Maldon

Situated on a hill overlooking the confluence of the rivers Blackwater and Chelmer, Maldon was an ancient but small port town that had sent burgesses to Parliament since 1332. It possessed a taxable population of only 542 in 1377 and fewer than 1,000 inhabitants in the mid 1520s. Unlike the considerably larger borough of Colchester, it was a regional marketing centre with no significant industry. It did however come to play a role in the coal trade by the fifteenth century, serving as an entry port for coal and iron ore shipped down the coast from Newcastle. In this period brewing and stock-rearing were also important activities in Maldon and its hinterland, which in the early modern period supplied meat to the London market.1 The Commons 1386-1421, i. 397; R. Tittler, ‘Incorporation of Bors.’, History, lxii. 37; W.J. Petchey, A Prospect of Maldon, 7, 105-6, 116-19; idem, ‘Bor. of Maldon’ (Leicester Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1972), 157, 290.

Issued with its first charter in 1171, Maldon received no new charter in the fifteenth century, although in 1454 Henry VI granted the burgesses letters patent confirming all previous charters and letters of confirmation. The lordship of Maldon belonged to the manor of Great Maldon, divided into two moieties, of which one belonged to the bishops of London. Bishop Braybrooke surrendered most of his jurisdictional rights to the burgesses in 1403, in return for an annual fee farm of ten marks, although he and his successors retained their status as lords of the borough after that date. Once held by the Lords Fitzwalter, the other moiety had passed by 1428 to Robert Darcy I, a successful lawyer who settled in the town (apparently after marrying a local woman) and represented it in the first Parliament of Henry VI’s reign. Other rights of lordship at Maldon rested with the Bourgchier family, lords of the manor of Little Maldon since the later fourteenth century; with the local abbey of Beeleigh; with the collegiate church of St. Martin le Grand, London; with the Lords Grey of Wilton and with the earls of Oxford.2 Essex Archaeology and Hist. xxxi. 148-51; The Commons 1509-58, i. 90; Petchey, ‘Bor. of Maldon’, 324.

Following Darcy’s death in September 1448 his son and heir Robert Darcy II* inherited his share of the manor of Great Maldon. Just under two years later, the younger Robert was one of 28 men from Maldon granted royal pardons. They received them shortly after Cade’s rebellion but it is unlikely that the recipients were all followers of the rebel leader. In the wake of the revolt the Crown had made pardons available to all free of charge, an offer taken up even by those not involved in it. It is very improbable that Darcy had participated in the rising, given that the government placed him on a commission of September 1450, instructed to arrest and imprison traitors in Essex, and he kept both his lands and his rights of lordship in Maldon. The Darcys retained these rights until Sir Thomas Darcy† surrendered them to the Crown in 1550. They also received an annual farm from the burgesses, although at £2 13s. 4d. this was less than half that paid to the bishops.3 The Commons 1509-58, i. 90; L.R. Poos, A Rural Soc. 257; R.A. Griffiths, Hen. VI, 619-23; I.M.W. Harvey, Jack Cade, 102; Petchey, ‘Bor. of Maldon’, 324.

During the reign of Henry VI, two bailiffs and a common council of 18 wardmen headed the administration of the borough. An assembly of freemen elected them and the other office-holders on the first Friday after Epiphany each year, a day also assigned for the admission of new burgesses, always a minority of the town’s residents.4 Maldon bor. recs., ct. bks. 1384-1449, 1457-1543, D/B 3/1/1, 2; Petchey, ‘Bor. of Maldon’, 58. Traditionally, the freedom of Maldon was open to the sons and sons-in-laws of burgesses, to those who had served an apprenticeship in the town and to outsiders who paid an entry fine of 20s., but the borough also came to award burgess status to those non-resident gentry whom it returned to Parliament.5 CPR, 1452-61, p. 156; Maldon ct. bk. D/B 3/1/1, f. 32v; Petchey, Maldon, 24. Maldon observed a form of ‘borough English’, by which freehold estates descended to youngest sons. In practice, a burgess might provide for his elder sons during his lifetime, meaning that the heir succeeded to no more than a residual estate. If his successors were daughters, they shared his estate equally between them, although the youngest daughter had the right to choose her share first.6 Petchey, Maldon, 82; Maldon ct. bk. D/B 3/1/1, f. 32v.

