Shropshire

In the early fifteenth century Shropshire had been one of the most troubled counties in England. Its position on the Welsh border exposed it to the depredations of the Glendower rising: in the spring of 1403 its inhabitants complained that a third of the shire had been ‘destruyez et degastez’ by the rebels.2 PPC, ii. 77-78. Modern studies have found the claim exaggerated but not groundless: H. Watt, ‘The Effect of the Glyn Dŵr Rebellion on Tax Collection’, in The Reign of Hen. IV: Rebellion and Survival ed. Dodd and Biggs, 48-81. Yet even after the rebellion had subsided, the county remained lawless. The demands of defence and minorities in the great marcher families of Stafford and Mortimer had concentrated power into the hands of the retainers of two powerful local peers, Thomas Fitzalan, earl of Arundel, and John Talbot, Lord Furnival, both of them generally absent from the county. The feuding between their retainers was severe enough to provoke a petition in the Commons in the Parliament of April 1414, and Henry V reacted by bringing the court of King’s bench to Shropshire in the following June.3 E. Powell, Kingship, Law and Society, 216-24.

In Henry VI’s reign the county presented a different aspect: lawlessness diminished and Shropshire’s political geography became very different. The death of Thomas, earl of Arundel, in 1415, leaving as his heirs general his three sisters and as his heir male, his cousin, John (d.1421), broke up one of the major baronial estates in the county. Although the bulk of Earl Thomas’s Shropshire lands (with their bordering marcher lordships of Clun and Oswestry) descended with the heirs male, his successors as earls of Arundel played little part in the county’s affairs, concentrating their interests on their lordship of Arundel in Sussex.4 CP, i. 246-7; CIPM, xxi. 816. In 1420 there was another significant change: on the death of Hugh, Lord Burnell, the bulk of his extensive Shropshire estate should have passed to one of his grand-daughters, who later married the famous soldier Sir John Radcliffe* of Attleborough in Norfolk, only for her title to be challenged by kinsmen.5 CP, ii. 435-6; CIPM, xxi. 663; Ancestor, viii. 172-83; The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 155-9. Thus, while Earl Thomas and, to a lesser extent, Burnell had exercised a significant influence over Shropshire’s representation under the first two Lancastrian Kings, their successors exercised none under the third.

Under Henry VI three great lords were in a position to influence the county’s representation. Lord Furnival, who succeeded to the baronies of Talbot and Strange of Blackmere on the death of his niece in 1421 (and was created earl of Shrewsbury in 1442), was the principal landholder in the north of the county.6 CP, xii (1), 620. Humphrey Stafford, earl of Stafford and (from 1444) duke of Buckingham, who succeeded to his great inheritance on his father’s death at the battle of Shrewsbury in 1403, came of age in 1423. As lord of the marcher lordship of Caus, his principal interests lay in the west of the county.7 C. Rawcliffe, Staffords, 192. In 1425, on the death of his maternal uncle, Edmund, earl of March, Richard, duke of York, inherited the lordships of Ludlow and Cleobury Mortimer in the south of Shropshire together with the nearby marcher lordships of Wigmore and Montgomery.8 CIPM, xxii. 507. Yet, although these lords had extensive Shropshire landholdings, none were resident there and each had very significant interests, not only landed but also political and military, elsewhere.

Shropshire was thus a county of strong but largely absentee lordship. The only resident peer, Richard, Lord Strange, who lived at Knockin in the north-west of the county, was a minor figure, succeeded in 1449 by a child.9 CP, xii (1), 355-6. It was also a county with few gentry. The loss of the returns for the income taxes of 1412 and 1436 and the incompleteness of those for 1450 make quantification difficult, but figures abstracted from the last of these taxes provide some useful comparisons. The total value of the assessments was only £1,284: of the 29 counties for which figures are available, only the small counties of Huntingdonshire and Rutland had lower ones. Consequently, the pool of men suitably qualified to represent Shropshire in Parliament was a small one. When, in 1434, commissioners listed all those in the county of sufficient standing to be required to take the parliamentary oath not to maintain peace-breakers, only 45 men were named. Among the equivalent lists for other shires, only those for Middlesex with 33 and Rutland with 27 have fewer names.10 S.J. Payling, ‘County Parlty. Elections’, Parlty. Hist. xviii. 258; CPR, 1429-36, pp. 370-413.

