Bedfordshire

One of the smallest English counties, Bedfordshire generally possessed more variety in architecture than landscape. Nevertheless, the downs above Dunstable in the south, part of the Chilterns, provided an obvious contrast with the more low-lying remainder of the county, and the flat countryside in the north-east was little different from that of neighbouring Huntingdonshire.3 N. Pevsner, Buildings of Eng.: Beds., Hunts. and Peterborough, 15; P. Bigmore, Beds. and Hunts. Landscape, 21, 23, 25. The most important urban settlement in Bedfordshire was its administrative centre and only long-term parliamentary borough, Bedford. Principally a market town for the produce of local agriculture, it was also a regular venue for the county’s shire courts, assizes and sessions of the peace. In this period Bedford castle, part of the barony of Bedford, was of no military importance, while the partition of the barony itself in the thirteenth century had left the burgesses largely free of outside interference. By Henry VI’s reign, it was in the hands of several co-parceners, none of whom wielded any real practical authority in the town. Among them were the Mowbray dukes of Norfolk whose share included the site of the castle.4 VCH Beds. iii. 12-13. Dunstable was another borough of some significance, which returned burgesses to the Parliament of 1312 but not thereafter. Established by Henry I, it fell under the lordship of the local priory, another of that King’s foundations. Dunstable occasionally featured in the itinerary of Henry VI, who inherited a manor at nearby Luton from his uncle, John, duke of Bedford, in 1435. Other royal interests in the county included the duchy of Lancaster manor of Sutton in north Bedfordshire.5 Ibid. ii. 247-8; iii. 350, 353, 355-61.

The prior of Dunstable enjoyed considerable jurisdictional rights in that borough but the sheriff of Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire and other royal officials did not always accept their exclusion from its internal affairs, and disputes periodically arose as a result. One such controversy that occurred in Henry VI’s reign had a parliamentary connexion. In 1428 the burgesses of Dunstable protested to the Crown about an attempt by the then sheriff, Humphrey Stafford I*, to make their borough contribute to the wages of the knights of the shire for Bedfordshire in the Parliament of 1427-8. The matter was referred to the court of King’s bench, but it had yet to make a ruling at the end of the decade.6 Ibid. iii. 350, 355-61; Bigmore, 108-9; B.P. Wolffe, Hen. VI, 361, 368, 369, 371; KB27/670, rot. 96.

The priory at Dunstable was one of at least two religious houses in that town.7 VCH Beds. i. 371-7, 395-6. Bedfordshire in general did not lack for such institutions, since it possessed a disproportionate number of them for a county of its size. Yet none was of especial importance and there is little evidence for any local influence they might have enjoyed.8 Ibid. 349. Similarly, the bishop of Lincoln, in whose diocese Bedfordshire fell and who possessed a manor at Biggleswade,9 Ibid. ii. 210. does not appear to have loomed large in the affairs of the county during Henry VI’s reign.

Those affairs were far from stable in this period, especially the first half of the reign. Traditionally, the Greys of Ruthin were the dominant magnates there but the arrival in the county of Sir John Cornwall upset the status quo. A career soldier who had made a spectacular marriage to Elizabeth of Lancaster (the royal widow of the earl of Huntingdon), Cornwall settled in Bedfordshire after acquiring the Ampthill estate at some unknown date before 1424. Of particular concern to the Greys was his decision to build a castle at Ampthill, situated just a few miles away from the Grey residence at Silsoe. It would appear that Cornwall, upon whom the Crown bestowed the title Lord Fanhope in 1432, and Reynold, Lord Grey, managed to remain on relatively cordial terms with each other until the late 1420s or early 1430s but the underlying tensions between them broke out into the open in 1437. In the spring of that year, two of Cornwall’s men, William Pekke and William Ludsopp, received appointments to a commission charged with inquiring into all felonies, trespasses and other offences committed in Bedfordshire. It was presumably at Cornwall’s bidding that Pekke arranged for the commissioners to sit at Silsoe and, to add to the provocation, he and Ludsopp arrived at Silsoe accompanied by Cornwall and his ‘meyny’. Angered by this incursion into his neighbourhood and fearing that the commissioners intended to procure indictments of his own followers, Grey also appeared at the head of a large band of men. There was a real danger of serious fighting until the sessions were deferred (in the end, they were probably never held). The government took serious alarm over the incident and in the following weeks Pekke, Ludsopp and their fellow commissioners received summonses to Westminster for questioning by the King’s Council.10 P. Maddern, Violence and Social Order, 206-9; R.A. Griffiths, Hen. VI, 570-1; PPC, v. 35-39, 57-59.

