term as bailiff, the exceptions being Green and Merwall (and since a complete list of the bailiffs cannot be constructed from the surviving evidence it is possible that they too served). This is very similar to the pattern prevailing in the earlier period, when nine of the 18 MPs were also bailiffs. The two Hordes were extremely active: Richard, who succeeded to both the property and place in town affairs of William Palmer, served at least 14 terms and his son Thomas at least 11. The former appears to have been in office when returned to the Parliaments of 1414 (Nov.), 1416 (Mar.), 1417 and 1420; and Parlour, who served at least six terms as bailiff, in 1417, 1419 and 1433. No other bailiff is known to have been returned to Parliament for the borough while in office. In total, 13 of the 39 seats were filled by men who had served or were currently serving as bailiff.

Of the second category (the seven MPs drawn from the borough’s neighbouring local gentry), none are known to have held office as bailiff. All, however, lived within a few miles of Bridgnorth, and, for some of them at least, there is evidence of their interest in the borough beyond their election to Parliament. Blike, an apprentice-at-law resident at Astley Abbots, just outside the town, was listed among the burgesses in 1443, and his daughter married another burgess, Humphrey Gatacre (she was probably the mother of John Gatacre†, MP for Bridgnorth in the 1470s). Thomas Clerk, who hailed from Much Wenlock, eight miles from Bridgnorth, was the father of William, who was named among Bridgnorth’s burgesses in 1443 (and went on to serve as constable of the castle there). Roger Haughton, from Swinney, had property in the town as tenant of the Staffords. Two of the others had close associations with other Bridgnorth MPs: at the time of his election in 1435, Wolrich, resident at Dudmaston, numbered Richard Horde among his feoffees; and Corbyn was a kinsman of Blike. The other two MPs from the local gentry were two kinsmen, William Lawley and his putative nephew, John, both from Much Wenlock, who recommended themselves to the Bridgnorth electors as lawyers: William, one of a group of Shropshire lawyers who made their careers in King’s bench in the early fifteenth century, was a filacer of that court when elected, and John was probably at an inn of court or Chancery when returned for the borough early in his career.

Between them those MPs who can be described as residents filled 17 of the 39 seats, and those who lived in the environs of the town, 21. These figures are, however, slightly misleading, for if Blike, who was a burgess, is counted among the residents, they took 27 of the seats. Even so, this complication does not alter the fact that all ten of the borough’s seats between 1422 and 1427 were taken by residents, and it is clear that the proportion of residents elected declined thereafter. Since many of those who came from outside Bridgnorth were lawyers, this resulted in a marked rise in the proportion of the town’s seats taken by such men. From 1402 to 1427 lawyers took only four of 37 known seats, and none of them after the return of Hugh Stanford† to the Parliament of 1413 (May).5 It is worth noting that earlier two resident lawyers – William Palmer and the borough’s attorney, John Farnales† – had dominated Bridgnorth’s representation, filling 14 of the 18 known seats between 1388 and 1399. However, the election of two lawyers in 1429, the first time Bridgnorth had been represented by two lawyers since 1395, heralded a new period of legal dominance of the borough’s representation. From 1429 until 1459 four lawyers – Blike, the two Lawleys and Thomas Horde – took 18 of the 29 seats, with two of them returned together to the Parliaments of 1437, 1449 (Nov.) and 1453 in addition to that of 1429.

None the less, whatever the fluctuating proportion of men of law among the MPs, there can be no doubt that the local element, whether residents or near-neighbours, dominated the borough’s representation throughout the period under review. The exception to this rule is the election of Thomas Mayne to two Parliaments in the late 1440s. He appears to have had no geographical connexion with either of the constituencies – Bridgnorth and Newcastle-under-Lyme – he represented in three successive Parliaments. There can be no doubt that he was elected because of his association with the powerful Staffordshire esquire John Hampton II*, an important member of the royal household, who from 1439 had an interest in Bridgnorth’s affairs as recipient, by Henry VI’s grant, of a large part of its fee farm. Mayne was from distant Colchester, where he was Hampton’s deputy constable of the royal castle.