Shropshire’s MPs are known for all save the last of the 22 Parliaments of the period.11 The names of the MPs of 1439 and 1445 (for which the returns are lost) are known from the tax allowance commissions: CFR, xvii. 141, 326. No contemporary reference has been discovered to support Wedgwood’s contention that John Leighton† was one of the Salop MPs in 1460: HP Biogs. ed. Wedgwood and Holt, 534-5. The 20 different men elected sat for the county on 57 recorded occasions between them. In addition, three were returned for other constituencies: Roger Corbet I and Thomas Horde for the county’s boroughs, Shrewsbury and Bridgnorth, respectively, and Thomas Acton, much more unusually, for Bletchingley in Surrey and Arundel in Sussex.12 Acton appears to have won these seats through legal services offered to Stafford as lord of Bletchingley and William Fitzalan, earl of Arundel, as lord of Arundel. All three sat for these boroughs before they were elected for Shropshire. On average, each of the county’s Members was elected to three Parliaments, and yet single returns were the norm, at least among those elected for Shropshire for the first time after 1422. Of the 15 MPs who fall into this category as many as ten are recorded as representing the county only once. The long parliamentary careers belonged to those first returned before 1422: William Burley, the lawyer, virtually monopolized one of the county’s seats, sitting on 19 occasions between 1417 and 1455, including ten consecutively between 1427 and 1445 (had he not been sheriff in 1426 his consecutive elections would probably have numbered 12); Sir Richard Lacon sat six times between 1413 and 1433; and Hugh Burgh five between 1415 and 1425. Of those elected for the first time in Henry VI’s reign only Horde, whose first election for the county came at the same time as Burley’s last, secured multiple returns. His parliamentary career was probably more impressive than the surviving records show: elected twice for his native Bridgnorth in the 1440s, he sat for Shropshire in at least four Parliaments between 1455 and 1472, and, given the loss of returns for the 1460s, he is very likely to have sat in other assemblies.

The frequency of single returns did not mean that Shropshire was generally represented by newcomers to the Commons. Burley’s long career, which included two elections as Speaker, ensured that the county usually elected at least one MP with previous experience of the workings of the Lower House. To ten of the 21 Parliaments the county returned two experienced MPs (including experience for other constituencies), and on only one occasion, to the Parliament of 1449 (Feb.), were two apparent novices elected. In all, 30 of the 42 known seats were taken by experienced MPs. This represented a significantly higher level of representative continuity than had prevailed in Shropshire between 1386 and 1421 (38 of 60). Indeed, it was a level matched in few other counties during Henry VI’s reign. The explanation lies largely in Burley’s exceptional career, although it is a moot point if, but for him, the county electors would have found new MPs or whether those elected only once would have served more often. Of the 12 cases of immediate re-election, Burley accounted for ten: the other two were William Lacon I in 1450 and Horde in 1459. Only once – when Burley and Lacon were elected in 1450 – was the county represented by the same two MPs in successive assemblies.

The river Severn more or less divided Shropshire into two distinct geographical areas: to the north and east of the river was a large area of rolling plain; to the south and west, an upland zone.13 VCH Salop, iv. 5-20. There does not, however, appear to have been a perception, as there was in some shires so clearly divided, that it was fitting to elect to each assembly men from the two distinct parts of the county. That aim was often unconsciously achieved on those several occasions when Burley, resident at Broncoft in the south, was matched with a Burgh of Wattlesborough or a Corbet of Moreton Corbet from the north. But evidence that no such consciousness existed is provided by those elections when near neighbours were returned together. In 1427 Burley was elected with William Ludlow of Stokesay, a few miles from Broncroft, and both MPs came from the south of the county on several other occasions. By contrast, only once were both MPs from north Shropshire: to the Parliament of February 1449 Nicholas Eyton of Eyton-upon-the-Weald-Moors was returned with Richard Banaster of Lacon. Yet this contrast probably reflects no more than Burley’s dominance of a seat, for there were only six Parliaments to which he was not elected.