The authorities had just cause for concern, since the simmering tensions between the two sides boiled over again in January 1439 when Cornwall and his men clashed violently with Grey’s followers at the sessions of the peace in Bedford. At the sessions, held in an upper chamber of the shire-house, there was a heated exchange of words and weapons were drawn. Panic ensued, leading to a stampede for the stairs in which no fewer than 18 men were crushed to death. Immediately afterwards, both sides returned certificates to the court of King’s bench reporting their respective versions of events, but in due course the Council concluded that neither account was trustworthy. In early March, after Cornwall had agreed to pay a fine at the Exchequer, the Crown issued a general pardon to him and 55 of his followers, including Pekke and Ludsopp. Grey’s supporters, headed by Sir Thomas Waweton, received a like pardon late in the following May, but the quarrel ended more favourably for Cornwall than it did for his opponents, since in the meantime the Crown excluded Waweton and several other Grey retainers from the commission of the peace. While Pekke also lost his place on the commission, it was he and John Wenlock, another of Cornwall’s men, who were Bedfordshire’s knights of the shire in the Parliament of 1439, which opened on 12 Nov. Unfortunately, the return for this election, held when the hostility between the two factions was at its height, is no longer extant, and it is impossible to tell whether their candidacy went unopposed. Some six months after the Parliament was dissolved, Pekke was reinstated as a j.p. but Waweton did not regain his place on the bench until after Cornwall’s death in 1443. By then Grey was also dead, and the removal from the scene of the quarrel’s two principal figures effectively assuaged the tensions afflicting the county.11 Maddern, 209-22; Griffiths, 571-2; CPR, 1436-41, pp. 246-7, 282-3; C140/38/49; 75/53.

The Grey-Cornwall quarrel was not the first between magnates to affect Bedfordshire in Henry VI’s reign, since there had also been an armed confrontation there between the retainers of John Mowbray, duke of Norfolk, and John Holand, earl of Huntingdon (Cornwall’s stepson), in the late 1420s. Some historians have suggested that the same divisions lay behind neighbouring Huntingdonshire’s disputed parliamentary election of 1429 although there is no evidence that either lord intervened in the election, or that they had any direct ramifications for Bedfordshire.12 J.S. Roskell, Commons of 1422, 17-18; The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 482, 528; R.E. Archer, ‘The Mowbrays’ (Oxford Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1984), 258-62. Among the principals in the Huntingdonshire dispute of 1429 was Sir Thomas Waweton. He was one of several landowners who regularly participated in the returns to the same Parliament of the knights of the shire for both Huntingdonshire and Bedfordshire, even on occasions when they themselves were standing in another constituency. As a result, they were in breach of the Act of 1413, which laid down that both electors and elected should reside in the county concerned.

Another magnate dispute affected Bedfordshire in the latter years of Henry VI’s reign, although less violently than that between Grey and Cornwall. Within months of his death in 1443, Cornwall’s executors had sold the Ampthill estate to Ralph, Lord Cromwell, but the young Henry Holand, duke of Exeter, manufactured a false claim to these lands and seized them in June 1452. Cromwell responded by taking legal action rather than resorting to physical force, and he had recovered Ampthill by mid 1455. In the meantime, the dispute had an important impact on the county’s politics, since Exeter worked to secure the return to the Commons of 1453 of men favourable to his cause: both of Bedfordshire’s knights of the shire in that assembly, Sir Henry Norbury and Thomas Wychard, were Holand retainers.13 S.J. Payling, ‘Ampthill Dispute’, EHR, civ. 881-907.