At least 22 men sat for Maldon in Henry VI’s reign but the evidence for the parliamentary representation of the borough in this period is incomplete. The loss of the returns of 1439, 1445 and 1460 means that the men elected to those Parliaments are unknown, while it is only thanks to borough records that we know that William Holcote sat in 1453, since the names of Maldon’s Members are not visible in its badly damaged return of that year. All of the known MPs for Maldon in the three and half decades prior to 1422 were resident in the town when returned, with only two of them originating from outside Essex,7 The Commons 1386-1421, i. 397. but nearly all of the borough’s known Members of the later fifteenth century were lawyers or gentry outsiders.8 William Albon†, John Chaunsey†, Richard Chirchyard†, Thomas Drakys†, Sir Richard Fitzlewis†, William Pestell†, Robert Plomer†, Thomas Salle†, William Tendring† and James Wright†. Furthermore, of the 27 MPs who sat for Maldon of the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI and Mary, only two were residents and just one of them was a native and office-holder of the borough.9 The Commons 1509-58, i. 91; ii. 54; iii. 672. The reign of Henry VI was a period of transition: although most of the 22 resided at Maldon, several of them were ‘gentlemen’ rather than typical townsmen, and three of the MPs of the mid and late 1450s, Walter Writtle, William Laweshull and William Tust, had either few or no previous links with the borough.

Of the resident MPs, Robert Darcy and Richard Galon, both originally from Northumberland, were not alone in coming from elsewhere, for Richard Bemond, Thomas Fuller, Richard Syslyngham and William Holcote (the son of a Suffolk woman), were not native to Maldon. Bemond gained the franchise after marrying a burgess’s daughter, as very probably did Fuller. Only three of the 22, Roger Bawde, Robert Burgess and John Worthy, were certainly sons of Maldon men but it is likely that John Burgess also came from a local family. There is little evidence of family traditions of sitting in Parliament among the 22, although Bawde was the elder brother of Richard Bawde†, who had sat for the borough in the Parliament of May 1421, and Robert Burgess was perhaps the son of John. The antecedents of John Cooper, Thomas Salcokke, Richard Sampson, William Ayllewyn, William Mayhew, John Pepyr and John Swayn are unknown.

Evidence for occupations is far more plentiful. Most of the residents among the MPs were merchants dealing in several commodities, although Pepyr and Richard Kyng followed specific trades, as a mercer and butcher respectively. Ayllewyn, who leased a shop below the moot hall, was an exporter of grain, as were Darcy, Swayn, Holcote and Thomas Lamb. Lamb, who also dealt in fish and coal, was a ‘schypman’ as well as a merchant. He kept a ‘colehepe’ in the borough, as did Holcote, Robert Burgess and Swayn. Brewing was an activity left to the women of the town, and the wives of several of the MPs were producers of ale.10 Maldon ct. rolls, 1413, 1414, 1423, 1425, 1427, 1434, 1436-7, 1449, D/B 3/3/8, 9, 14, 15, 20, 22, 29, 419; ct. bk. D/B 3/1/1, ff. 22, 34. Darcy was a wealthy lawyer and esquire and Galon was another member of the legal profession, as perhaps were Writtle and Holcote. In spite of participating in trade, Holcote was a ‘gentleman’, a status also enjoyed by Tust and Worthy. The low ratio of lawyers to merchants may reflect the settled state of the borough in the period under review, during which it possessed an established administrative structure and remained free of internal dissension and jurisdictional disputes with outside interests.

Whatever their occupations, it is likely that most of the 22 were (at least in local terms) men of substance, in spite of the lack of evidence for the incomes of all but Darcy, a man of remarkable wealth. According to his assessment for the subsidy of 1436, he then enjoyed an annual landed income of no less than £366. Another of the gentry MPs, Writtle, must have possessed estates of some significance, even if nowhere near those of Darcy in terms of extent and value, while one of the townsmen among the 22, John Burgess, ran up significant debts, perhaps through ambitious but unsuccessful business ventures.