As a group, the Shropshire MPs were closely related: Thomas Corbet II and Roger Corbet II were brothers, Roger Corbet I was their uncle and Thomas Corbet I their cousin (albeit a distant one); John Burgh was the son of Hugh Burgh by a second cousin of the Corbet brothers, and the two William Lacons were sons of Sir Richard Lacon, one of them by a near-cousin of the Corbets.14 These families filled as many as 21 of the county’s seats between 1413 and 1453. Of the 16 MPs’ wives who can be identified by their family names, eight came from other families with interests more or less confined to the county; and three of these eight were the daughter or sister of another of the county’s MPs.15 Acton and Horde married daughters of John Stapleton, MP for Salop in 1421 (Dec.), and Thomas Corbet I, a sister of William Burley. The external marriages arose, in large part, from the interests of the bride’s family within Shropshire rather than those of the groom’s outside the county. This apparent insularity is also reflected in the high number of MPs who came from families that had furnished the county with MPs in previous generations. Acton, Banaster, John Burgh, the four Corbets, Eyton, the two William Lacons, and Ludlow could all claim this distinction. Indeed, a Corbet had represented the county as long before as 1290, an Eyton in 1298 and a Ludlow in 1307.

The loss of subsidy returns makes it difficult to be dogmatic about the MPs’ relative wealth. None the less, there is evidence enough to show that three of them – (Sir) John Burgh, Sir Richard Lacon and Burley – were distinguished from their fellows in that regard, each of them certainly worth in excess of £100 p.a. By the end of his life Burley received fees totaling £73 p.a. from Richard, duke of York, alone, and was thus probably, at the end of his parliamentary career, the richest of the county’s gentry, although his resources had not been so extensive when that career had begun. Below this wealthy elite (to which must be added William Lacon II who briefly held his father’s estate) was a larger group that could rely on revenues of over £40 p.a., the income that rendered a man liable to a fine for distraint of knighthood. Seven of the county’s MPs were distrained on one or more occasions: Brugge, Eyton and Wynnesbury were called upon to pay fines in 1439; Burley, Roger Corbet II, Thomas Corbet I, Eyton and Ludlow in 1458; and, in 1465, the same two Corbets and Ludlow. Of these, Roger Corbet II and Ludlow were probably the richest; and Brugge and Eyton the poorest. Eyton is known to have owned only a single manor, and Brugge derived a significant part of his income not from land but from a royal annuity of £20. Four other MPs are known to have had resources equivalent to that of those distrained. Thomas Corbet II held the estate that later came to his brother Roger, although, during his tenure, it was encumbered by their mother’s survival; Hugh Burgh had his wife’s lands, worth about £60 p.a.; Acton, through a combination of his legal fees, his patrimony and the lands of his wife (one of the coheiresses of John Stapleton† of Stapleton), was a man of substance; and the same can be said of Acton’s brother-in-law and fellow lawyer, Horde, whose landed income was put at as much as £55 p.a. in his inquisition post mortem.

The other six MPs appear to have had lesser incomes. In the case of two of them their lack of resources was irrelevant to their qualifications as an MP: Sir Christopher Talbot held no lands in the county when elected, but as a younger son of an earl he had other recommendations; and William Lacon I, who although he had only a very small estate (perhaps held only in reversion) when returned, was then a rising young lawyer, eventually destined for promotion to the judicial bench. Of the four others, Roger Corbet I was a younger son of the Corbets of Moreton Corbet, but, although not tenant of their lands, he was at the time of his election effective head of the family during the minority of his nephew, Thomas Corbet II. The election of two of the other three is to be explained in terms of their baronial connexions. Cresset, holder of two manors in Shropshire, was employed as a receiver by both the earl of Stafford and the duke of York; and Banaster, who had inherited the manor of Lacon, was receiver-general of the first earl of Shrewsbury. Hawkstone’s three elections appear to have no such obvious explanation: he held two Shropshire manors of unknown value, and it may be that, since he served as escheator, sheriff and j.p., his resources were more extensive than the sources allow.

