Plymouth

According to a legend recorded by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Historia Regum Britannie, Plymouth had been the site of the battle between Corineus, a companion of the Trojan refugee Brutus who had settled Britain, and the giant Gogmagog. The tradition was kept alive in the fifteenth century by the burgesses, who paid ‘for þe renewyng of þe pyctur of Gogmagog a pon þe howe’, and its periodic cleaning.2 Plymouth Mun. Recs. ed. Worth, 93, 96. Although the port which controlled the estuary of the Plym and Tamar rivers had been known as ‘Plymouth’ from at least the mid thirteenth century, the several settlements which eventually combined to make it up did not formally acquire a corporate identity until the end of the 1430s. The principal constituent part of the later borough of Plymouth, the town of Sutton Prior, belonged to the nearby Augustinian priory of Plympton; the neighbouring hamlet of Sutton Vautort and the tithing of Sutton Raf, formerly part of the royal manor of Sutton, had been acquired by the Vautort family in the reign of Henry I; the surrounding hundred of Roborough was held by Buckland abbey; and control of the harbour of ‘Sutton Pool’ or the water of Sutton was retained by the Crown, which eventually settled it on the duchy of Cornwall.3 R.N. Worth, ‘Earlier Municipal Hist. of Plymouth’, Trans. Devon Assoc. xvi. 725-34; C.W. Bracken, ‘Obsolete Plymouth Manors’, Trans. Devon Assoc. lxxiv. 211-24; Plymouth Mun. Recs. 10; M. Kowaleski, ‘Port Towns’, New Maritime Hist. of Devon ed. Duffy, Fisher, Greenhill, Starkey and Youings, i. 63. At the beginning of the thirteenth century Sutton was little more than a fishing village, but even before the acquisition of Aquitaine by the English Crown greatly enhanced its strategic significance it had begun to grow into an important centre of local commerce, where Henry III allowed the prior of Plympton to establish a market in 1254. Over the course of the following century Sutton’s population grew exponentially, and the number of 4,837 individuals assessed for the poll tax of 1377 points to a total population of at least twice that number.4 Worth, 725. By this date, Plymouth had for some years been one of the head ports for the collection of customs and subsidies in the westernmost district of England.

By around 1310 the government of Sutton was vested in a provost appointed by the prior of Plympton at the nomination of 12 of the priory’s tenants in the town, and within half a century of that date this official assumed the title of mayor.5 Kowaleski, 63; Plymouth Mun. Recs. 11. The town’s increasing prosperity brought with it conflict with its feudal overlord, as the townsmen sought to assert their independence. In 1318 they procured a writ ad quod damnum in a bid to secure incorporation and liberties similar to those enjoyed by the citizens of London, but this attempt was defeated, as were successive similar efforts over the course of the following century.6 SC8/66/3275; 143/7106; CIMisc, ii. 325; Plymouth Mun. Recs. 35-37. In 1384 a group of Plymouth burgesses elected a rival mayor to the prior’s appointee, but once again the priory succeeded in asserting its rights in the King’s lawcourts.7 Plymouth Mun. Recs. 11-12; C44/13/17; Kowaleski, 63. What eventually brought the townsmen the desired independence was the impact of the war with France. One consequence of the drawn-out conflict was a proliferation of pirates and privateers in the Channel, and many of them found safe havens in the numerous small creeks and inlets on the Tamar and Plym estuaries.8 W. Country Shipping (Devon and Cornw. Rec. Soc. xxi), nos. 37, 53, 71; C.L. Kingsford, Prejudice and Promise, 92, 94. Moreover, on more than one occasion French fleets attacked Plymouth, which served as a strategic point of embarkation for expeditions to Gascony. The most severe of these attacks took place on 10 Aug. 1403, and saw a large part of the town burnt before the inhabitants, supported by men from the surrounding countryside, drove the invaders back.9 C.J. Ford, ‘Piracy or Policy’, TRHS, ser. 5, xxix. 77.