Like that of 1439, Bedfordshire’s returns to the Parliaments of 1445, 1455, 1459 and 1460 are no longer extant although other sources supply the names of the knights of the shire in 1445 and 1455. In total, there are 17 known Members but the county may have had as many as 21 different MPs in this period, assuming the representatives of 1459 and 1460 were all new to the Commons. Almost all the 17 resided in Bedfordshire to a greater or lesser extent, and a clear majority were natives of the county or had family ties with it. Only Norbury was not properly qualified to sit for Bedfordshire, since he failed to meet the residential qualification demanded of knights of the shire by an Act of 1445. By a curious coincidence, at least three of the MPs had links with the south-west of England and the Welsh marches. First, William Daubeney spent much of his time on his estates in Somerset and Cornwall and was more active in local government in the latter county than he was in Bedfordshire. Secondly, Ludsopp was ‘of Herefordshire’ until he married the widow of Sir Thomas Woodhill early in Henry VI’s reign, a match his patron Sir John Cornwall, who also possessed interests in the West Country, may have helped to achieve. Thirdly, Wychard was known as ‘of Somerset’ before he settled in Bedfordshire. Furthermore, another of the MPs, James Gascoigne, who owed his links with Bedfordshire to his marriage, also appears to have acquired a connexion with the south-west, since he was probably the man of that name who sat for the Devon borough of Barnstaple in the Parliament of 1431. One might speculate that those Members who were either not natives of Bedfordshire or were just as much associated with other parts of the country, did not identify with their constituency as closely as did those knights of the shire for other counties with stronger regional identities, like Norfolk, Kent and Cornwall. Of course, it does not necessarily follow that its representatives were less active in the Commons than their fellow MPs, or not as conscientious in fulfilling their duties as Members of the Lower House.

Whether recently settled in Bedfordshire or not, a majority of the 17 had connexions with other MPs or came from families with a tradition of parliamentary service. The Wawetons supplied at least two other knights of the shire to medieval Parliaments: John Waweton†, who sat for Huntingdonshire in ten Parliaments of the later fourteenth century, and William Waweton*, who gained election for the same county in 1433. Sir Thomas and John Wenlock were brothers, being the sons of a former knight of the shire for Bedfordshire in the Parliament of October 1404, and both of John’s wives were daughters of MPs. John’s second wife was also the widow of (Sir) John Fray†, a knight of the shire for Hertfordshire in Henry V’s reign. Daubeney, John Ragon and Norbury were likewise all sons of MPs and related by blood or marriage to others. As for other parliamentary connexions, Daubeney’s father-in-law was seven times a knight of the shire for Somerset and Ragon was the grandson of John Wydeville† and the nephew of Thomas Wydeville*. Norbury was the elder brother of Sir John Norbury* and related by birth or marriage to several other parliamentarians. Gascoigne, Ludsopp and Wychard were the sons-in-law of MPs, as probably was Robert Rufford, who was certainly the stepson of another of the 17, John Fitzgeffrey. Gascoigne was the younger half-brother of Sir William Gascoigne†, Wychard’s second wife was the widow of a former Speaker, Roger Hunt*, and Thomas Reygnes was the grandson of the Thomas Reygnes† who sat in at least four Parliaments of the late fourteenth century, twice for Bedfordshire and twice for Buckinghamshire. Such connexions mirror the three and a half decades before 1422, since at least ten of the 27 known knights of the shire of that period – of whom Sir Thomas Waweton was also one – were likewise heirs to a tradition of parliamentary service.14 The Commons 1386-1421, i. 255.

