Dunwich

An important settlement in Anglo-Saxon times, Dunwich was one of England’s largest ports by the twelfth century, but its story in the later Middle Ages is one of steady and irreversible decline. Its most serious problem was its location on a rapidly eroding stretch of the east coast. There were probably no serious losses of land to the sea in the early years of the fifteenth century, but by then the town had already suffered considerable damage. Very substantial parts of it had disappeared during the great storms of 1287-8, 1328 and the 1330s, and by 1428 three of the town’s six parishes, Saints Nicholas, Leonard and Martin, were ‘submerged by the tides and totally devastated by the sea’. To compound Dunwich’s difficulties, the movement of tides and shingle had altered the position of the original harbour mouth, and this had become totally blocked by 1328. As a result, the town had to resort to a new and far less satisfactory entrance to the harbour. Situated near Southwold and the manor of Blythburgh, it was both narrow and shallow, so restricting the passage of larger ships and posing navigational hazards. These changes in physical geography also enabled vessels to bypass Dunwich – where they were liable to tolls – and to dock directly at Southwold and Walberswick. The position of the new harbour mouth also led to jurisdictional clashes with the lords of Blythburgh, making it necessary for the burgesses to reach an agreement with the then owner of that manor, Sir Roger Swillington, in 1410. Sir Roger undertook that he and his successors would pay the bailiffs of Dunwich £1 p.a., in return for which the men of Blythburgh and Walberswick were to enjoy freedom from all tolls and customs at the port of Dunwich. By 1435, it seemed that shingle would block the new harbour mouth as well, and Swillington’s nephew and successor, John Hopton, consented to the cutting of another entrance on his land. In the event, it would appear that this work actually took place and that the town was able to continue to use the existing entrance. Relations between Hopton and the burgesses were evidently cordial at this date, but they quarrelled on other occasions during Henry VI’s reign and were again at odds shortly after the accession of Edward IV.1 Bailiffs’ Minute Bk. 1-3; M. Bailey, ‘Per Impetum Maris’, in Before the Black Death ed. Campbell, 195-7; Procs. Suff. Inst. Archaeology, xxxvi. 73; C.F. Richmond, John Hopton, 44, 152-4; T. Gardner, Hist. Dunwich, 138-9.

The sea was not later medieval Dunwich’s only problem. It also suffered badly from the Black Death, the decline of the herring industry on the east coast of England and other economic problems that ensured a severely distressed economy in the first three decades of the fifteenth century. Dunwich’s early thirteenth-century population was about 6,000 but the effects of the Black Death and subsequent outbreaks of plague were savage. There were perhaps just 1,000 inhabitants (mostly living in the parishes of All Saints, St. Peter and St. John) in 1400, and it would appear that there were 1,150 in the mid 1520s. The freemen of the town comprised about one third of the male taxpayers in early fifteenth-century Dunwich and there were no more than 62 burgesses in 1411.2 Bailiffs’ Minute Bk. 2-4; M. Bailey, Med. Suff. 132, 277, 281; B.G. Blackwood, Tudor and Stuart Suff. 5. Most of the burgesses were natives of the town who owed their status to right of birth; others had acquired it by paying a fine of 6s. 8d., although those who purchased their freedom had to have a stake in local affairs.3 Bailiffs’ Minute Bk. 7; Bailey, Med. Suff. 132. The decline of the herring industry, one of Dunwich’s economic mainstays, was the result of falling prices for both herring and sprat and competition from better-equipped Dutch fleets. English fishing fleets reacted to this development by undertaking pioneering expeditions to Iceland and the Faroes, but it is unlikely that vessels from Dunwich commonly made voyages of such length before 1430. By the later years of Henry VI’s reign, Dunwich was also suffering from a slump in trade, prompting its burgesses to enter into a commercial treaty with the port of Kingston-upon-Hull.4 Procs. Suff. Inst. Archaeology, xxxvii. 108, 112; Bailiffs’ Minute Bk. 16-17; A. Suckling, Suff. ii. 242. In spite of the borough’s relentless decline, there were individual burgesses, including some of those who sat for it in Parliament, who were privately rich. They were, however, in a distinct minority: the records of the lay subsidy of 1524 show that 89 per cent of Dunwich’s inhabitants possessed less than £10 in assessed wealth.5 Bailey, Med. Suff. 281.

