Horsham

In this period Horsham, lying near the Surrey border and on the road from London to Steyning, remained a small settlement with a taxable population which sometimes numbered fewer than 50 adults. Its inhabitants made a living from the sale of the products of the heavily-wooded land surrounding the town, pastoral farming, iron-working and quarrying stone.1 VCH Suss. vi (2), 129, 131, 135, 147, 174, 178. The lordship of Horsham had descended along with the rape of Bramber to the Mowbrays, and those who occupied the 52 burgages, established very early on in the town’s history, each paid the lord 1s. a year as rent. From the late fourteenth century the portreeves and burgesses leased the tolls of the weekly market and July fair from the lord at a fixed rate of two marks a year, and in addition the Mowbrays received the profits of the local courts. Even so, their revenues from Horsham remained static, and in the accounting year 1476-7 amounted to no more than £3 18s. 10d.2 Ibid. 171, 180; SC6/1023/2; DL29/454/7312. Besides the Mowbrays other landowners from the nobility and gentry acquired interests in manors within the parish of Horsham: in 1449 the archbishop of Canterbury was granted by the Crown the right to hold a market and two annual fairs there (to take place in West Street, which formed part of his manor of Marlpost); Beatrice, dowager countess of Arundel, possessed the manor of Coltstaple for term of her life; and Walter Urry* (d.1446/7) and his son-in-law the lawyer Thomas Hoo II* (d.1486) held the manor of Roffey in succession.3 VCH Suss. vi (2), 159-60, 171-2; CChR, vi. 106.

Returns for Horsham are extant for 18 of the 22 Parliaments assembled between 1422 and 1460, and provide the names of 25 MPs. As many as 19 of the 25 sat for this borough just once. Yet, as William Stoute sat in four Parliaments from 1419 to 1432, and Henry Boteler I, Roger Donstall and Stephen Payn were each returned to five in the years between 1413 and 1435, it is apparent that in the Parliaments of Henry V’s reign and until Henry VI reached his majority Horsham was usually represented by men experienced in the workings of the Commons. In 1420 and in all six of the Parliaments assembled from 1427 to 1435 neither of the men elected were newcomers, and in the other Parliaments of the period 1413-35 (with the exception of the Leicester Parliament of 1426), one of those returned is known to have been tried and tested before. Then too, in 1422, 1429 and 1431 preference was given to one of the Members of the immediately preceding Parliament. Thus, continuity was a key characteristic of the borough’s representation in the 1420s and early 1430s.

Matters changed after 1435. Both men returned by Horsham in 1437 and to four of the five Parliaments between 1447 and 1453 appear to have been newcomers to the parliamentary scene.4 Although the gaps in the returns mean that we cannot be certain. Furthermore, the more experienced MPs of 1442, November 1449, 1459 and 1460 had all gained their knowledge of the Commons not by representing Horsham but by sitting for other constituencies: James Janyn (1442) had done so for three other boroughs in Surrey and Sussex; Richard Danvers (November 1449) for Shaftesbury in Dorset; John Lewknor (1459) as a knight of the shire for Sussex; the latter’s brother Richard (who joined John in the same Parliament) as a burgess for Bramber; and John Harowe (1460) as an MP for the city of London. The return of outsiders of this kind marked a new departure for Horsham. For the previous 60 years or longer none of the borough’s MPs, save only Walter Urry, had ever sat for another constituency, and Urry (unlike the newcomers after 1435), was at least a prominent local landowner and well known in the town. Now, an increasing number of strangers to the locality were making an appearance, among them William Rous and William Jenney, who themselves went on to represent other constituencies in later Parliaments.

Taking the period of Henry VI’s reign as a whole, fewer than half of the MPs for Horsham were local men, numbering perhaps 12 of the 25. Among them was Henry Boteler, probably the son of a namesake who had sat for the borough in the previous century, but save in his case there is no sign that any of the inhabitants of Horsham established family traditions of parliamentary service. Several of these local men held both property in Horsham and land within a radius of five miles of the town, but of their occupations little is recorded. All we know is that they included a yeoman, a chapman or mercer, and a ‘gentleman’ (Styler). None of them appear to have filled administrative offices of any importance, even in the neighbourhood, although the absence of Mowbray estate accounts for Horsham in the period under review here means that the names of the bailiffs appointed by its lords are unknown. None of these local men were ever appointed to royal office or ad hoc commissions.