Late in his career, Waweton, already a figure of some consequence, made a marriage that considerably enhanced his standing in local society, since his third wife could claim among her relatives Richard II’s first queen, Anne of Bohemia.Norbury was another knight of impressive connexions and high social status, in spite of his father’s relatively humble beginnings. A godson of Henry IV, he also had a family tie with the peerage, in so far as his mother was the widow of William Heron†, Lord Say. John Wenlock, likewise born into a family of no great distinction, was the only man among the 17 who became a member of the peerage, and not until just after the period under review, as a reward for committing himself to the Yorkist cause. Reflecting the general decline of knighthood in the late Middle Ages, only Norbury, Waweton and the two Wenlocks represented Bedfordshire as belted knights, of whom John Wenlock sat as an esquire in the first three of his half a dozen known Parliaments. Yet most, if not all, of the 17 were well able to support the status and a further four men, Daubeney, John Enderby, Fitzgeffrey and Ludsopp, were all distrained for the honour at least once. The paucity of actual knights was not a break with the immediate past, since a mere five of the 27 known MPs for the county in the three and a half decades before 1422 sat for it as such.15 Ibid. 252.

Knighthood retained its military connotations, and Waweton is the only MP among those who received the honour not known to have served in France. Both Wenlocks campaigned across the Channel before embarking on their parliamentary careers, as did Norbury. Sir Thomas Wenlock fought at Agincourt and Norbury was another soldier of some distinction, whose military career of well over 20 years ended with his capture at Formigny in 1450. Although subsequently released by the French, he was technically still a prisoner on parole when he sat in the Parliament of 1453, as he was at his death in 1455. The never knighted Ludsopp (one of Sir Thomas Wenlock’s comrades-in-arms at Agincourt) and Gascoigne also served across the Channel before entering the Commons, as perhaps did Enderby, Ragon and Wychard. Such men were well qualified to participate in parliamentary debates about the war in France; whether they did must remain a matter for speculation, owing to the lack of evidence.

Whatever his military experience, Enderby was certainly a lawyer, as was John Laurence. It is very likely that Pekke was another member of the legal profession, as possibly was William Herteshorn. Lawyer or not, Pekke began his career as a burgess of Bedford and represented that borough in the Commons ten years after sitting for Bedfordshire. While there is no evidence that he or any of the others among the 17 engaged in trade, it is conceivable that John Wenlock amassed some of his wealth through commercial enterprises. He acquired property in London and became an honorary member of its Merchant Taylors’ Company, and his frequent embassies abroad (some of which were directly concerned with mercantile affairs) could have given him the opportunity to participate in trading ventures. Wenlock was not the only MP with London connexions. Norbury likewise owned property in the City and both Ludsopp and Fitzgeffrey took part in conveyances of buildings there. Norbury was buried in the fashionable Greyfriars’ church in London, as was Rufford, whose relative John Rufford (probably his younger brother) was a mercer in the City. Waweton also appears to have had a family connexion with London in the person of the fishmonger John Waweton.

It is impossible to arrive at a reliable estimate of the landed incomes of most of the MPs. The best evidence relates to the Daubeney estates, valued at over £150 p.a. at the beginning of the fifteenth century, and Norbury’s inheritance, which was probably worth at least twice that sum. Ragon was also the heir to sizeable estates but he never came fully into his own because he predeceased his mother, who held a life interest in much of the lands in question. John Wenlock significantly augmented the modest holdings he inherited from his childless elder brother, Sir Thomas, but he was never a great magnate in landed terms, even after his elevation to the peerage. Yet it is possible that both Wenlocks held lands in English-ruled France at some stage, and hard to believe that Norbury, who spent so much of his career across the Channel, did not acquire estates there. According to assessments for the subsidy of 1436, Enderby enjoyed a yearly landed income of £100 and Laurence a mere £20 p.a. While the latter is likely to have added to his holdings by the time of his election to the Commons in the late 1440s, he may also have disposed of part of his inheritance (his lands in Northamptonshire) by that date. For want of evidence, it is impossible to arrive at valuations for the landholdings of the others among the 17, although Reygnes’s family was never wealthy by county standards and Pekke, Fitzgeffrey and William Gedney were not especially significant landowners.