Although Plymouth was rebuilt, the memory of the event was still fresh in 1411, when the Commons first collectively interceded with the Crown on behalf of the townsmen, stating that ‘in the past in time of war the said town and people living there have been attacked by the enemies of our lord the king’. The remedy sought was again the incorporation of Plymouth, but once more the King proved reluctant to over-ride the rights of the borough’s lords, and instructed the townsmen to meet with their masters and to report their decision to the next Parliament.10 PROME, viii. 549. Evidently, the outcome did not favour the townsmen, for there is no further mention of it on the parliament rolls until 1439. Plymouth’s case was then championed by Richard Trenode*, a native of the town who had settled in Bristol and had represented that borough in three Parliaments. Trenode was subsequently rewarded for his good offices by the establishment of a chantry in the parish church of St. Andrew, Plymouth, at the borough’s expense.11 Plymouth Mun. Recs. 36-37. As a result of his intervention the Commons took up the cause of Plymouth’s incorporation once more, describing in colourful language how the town had been ‘ob defectum clausure sive muracionis earumdem ... sepius combuste et destructe; necnon habitatores earumdem, de bonis et catallis suis nocte dieque spoliati, multique eorumdem habitatorum per eosdem inimicos ad partes exteras educti, ibidem, quousque fines et redemciones fecerunt, diris carceribus miserabiliter mancipati extiterint’.12 PROME, xi. 278-86. In the face of the already deteriorating English position in France, the threat to the strategically important harbour clearly made an impression on the King’s Council, the lords of which were instructed to settle the finer points of the townsmen’s petition for incorporation.13 C49/23/7. The principal loser, Plympton priory, was compensated by an annual rent of £41 from the newly established borough, while the abbot of Buckland’s rights in Roborough hundred were exchanged for the advowson of the church of Bampton, which the prior of Bath surrendered in return for an annual rent of ten marks from the burgesses. Under the terms of the resultant Act, the burgesses were authorized annually on St. Lambert’s day (17 Sept.) to elect a mayor who would take office at Michaelmas. Until such elections could be held for the first time, William Keteridge*, a Plymouth lawyer who had sat in Parliament for Tavistock in 1425 and 1429, was to serve as mayor. The terms of the act of Parliament were expanded upon in a royal charter issued at Windsor castle on 25 July 1440, which granted to the burgesses a guild merchant, two annual fairs and two weekly markets, the return and execution of royal writs, the power to elect a coroner, and to the mayor of Plymouth the power to sit as a j.p. and to hear pleas in his own court at the guildhall.14 CPR, 1461-7, pp. 309-10. This last privilege in particular had to be defended on more than one occasion after 1440 – not only when Plymouth burgesses found themselves sued in the Westminster lawcourts, but also when outsiders sought to challenge the right of the mayor and community to enforce the law and make arrests within the boundaries of the borough.15 CP40/720, rot. 133; 745, rot. 52d; 746, rot. 487; 765, rot. 308; E159/234, brevia Hil. rot. 29d; KB145/7/5, no. 8. Equally, it seems that although the prior of Plympton had come to terms with his loss of control over the borough, there was more trouble with some of the other interested parties. Thus, by mid 1442 the annual rent to the prior of Bath was already a year in arrears and had to be levied by the sheriff of Devon, and before the autumn of that year there had been clashes between the townsmen (including some of Plymouth’s later parliamentary representatives like Carwynnak, Edgecombe and Thomas Hill IV) and the servants of the abbot of Buckland.16 E13/142, rot. 16; CP40/727, rot. 334d.

While neither the act of incorporation nor the new borough’s charter specified a structure for Plymouth’s administration below the mayor, a subdivision of the ‘community’ into 12 aldermen and a council of 24 quickly became established.17 Plymouth Mun. Recs. 24, 29. Other borough officials included a recorder (a post usually held by a prominent local lawyer like Thomas Tresawell†, who represented Plymouth in Parliament in Edward IV’s reign), and a plethora of lower-ranking positions, such as a municipal ale-taster. The act of 1440 had conferred upon the townsmen the power to admit others to their freedom, and in 1472 an ordinance of the mayor and commonalty would link the freedom with membership of the guild of Our Lady and St. George.18 PROME, xi. 278-86; Plymouth Mun. Recs. 27.