By contrast, 13 MPs, all of whom were elected after 1435, came from outside the town. Furthermore, of these 13 only four appear to have been natives of Sussex. These four lived in the eastern part of the shire: John Iham in the rape of Hastings, Henry Welles at Northiam, and the brothers John and Richard Lewknor, who belonged to a prominent family of gentry, at Horsted Keynes. Two others hailed from neighbouring counties: James Janyn from Surrey and Thomas del Rowe from Kent; and three were normally resident in the capital – William Rous, the Chancery clerk, who was returned in February 1449, and the London citizens John Worsop and John Harowe, who sat together in 1460. The remaining four came from even further away: Richard Danvers belonged to the wealthy Oxfordshire family of landowners and lawyers, William Goureley had grown up in Derbyshire and William Jenney lived in Suffolk, while John Leventhorpe’s family, originally from Yorkshire, were by this period well established in Hertfordshire and Essex.

This group of 13 also differed from the inhabitants of Horsham in several other respects. Some, most notably the Lewknor brothers and Danvers, were of armigerous rank and born to prominent landowning families. Indeed, John Lewknor, a former shire-knight, himself possessed land worth at least £85 p.a. which he had acquired through marriage to an heiress. The two MPs of 1460, Worsop and Harowe, were respectively members of the Drapers’ Company and Mercers’ Company of London, who had made a profitable living through overseas trade, notably the shipment of wool to the staple at Calais, and were used to handling substantial sums of money. By contrast, a number of the MPs may have been chosen for their expertise in the law, or their experience of government at the centre. When returned for Horsham in 1437, Welles was serving as clerk of the peace in Sussex, and had seen regular employment as an attorney in the central courts. William Rous, the Chancery clerk elected to the Parliament of 1449 (Feb.), had as his companion Thomas del Rowe, a clerk of the court of common pleas who occupied the post of filacer at least by the start of the second parliamentary session. Richard Danvers, one of a formidable quintet of brothers who entered the legal profession (including the future justices Robert* and William†), was a member of the Inner Temple, and William Jenney, his companion in the Parliament of 1449 (Nov.), belonged to Lincoln’s Inn, of which he had formerly been a governor, and after his parliamentary service for Horsham rose to become a serjeant-at-law and ultimately justice of the King’s bench. John Leventhorpe II, returned by Horsham in 1453, was also well known in the courts at Westminster, for he was currently marshal of the Marshalsea. The principal occupation of his fellow MP, William Goureley, styled variously as ‘smith’ and ‘gentleman’, was that of an auditor, specializing in the administration of large estates.

Their knowledge of the workings of Chancery and the law-courts may well have been a factor in the election of Rous and del Rowe in 1449. Others elected for Horsham were experienced in the government of their locality: John Lewknor had been sheriff of Surrey and Sussex in 1450-1, the same year that his brother Richard was escheator in the joint bailiwick; Danvers was appointed escheator of Northamptonshire and Rutland during the first session of his Parliament of 1449-50; and Jenney had been a j.p. in Norwich and Suffolk. Worsop could offer a different expertise: he had been controller of customs in the port of London.5 Danvers was later appointed collector of customs in Southampton and London; and he and two of the other outsiders went on to be j.p.s. – Danvers as a member of the quorum in Oxon., and the Lewknor brothers on the bench in Suss.

