Background Information
Number of seats
2
Constituency business
none found.
Date Candidate Votes
1422 HUGH RASYN
WILLIAM FORSTER I
1423 WILLIAM FORSTER I
JOHN DANIELL
1425 ROBERT BAMBURGH
WILLIAM FORSTER I
1426 ROBERT WARDALE
JOHN ACCLOM
1427 JOHN DANIELL
WILLIAM FORSTER I
1429 JOHN DANIELL
WILLIAM FORSTER I
1431 WILLIAM FORSTER I
GEORGE TOPCLIFFE
1432 JOHN COLLOM
JOHN THORPE
1433 WILLIAM FORSTER I
JOHN DANIELL
1435 WILLIAM FORSTER I
JOHN ACCLOM
1437 ROBERT BAMBURGH
JOHN ACCLOM
1439 (not Known)
1442 WILLIAM FORSTER I
ROBERT CARTHORPE
1445 (not Known)
1447 WILLIAM HELPERBY
JOHN ACCLOM
1449 (Feb.) HENRY EUER
WILLIAM PAULYN
1449 (Nov.) JOHN ACCLOM
THOMAS BENTON
1450 GEORGE TOPCLIFFE
THOMAS BENTON
1453 JOHN ROBINSON
JOHN BESYNGBY
1455 JOHN DANIELL
ROBERT HOGESON
1459 (not Known)
1460 THOMAS GOWER II
THOMAS SAGE II
Main Article

The fourteenth century had been a troubled period in Scarborough’s history. The damaging effects of violent contention between the town’s dominant elite (the potentiores) and lesser townsmen were exacerbated by depopulation, economic recession, a serious raid by the French in 1378 and a heavy fine imposed on the town for its involvement in the Peasants’ Revolt.1 The Commons 1386-1421, i. 740. By contrast, the fifteenth century was a much less eventful period in the town’s history. If the town remained divided into two contending factions, their rivalry has left only one trace in the surviving records. On 18 June 1454 the royal council, responding to reports of disturbances in Scarborough, ordered the townsmen to lay aside ‘alle noveltees’ and conduct themselves according to the ‘noble constitucions’ formerly ordained for their ‘politique reule’. These disturbances may have been related to the Yorkshire rising of Thomas Percy, Lord Egremont, and Henry Holand, duke of Exeter, in the previous month, although the curious wording of the royal injunction and the confirmation of these ‘noble constitucions’ on 26 June hints at a return to the town’s earlier class divisions.2 E28/82, 18 June 1454; A.P.M. Wright, ‘Relations between the King’s Govt. and Bors.’ (Oxf. Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1965), 47; CPR, 1452-61, p. 159. If so, however, the trouble was apparently brief.

Of greater relevance to the town’s history in the fifteenth century was continuing economic difficulties. The recovery of the borough’s population was hampered by the pestilence of 1438-9, which took a particularly heavy toll in the north, and the main basis of the town’s economy, the fishing industry, appears to have declined in the second quarter of the century.3 A.J. Pollard, North-Eastern Eng. 47; P. Heath, ‘Scarborough Fleet’, Northern Hist. iii. 61-66; W.R. Childs, ‘Mercantile Scarborough’, in Med. Scarborough ed. Crouch and Pearson, 24-25. These difficulties were recognized by the Crown: Scarborough was one of three boroughs, along with Cheltenham in Gloucestershire and Headington in Oxfordshire, given remission from a half of the fifteenth and tenth granted by the Parliament of 1442, and this remission was later extended to the grant made in the 1445 Parliament.4 PROME, xi. 328, 401. It would be wrong, however, to place the emphasis solely on decline. The annual fee farm of £66, together with a further £25 p.a. for the neighbouring manor of Falsgrave, due from the burgesses to the Exchequer, appears to have been paid without default. Further, a recent survey of what little evidence survives has described the town’s economic state in the period as ‘difficult but not dire’, and such a conclusion is consistent with what is known of the town’s MPs.5 Childs, 25.

Of the 22 Parliaments that met during the reign of Henry VI, the names of the Scarborough MPs are known for 19. These 38 seats were taken by 19 individuals, who between them were returned for the borough on a total of 45 occasions. None is certainly known to have represented another constituency, although Gower may have represented Appleby in the Parliament of 1435. Residents still dominated the town’s representation. Of the 19 MPs, 16 were permanent residents predominantly from families established in the town for at least a generation. Two of them were from dynasties with a tradition of parliamentary service: four Accloms, over three generations, sat for the borough in at least 15 Parliaments between 1369 and 1449; and four successive generations of the Sages filled at least seven seats between 1388 and 1472. Such dynasties, most notably the Rostons (who represented the town on at least 17 occasions between 1298 and 1384), had been an occasional feature of the borough’s representation in earlier periods of parliamentary history, but they were not to recur later.