The drop in Dunwich’s population ensured a scaling down of the administration of the borough and a reduction in its annual fee farm. Before the late 1340s, a mayor and four bailiffs headed the municipal administration but it lost its mayor and two of the bailiffs in a reorganization of 1347. Ten years later, Edward III drastically cut the fee farm (already reduced from the £108 at which it had stood in the early thirteenth century) from £65 to £14 10s. 9d., and in the mid fifteenth century it was reduced still further, to just over £12. Henry IV began the practice of granting out the fee farm in 1403, when he committed it to Thomas Mowbray, Earl Marshal. Following Mowbray’s execution two years later, the King’s half-brother, Thomas Beaufort, acquired the farm, which presumably reverted to the Crown after his death in 1426. Thirteen years later, Henry VI granted it to Sir William Phelip†, Lord Bardolf. Bardolf died in 1441, and the King reassigned it to William de la Pole, earl of Suffolk, just under two years later. De la Pole, by then marquess of Suffolk, obtained a fresh grant of the farm in June 1447, this time for life.6 Ibid.; The Commons 1386-1421, i. 619-20; CFR, xiii. 71-72; xvii. 154, 248-9; CPR, 1446-52, p. 56. In mid 1450, a month after de la Pole’s exile and murder, the Crown committed it to John Hopton’s eldest son, William Hopton, then an esquire of the Household, only to resume it soon afterwards because William and his sureties had failed to render proper accounts.7 CFR, xviii. 159; Richmond, 110n; E101/410/3, 6, 9; Gardner, 24n. In the following year Dunwich’s burgesses acquired the keeping of the fee farm for themselves, in return for which they agreed to pay the Crown £12 5s. 5d. p.a. They secured a new grant in February 1454, retaining it for the rest of Henry VI’s reign and securing its renewal when Edward IV came to the throne.8 CFR, xviii. 221; xix. 81; xx. 62.

Upon Edward’s accession, the burgesses also petitioned for a renewal of the charters they had acquired when Henry VI came to the throne.9 CChR, vi. 194-5; CPR, 1422-9, p. 167. Apart from these and previous charters (or copies of them), the only other significant original document to have survived is a ‘minute book’ covering the years 1404-30.10 Bailiffs’ Minute Bk. The book’s discovery post-dates the constituency survey for Dunwich in The Commons 1386-1421, i. 618-21. Its survival is fortunate, since it provides important evidence for the administration of the borough. Nominally, this rested with the general body or ‘community’ of burgesses, but in reality it was very much in the hands of a tight circle of the wealthiest townsmen. The day-to-day running of the town was the responsibility of annually elected officers. Of these, the most important were the two bailiffs. They maintained law and order (although they left the more serious disturbances and assaults to the town’s coroners and the commissioners of the peace for Suffolk), presided over the borough’s courts and administered its finances. As a check on the bailiffs, there were auditors who went over their annual accounts. It was the task of the under bailiffs and a number of other lesser officers to assist the bailiffs in their work. The under bailiffs helped to collect Dunwich’s fixed income (from urban rents, court revenues and other sources) but this rarely covered all the borough’s outgoings. When necessary, various taxes (or ‘fines’) and ‘doles’ (subsidies on fishing boats) were imposed on the inhabitants and tax collectors and other officials were elected to gather them. From 1429 onwards, the bailiffs also had the assistance of two chamberlains, whose duty was to organize the collection of taxes levied on fishing vessels, as well as perquisites arising from wrecks. When it came to decision-making, the bailiffs usually consulted the borough council, although occasionally they sought the backing of ad hoc assemblies of all the burgesses. The council consisted of 24 members until its reduction to 18 in 1419, perhaps an attempt to make the town government both more efficient and more accountable. The council seems to have controlled appointments to the office of bailiff, a position dominated by the most substantial burgesses.11 Bailiffs’ Minute Bk. 4-9; Bailey, Med. Suff. 136.

Most of the 20 known MPs for Dunwich in Henry VI’s reign resided there, and only Brantham, Polard, Canon and Beaumont were certainly not natives, given that they purchased their freedom. In spite of the well-established ties between a majority of the MPs and the town, only the Cuddons, who were cousins, were from a family with a tradition of parliamentary service over several generations, although Thorpe’s father had sat for Dunwich in a couple of Parliaments of the 1380s. Nevertheless, residence was by no means a sine qua non for the borough’s parliamentary representatives, and five of the 20 (Jenney, Mekylffyld, Rous, Strange and Sulyard), were members of the Suffolk gentry who lived elsewhere. Although the outsiders were in a minority, their election represented the beginnings of a distinct shift in the parliamentary representation of Dunwich, which accelerated rapidly in the century after 1461. For instance, all of the borough’s MPs in the early fifteenth century were active burgesses but just six of its 17 known Members in the Parliaments of the years 1529-59 were resident merchants or ship-owners with municipal experience.12 Bailiffs’ Minute Bk. 11; The Commons 1509-58, i. 190; 1558-1603, i. 247. As far as is known, the Parliament of 1459 was the first in which neither of the MPs (Sulyard and Mekylffyld) was a resident burgess.

