Hindon

In a county where the deserted ruins of Old Sarum possessed the parliamentary franchise, the village of Hindon could not be said to be the most rotten of boroughs, but in commercial or political importance it nevertheless fell far behind most other urban constituencies of fifteenth-century England. The vill of Hindon had been founded by the bishops of Winchester in the early thirteenth century in the north-eastern corner of their manor of East Knoyle. By the middle of that century it consisted of some 150 houses, but the Black Death seems to have struck the community hard, and in 1377 there were a mere 77 contributors to the poll tax. Although not a major commercial centre, Hindon had some importance for local trade, focused on its weekly market (established in 1219), and by the mid fifteenth century there was already an abundance of the inns and taverns which would later come to dominate the street picture.1 VCH Wilts. xi. 98-100. Hindon was never incorporated, and did not possess any independent administrative structures of its own, being governed by the bailiff of the episcopal manor, borough and hundred of Downton (of which the manor of East Knoyle, although geographically detached, formed a part).2 The Commons 1509-58, i. 225. Among the more important landowners in Hindon was John Brut†, whose property there passed to Thomas Tropenell* in 1456.3 VCH Wilts. xi. 100.

Hindon had been called upon to send representatives to nine of the Parliaments summoned between 1378 and 1385, but on each occasion the sheriff of Wiltshire reported that no return could be made – presumably because the local authorities had failed to respond to his precept. It is worthy of note that at Downton, the other Wiltshire borough pertaining to the see of Winchester, the bishop’s bailiff similarly made no response. Owing to this failure Hindon was not represented in the Commons until the late 1440s, when along with Westbury it was among the new parliamentary boroughs created by the duke of Suffolk’s administration. The exact circumstances of Hindon’s enfranchisement cannot now be established, but no formal royal charter was issued, and it seems that its assumption of the status of a parliamentary borough was effected by a simple instruction to the sheriff of Wiltshire, John Norris*, the influential esquire for the King’s body, to issue the necessary precept. The details of whether, when and how the men of Hindon chose their MPs are obscure. The sheriff normally returned the names of the representatives of the numerous boroughs in his shire into Chancery in the form of a schedule attached to the county indenture, but from at least 1449 he apparently also sealed separate indentures with the authorities in each borough. For Hindon, such indentures survive for the Parliaments of 1449 (Nov.), 1453 and 1455. The indentures are of no value in establishing the extent of the franchise, but they do indicate that a small group of men took the lead in the elections. The most prominent among them were William Holbeme, who set his seal to the indentures of 1453 and 1455 and in addition found sureties for the elected Members in 1449 (Feb.) and 1450, and Robert Wotton*, who like Holbeme sealed the indenture of 1453 and found sureties in 1450.4 It may have been Wotton (only the Christian name is now legible) who headed the Hindon attestors in 1455: C219/16/3. John Uffenham*, under his alias of Laurence, sealed the indenture of 1455 and provided sureties in 1450, while ten other men each appeared as mainpernors on individual occasions.

In view of the stranglehold in which the Crown and the bishop of Winchester manifestly held Hindon over its choice of representatives, it is hard to know how to interpret the periodic evidence of interference with the sheriff of Wiltshire’s returns into Chancery. Thus, on the occasion of Hindon’s first election the name of John Rokes was inserted into the sheriff’s schedule over an erasure, and similar tampering is evident in the cases of Twyneho in 1450 and Hervy in 1459. With regard to Waller’s return in 1453 it was the sheriff’s indenture which was altered. While it is possible that these alterations represent late changes in plans made at the centre of government, the possibility that some may have arisen from genuine scribal errors cannot be excluded.5 C219/15/6; 16/1, 2, 5.

The names of Hindon’s representatives are known for six of the seven Parliaments that met between the borough’s enfranchisement in February 1449 and Henry VI’s deposition in 1461. Only for the Yorkist assembly of 1460 are no names on record. Ten men shared these 12 seats among them. All but three of them represented Hindon only a single time; the exceptions being Tilney (who had the added distinction of being the only Hindon MP in this period to secure immediate re-election) and John Seymour II, both of whom represented the borough in the Parliament of 1455, as well as Hervy whose second recorded return in 1467 occurred outside the period under review. This did not, however, mean that the men who sat for Hindon in Henry VI’s reign generally possessed no prior parliamentary experience, for only in November 1449 were both MPs seemingly complete novices. In 1449 (Feb.), 1450, 1453 and 1459 at least one of the borough’s representatives had been returned before, albeit for other constituencies: Troutbeck had sat for Hertfordshire in 1447, the Parliament immediately preceding that of February 1449 in which he sat for Hindon; Twyneho had represented Shaftesbury before he sat for Hindon in 1450; Tilney had been MP for Downton before his return for Hindon in 1453; and Hervy (returned in 1459) had previously represented the Cornish borough of Launceston. Troutbeck was exceptional among Hindon’s MPs in this period for having twice been a knight of the shire before accepting the considerably less prestigious seat for an obscure Wiltshire borough, although Seymour was also prepared to alternate between Hindon and a seat for the county of Wiltshire, so that he sat in the four consecutive Parliaments from 1450 to 1459. Taking into account returns for other constituencies, Troutbeck and Seymour sat in four Parliaments each, Hervy, Rokes and Tilney in three and Twyneho in two.