Even in the three exceptions to the rule that Scarborough returned residents, the rule was only partially breached. Two of them had close connexions with the town and are known to have had property there. Euer lived at Old Malton, some 18 miles away, and purchased property in Scarborough, although it is not known whether he had done so by the time, early in his career, that he represented it in Parliament. Besyngby lived in London, but had inherited property in Scarborough from his maternal grandfather, Robert Shilbottle†, MP for the town in the 1390s. The third, Gower, had more remote connexions, for he lived at Stittenham, some 30 miles away, and largely owed his election to the exceptional circumstances of 1460. Yet he was not a complete outsider. His putative brother, John Gower, had married the widow of another of Scarborough’s MPs, Forster, and in 1458 he himself had been named alongside Daniell and Sage to a local piracy commission. In short, the borough’s representation was still entirely in the hands of its residents or those who could claim some connexion there.

This appears to have remained largely the case at least until the end of the fifteenth century. Most of the names of its MPs from 1461 to 1529 are lost, but of those that are known nearly all were townsmen. Only in the election of Edmund Thwaites†, a Yorkshireman in the service of Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, in 1478, when the earl was constable of Scarborough castle, is there an indication that the pattern of the borough’s representation was departing from its historic pattern. Yet, when a near complete record of the town’s MPs resumes in 1529, a transformation was complete and the town’s residents had become largely irrelevant to its representation. While, of the fifteenth-century MPs, only Ralph Hotham†, who sat for Northumberland, and possibly Gower, represented another constituency, no fewer than nine of the 18 MPs elected between 1529 and 1558 did so for constituencies that were as remote as Lostwithiel and Flintshire. Even of those who are recorded as only representing Scarborough, most had no connexion with the town. The burgesses had, in short, almost entirely surrendered their representation to the nomination of outsiders. Only in the Parliament of 1554 (Nov.), in which the Crown had directed the boroughs to return residents, was Scarborough represented as it had once always been.6 The Commons 1506-58 i. 249-50.

The story of the borough’s representation in Henry VI’s reign thus marks the beginning of the end of an era. One of its characteristics was the continuing dominance of townsmen; another was the high decree to which the responsibility of representation was shared. As many as 11 of the 19 MPs are recorded as returned only once. This is not, of course, to say that others did not have very active parliamentary careers. Forster was elected to 11 Parliaments between 1419 and 1442; Acclom to six from 1421 to 1449; and Daniell to five from 1423 to 1455. Yet this pattern of predominantly single elections, broken by a handful of multiple ones, suggests, at least in one interpretation, a low level of competition for seats, with the few who were willing to sit, most notably Forster, easily able to secure election. Thus, when no willing candidate could be found, the obligation to take a seat fell upon one of the leading townsmen who had not previously been returned.

If the proportion of MPs taking only a single seat is, indeed, to be accounted an inverse reflection of the enthusiasm with which parliamentary representation was viewed, it might be concluded that the desirability of a parliamentary seat for the townsmen of Scarborough diminished over time. It is perhaps significant here that, in the immediately preceding period, 1386 to 1421, just six of the 25 MPs are recorded as sitting only once. This invites the conclusion that a continuing decline in enthusiasm for parliamentary service among the leading townsmen is part of the explanation for the later revolution in the borough’s representation.

The fact that during the reign of Henry VI no petitions to Parliament survive from the burgesses of Scarborough can be interpreted as a further indication of this lack of enthusiasm. It is possible that the remissions of taxation granted to the town in the Parliaments of 1442 and 1445 was the Crown’s response to such petitions, now lost, but, in general, it does not appear that the parliamentary petition was the method by which the burgesses sought concessions from the Crown.7 PROME, xi. 328, 401. During the reign they twice – in June 1423 and June 1454 – secured royal confirmation of earlier charters, but on neither occasion was a Parliament in session (although in 1454 a Parliament had concluded only two months before).8 CPR, 1422-9, p. 93; 1452-61, p. 159. Similarly, they sued out five short-term grants of the right to levy pavage and quayage during the reign, but only one of these grants, that of December 1423, was made either during a Parliament or soon after a dissolution.9 CPR, 1422-9, pp. 156, 384; 1429-36, p. 442; 1452-61, pp. 288, 504.

