Gatton

Gatton was among the smallest of the boroughs represented in Parliament in this period, and even at the close of the nineteenth century scarcely more than 200 inhabitants were recorded there. Yet like that of Reigate, its close neighbour, the site of Gatton had been occupied for many centuries before the borough began to send representatives to Parliament. Since the Roman period Gatton had been connected with the other settlements at the foot of the North Downs by the principal east-west road which ran along the Holmesdale valley. A church was founded there around the time of the Conquest, and its parish came to cover an area of some 1,200 acres on the crest and southern slopes of the Downs.1 VCH Surr. iii. 196; iv. 436; Surr. Arch. Collns. i. 5. This part of Surrey was rich in natural resources, particularly good quality stone, often known as ‘Reigate stone’, which was used for building works at Windsor Castle and Canterbury cathedral. Quarries were located to the north and east of Reigate, particularly at Merstham, which became the main centre for this important local industry, and the material, sometimes called ‘Gatton firestone’, was readily available for the construction of churches in the county, such as at Stoke d’Abernon.2 J. Greenwood, Essays towards a Hist. of Reigate, 205; Archaeologia Cantiana, xlv. 45; Trans. London and Mdx. Arch. Soc. xxviii. 278-82; Surr. Arch. Collns. xx. 18. Though little more than a hamlet and never formally incorporated, in 1332 Gatton was assessed for parliamentary subsidies at the rate of a tenth, like larger urban communities, although only 17 inhabitants were wealthy enough to qualify for taxation. Unlike at Reigate, there is little evidence of expansion over the next 200 years, and in 1524 only six tax-payers were listed.3 E179/184/4, m. 3; J.D. Sheail, ‘Distribution of Wealth in Eng.’ (London Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1968), 383.

The manor of Gatton, covering a similar area to the parish, had by the early fourteenth century come into the hands of Simon Northwode†, in the right of his wife, and it continued to be held by the Northwodes until 1364. Then conveyed to Richard Fitzalan, earl of Arundel, it was among the properties seized by the Crown on the attainder and execution of his successor in 1397, and restored to Earl Thomas following the deposition of Richard II. When the latter died without issue in 1415 Gatton formed part of the share of the Fitalan estates assigned to his sister and coheiress, Elizabeth, widow of Thomas Mowbray, duke of Norfolk,4 CPR, 1301-1307, pp. 338-9; 1361-4, p. 486; 1396-9, p. 289; VCH Surr. iii. 198, VCH Suss. ii. 64; CP, ix. 604, 606. and on her death in 1425 they passed to her younger son, John Mowbray, who successfully claimed his father’s dukedom in the Parliament of that year. Like Reigate, Gatton thus came to form part of the vast estates controlled by the Mowbrays across England. Those in East Anglia and the south-east were particularly closely supervised by Mowbray officials in this period, and provided successive dukes with the means of rewarding valued servants and retainers with fees and annuities. One of the most prominent beneficiaries of Mowbray patronage was John Timperley I*, who received numerous grants from estates in Surrey from the third duke, John (d.1461). In 1446, the year in which he was appointed steward of the lordship and constable of the castle of Reigate, it is likely that he obtained a grant of Gatton at about the same time, for in March 1449 he received a royal charter allowing him to enclose the manor and some 800 acres of land there and at Merstham to create a park.5 VCH Surr. iii. 198; CChR, vi. 112.