It is impossible to tell what, if any, external pressure the borough came under to elect outsiders. In any case, the election of outsiders is not proof of such pressure. First, there is no reason why the burgesses could not have freely decided among themselves that there were advantages in having prominent lawyers like Rous, Jenney and Sulyard representing them. Rous and Jenney, in particular, did not live far away, and it is likely they possessed a good knowledge of borough affairs. While neither of them appears to have had a previous connexion with Dunwich, their families acquired property there and descendants of theirs likewise sat for the town in Parliament.13 The Commons 1509-58, i. 190. Secondly, the borough’s insolvency is likely to have made it expedient to return such men, usually readier than ‘typical’ burgesses to forgo their wages as MPs. Thanks to its financial problems Dunwich consistently paid its MPs less than the customary daily rate of 2s. allowed to parliamentary burgesses. While other boroughs like Cambridge that were much better placed to withstand the general economic woes of this period came to cut such wages, Dunwich’s Members were particularly hard done by. For example, its representatives in the Parliament of 1426 took no more than 4s. each per week. Furthermore, the MPs of 1427 received a weekly wage of 6s., apparently to share between them, but even then the borough was obliged to levy a special tax to ensure that they were paid.14 The survey for Dunwich in the period 1386-1421 failed to find any evidence at all that the borough paid wages for parliamentary service (The Commons 1386-1421, i. 620), but it lacked the evidence of its minute book, which shows that it did indeed do so before 1422. Over three decades later, Strange would agree to accept a quantity of herring in lieu of parliamentary wages after gaining election for the borough for the third time in 1463. Like Rous and Jenney, Strange possessed lands lying within a few miles of Dunwich, as indeed did Mekylffyld. His family certainly had a prior connexion with the borough, since his father had attested its returns for the Parliaments of 1435 and November 1449.

Among the MPs who were residents rather than outsiders, at least two of them, Robert Cuddon and Thorpe, were on the fringes of the gentry, although the latter’s social status was far from fixed since he was a ‘yeoman’ and ‘merchant’ as well as a ‘gentleman’. There is, however, no doubt that Thorpe, one of the richest Dunwich burgesses of his day, owed his prosperity to his business dealings. Gyne and Moreff were also merchants, of some significance in the case of Moreff. He traded as far abroad as Prussia and it is likely that he also had commercial dealings with the Low Countries, where Dunwich’s main international trading links lay.15 Bailiffs’ Minute Bk. 21. He certainly possessed a stake in the local fishing industry, as did Luke and Thomas Peers, Luke as the joint owner of a boat and Peers as a sea-going captain and ship-owner. There is little evidence for the occupations of the other MPs, although Canon was clerk of the town and Brantham was a brewer. Brantham and Canon were of far more modest means than most of the MPs, especially the wealthy Cuddons, Moreff and Thorpe. Canon was from a particularly lowly background, but his abilities enabled him to attain the office of town clerk, a position he had exercised for over a decade before his election in 1426. Curiously, he did not become a freeman of Dunwich until October 1416, even though by that date he had been clerk for some two years and had sat in his first Parliament, a breach of the normal rules or conventions that is difficult to explain.