Even though many of Scarborough’s MPs in Henry VI’s reign are recorded as sitting only once, there was a marginally higher level of representative continuity then than in the 1386-1421 period, when single terms were so much rarer. In the later period 23 of the 38 known seats were taken by experienced MPs (or 24 if Gower was the Appleby MP of 1435), compared with 29 of the 48 in the earlier one. The contrast is even starker in respect of instances of immediate re-election. In the earlier period on only three occasions was the town represented by an MP who had sat for it in the previous Parliament; in Henry VI’s reign there were as many as nine such instances, including two in 1429 when the MPs of 1427 were elected again. This contrast is, however, more apparent than real, a function of Forster’s exceptional parliamentary career. Strikingly, he was elected to nine of the 11 Parliaments between 1421 (Dec.) and 1435, and he thus accounts for as many as six of these nine cases. Without him, Scarborough’s level of representative continuity would have been very much lower. Indeed, after his death in 1443, a year after his last election, novice MPs came to predominate. Between 1422 and 1442 inclusive, newcomers filled only six of the 24 known seats and only in 1432 did two novices sit together; but between 1447 and 1460 they filled nine (or eight if Gower had represented Appleby in 1435) of 14 and in either two or three Parliaments – those of 1449 (Feb.) and 1453 and perhaps also that of 1460 – two novices sat together.

Any discussion of the relationship between election to Parliament and the holding of administrative office in the borough is hampered by a loss of evidence. Although a list of the borough’s bailiffs, albeit one that is by no means complete, can be compiled from a variety of sources, the identity of the councillors and the other officers is almost completely unknown. In the fifteenth century only for 1456 and 1463 does a complete list of officers and councillors survive.10 N. Yorks. RO, Northallerton, Scarborough recs. DC/SCB, ct. bk. 3, unfoliated. Thus, although all else that is known of the town leads to the conclusion that it was represented by the same men who filled its administrative offices, this cannot be demonstrated with certainty. Only one of the MPs, Sage, is known to have held office as coroner and none to have served as chamberlain. Sage also had the unique distinction of serving as mayor under the terms of the charter granted to the town by Richard III but soon revoked by Henry VII.

Only in the case of the office of bailiff can more realistic statistics be compiled. Ten of the 19 MPs are known to have held that office, and it is significant that nine of them are known to have served more than one term. Wardale, although elected to Parliament only once, was bailiff for at least eight years between 1424 and 1450, and Acclom for at least five from 1420 to 1448. There was also a close chronological correspondence between election as bailiff and election to Parliament. On at least six occasions in Henry VI’s reign the town elected one of its bailiffs: Rasyn in 1422, Wardale in 1426, Forster in 1433 and 1435, Robinson in 1453 and Hogeson in 1455.11 In addition, in 1427 Richard Daniell, as bailiff, returned his son, John. This was a continuation of a pattern observable in the period between 1386 and 1421. Then, 13 of the 25 MPs are known to have served as bailiffs, many for multiple terms, and on at least nine occasions one of the bailiffs returned himself. If, as seems likely, the townsmen were not enthusiastic parliamentarians, it seems improbable that the bailiffs exploited the influence of their office to secure election. Much more probable is the existence of an informal rule that, if no suitable MP could be found, one of the bailiffs was required to fill a vacancy. It is worth remarking in this context that only three of the MPs – Acclom, Bamburgh and Forster – sat in Parliament having served as bailiff.

None the less, the prominence of bailiffs among the town’s MPs, a prominence that would be revealed as greater if a complete list of the bailiffs could be compiled, indicates that the town’s representation was dominated by its leading residents. What little is known of the service of MPs on the three advisory councils confirms this dominance. The identity of these councillors is known only for 1456 and 1463, but the evidence is enough to suggest that the MPs were chosen from only those burgesses who could reasonably aspire to election to the premier (or, at worse, the second) of the councils. Of the 36 councillors of 1463 only three – Helperby, Robinson and Sage – are known to have sat in Parliament and all appear among the first 12. In 1456 no fewer than six of those named to the first 12 – Acclom, Collom, Daniell, Hogeson, Robinson and Wardale – are recorded as an MP, and another, Helperby, appears among them but with his name crossed through (perhaps he refused to serve). Two of those in the second 12 – Paulyn and Sage – are also known to have been MPs.