Over the course of his public career, Burgess served at least seven terms as a bailiff of Maldon. A majority of his fellow MPs were likewise active in local government and had already exercised borough office when they began their parliamentary careers, suggesting that most of them were of relatively mature years when they entered the Commons. It would therefore appear that, when free from external pressures, the electors of Maldon usually sought to return to Parliament burgesses of administrative experience. Three of them, Ayllewyn, Robert Burgess and Fuller, dominated the office of bailiff for much of the mid fifteenth century, each serving at least 12 terms in that position. Ayllewyn was a bailiff for all but eight of the years 1422-42, Burgess for all except eight of the following 20 years and Fuller (several months into his first term as bailiff when elected to his only known Parliament) for all but four of the period 1455-71. Another veteran office-holder, Syslyngham, served no fewer than 22 terms in the lesser position of wardman from the mid 1440s to the mid 1470s, and he was serving as such when returned to the Commons in 1447. The six men who appear never to have held borough office were Laweshull, Tust, Worthy and Writtle, all non-residents or outsiders (or both), and the lawyers, Darcy and Galon, both resident at Maldon but not typical townsmen.

Only Darcy and Writtle served in local government at a county level although six (or seven) of the other MPs attested elections to Parliament of Essex’s knights of the shire,11 Ayllewyn, Robert (and perhaps John) Burgess, Fuller, Holcote, Lamb and Mayhew. indicating at least some involvement in public affairs beyond the borough, and none of the 22 appears to have found employment on Crown estates in the county. Just one of the MPs, Laweshull, had an association with the royal court in a conventional sense, serving as a page, groom and yeoman of the Household, and he owed his return to the partisan Parliament of 1459 to his immediate connexion with the Lancastrian Crown. Darcy also featured in Household accounts in his capacity as keeper of the writs in the court of common pleas, the holders of which were the King’s servants. He had already completed the first of his terms in the office in March 1413, and he may already have embarked on his second when elected to the Parliament of 1422. Office in the common pleas gave Darcy a role in central government, of which Writtle, appointed clerk of estreats at the Exchequer just days before his election to the Parliament of 1455, is the only other man among the 22 known to have played a part. Yet Writtle owed the position to his patron, Henry Bourgchier, Viscount Bourgchier, who had taken up office as treasurer of England a few weeks earlier, rather than to the direct appointment of the Crown.

As lords of the manor of Little Maldon, the Bourgchiers were an important presence in the town and Writtle was far from alone in his association with them. Darcy performed legal work for Henry Bourgchier and his mother Anne, countess of Stafford. John Burgess had stood surety for Bartholomew, Lord Bourgchier, while attending his first Parliament in 1404, and he farmed the Bourgchier manor of Little Maldon in the early 1400s. Ayllewyn acted for Henry Bourgchier as an attorney in the borough court and both Swayn and Worthy were servants of the family. The non-resident Worthy probably owed his parliamentary career to Henry Bourgchier’s patronage, as certainly did Writtle. The circumstances in which Writtle gained election in 1455 were very much political. The summoning of the Parliament of that year followed the first battle of St. Albans, an encounter that allowed Bourgchier’s brother-in-law, Richard, duke of York, a period of ascendancy in the government of the realm. While predominant at Maldon, Bourgchier patronage was by no means exclusive. Swayn, for example, had another master in John de Vere, 12th earl of Oxford, whose bailiff at Maldon he was just months after his first Parliament, if not at the time of his election to that assembly. Shortly after leaving the Parliament of 1437, Bemond was a co-plaintiff of Oxford in the borough court, while the prominent lawyer Darcy counted the same lord among his clients soon after sitting in that of 1422. Darcy also served other noble patrons after representing Maldon in Parliament, the King’s uncle, John, duke of Bedford, among them. While never a member of the peerage, he himself came to wield a considerable amount of influence in the borough, thanks to his wealth and the rights of lordship he had acquired there. His family marked its presence at Maldon by beginning, in the mid or late fifteenth century, to build a large mansion next to the church of All Saints. While the project as a whole never reached completion, a tower comprising part of it was constructed. In the late sixteenth century the burgesses adopted ‘Darcy’s Tower’ as their moot hall, in place of the borough’s previous hall, a structure erected before 1400.12 Essex Archaeology and Hist. xxxi. 149; Petchey, ‘Bor. of Maldon’, 6; idem, Maldon, 98; N. Pevsner, Buildings of Eng.: Essex, 291. Several of Darcy’s fellow MPs had ties with him and his family as business associates and lessees, and it is possible that Salcokke became the Darcys’ bailiff at Maldon some years after sitting for the borough in the Parliament of 1426.