While professional qualifications almost certainly played an important part in securing the elections of these particular outsiders, another factor which came into play was a link with the lord of the borough, John Mowbray, 3rd duke of Norfolk (d.1461). The two men returned to the Parliament of November 1449, Jenney and Danvers, were both personally known to the duke, for he had employed Jenney (his feudal tenant of manors at Knoddishall and Theberton in Suffolk) as legal counsel for the previous five years, and not long afterwards he granted Danvers an annuity; in 1453 Horsham returned Goureley, currently engaged as auditor of the accounts presented by the duke’s estate officials, in company with Leventhorpe, then serving by the duke’s appointment as marshal of the Marshalsea; and Richard Lewknor, one of the MPs of 1459, held office under the 3rd duke and his successor as constable of their castle at Lewes and their master forester at Worth. Mowbray, who rarely visited Sussex, is unlikely to have influenced the elections directly; rather, Thomas Hoo II, his chief councillor and man of affairs, who lived in a manor-house at Horsham, appears to have been instrumental in deciding who should be returned. The surviving records provide no more than hints of Hoo’s connexions with the borough’s MPs from 1447 onwards, and of the pervasive effect of his machinations on the lives of those he encountered. Yet it is clear that Iham and del Rowe (who he, as a knight of the shire, accompanied to successive Parliaments) were engaged to assist in his complicated business transactions, and that Danvers had commercial dealings with him. Closest of all to Hoo were John and Richard Lewknor, the MPs in the Parliament summoned to Coventry in 1459, for they were his younger half-brothers and always looked to him for guidance.6 Perhaps Hoo accompanied them to Coventry as one of the unknown shire-knights for Suss.

How Horsham’s representation was affected by the politics of the civil war is difficult to interpret, especially as besides being a leading member of the duke of Norfolk’s council Hoo was the principal agent in the south of England for Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, and in the escalating crises of 1459-61 these two magnates opted to take different sides, with Mowbray supporting York and Percy remaining loyal to the Lancastrian Crown. Hoo followed Percy’s lead. After the victory of Queen Margaret’s forces at the battle of St. Albans on 17 Feb. 1461, he personally helped to reunite Henry VI with his queen by seeking out the earl in the queen’s camp. It is very likely that neither of the MPs returned by Horsham to the Parliament summoned by the Yorkist regime to meet on the previous 7 Oct. had been promoted by Hoo, for Harowe died at Wakefield fighting for York, and Worsop was currently suing the lawyer and his master the earl of Northumberland for the enormous sum of £1,189.

There is nothing in the extant records to shed light on the process whereby outsiders came to be elected for Horsham in the 1440s and 1450s, yet the returns for the Sussex boroughs to this politically crucial Parliament of 1460-1 were unusual in several respects. In response to the writ of 30 July (barely three weeks after the Yorkist victory at Northampton), elections for Sussex were held in the county court at Chichester on 28 Aug., and the shire indenture was dated accordingly. Curiously, four of the five surviving indentures for boroughs in Sussex were all attested not in the towns themselves but in the same county court and on the very same day.7 Only the indenture for the city of Chichester bore a different date: 22 Sept.: C219/16/6. The indenture for Horsham is now largely illegible, save for the name of one of the parties; an explanation as to how the two Londoners came to be returned is to be sought in vain. Yet, significantly, these two citizens of London were not alone in securing election for a Sussex borough, for they were joined in Parliament by Robert Gayton*, a member of the Grocers’ Company, who was returned for Steyning. How they arranged their elections is a mystery, although it may be surmised that they did so only after the shire indenture had been handed in to the Chancery.

In the first half of the fifteenth century the names of the MPs for Horsham had appeared only on a schedule listing the parliamentary burgesses from Surrey and Sussex, which the sheriff returned along with the indentures recording the elections of the shire knights. No indentures for the boroughs of Sussex survive before 1453. On that occasion the one for Horsham was drawn up between the sheriff and John Kyngston and John Duke, the borough’s constables, and stated merely that the constables, with the assent of ‘the whole community’ of Horsham, had elected Leventhorpe and Goureley. After 1460 the next extant indenture was dated at Horsham on 22 Sept. 1472, and made between the sheriff on one part and the two bailiffs and 15 named burgesses on the other; while that for the Parliament of 1478 was made between the sheriff and one bailiff together with nine named burgesses.8 C219/16/2; 17/2, 3.