By virtue of inheriting his grandfather’s estate in Buckinghamshire, Reygnes possessed landed interests outside Bedfordshire, as did almost all of his fellow MPs. Most of these interests lay in neighbouring counties or elsewhere in southern England. Rufford also inherited property in Buckinghamshire, while Enderby bought an estate there to provide for his son by his third marriage. Fitzgeffrey gained a temporary interest in the same county by marrying Rufford’s widowed mother, Joan, although not until after beginning his parliamentary career, and Herteshorn and Gedney also held lands elsewhere in the right of their wives. Norbury succeeded to extensive estates throughout southern England and his wife brought him several manors in Surrey and two others in Cambridgeshire and Bedfordshire, of which the Bedfordshire property was his sole interest in that county. Daubeney’s landed inheritance lay in Somerset, Lincolnshire and Cornwall as well as Bedfordshire. It is unclear whether Sir Thomas Wenlock held any lands in his ancestral county of Shropshire, although John, his younger brother and heir, was subsequently able to make good a title to lands in Wenlock and Much Wenlock which he claimed by inheritance. Yet there is no evidence that John Wenlock ever tried to create a power base for himself in Shropshire, and most of the estates he acquired outside Bedfordshire, whether by marriage, purchase or grant of the Crown, lay in southern England. Gascoigne, a younger son who owed his connexion with Bedfordshire to his wife’s estates, obtained a life interest in a manor in Yorkshire. Pekke appears to have owned property in Hertfordshire and Gedney may have inherited lands in Northamptonshire. Laurence certainly succeeded to a minor estate in the latter county, where Ragon owned a manor at East Haddon. Ragon’s inheritance also included the manor of Bourn in Cambridgeshire. Finally, Waweton succeeded to estates in Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire on the death of his father.

In terms of service in local government, Waweton was one of the most experienced of all the known MPs for Bedfordshire of this period. By contrast, Sir Thomas Wenlock, who campaigned extensively in France for much of his career and did not enter his first Parliament until late in life, appears not to have served in the administration of the county at all, while the two semi-outsiders, Norbury and Wychard, played no more than a nominal role in it. To a greater or lesser extent, the rest of the 17 held office in the local government of Bedfordshire although Rufford did not do so until after the period under review. Four of the MPs, Gascoigne, Gedney, Waweton and John Wenlock, served as sheriffs of Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire. In each instance, they took up the office after entering the Commons for the first or only time although Waweton had already held it when Henry VI succeeded to the throne. He was the most experienced sheriff among them, serving no fewer than four terms as such. Irregularly, Gascoigne became sheriff while a Member of the Parliament of 1433; in the event, he never accounted at the Exchequer, for he died in office in June 1434. Another of the 17, Daubeney, was also sheriff, but in Cornwall rather than Bedfordshire and not until he had represented the latter county in his only known Parliament. Five of the 17 (Herteshorn, Laurence, Ludsopp, Rufford and John Wenlock), served terms in the lesser office of escheator of Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire. Laurence was escheator when elected to the first of his two Parliaments, Ludsopp received his appointment to the same office while a sitting MP and Herteshorn his during his second Parliament. Wenlock and Rufford did not serve their terms as escheator until after entering Parliament, and in Rufford’s case not until Edward IV’s reign. Eight of the 17 served on the commission of the peace for Bedfordshire but only Pekke joined the bench before entering the Commons, demonstrating that the electorate did not expect prior service as a j.p. in candidates as knights of the shire. Finally, a majority of the MPs served on ad hoc commissions in the county, but all save Pekke did so after their first or only election to Parliament. In short, as in the three and a half decades prior to 1422,16 Ibid. 253. extensive experience of local government was not a requirement for prospective knights of the shire.