Gatton possessed no administration independent from that of its lord. In 1453, the sheriff’s electoral indenture was counter-sealed by the borough’s constable, Richard Stonor, whose office is thought to have been made by appointment during the sheriff’s tourn at Sandridge.6 VCH Surr. iii. 198. One of a number of constituencies enfranchised or re-enfranchised in the increasingly troubled second half of the 1440s, evidently at the behest of Henry VI’s government, Gatton had perhaps come to the administration’s attention when Timperley sued out his charter. By contrast with some of the others, which had previously sent representatives to the Commons, albeit in some instances many decades before, Gatton, as far as is known, had never been a parliamentary borough prior to 1450. In that year, as previously, the sheriff of Surrey returned the names of the representatives of the boroughs in his county in the form of a schedule accompanying the indenture certifying the election of the knights of the shire. In 1453 and 1460, however, he (in the first instance Sir Richard Fiennes, in the second his brother Robert Fiennes*), sealed separate indentures with the authorities of each borough.7 No Surr. returns survive for 1455. The sole surviving indenture for Gatton, that of 1453, offers few clues as to the electoral procedure adopted: as already noted it was counter-sealed by the constable of Gatton, who certified the election ‘with the assent of the whole borough’. The indenture was a somewhat dubious document, for while it was plausibly dated to 24 Feb., first in a cluster of Surrey boroughs whose choices were recorded in the two weeks before the assembly of Parliament at Reading, the clerk failed to give the location of its sealing.8 C219/16/2. Nor was this the only occasion when the sheriffs’ returns raise questions over the Gatton elections, for in 1450 the name of one of the men purportedly elected had been added into the schedule over an erasure.9 C219/16/1.

Returns survive for four of the five Parliaments held between 1450 and 1460, yielding a total of eight names. Four of those elected (Dauntsey, Framlingham, Holman and Umfray) were returned to Parliament on just one occasion, while three (Huls, Mille and Stodeley), had each been returned previously, respectively for East Grinstead, New Shoreham and Reigate. Indeed, if it was Robert Bentham I*, rather than an otherwise unidentified Thomas Bentham, who was returned in 1450 (as seems possible), both Gatton Members of that year had also sat in the preceding Parliament, for Robert had sat for Heytesbury in Wiltshire. Alone of Gatton’s representatives, Huls went on to be re-elected to the next Parliament, securing a seat for Midhurst in Sussex on this third successive occasion.

In 1536, Thomas Howard, duke of Norfolk, was to consider Gatton one of the boroughs where, so he wistfully observed, ‘in times past [he] could have made burgesses of the Parliament’, but as far as Henry VI’s reign was concerned, this statement contained only an element of truth.10 The Commons 1509-58, i. 194. Although Holman, a local man connected the duke’s retainer Timperley by ties of tenure, may have owed his return in 1459 to that association, and Mille, returned in 1460, had sat for another Mowbray borough in the past, direct interference of Duke John or his retainers in Gatton’s representation may be suspected on just two occasions: in 1453 and 1460. Seven days before the Gatton indenture was sealed in February 1453 John Framlingham, a Suffolk esquire with no connection with the borough, had been indicted at Ipswich for criminal and treasonous activities dating back to 1450 and arising from the rivalry between the Mowbrays and de la Poles in East Anglia. His motivation for seeking a seat in Parliament is clear enough: it would provide him with the privilege accorded to Members of the Commons of immunity from prosecution while the sessions lasted. John Stodeley, returned in 1460, came from a different background. A London scrivener, he had served the duke as auditor of his estate accounts in Surrey, and had been useful to the duke for his reports about current events. He had represented another Mowbray borough, Reigate, ten years earlier, and remained on good terms with several Mowbray retainers including Timperley.

Yet otherwise Gatton’s representation was more often than not determined by successive sheriffs of Surrey and Sussex and links with the King’s household. Gatton owed its enfranchisement in 1450 to the initiative of just such a sheriff, the courtier and esquire for the King’s body, John Penycoke*. Beyond reasonable doubt, Hugh Huls, who came from Cheshire and made a name for himself in Wales, owed his election in 1450 to his kinship with the keeper of the privy seal, Andrew Huls, and it is possible that the other Gatton Member, whose name, Thomas Bentham, was inserted into the official record over an erasure, was in fact Robert Bentham I, a yeoman of the Crown who had represented Wiltshire boroughs in the two Parliaments of 1449. Similarly, in 1453 and 1459 yeomen of the King’s chamber (Dauntsey and Umfray) were returned. In 1460, Parliament was summoned in Henry VI’s name, but at the command of the Yorkist victors of the battle of Northampton. The sheriff of Surrey and Sussex charged with holding the election was, however, a Lancastrian loyalist, Robert Fiennes, at one time an esquire for the King’s body, who had been appointed to office during the court’s ascendancy in the previous autumn. Alongside the duke of Norfolk’s retainer Stodeley, Fiennes was thus able to return in Hugh Mille a member of another family with longstanding commitments to the house of Lancaster.