Like 11 of the other MPs for Maldon of this period, Darcy appears to have sat for the borough just once but he was already an experienced parliamentarian when returned in 1422, having represented Newcastle-upon-Tyne two decades earlier and the county of Essex in three Parliaments of Henry V’s reign. Galon, John Burgess, Sampson and Cooper also began their parliamentary careers before 1422 but Writtle, twice a knight of the shire for Essex in Edward IV’s reign, is the only man among the 22 known to have sat in the Commons after the period under review. Galon sat in at least nine Parliaments, including the first four of Henry VI’s reign, and Burgess, whose career as an MP spanned a period of nearly 30 years, in eight. By contrast, neither Sampson nor Cooper appears to have sat in more than two Parliaments and, of those of the MPs first elected following the accession of Henry VI, only Swayn and Holcote certainly attended as many as three of that King’s reign.

In at least 16 of the 21 assemblies in the three and a half decades prior to 1422 for which we know the names of the borough’s MPs, at least one of the Members had previous experience of the Commons. Furthermore, it is possible that in only three Parliaments of that period, those of 1390 (Jan.), 1406 and 1421, were both men novices.13 The Commons 1386-1421, i. 397. As Henry’s reign progressed, however, there was an increasing tendency to choose men with no previous parliamentary experience. While the borough never elected a couple of novices to the same Parliament before 1437, both of Maldon’s representatives in the Parliaments of 1437, 1442, 1447, 1455 and 1459 may have been newcomers to the Commons. Leaving aside the elections of 1455 and 1459, when outside forces ensured the returns of Writtle and Laweshull, the apparent growth in the return of novices may have arisen at least partly from an increasing unwillingness to sit in the Commons. A borough ordinance of the mid 1440s, excusing those who had attained the position of bailiff from holding any other municipal office there in the future but not from serving in Parliament, was perhaps a reaction to such reluctance.14 Maldon ct. bk. D/B 3/1/1, f. 32v. If Parliament had become unpopular, it was probably because the borough found it difficult to pay its Members’ expenses, even though it appears that it allowed each of them no more than 1s. per day, half the statutory rate.15 Holcote received 1s. per day when riding to one of the sessions of the Parl. of 1453: ct. roll D/B 3/3/196. Early in the reign, the borough authorities resorted to the expedient of taxing the town’s inhabitants in order to pay Darcy and Galon for their time in the Parliament of 1422.16 Maldon ct. bk. D/B 3/1/1, f. 21.

Just two of Maldon’s indentures of return for Henry VI’s reign, those of 1453 and 1455, survive and damage to the earlier document renders it singularly uninformative. The parties to the indenture of 1455, drawn up at the same county court that elected the knights of the shire for Essex of that year, were the sheriff of Essex and Hertfordshire on the one hand and six named burgesses, including one of the bailiffs, Robert Burgess, on the other. It recorded that Burgess and the five other attestors had elected Writtle and the other bailiff, Fuller, with the assent of all their fellow burgesses. For the purposes of comparison, there are still extant three election indentures for Maldon from the reign of Edward IV, those of 1467, 1472 and 1478. In 1467 one of the bailiffs, James Wright, was again one of the men elected, and in the indenture of that year the borough’s attestors were Wright’s co-bailiff, Thomas Fuller, three other named townsmen and ‘other burgesses’. In those of 1472 and 1478, by contrast, the parties were the sheriff and the two bailiffs only. In spite of these differences in form, there is little doubt that the indentures simply recorded the results of earlier proceedings in the moot hall.