It seems that the loss of Gascony badly affected Plymouth’s economic fortunes. By 1465, it was claimed, the borough had ‘falle into povertee and dekay’, so that it was unable to pay the rent to the prior of Plympton at the previous level. As a result, the final session of the Parliament of 1463-5 reduced the sum annually payable to the priory to £29 6s. 8d.19 PROME, xiii. 217-30; Plymouth Mun. Recs. 27. By 1472 the annual rent payable to the prior of Bath had similarly fallen into arrears, and in 1475 the borough’s contribution to the parliamentary fifteenth and tenth, traditionally rated at £24 12s. 8d., was reduced by half. Nevertheless, although Plymouth’s wealth might be diminished, its municipal pride was not, and the town’s accounts from the 1480s show expenditure on communal standards, banners and streamers, as well as on the repair of the community’s several ceremonial maces.20 Plymouth Mun. Recs. 26, 34, 90, 93, 94.

The town of Sutton Prior had returned Members to the Parliaments of 1298, 1311 and 1313 (Sept.), as well as possibly to other assemblies of the early fourteenth century for which the Devon returns are lost, but thereafter its parliamentary representation fell into abeyance until the incorporation of Plymouth in 1440. No evidence of the procedure followed at the borough’s parliamentary elections in Henry VI’s reign has been found. During this period the sheriff of Devon invariably included the names of the Plymouth Members in the same indenture and schedule in which he recorded the names of the knights of the shire and of the representatives of the other boroughs within the county, but the borough elections were evidently held locally under the authority of precepts sent to the mayor and bailiffs of each community. It is possible, although no definite evidence to this effect has been discovered, that the franchise at Plymouth was vested in the freemen of the borough, all of whom were by an ordinance of 1520 enjoined to participate in the annual mayoral elections.21 Ibid. 27, 33.

The names of Plymouth’s MPs are known for seven out of the ten Parliaments that met after the borough’s incorporation and before 1461. No returns survive for the assemblies of 1445, 1459 and 1460. Twelve men shared the 14 seats for which names are known: only Dawen and William Tailor III represented Plymouth twice during the period under review. The only Plymouth MP known to have carved out an even remotely impressive career in the borough’s service was Richard Page, whose first return in 1455 was followed by at least two later elections (in 1467 and 1478), but who may also have been elected to other Parliaments for which the returns are lost. Nor did most Plymouth’s MPs either gather experience in the service of other constituencies or go on to represent them at a later date. Only Wolston, one of the borough’s first MPs after its incorporation, had entered the Commons previously (having sat either for Barnstaple or Tavistock in 1433, 1435 and 1437), while Radford went on to sit for Barnstaple five years after his return for Plymouth, and Page probably found a seat at Launceston for the long Parliament of 1472. Although the parliamentary record of Plymouth’s MPs was thus unimpressive, several of them were nevertheless members of families that possessed, or would subsequently acquire, long traditions of service in the Commons. Thus, Wolston was the putative son of Alfred Wonston*, the lawyer and duchy of Cornwall officer who had sat in at least four Parliaments between 1407 and 1426 for three different Devon boroughs; Radford was a distant kinsman of Nicholas Radford*, the recorder of Exeter who had been knight of the shire for Devon in 1435; and Edgecombe belonged to a prominent gentry family residing at Stonehouse to the west of Plymouth, who in Sir Richard† (d.1489) and his lineal descendants sent one or more MPs to Parliament in every generation until their elevation to the Lords by George II in 1742.