All of the MPs, save Talbot, held land in the county when they were elected as its representatives, but most did not do so outside the shire. In one sense this was a reflection of the attenuated holdings of several of the MPs, and yet even some of the more substantial had surprisingly confined properties. Sir Richard Lacon’s lands outside the shire were restricted to two manors in Buckinghamshire, his title to which was disputed, and Burley’s properties in Staffordshire were his own purchase. Only the Burghs, through two heiress marriages in successive generations, had large holdings outside the county at the time they served Shropshire in Parliament: Hugh Burgh’s wife brought him lands in Merioneth, Pembrokeshire and Cardiganshire; and John Burgh’s brought him manors in two counties.16 I have excluded the great acquisitions made by Roger Corbet II and Talbot after the end of their parliamentary service. Of the rest, William Lacon I had purchased a home in Kent as a base for his legal practice in London; Talbot had manors in Derbyshire by his father’s grant; and Thomas Corbet I a small estate in Warwickshire and Leicestershire by inheritance and an interest in further property in Cheshire and Herefordshire by marriage. This pattern of landholding contrasts with that prevailing among the MPs for the earlier period. Then, nearly half the shire knights had lands outside Shropshire and two of them, Sir Adam Peshale† and Sir Hugh Cheyne†, represented other counties in Parliament.

Although, as a group, the MPs were by no means impoverished, few of them were knights. While the percentage of knights among MPs was in general decline between 1350 and 1450, this decline was starkly pronounced in Shropshire. Fourteen of the 28 seats between 1386 and 1402 were taken by knights; yet between 1404 and 1459 a mere eight of the county’s 74 known seats were so filled, four of them by Sir Richard Lacon. Of our 20 MPs, only three were knights at the time of at least one of their elections, and only Roger Corbet II and William Lacon I were knighted after the end of their parliamentary careers. The lack of knights as MPs was not, however, a reflection, even in part, of a new reluctance on the part of the county’s knights to seek election. Few knights were returned because Shropshire had become virtually denuded of them. By the mid 1430s Sir Richard Lacon was the only knight with his permanent residence there, although two others – Sir William Mallory of Papworth St. Agnes in Cambridgeshire, who married the mother of Thomas Corbet II and Roger Corbet II, and Sir William Lichfield* of Eastham (Worcestershire), tenant of the Shropshire manor of Kinlet – were intermittently involved in the shire’s affairs.17 CPR, 1429-36, p. 408. Lichfield was twice sheriff of the county and attested the election of 1429. The only two later knights who had any claim to represent the county in the period under review here – John Burgh and Talbot – were both elected.

The lack of local knights is one explanation for the prominence of lawyers among the county’s MPs. This is first apparent under the first two Lancastrian Kings and continued under Henry VI. Although only four of the 20 can be certainly classified as professional legal men, they filled nearly half of the known seats – 20 out of 42 – including no fewer than eight of ten between the Parliaments of 1449 (Nov.) and 1459.18 The four certain lawyers were Acton, Burley, William Lacon I and Horde.

The great decline in knighthood in Shropshire is surprising, for, given its position in the Welsh march, one might have expected its MPs to have maintained a level of military experience above the norm. The suppression of Glendower’s Welsh rebellion provided an outlet for martial endeavour and perhaps an incentive to undertake further campaigns; and the great lords of the march, active in the war in France (most notably Thomas, earl of Arundel, John, earl of Shrewsbury, and Richard, duke of York) provided the county’s gentry with a natural military leadership. The reality, however, falls short of this expectation. Three of the MPs, Sir Richard Lacon, Hugh Burgh and John Brugge, are known to have fought against Glendower, but only three are recorded as fighting in France under Henry V: Lacon was knighted during the Agincourt campaign and continued to serve periodically in France until the end of Henry V’s reign; Wynnesbury also indented to serve under Arundel in 1415, but returned sick, like Arundel himself, after the siege of Harfleur; and Ludlow went briefly to France in 1420. This comparative lack of engagement in Henry V’s campaigns is puzzling and can only be partially explained in terms of the rival demands of defence of the Welsh border. Interestingly, however, and contrary to the general picture, the MPs as a body had a better record of service in the less glamorous warfare of Henry VI’s reign. In the 1430s Banaster was in the garrison of Caudebec, where his master, Lord Talbot, was captain, and campaigned again in France in 1442; in 1430 Robert Corbet II, as a young man with the expectations of a younger son, mustered at Mantes, and in 1436 served under Talbot, whose niece his elder brother had married shortly before; Ludlow briefly held office as marshal of Calais; and Talbot’s son, Sir Christopher, who had a formidable reputation as a jouster, was in France in 1435 and would probably have made a greater military name for himself had his life not been cut short. None the less, the over-all picture is not one of enthusiastic martial endeavour on the part of the county’s MPs.