The election of Mayne shows most clearly that membership of the freedom was not an indispensable qualification for election for Bridgnorth, although towards the end of Henry VI’s reign the borough authorities began to develop the idea that it ought to be. John Cardmaker, elected in 1450, had been admitted shortly before his return; in 1461, Humphrey Blount†, an esquire from Kinlet, was admitted specifically as a prelude to election to Parliament; and on 25 May 1467 William Clerk† was both made a burgess and elected to Parliament. Yet even then prospective MPs were not invariably admitted to the freedom as a validating prelude to their election. In 1500, on the day the bailiffs were elected, Thomas Wyldecote† was created a burgess as belated reward ‘pro labore suo’ in the Parliament of 13 years before.6 Bridgnorth ct. leet bk. ff. 5v, 15. This, in turn, suggests the possibility that admission to the freedom may have been seen as much as a reward for agreeing to represent the borough in Parliament as it was a method of validating the return of outsiders.

Even though Bridgnorth was not a wealthy town, its MPs played a significant part in shire administration. Several of its seats were filled by men who had held one or more of the major county offices. Most notable in this regard was the election of Bruyn in 1425. Not only was he then on the Shropshire bench, but he had also recently served as escheator and, for the long term of three years, as sheriff. He was, in short, one of the most important men in the county when elected for the lesser of its two boroughs. Nor was he the only serving j.p. to be elected for Bridgnorth: Thomas Horde was on the bench when elected to the Parliament of November 1449. In addition, Blike was in office as one of the coroners of Shropshire when he represented the borough in the 1450s. Other of the seats were also taken by those who had held county office. Seven were filled by former escheators in the persons of Richard Horde and John Lawley; and William Lawley had recently been under sheriff when returned in 1429. This overlap between the holders of county and town office, equally apparent in the case of the Shrewsbury MPs, reflects the poverty of the county, which allowed the leading borough families greater opportunities than existed in more prosperous shires.7 Anomalously, in 1456-7 Thomas Horde was both bailiff of Bridgnorth and sheriff of Salop. Such overlaps are not found in counties with a greater number of wealthy gentry.

The activities of the MPs in county administration are also a function of their landholdings outside the borough. Although, taking the MPs as a body, most of these landholdings lay in the near vicinity of Bridgnorth, some had property interests further afield. Bruyn inherited from his father lands in Chester and Blike’s maternal inheritance included a moiety of a manor in Warwickshire. Parlour’s wife brought him, together with an hereditary interest in the forestership of Morfe (a royal forest near the borough), property in Worcestershire; Richard Horde also married well, for his wife had a significant estate in Shrewsbury, and his son, Thomas, even better, for his wife was one of the coheiresses of the gentry family of Stapleton of Stapleton; and John Lawley, after his parliamentary career was over, married a wealthy Berkshire widow.

Unfortunately, few of the Bridgnorth election indentures survive. The names of the MPs are generally known only from the dorse of the writ directed to the county sheriff. It is, however, certain that separate borough elections were held for both Shropshire boroughs – Shrewsbury and Bridgnorth – and individual borough indentures were drawn up. Once these had been returned to the sheriff’s office, the sheriff generally simply abstracted the names of the MPs, returning only the county indenture into Chancery.8 In the return of 1427 the names of the Bridgnorth MPs have been added in different ink from the rest of the endorsement, suggesting that the bailiffs had informed an impatient sheriff of the names of the MPs only after the rest of the county’s electoral business had been transacted: C219/13/5. Interestingly, this is the only Salop indenture for the period which notes the name of its bearer into Chancery, and this was a Bridgnorth man, Richard Blike. Perhaps Blike had brought the delayed Bridgnorth indenture to the sheriff, who had then dispatched him to Westminster to explain the irregularity in the endorsement of the writ.