The only other positions of responsibility Canon exercised within Dunwich were those of a collector and assessor of taxes, and there is no evidence that Brantham, a tax collector and under bailiff in the previous two reigns, ever held any of the principal offices there either. In short, their role in municipal administration reflected their origins, even if their lowly backgrounds did not preclude a parliamentary career. It is unlikely that either of them aspired to the position of bailiff, an office usually occupied by the more substantial burgesses from whom those of Dunwich’s parliamentary representatives who were resident townsmen were typically drawn. Save for the outsiders and the obscure Nicholas Parker and Nicholas Spicer, all of the MPs held one or more borough offices. At least nine of them became bailiff, most of them before entering Parliament for the first time, and several, notably Luke, Moreff and Thomas Peers, served multiple terms as such. This represented a continuation of an earlier pattern, since a majority (albeit less clear cut) of the MPs of the 1386-1421 period who became bailiffs likewise exercised the office before embarking on their parliamentary careers. While serving as bailiff, two of the Members of the period under review, Moreff and John Peers, were party to their respective returns to their only known Parliaments, meaning that they combined the most significant borough office with a seat in the Commons, as did John Luke in 1423 and Robert Cuddon in both 1442 and 1450. It is impossible to determine whether the elections of those already occupied with important responsibilities at home – or, indeed, of the relatively lowly Brantham and Canon – arose from a general reluctance among the leading burgesses to enter Parliament. Moreff, Peers and Cuddon were not the only men to combine borough office with a seat in the Commons. Beaumont took on the newly-created role of chamberlain a day before he gained election in 1429. Canon was town clerk at the outset of his parliamentary career, and probably throughout it as well. Brantham was an under bailiff when he sat in his first Parliament, that of May 1413, while Polard was probably one of the coroners while a Member of his last, that of 1437. As the examples of Brantham and Canon show, it was not unprecedented for burgesses to hold municipal and parliamentary office simultaneously prior to 1422, and several other MPs of the period 1386-1421 likewise combined such responsibilities.

Whatever their status within the borough, those MPs who were townsmen rather than outsiders feature scarcely at all in the administration of the wider county of Suffolk. Only Robert Cuddon certainly held office in the county, serving as a tax collector there several years after beginning his parliamentary career. His cousin Richard Cuddon and Robert Thorpe also exercised responsibilities by direct appointment of the Crown, but they did so within Dunwich, where both were members of a gaol delivery commission of 1423, and well before either entered the Commons in the first place. It is impossible to ascertain the ages of any of the MPs with a degree of certainty although it is likely that most of the townsmen among them were of mature years when embarking upon their parliamentary careers. By contrast, three of the lawyer-outsiders, Mekylffyld, Rous and Sulyard, were probably still relatively young men when they took up their seats for the borough, their representation of which must have helped them in terms of self-promotion and consequent advancement.

None of the five outsiders, let alone any of the other MPs, appears to have possessed a link with the Crown, whether through service on royal estates or a position at Court, at the time of their first (or only) election for Dunwich. Rous became a steward and receiver for the duchy of Lancaster in Suffolk, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire but not until just over a year after sitting in the Parliament of 1437, although he still held those offices when he represented Dunwich again in 1442. A few months after sitting for the borough in 1437, Rous acquired a share of the farm of three of the duchy’s manors in Suffolk. Nevertheless, he did so through the good offices of his then patron, Sir William Phelip, who was chief steward of the duchy of Lancaster in the south of England and to whom he probably also owed his duchy offices.

By 1437, Rous had also formed an attachment with William de la Pole, earl of Suffolk, but there is no way of knowing whether either Phelip or the earl actively supported his candidature for the Commons. The other outsiders likewise enjoyed connexions with one or more noble patrons, ties that were potentially significant for their parliamentary careers, although it is unclear whether Strange’s links with John Mowbray, duke of Norfolk, and Sulyard’s with Alice de la Pole, dowager duchess of Suffolk, played a part in their respective elections in 1455 and 1459. Mekylffyld, Sulyard’s fellow MP in the anti-Yorkist Parliament of 1459, also had de la Pole associations and his candidature probably had the backing of the Court’s supporters in East Anglia, even if he was no diehard Lancastrian. In the case of Strange, wider political circumstances permitted his patron, the duke of Norfolk, to wield significant influence in the East Anglian elections of 1455, but Dunwich’s growing insolvency provides an alternative explanation for the readiness of its burgesses to return him to the Commons that year. It might however be reasonably argued that Jenney, another of those linked with Mowbray, enjoyed the duke’s support when standing for Dunwich in 1450. He had sat in the previous Parliament for Horsham, the Sussex borough of which Mowbray was lord, and before the elections to that of 1450 Norfolk and his ally, Richard, duke of York, were active in East Anglia ‘labouring’ for the return of men sympathetic to their cause. Evidence of links between the townsmen among the MPs and the nobility is extremely slight. Thomas Peers and Gyne stood as mainpernors for William de la Pole, earl of Suffolk, when he obtained the keeping of Dunwich’s fee farm in 1443. It appears that Parker also had an association with that extremely influential peer at the time of his election to the Parliament of February 1449, while the Cuddon family had enjoyed good relations with the previous keeper, Sir William Phelip, Lord Bardolf. Yet none of these contacts, real or apparent, with such magnates necessarily had any bearing on their parliamentary careers.