One might have expected the close ties between the MPs and the great families of the Welsh march to have been translated, as were those between the Cumberland MPs and the great families of the northern march, into active participation in the civil war of 1459-61. Yet, if the MPs can be said to have followed the military lead of the county’s aristocracy in its ventures overseas only in part, the same can be said of them with regard to war at home. Despite the extensive landholdings in Shropshire of York, Talbot and Stafford, and the culmination of an important campaign there (the rout of the Yorkists at Ludford Bridge in October 1459), its gentry were not prominent among those who took an active part in the civil war. None of the eight MPs who lived through those turbulent years are known to have taken up arms for one side or the other, and only in the case of Sir John Burgh, a follower of the Lancastrian Talbots, did the change of regime have a significant impact upon a career.19 The eight are Acton, John Burgh, Roger Corbet II, Thomas Corbet I, Eyton, Horde, William Lacon I and Ludlow.

In the case of the others it is possible to say only that they had baronial connexions that might have moved them to favour one side over the other. The lawyer, Acton, was closely associated with John Talbot, second earl of Shrewsbury, who died fighting for Lancaster at the battle of Northampton in July 1460. This connexion explains his earlier election to the Coventry Parliament of 1459, in which the Yorkist lords were attainted, but he was only mildly inconvenienced by Edward IV’s accession. Much the same could be said of the other Shropshire MP of 1459, Horde, another lawyer employed by the Talbots, who soon found a new patron among the Yorkist aristocracy in John Tiptoft, earl of Worcester. Much more striking, however, than the apparent docility of those connected with the Lancastrian lords in the county is the apparent lack of active support for the duke of York. In neighbouring Herefordshire there was a militant Yorkist faction, yet, despite the duke’s castle at Ludlow and his extensive estates in Shropshire, he did not receive the same support there. Roger Corbet II, Eyton, William Lacon I and Ludlow may be numbered among his sympathisers, but none are marked out as active partisans by rewards received in the early years of Yorkist rule. This is difficult to explain. Perhaps the death in 1458 of Burley, the best-rewarded and most important of the duke’s Shropshire adherents, diminished local support for York just as the crisis came. In all, the county’s gentry, as represented by their MPs, appear much less martial than those of other counties of the marches, like Herefordshire and Cumberland.

As in all counties there was a high degree of overlap between the personnel of office-holding and parliamentary representation. Thirteen of the 20 MPs held office as sheriff of Shropshire at some point in their careers, compared with 15 of 29 MPs of the period 1386-1421. Multiple terms were common in both periods but particularly so in the period under review here: Ludlow served as many as five terms, John Burgh and Horde each served four, and Thomas Corbet I and Eyton three. This reflects the lack of suitable candidates in a county of few substantial gentry. This notion of a paucity of candidates is apparently undermined by another statistic: of the 26 men who held the county’s shrievalty in Henry VI’s reign, as many as 16 did not represent it in Parliament. This contradiction is explained by the frequency with which the Crown’s choice of sheriff fell on those whose main interests lay either outside Shropshire or in one of the county’s boroughs. As many as eight of the sheriffs represented other constituencies in Parliament: three sat for Bridgnorth, one for Shrewsbury, and one each for Northamptonshire, Warwickshire, Gloucestershire and Staffordshire. This invites another conclusion. Qualification for election to Parliament in the eyes of the county was not the same as qualification for pricking as sheriff by the Crown; the county looked no further than the leading resident gentry, the Crown had to look further afield to find its sheriffs. This, however, is not to say that Shropshire was infrequently represented by men who had previously served as its sheriff: as many as 27 of the 42 seats were filled by former sheriffs. Yet this also is a slightly misleading statistic, for 13 of these returns are accounted for by Burley.

Only eight of the 20 MPs served in the lesser office of escheator, but again Burley’s career ensured that the bulk of the county’s seats, 25 out of 42, were taken by men who had already held the office. On two occasions the serving escheator was elected, namely Wynnesbury in 1432 and Burley in 1433. This marked the continuation of a pattern established in the earlier period when, between 1393 and 1417, serving escheators were elected on six occasions. After 1433, however, the apparent electoral advantage held by the escheator is no longer manifest.20 Interestingly, the escheator regularly attended elections, appearing on nine occasions between 1419 and 1455. Fourteen of the 20 MPs served as j.p.s, five of them having been appointed to the bench before they first sat in Parliament. The proportion of seats taken by MPs who were serving j.p.s increased from the period 1386-1421. In that earlier period only 21 of the 60 parliamentary seats were so filled, against 23 of 42 in Henry VI’s reign, when in five Parliaments (those of 1422, 1425, 1427, November 1449 and 1450), the county was represented by two serving magistrates. It might be imagined that this increase reflects the undoubted growth in the size of the bench, but the reason for the contrast is to be found rather in Burley’s many elections, since he accounts for 14 of the 23 elections of a serving j.p. in the later period.