Ten of the MPs are recorded as holding office other than those of merely borough administration or to have been appointed to ad hoc commissions of royal government. Three of them were the MPs who cannot be described as residents. Gower, before his election for the borough in 1460, had served as riding forester of the local forest of Galtres and receiver of the duchy of Lancaster lordship of Pickering; and Besyngby, when he represented Scarborough in 1453, held two minor offices in Norfolk as reward for his service in the royal household. The third, Euer, was a j.p. in the North Riding, although not until nearly 20 years after he had represented Scarborough. Such offices were beyond the aspirations of the townsmen. Those who were townsmen received the occasional appointment to royal commissions concerned with local matters. Acclom and Daniell, for example, were named on the commission of sewers issued for Scarborough in 1438; and Daniell, Hogeson, Robinson and Sage to commissions relating to local piracy in the 1450s. In marked contrast to the earlier period when the town held, in the 1390s, the status of a head port, none of the MPs is known to have been named to any post relating to the collection of customs. Similarly, the commissions of the peace issued for the town in 1411 and 1413 were not repeated thereafter for, in an addition to the borough’s privileges made by Henry V on 14 Dec. 1414, the bailiffs were empowered to act as j.p.s. there.12 T. Hinderwell, Hist. and Antiqs. Scarborough (3rd edn.), 275-6.

The pattern of office-holding implies that the Scarborough MPs were an insular group, their interests largely confined to the town. None the less, nine of them are known to have had property interests beyond the confines of the borough at some point in their careers. Three of these were the MPs who cannot be accounted as townsmen, and two more – Robinson and Wardale – had property only in the neighbouring settlement of Falsgrave. Another, Bamburgh, had but a small holding at Huntington near York, but the remaining three – Helperby, Paulyn and Acclom – can be said to have been both resident townsmen and minor local gentry. Helperby’s mother was the heiress of a gentry family and brought him the manor of Killerby in Cayton, some four miles south of the town; and Paulyn was the son of a gentleman of Hunmanby, about ten miles from Scarborough, who had come to play a part in the town’s affairs through his interest in fishing. Acclom is often described in the records as resident at Ganton, about seven miles south of Scarborough, and he is known to have had other property slightly further afield at Levisham. The probability is that his family, one of the richest in the town, had begun the process of establishing itself among the gentry.

Most of the evidence for the commercial activities of the MPs comes from a unique source: accounts, for the periods 1414-18 and 1435-42, of the tithes paid to the town’s church of St. Mary on catches of fish.13 E101/514/31, 32; Heath, 53-69. This shows, not surprisingly, that a few of the MPs were involved in fishing on a very considerable scale. Daniell and Collom, in more than one year, paid tithes of catches worth well over £100, with Daniell’s catch in 1438-9 approaching £200. Yet the accounts also imply that the industry was in decline. While in the first period they cover several townsmen, including Collom, had fished the distant waters off Iceland, an enterprise requiring considerable investment, their involvement had all but ended when the accounts resume in 1434. It may be that fishing itself had become a less attractive investment for the leading burgesses. Acclom’s brother, Robert†, and Helperby’s father, William†, for example, had both been heavily involved, fishing even in the distant Iceland waters, but Acclom himself is not recorded as paying fish tithes and Helperby seems to have run down the family’s activity. No doubt, if the fish tithe records were more complete, other of the MPs could be shown to have been involved in the industry. Sage, perhaps the richest of Scarborough’s residents, owned three large ships, called ‘fysshers’, in the 1470s, and in the 1440s Forster owned two warehouses for the storage of herring. Yet, given the importance of fishing in the town’s economy, one might have expected a greater proportion of its MPs to have appeared in the surviving tithe accounts.

Of the other commercial activities pursued by the MPs very little evidence survives. Acclom, Carthorpe, Thorpe and Topcliffe all sued out royal licences to export grain; an indictment for the evasion of customs shows that Bamburgh exported wool; and Hogeson is described as a draper and Paulyn as a mercer. But such episodic evidence gives a far from complete picture. Equally incomplete is the evidence of ship-owning among the town’s MPs, but the occasional reference to their piratical activities shows that Sage’s three ‘fysshers’ were far from the only ships in their ownership. In 1412 Acclom was among the Scarborough men accused of robbing a Danzig merchant of goods worth £196 at sea; in 1420 Bamburgh illegally took another ship of Danzig in the mistaken belief that it belonged to a trader indebted to Scarborough merchants; and in 1434 Daniell and Topcliffe were among those who, contrary to the Anglo-Scottish truce, seized Le Nicholas of Aberdeen, loaded with salmon, at the Scottish port of ‘La Frith’. The most significant act of piracy belonged to Sage. In 1474 some 60 men in his three ‘fysshers’ took a ship of the Hanse, off Scarborough, and then sold it and its cargo at Newcastle-upon-Tyne for 400 marks, in blatant disregard of the truce concluded with the Hanseatic League a few months before.