While it is fair to assume that Dunwich’s electorate felt it desirable to return Members with previous parliamentary experience, it is unlikely that the leading resident burgesses actively sought a seat in the Commons. Apart from Luke and Robert Cuddon, none of those who attained the office of bailiff definitely sat in more than two Parliaments. Of those who sat more than twice, only Luke, Polard and Canon had anything like parliamentary careers. The same was probably the case for no more than a small minority of the known MPs who represented the borough in 1386-1421, even if the large gaps in the evidence for those years make such a comparison unsatisfactory. The Members of that earlier period included three of the 20, Luke, Canon and Robert Cuddon, all of whom first entered the Commons in the reign of Henry V. Just two others, Strange and Sulyard, certainly sat in Parliaments after Henry VI’s reign but the latter did not sit for Dunwich again after 1459 and, in any case, their Membership of these latter assemblies has no bearing on the parliamentary history of the borough during the period under review. While the loss of several of the returns renders the evidence incomplete, no two men certainly sat together for Dunwich in consecutive Parliaments in Henry VI’s reign; on the other hand, there was no occasion when both of the borough’s MPs were definitely novices.16 Owing to the loss of the returns of 1439 and 1445, it is impossible to ascertain that John Gyne and John Peers were novices at their election in 1447. Evidently, the burgesses recognized the need to have their borough effectively represented, whether by those drawn from their own ranks or, as was increasingly the case towards the end of the reign, by outsiders, assuming that the outsiders constituted freely chosen rather than imposed candidates.

As in the previous reign, the parliamentary returns for Dunwich took the form of an indenture, of which those for the Parliaments of 1422, 1425, 1426, 1432, 1439, 1442, 1445, February 1449 and 1460 have not survived. The town’s MPs of 1439, 1445 and 1460 are unknown, but the names of those in the other six of these Parliaments appear in the schedules that the sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk returned with the writ of summons to the Chancery. One of the extant returns, that of 1427, is of particular interest since it records the election of Richard Russell‡ alongside John Polard to the Parliament of that year, although the borough’s minute book shows that it was Philip Canon who accompanied Polard to Westminster. The reason for Russell’s withdrawal is unrecorded. If it arose from health problems these did not completely incapacitate him since he was one of the assessors of a tax the borough imposed upon its residents to cover the cost of sending its MPs to the same assembly.17 C219/13/5; Bailiffs’ Minute Bk. 96, 132. The official return was the basis for the mistaken assumption (in The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 254-5) that Russell actually sat in 1427. The parties to the extant indentures from the years of Henry VI’s minority were on one hand the bailiffs and on the other Dunwich’s coroners and 12 of the burgesses.18 The Commons 1386-1421, i. 620-1. The earliest surviving indenture from the period of the King’s majority is that for the Parliament of 1447. It simply states that the bailiffs had presided over an election in the presence of seven named burgesses and ‘many other burgesses and residents’, as does that for the Parliament of 1449-50. According to the indenture for the Parliament of 1450, the bailiffs, acting in association with the two coroners, held an election in the presence of a dozen named burgesses and many others, but that for 1453 states that the bailiffs presided without the coroners’ help. Later returns from Henry’s reign, as well as those from that of Edward IV, record that the bailiffs held elections in the presence of the coroners, some ten or more named burgesses and ‘many others’. The reasons for these changes in form and their significance (if any) are unknown.

The surviving borough indentures show that the Dunwich election was conducted separately from the county one. In 1427, for example, the county election was held on 1 Sept. and that in the borough not until 30 Sept., although generally the two elections were held closer together. There is no evidence relating to the actual conduct of the borough elections and it is impossible to ascertain whether all of the burgesses voted.19 Bailey, Med. Suff. 10. It is nevertheless likely that the town’s elite, whose names feature prominently in the formal returns, dominated the proceedings. Ten of the MPs were themselves attestors, some of them on a very regular basis, and Polard witnessed his own return in 1437 while a coroner. Just one of the 20, Thomas Peers, attested any of the surviving returns of the knights of the shire for Suffolk. His name features in the county’s return to the Parliament of 1455: presumably, his presence in the shire court arose from his own election to the same assembly.