In respect of the other two major offices of local government, however, the conclusion is obvious. As far as Shropshire was concerned, first election to Parliament was coming later in an individual’s career. As the period progressed it became rarer for an individual to be returned who was without administrative experience of one sort of another. Between 1422 and 1439 three MPs (the two Thomas Corbets and Roger Corbet II) were elected before they had gained any such experience, but thereafter only Banaster falls into this category. The new MPs tended rather to be men of considerable experience: Cresset had served as both sheriff and escheator before his first election in 1437; Eyton, when elected to the Parliament of February 1449, had already two terms as sheriff to his credit; and when representing the county for the first time Horde had already held all three of the major offices of shire administration.

Yet although there is an altered pattern to be observed here, it is going too far to see it as a product of design rather than accident. More worthy of remark is the close correlation that developed between parliamentary service and first appointment to the bench. John Burgh was added to the magistracy for the first time between the second and third session of his first Parliament in 1445; Eyton was made a j.p. in July 1449, 12 days before the end of his only Parliament; and William Lacon II became a j.p. in July 1453, between sessions of his only assembly. The probability is that all three lobbied for nomination while at Westminster.

Interestingly, none of the 13 who were both Shropshire MP and sheriff held the shrievalty in any other shire, nor did any of the eight MPs who took office as escheator hold that office elsewhere. This insularity is not so apparent in the case of the 14 MPs who were named to the county bench, three of whom were also nominated in other shires, but the general picture is clear.21 William Lacon I, as a royal justice, was a magistrate in several shires; Talbot, who had lands in Yorks. by his father’s grant, was a j.p. in the W. Riding; and Acton was briefly a j.p. in Herefs. The MPs had played little part in the affairs of shires other than their own.

The county elections were invariably held in Shrewsbury castle, already partly ruinous by the 1420s. Indentures survive for 19 of those convened during the reign of Henry VI, and for 33 of those held in the fifteenth century. The evidence they provide is, in the absence of more illuminating sources, very important, but it is difficult to interpret. Conclusions are necessarily tentative. None the less, there is a pattern to the indentures that gives substance to speculation. Although the number of attestors named in individual returns varies from 4 to 76, the great majority of the indentures list a number not far from the mean average of 26.22 The attestors are named in approximate order of status, but until 1447 only the knights (who, on the rare occasions any were present, always headed the lists) were assigned their social rank. The indenture of 1447 describes 12 of the 34 attestors as ‘esquires’ (but, oddly, they are not listed together after the single knight), and ‘esquires’ were usually singled out in later returns. The first indenture to identify ‘gentlemen’ was that of 1478. When the number departs markedly from this norm, it may denote some special circumstances attending the election witnessed. The two longest indentures, those of 1420 and 1429, perhaps mark contested elections, the sheriff choosing to cite so many attestors because either the election was more than usually well attended or, fearing his return might be challenged, he was seeking the security of numbers.23 C219/12/4; 14/1. For election disputes in the county in 1485 and 1491: P.R. Cavill, The English Parls. of Hen. VII, 119, 138-40. Notable for the opposite reason are the two indentures that name fewer than ten attestors. Particularly striking is that of 16 Oct. 1449, which names only three former MPs (Wynnesbury, Thomas Corbet I and Roger Corbet II), and Fulk Sprenghose of Plaish, who had been the county’s sheriff in 1447-8. Perhaps they, as county elders, compromised the election between them, or else the sheriff, John Burgh, departing from the established local practice, contented himself with naming only the most prominent of those present.24 C219/15/7.