As the circumstances of Hindon’s enfranchisement indicate, the borough was intended to provide safe seats for supporters of the King’s administration, and it did so from the outset. Its first two MPs (Rokes and Troutbeck) were prominent members of the royal household, and several of their successors likewise possessed ties at Court. Prudde was probably the son of Henry VI’s serjeant of the glasiery, while Twyneho was closely connected with the treasurer of the Household, John Stourton II*, Lord Stourton. Before long, the lord of the borough of Hindon, Bishop Waynflete of Winchester, also began to assert his influence. Increasingly, Hindon’s seats were taken by members of the bishop’s familia: Chaundre was an esquire of Waynflete’s household; Hervy served as justiciar of the bishop’s court of pavilion; and Seymour and Tilney both possessed significant ties to Waynflete. Waller owed his return to the position of his father, who had been the master of Bishop Beaufort’s household, and was subsequently taken into the service of his successor.

As ties of patronage with Crown or bishop were of the first importance in determining Hindon’s parliamentary representation, it is not surprising to find that every single one of the borough’s MPs in this period was in breach of the statutory requirement for residency. Seymour, as a Wiltshire landowner from Stapleford, came the closest to fulfilling the letter of the law, while Rokes, Hervy and Twyneho at least possessed homes in the neighbouring counties of Somerset and Dorset. The others came from much further afield. Coberley, Prudde and Waller respectively hailed from Surrey, Middlesex and Kent, while Chaundre and Tilney originated from the midland counties of Northamptonshire and Lincolnshire. Troutbeck, whose administrative duties at Westminster had caused him to acquire an estate in Hertfordshire, originally came from the un-enfranchised county palatine of Cheshire.

These men brought with them to the Commons their experience of office-holding in the service of the Crown. Thus, Chaundre was acting as controller of the tunnage and poundage in the great port of London at the time of his return, and had relinquished the post of escheator of Northamptonshire and Rutland just two weeks earlier; Hervy was a member of the quorum of the Surrey bench when returned for Hindon; and Rokes had held a range of offices, including the receivership of the honour of Wallingford and of Queen Katherine’s other dower lands, and the escheatorships of Hampshire and Wiltshire and of Oxfordshire and Berkshire (he was occupying the latter post when returned for Hindon); he was appointed controller of customs in the Dorset port of Poole while sitting in Parliament. Even more impressive than Rokes’s cursus was that of Troutbeck, who had held the shrievalty and chamberlainship of the palatinate of Chester, served on royal commissions there and in his adopted county of Hertfordshire, held various Welsh offices under the Crown and the duke of Exeter, and was currently serving as joint King’s remembrancer of the Exchequer. Hindon’s other representatives had no experience of Crown office at the time of their first return, but Coberley, Tilney and Waller all went on to serve as royal commissioners and Tilney and Twyneho to sit on the judicial benches of Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire, in the case of the former, and Somerset in that of Twyneho. Both Tilney and Seymour were later pricked as sheriffs, and Waller became Edward IV’s receiver of the Crown’s lands in four counties of the south-east. Alone of Hindon’s MPs in the period under review Prudde never held office.

Two of the borough’s representatives came from families with proud parliamentary pedigrees: Hervy’s father Richard* had sat in three Parliaments between 1399 and 1427, while Seymour’s great-grandfather Sir William Sturmy*, maternal grandfather Mark William†, father John Seymour I*, and brother Richard* all sat in the Commons in their turn. Others established similar traditions for themselves: Rokes’s son John II* represented three Dorset boroughs between 1453 and 1472, and Waller’s brother John† followed him as MP for Hindon in the reign of Edward IV, while Twyneho was followed into Parliament by his brother John† and two of his sons.