Lawyers played little part in the borough’s representation during the period under review here. Two can be tentatively identified as such: Euer, many years after he had represented the borough, was named to the quorum of the peace and Bamburgh served as clerk of the borough court. Neither, however, is identified as a lawyer through anything else known of their careers, and they would hardly qualify for the appellation when compared with men of law who represented Scarborough in the following century. As the town’s residents gave away their right to be elected, lawyers filled some of the vacancies. Of the 18 MPs who represented the borough from 1509 to 1558, four were common lawyers, all, perhaps not coincidentally, of Middle Temple, and one a civil lawyer.14 Two were lawyers of distinction: Sir John Tregonwell† was a master in Chancery when he sat for the borough and Anthony Browne† was appointed c.j.c.p. four years after doing so.

Only the most rudimentary evidence survives to illuminate the mechanics of parliamentary election in the borough. The elections were conducted by the bailiffs acting in response to the precept directed to them by the sheriff of Yorkshire. Since no separate election indentures survive for the borough, it is probable that their notification to the sheriff of electoral results simply took the form of a bald statement of the names of the MPs and those who offered surety for their attendance. The sheriff then endorsed this information on the writ of parliamentary summons and returned the writ into Chancery. Whatever he had received from the town’s bailiffs was simply discarded and is now lost. The only observation worth making from the endorsements of the writs is that the MPs often drew their sureties from former or future MPs. When, for example, the obscure Thomas Benton was returned in 1450, he called upon two former MPs, Acclom (who had sat with him in the previous assembly) and Carthorpe, to stand as his sureties. Robinson was particularly active in this regard, standing as surety for the elections of Helperby in 1447, Acclom to the Parliament of 1449 (Nov.), Hogeson in 1455, Gower and Sage in 1460, and Sage again in 1472.

With respect to the franchise there is no evidence for the period, but evidence for later Parliaments shows that it was restricted to the principal borough officers, namely the two bailiffs, two coroners, four chamberlains and 36 councillors, divided into three councils of 12 of descending rank. These officers were elected annually on the morrow of Michaelmas by a process that was narrowly oligarchic. Although the coroners were elected by the ‘common assent’ of the whole community, the bailiffs and chamberlains were chosen by a group of 12 burgesses, four of whom were nominated by the coroners and the other eight by these four. The bailiffs and coroners then nominated another jury of 12, which in turn nominated the 12 principal councillors, and these 12 councillors then chose the two inferior councils.15 D. Crouch, ‘Urban Govt.’, in Med. Scarborough, 41-43; Hinderwell, 120-1. The inferior townsmen were thus entirely excluded from the process of parliamentary election and almost entirely from the election of those who were to exercise the parliamentary franchise.

In respect of the factors determining the results of individual elections, political considerations beyond the local are apparent in the later part of the period under review here. The first return to imply some external interest is that of Euer to the Parliament of February 1449. A younger son of one of the greatest gentry families of the north, the town had never previously returned a man of his type. Further, his election was clearly related to that of his father, Sir William Euer*, to the same Parliament at hustings in Yorkshire which Henry himself attended. Thereafter, the escalating national strife of the 1450s ensured that considerations external to the town exercised a powerful influence over whom it returned. The election of Besyngby in 1453 is a clear example. Although he was the maternal grandson of a Scarborough MP, he played no part in the town’s affairs, and his election, to a Parliament notable for the high number of royal servants returned, can only be attributed to his place in the royal household.