This, in turn, raises the perennial question that arises from any analysis of electoral returns: setting aside such exceptional returns as this, what proportion of those present are generally named in the indentures? Given Shropshire’s relative poverty, it is entirely feasible that the indentures naming over 70 witnesses are attempts at complete lists. If so, it may be that about this number gathered at most elections, and that the indentures fluctuated in length according to the energy and inclination of the sheriff and his officers. Since most elections went uncontested, the sheriff had little incentive to ensure that the electorate was accurately enumerated; only when a contest arose did the fear of challenge provide an incentive to comprehensiveness. The other alternative is that the electoral function was sometimes delegated to a small group. The language of two of the indentures gives some support to this surmise: the elections of 1447 and January 1449 were said to have been made by the attestors ‘nomine’ of the whole county.25 C219/15/4, 6. Since, however, the indentures were not intended to describe accurately the election process, this is likely to have been no more than a form of words.

Such speculations aside, the Shropshire indentures, when compared with those from other counties, present some distinctive features. They demonstrate that the hustings were, to an extent unusual elsewhere, occasions for the gatherings of a sizeable proportion of the county’s gentry. This is to be inferred from several indicators. First, several of the MPs were remarkably assiduous in their attendance: Thomas Corbet I came to at least 15 elections between 1422 and 1472; Wynnesbury, 14 from 1413 to 1449; Cresset, 11 from 1413 to 1442; and Hawkstone, ten from 1413 to 1435. By contrast, three of the MPs – Talbot, William Lacon I and Banaster – are never recorded as present at an election. Between them the remaining 17 attested on as many as 94 recorded occasions, a record, mutatis mutandis, matched in few other counties.26 The highest figure comes from Cumb., whose MPs appear in its indentures on 107 occasions. Several times, the hustings served as a reunion for Shropshire’s former representatives: four former MPs headed the attestors named in the 1426 indenture, and five that of 1447.27 C219/13/4; 15/4. Second, the electorate was remarkably stable in its composition. It was rare for more than a couple of attestors to any election to be making their only known appearance at the hustings, and, aside from the four MPs cited above, another seven of the shire gentry appear in ten or more of the surviving returns. Third, nearly all of the shire gentry attested at least one election. Of the 45 men considered of sufficient weight locally to be required to take the parliamentary oath of 1434, only three are not recorded in the indentures and as many as 22 of them appear among the 34 attestors to the election of 1433.28 CPR, 1429-36, p. 408; C219/14/4. This pattern of a small electorate, consistent in its attendance, seems to be common to counties with small gentry communities: it is also observable in Cumberland, Middlesex and Rutland.

In respect of the political factors that determined who was elected to represent the county, royal servants were not prominent among Shropshire’s MPs. Few held office in royal administrative service (beyond the routine ones of county administration) whether at the time of their election or at any other time of their careers. Two of those who did were the prominent lawyers, Burley and William Lacon I: the former was acting as deputy-justiciar of Chester and North Wales when elected to represent Shropshire in 1429 and 1439, and the latter was appointed to the higher office of justice of North Wales shortly before sitting in his second Parliament. Of the others, Hugh Burgh had been in office as treasurer of Ireland when elected for the county in 1415 and 1416 (Mar.), although, effectively, as the appointee of John, Lord Talbot, the King’s lieutenant there, rather than the Crown, and Roger Corbet I is known to have been constable of the royal castle of Holt (Denbighshire) in the early 1420s and may still have been in office when he sat for Shropshire in 1429.

The reason for the comparative insignificance of royal servants among the county’s MPs lies in the dominance of the great marcher families. With so many of Shropshire’s gentry active in the service of one or other of these families (and often more than one), the majority of the county’s seats were inevitably filled by men in the service of such lords. Yet, in most cases, they were returned principally because of their place within the county community rather than within a baronial retinue. Burley, to cite an admittedly extreme example, held stewardships in the estates of Fitzalan, Talbot, Stafford and Richard, duke of York, and needed no patronage to win a seat. There was certainly no parallel in Henry VI’s reign for the dominance over representation of a single retinue, such as that exercised in the county by the Fitzalan retinue in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.