On three occasions in the fifteenth century, however, this practice was not observed, namely in 1407, 1453 and 1459, and borough indentures were returned. The explanation on each occasion probably lies in the sheriffs’ desire to suppress any suggestion of irregularity: the Parliament of 1407 was the first for which election indentures had been required by statute; in 1453 the sheriff, (Sir) John Burgh III*, had, against statute, returned himself for the county, and was probably anxious to give no further occasion for his conduct to be questioned; and the elections of 1459 were held in very tense political circumstances with the additional complication that one sheriff was replaced by another as the election process was pending.9 This explanation – that the return of separate borough indentures was prompted by some unusual circumstance – finds further support in the fact that in 1478 the sheriff returned the indenture for Shrewsbury, when that election was disputed, but did not trouble to return those for the county’s other boroughs, which then, aside from Bridgnorth, included Ludlow and Wenlock: C219/17/3. Of the three separate Bridgnorth returns, that of 1453 is unrevealing in that it names no attestors, but those of 1407 and 1459 provide a glimpse of the electoral process in the borough. The indenture of 1407, dated on Monday 10 Oct., three days before the county election, was drawn up between the two bailiffs on one part, and the county sheriff on the other, and names ten burgesses as electors, but states that ‘many others’ unnamed participated in the election. The indenture of 1459, dated five days before the shire election, takes a different form in that the contracting parties were the bailiffs and the attestors, of whom ten are again named but with no reference to other participants (as far as can be made out in an only partially legible document).10 C219/10/4; 16/5.

Interestingly, in all three instances where separate borough indentures survive, the Bridgnorth and Shrewsbury returns mirror each other in form, showing that, even when separate indentures were returned, what was sent by the boroughs to the sheriffs’ office was redrafted there for return into Chancery. From the attestors named in the Bridgnorth returns of 1407 and 1459, it is possible to conclude little. The attestors of 1407 were headed by two former bailiffs, John Lyney (who may have been the father of the MP of 1426) and the elderly William Goldsmith†, who had represented the borough in four Parliaments; and in 1459 they were again headed by two important burgesses, Thomas Persons (an MP in the previous Parliament), and John Dawes, both of whom served as bailiffs. Yet the others named in both years are obscure, and if any conclusion can be drawn from such limited evidence it is that the electors were not dominated by the borough elite.

In view of this overlap between county and borough, it is not surprising to find that seven of the Bridgnorth MPs attested Shropshire elections. Richard Horde did so on as many as 13 occasions, although he was the only one who was faithful in his attendance: Bruyn and Parlour are each recorded as present at three county elections; Thomas Horde, Clerk and Haughton at two each; and Wolrich once. They appear not as borough attestors appended to a combined county and borough indenture, but as a function of their landholdings in the county.

The two elections of the outsider Thomas Mayne raise the question of how far connexions with important men outside the borough were a factor in Bridgnorth’s elections. Clearly in Mayne’s case he would not have been elected but for his service to Hampton, but for others such connexions were an additional rather than a sole recommendation. Corbyn was a kinsman of Blike as well as an associate of Hampton. John Lawley, as a young lawyer from nearby Much Wenlock, was the sort of man the borough ordinarily returned. No doubt, however, his kinship with John Wenlock made him a more significant figure in the eyes of the electors than he would otherwise have been, and it is probably more than coincidental that Wenlock himself was an MP in three of the seven Parliaments to which Lawley was elected, including those of 1437 and 1455 when he represented Bridgnorth. More striking is the case of Blike, a close associate of the ubiquitous Shropshire lawyer, William Burley I*. They were returned together to at least nine Parliaments between 1429 and 1450, and it may be that the lesser man secured election to assist the greater man in Parliament. Interestingly, the Crown paid Burley 100s. and Blike one mark for their labours on royal matters in the Parliament of 1439-40. Also worth citing is the case of Haughton, whose return to the divisive Coventry Parliament of 1459 is probably to be explained by his Lancastrian sympathies, at least if one might draw an inference from the later evidence of his place in Henry VI’s service during the Readeption.11 By 1480 he was a follower of the Talbots, an allegiance, which, if it dated back to the 1450s, would explain his support for Lancaster.

This pattern of a representation dominated by the townsmen and their near-neighbours among the gentry continued into the sixteenth century. Of the 14 known MPs of the period 1509 to 1558 at least seven can be described as townsmen. It was not until the reign of Queen Elizabeth, when the borough’s representation fell into the hands of the nominees of the council in the marches of Wales, that this ancient pattern was broken.12 The Commons 1509-58, i. 175; 1558-1603, i. 231.