Later the widening divisions in national politics prompted Richard Neville, earl of Salisbury, whose castle at Sheriff Hutton lay not too distant from Scarborough, to take an interest in the town’s affairs as he had not done before. Whether he sought to create an affinity in the town or whether some of the leading townsmen sought his patronage cannot be discerned. Yet it is surely not coincidental that Hogeson, as bailiff, should have returned himself to the Parliament that met in the wake of the Yorkist victory at St. Albans in 1455, and, two years later, named Salisbury as the supervisor of his will. Hogeson’s fellow MP in this Parliament, Daniell, resuming his parliamentary career after a break of 20 years, may also have been sympathetic to Neville, as also, much more certainly, was Robinson, who had sat with Besyngby in the Parliament of 1453. In the elections to the Yorkist Parliament of 1460, however, the earl’s influence was felt in a different way. One of those elected, Sage, at the beginning of a long career, was connected with the Nevilles if one may judge from his later support for the Readeption. But more interesting and significant was the election of Gower, an important Neville retainer who probably fell in their cause at the battle of Towton. As remarked earlier, he was not without a connexion with Scarborough, but, as an important member of the local gentry, his election has only one earlier parallel in that of Euer. It may also be taken to imply that there was a degree of active management, at least in respect of 1460, in the return of the borough’s MPs with a Neville connexion. The earl of Salisbury either sought or attracted the support of some of the leading townsmen, but, when he wanted a more substantial figure to represent his interest in the crucial Parliament of 1460, he looked to a retainer who had his own connexions there.

Support in Scarborough for the Nevilles and, through them, for York, was expressed beyond Parliament. None of the MPs is certainly known to have taken up arms in the civil war of 1459-61, but there is strong indirect evidence to show that two of them did. Helperby was the beneficiary of three royal grants after the Yorkists assumed control of government, ‘in recompense for his great care and cost of which the King [Edward IV] knows’. Robinson provides a more interesting case. In two Chancery petitions of the early 1460s, he complained of a double misfortune. He claimed that, after the field ‘of Ludlow’, he had been forced to leave his native county by the affinity of Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, ‘for the seruice and true hert that he ought’ to the earl of Salisbury. Then, in April 1460, he was arrested by his fellow townsman, John Lambert, acting on an admiralty warrant issued on false grounds, and then imprisoned for six weeks in the Percy castle at Wressle until he paid a ransom of £50.16 C1/27/250. For Lambert: Childs, 28. More difficult to discern is support for Lancaster, and it is regrettable in this regard that the names of the town’s MPs for the pro-Lancastrian Parliament of 1459 are lost. An obvious candidate for election was the lawless Lambert, an adherent of the Percys, and perhaps also Euer, whose eldest brother, Ralph, was to fall in the Lancastrian cause at Towton. On balance, however, the available evidence suggests that the sympathies of the leading townsmen lay with York.

If, however, Scarborough favoured York, it was not until the reign of Richard III that it made any significant gain from the change of regime. In April 1485 that King, who had been lord of the castle and lordship of Scarborough from 1474, made an extraordinary grant in favour of the burgesses, elevating the borough to the status of a shire incorporate, a privilege only previously bestowed on the great cities and towns of the realm. This privilege, in such striking incongruity to Scarborough’s size and wealth, did not survive the battle of Bosworth.17 C.D. Ross, Ric. III, 58. Its abrogation was followed soon after by an end to the long tradition that the town was represented in Parliament by its residents.

Author
Notes
  • 1. The Commons 1386-1421, i. 740.
  • 2. E28/82, 18 June 1454; A.P.M. Wright, ‘Relations between the King’s Govt. and Bors.’ (Oxf. Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1965), 47; CPR, 1452-61, p. 159.
  • 3. A.J. Pollard, North-Eastern Eng. 47; P. Heath, ‘Scarborough Fleet’, Northern Hist. iii. 61-66; W.R. Childs, ‘Mercantile Scarborough’, in Med. Scarborough ed. Crouch and Pearson, 24-25.
  • 4. PROME, xi. 328, 401.
  • 5. Childs, 25.
  • 6. The Commons 1506-58 i. 249-50.
  • 7. PROME, xi. 328, 401.
  • 8. CPR, 1422-9, p. 93; 1452-61, p. 159.
  • 9. CPR, 1422-9, pp. 156, 384; 1429-36, p. 442; 1452-61, pp. 288, 504.
  • 10. N. Yorks. RO, Northallerton, Scarborough recs. DC/SCB, ct. bk. 3, unfoliated.
  • 11. In addition, in 1427 Richard Daniell, as bailiff, returned his son, John.
  • 12. T. Hinderwell, Hist. and Antiqs. Scarborough (3rd edn.), 275-6.
  • 13. E101/514/31, 32; Heath, 53-69.
  • 14. Two were lawyers of distinction: Sir John Tregonwell† was a master in Chancery when he sat for the borough and Anthony Browne† was appointed c.j.c.p. four years after doing so.
  • 15. D. Crouch, ‘Urban Govt.’, in Med. Scarborough, 41-43; Hinderwell, 120-1.
  • 16. C1/27/250. For Lambert: Childs, 28.
  • 17. C.D. Ross, Ric. III, 58.