As for office at the centre of power, just two of the MPs, John Wenlock and Gedney, certainly joined the royal household. Wenlock did not enter the King’s establishment until after beginning his parliamentary career, although it is very likely that his association with it facilitated his election to his fourth Parliament in 1447. There is little doubt that Gedney, his fellow MP in 1447, owed much to the support of the Crown for his seat, since he was a bureaucrat of obscure background and the Lancastrian government and Court mobilized their resources to secure the return of its members and supporters to the Parliament of that year. He was far from an established member of the Bedfordshire gentry but had formed links with the county by acquiring the wardship of Gasciogne’s son and heir, and through his wife, who possessed dower interests there. Before entering Parliament, Gedney had served as secretary to Queen Katherine, the widow of Henry V, and Margaret of Anjou, the wife of Henry VI, and as clerk of the signet. By contrast, Wenlock did not attain his office of chief butler of England until late in Henry VI’s reign, several years after he apparently sat as a knight of the shire for Bedfordshire for the last time. Previously, however, he had represented the Crown as an ambassador on several diplomatic missions to France. Alone among the 17, he also took up office in the duchy of Lancaster but at a regional rather than national level and, again, not until just before the last Lancastrian King lost the throne in 1461.

A prominent feature of the earlier part of Wenlock’s career was his attachment to Sir John Cornwall, Lord Fanhope. Cornwall was also a patron of Sir Thomas Wenlock, and the two brothers campaigned with him in France during the early 1420s. Geographical ties appear to explain the link with Cornwall who, just like the Wenlocks, possessed interests in Shropshire as well as Bedfordshire. John Wenlock’s later years were notable for his association with another lord, the powerful Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, but this attachment did not fully come about until after the period under review and is unlikely to have had a bearing on his time as an MP. As already noted, Pekke and Ludsopp were also Cornwall’s followers, as indeed was Reygnes. Like Pekke and Ludsopp, John Wenlock was present at the Silsoe confrontation of 1437 and the fracas at Bedford nearly two years later, while Reygnes was also another of those attending Cornwall on the latter occasion. The election of Wenlock and Pekke to the Parliament of 1439 appears to bear testimony to the temporary advantage that Cornwall seems to have enjoyed over his rival, Reynold, Lord Grey, in the immediate wake of the trouble at Bedford. On the other side, Grey likewise counted several of the other MPs as his retainers, among them Enderby, Waweton, Fitzgeffrey and Laurence. Enderby and Waweton were at Silsoe in 1437, on which occasion Waweton was instrumental in helping to prevent any violence. Neither he nor Enderby showed such restraint at Bedford nearly two years later, in which fracas they were two of the chief protagonists, and Fitzgeffrey and Laurence were among the other Grey retainers who confronted Cornwall at the shire-house. Ragon, Herteshorn and Rufford were also probably (or certainly) members of the Grey interest, although in the time of Reynold’s grandson and successor, Edmund Grey, in the case of the latter two men. It is nevertheless impossible to confirm that their attachment to the Greys had a bearing on the parliamentary careers of any of the MPs associated with them. As it happens, one of the clearest apparent examples of intervention by a magnate in a Bedfordshire election of this period, the previously mentioned return in 1453 of the duke of Exeter’s retainers, Norbury and Wychard, occurred some years after the deaths of Reynold, Lord Grey, and Cornwall. Service to the Greys or Cornwall was by no means exclusive. Waweton, for example, also received retaining fees from Edmund Mortimer, earl of March, and Robert, Lord Willoughby. During the Parliament of 1425, he used his position of Speaker for his own personal advantage, since one item of business for the Commons concerned his request for the payment of part of an annuity that March had awarded him. It is also very likely that his hand lay behind another Commons’ petition of that assembly concerning the livery of dower to the earl’s widow.