Compared to many other south-western boroughs, an unusually high proportion of Plymouth’s representatives in Henry VI’s reign were local men: seven of the 12 (Carwynnak, Dawen, Edgecombe, Hill, Page, Pitlesden and Tailor) lived in the town, and as the two men who represented the borough twice numbered among them, almost two thirds (nine of 14) of the seats for which names are known were taken by resident burgesses. Of the remaining five, Cliffe alias Scobell probably lived at South Pool, where he later held manorial office under John, Lord Dynham, Brigham and Welywrought normally resided in the earl of Devon’s household at Tiverton castle, Radford hailed from nearby Cadeleigh and Wolston from the parish of Staverton to the north of Dartmouth. It is possible that this high proportion of local men among Plymouth’s MPs owed something to a degree of pride taken by the burgesses of Plymouth in their still recent and hard-earned incorporation. As a consequence, it seems, townsmen were prepared to put themselves at their community’s disposal without claiming the remuneration which prohibited the election of local men elsewhere. No record of the wages paid to Plymouth’s MPs in the reign of Henry VI has survived, but by the 1480s the borough’s Members usually contented themselves with lump sums ranging from 26s. 8d. to 40s.22 Ibid. 91, 93. Moreover, the town’s elite did not shy away from its representation either: Carwynnak was serving as the royal coroner in the port at the time of his return as one of Plymouth’s first MPs, and later went on to hold the mayoralty, while Pitlesden was serving the second of two successive terms as mayor when he represented Plymouth in 1455.

In terms of their professions or trades, Plymouth’s MPs were a mixed group, although only two, the prosperous merchants Hill and Pitlesden, were active in the cross-Channel trade, while Carwynnak, Page, Radford and Wolston were busy lawyers. The most prominent of the latter was Page, who had trained at the Middle Temple and rose to be solicitor-general under Edward IV, after previously serving Queen Elizabeth in a similar capacity. Yet, unlike Page, whose service to the Crown only began after Edward IV’s accession, several other of the MPs had experience of office-holding prior to their return for the borough. Thus, Edgecombe had been joint keeper of the Devon silver mines under both Henry V and Henry VI, while Hill, Pitlesden, Radford and Wolston had served on royal commissions. Pitlesden had for some years been a customs collector in the Plymouth district, while Hill had briefly held office as controller. Like Page, whose extensive career of office-holding under Edward IV included a range of royal commissions in Kent, Brigham, Carwynnak, Pitlesden and Wolston all received further (or in Brigham’s case first) appointments subsequent to their parliamentary service. Only in the case of Pitlesden can a direct connexion between Membership of the Commons and appointment to office be suggested, for he was chosen escheator of Devon and Cornwall (by far the most senior office he had held to date) a week before the Parliament of 1455, of which he was a Member, reassembled for its second session. When appointed, he had only recently relinquished the mayoralty of Plymouth which he had held for two years (in the process effectively returning himself to the Commons in the spring of that year).

If the Crown thus ostensibly failed to secure the return of its servants for the newly created borough, at least one local magnate was rather more successful in this respect. The incorporation of Plymouth coincided closely with the reassertion by Thomas Courtenay, earl of Devon, of his family’s traditional authority in the south-west, but it was not until the end of the 1440s (by which date Courtenay had become disenchanted with Henry VI’s government and its championship of his great local rivals, Sir William Bonville* and James Butler, earl of Wiltshire), that he seems to have actively sought to influence parliamentary elections. In 1449 and 1450 a number of south-western boroughs returned Courtenay retainers, and Plymouth was no exception. Of the two Members elected to the Parliament of 1449 (Nov.), Welywrought was the steward of the earl’s own household, while his companion, Brigham, was one of the earl’s retainers who would later become receiver-general of his second son, Henry. Also connected with the earl was Radford, whose kinsman Nicholas had been steward of the comital estates during Thomas Courtenay’s long minority, and probably also Tailor, who was descended from a family of Courtenay clients from Topsham. Conversely, it is not possible to be sure whether Cliffe alias Scobell, who is thought to have served as reeve of John, Lord Dynham’s manor of South Pool in the second half of Edward IV’s reign, was already connected with his later patron’s family in the 1450s when he represented Plymouth in the Commons. Also to be considered was the influence of the Edgecombe family, who even before their acquisition of the manor of West Stonehouse by the marriage of Sir Peter Edgecombe† to the heiress of the Dernfords could claim to be the most important gentry in Plymouth’s immediate vicinity. In 1447 a member of the family undertook the representation of the borough in the Parliament at Bury St. Edmunds, and it is indicative of the Edgecombes’ importance in the locality that Plymouth marked Sir Peter’s knighting and appointment to the Devon shrievalty in 1494 with generous gifts of wine and sweetmeats.23 Ibid. 93.