By 1425 Waweton was a veteran of the Commons, having initially gained election to the House (as a knight of the shire for Huntingdonshire) in the late fourteenth century. Enderby also began his parliamentary career before 1422, and either he or Waweton sat for Bedfordshire in the first eight Parliaments of Henry VI’s reign. As in the three and a half decades prior to 1422,17 Ibid. 252. the county enjoyed a good degree of continuity of representation for much of the period under review, and the Parliament of November 1449 was the first of the reign in which both knights of the shire were new to the Commons. There were also two newcomers in 1453 when those elected were the duke of Exeter’s men, Norbury and Wychard. The loss of the relevant returns ensures that we remain ignorant as to whether this was also the case for the last two Parliaments of the reign. Whether through competition for seats or a reluctance to sit in the Commons at all, no two of the known knights of the shire for Bedfordshire in the years 1386-1421 sat together in consecutive Parliaments.18 Ibid. In the period under review, by contrast, there were at least three instances of double re-elections, in 1423, 1431 and 1450. As far as the evidence goes, only Waweton sat as a knight of a shire for another county besides Bedfordshire, although Pekke was one of the burgesses for Bedford in the first Parliament of 1449 and, as already noted, Gascoigne very probably represented Barnstaple in 1431.

At first sight, it appears Waweton gained election most frequently, despite (or perhaps because of) his repeated flouting of residential requirements demanded by the statute of 1413 when standing for elections in Bedfordshire and Huntingdonshire. It is nevertheless possible that his father and namesake sat in some of the earlier Parliaments previously ascribed to him.19 Both VCH Hunts. ii. 357 and The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 789, wrongly state that he was the son of John Waweton†, although a pardon he acquired in 1415 and a lawsuit he pursued against his kinsman William Waweton in the early 1440s show that he was actually the son and heir of Thomas Waweton esq.: C67/37, m. 28; CP40/716, rot. 318. This identification means that the elder man could have sat in some of the earlier Parls. in which Sir Thomas is supposed to have sat. It may well be, therefore, that Enderby, who represented Bedfordshire in all of his 11 known Parliaments, sat more frequently than Waweton. No doubt, his qualifications as a well-connected lawyer were a particular attraction for the county’s electors. John Wenlock also became an extremely experienced parliamentarian. After his first election to the Commons in 1433, he sat for Bedfordshire on five subsequent occasions and was Speaker in 1455. His parliamentary career extended beyond the period under review, since he attended the Lords following his elevation to the peerage as Lord Wenlock in Edward IV’s reign.

Elections of the knights of the shire for Bedfordshire took place at the shire-house in Bedford, normally on a Monday although those to the Parliaments of 1425 and 1437 occurred on a Friday and a Wednesday respectively. For one of the elections, that to the Parliament of 1431, the shire court convened on Christmas Day 1430, if one is to take the given date at face value. Each of the surviving returns, save that of 1447, includes an indenture between the sheriff on the one hand and a group of attestors on the other. Owing to a scribal error, the indenture for 1433 names Sir Thomas Sackville* and William Whaplode* as the men returned to the Commons. Sackville and Whaplode did indeed sit that year, but as the knights of the shire for Buckinghamshire, with which Bedfordshire shared its sheriff and escheator. The indenture was never amended although a separate schedule listing the representatives of both counties correctly named Gascoigne and John Wenlock as the men elected for Bedfordshire. The return for 1447 differs from the others in that it is in English, not Latin, and the sheriff’s name appears at the end of the indenture, rather than at the beginning as the first-named party. It is not clear why, and subsequent indentures reverted to the previously used form and Latin wording. The number of attestors varied from election to election, from as few as 14 in 1427 to as many as 113 in 1453, although it is very likely that they comprised a small minority of the actual participants. It is possible that an irregular election took place in 1453, because so many of the witnesses were obscure men and neither of those elected, Norbury and Wychard, was an established member of the Bedfordshire gentry. The Parliament of 1453 marked the political recovery of the royal court after the great national crises of 1450-2, and the duke of Exeter, the patron of the county’s representatives in that assembly, was a supporter of the Court.