None the less, there is some evidence that, even before elections became subject to the dictates of baronial faction in the 1450s, powerful lords were ready to take an occasional interest in them. There is one curious piece of direct evidence: in 1435, according to a bailiffs’ account for the Talbot lordship of Blackmere, Burley and Lord Talbot’s receiver-general distributed gifts of fish to those assembled at the hustings. Burley was returned with Thomas Corbet II, husband of Talbot’s niece, but one can only speculate as to whether this was cause and effect.29 A.J. Pollard, ‘The Talbots’ (Bristol Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1968), 240-1. The private interests of the first earl of Shrewsbury appear to have been a factor in at least other two elections. The first is the election of one of his younger sons in 1442. The earl, then absent in France but soon to return, probably wanted his son, himself a soldier, in the Commons to rally support there for financial grants necessary for the defence of Normandy. More interesting is the election to the Parliament of February 1449, the only occasion in Henry VI’s reign in which Shropshire returned two parliamentary novices. Here again the Talbots had a clear reason to seek support in the Commons. The earl was again absent in France, and his wife, Margaret Beauchamp, was seeking parliamentary sanction for an award recently made in her great dispute with her cousin, James, Lord Berkeley. It is, therefore, unlikely to be mere coincidence that Banaster, the earl’s receiver-general, and another servant of the Talbots, Eyton, were elected for the county at hustings again conducted by John Burgh.30 On 3 Apr. 1449, the day before the first prorogation, the Crown confirmed the estate of various feoffees, one of whom was Banaster, in lands conveyed to them by the earl by an unlicensed alienation: CPR, 1446-52, p. 249. Banaster’s return is particularly interesting in that, unlike Burley and Sir Christopher Talbot, he was too insubstantial a figure to have commanded election without the earl’s influence, exercised here through the countess. To add to these instances of Talbot influence might be added the elections of Cresset in 1437 and 1447. These probably would not have come about but for his place in the duke of York’s retinue, although there is no evidence that the duke exercised his influence directly. It would probably be more accurate to suppose that the offices Cresset held in the duke’s administration gave him the standing to aspire to a parliamentary seat.

The elections of the late 1450s offer a different aspect. As national politics became more polarized, great lords sought to place men in the Commons to promote, not purely personal matters, but rather their factional political interest, just as their retainers sought to be there to the same end. The Shropshire election of 1459 is, in common with that in many other shires, to be interpreted in these terms. Both of those returned, Acton and Horde, were closely connected with John Talbot, second earl of Shrewsbury, who, after a period of equivocation, had become a mainstay of the militant Lancastrian regime. Although neither of the MPs was to prove as committed to Lancaster as their master, there can be little doubt that they owed their return to their association with him.31 This election was conducted by the Lancastrian household servant, Thomas Cornwall of Burford, even though he had been replaced by Sir Robert Corbet five days before: C219/16/5.

Horde’s earlier election for the county in 1455, to the Parliament that met in the aftermath of the Yorkist victory at the first battle of St. Albans, may also to be interpreted in related terms. Then the earl had yet to commit himself wholeheartedly to Lancaster, arriving on that battlefield too late to fight for one side or the other, and his equivocal position may have rendered him anxious to have his own men in this assembly. Burley’s return at the same election is also noteworthy. No external influence was necessary to win him a seat, but his principal lord, the duke of York, had every reason to want so experienced and able a man to represent his political interests in the Lower House. This Burley memorably did. In November 1455, usurping a role that usually belonged to the Speaker, he led a Commons’ delegation to the Lords: the delegation’s aim, successfully achieved, was to secure the Lords’ agreement to the duke’s reappointment as Protector.

Although baronial interests undoubtedly played a part in Shropshire’s elections, the private interests of the MPs themselves must be given equal weight in any analysis of the pattern of representation. Their motives in standing are generally lost to historical view, but they can sometimes be inferred. When elected in 1423, Sir Richard Lacon was facing an appeal of treason (for the making of false coin): his place in the assembly may have aided him in securing its abandonment. In 1439 Robert Corbet II, at the age of only about 24, won election just at the time that he was suing livery out of royal hands of the estates of his recently-deceased mother. Some personal matter may also explain why, in 1453, Burgh, the serving sheriff, breached statute by returning himself to Parliament, an offence he weakly sought to disguise by naming the MP not as ‘Sir John Burgh’ but as ‘Sir John Burgh, son and heir of Hugh Burgh of Wattlesborough’.

The Shropshire MPs were an insular and closely-related group, with close connexions with the great families of the Welsh march. These connexions strongly influenced the county’s representation in the 1450s and were factors even before that date. The county court remained, at election time at least, a gathering place for a sizeable proportion of the county’s gentry in the way it did not in any other than border shires. There was also a closer relationship between the representation of the county and that of its boroughs, Shrewsbury and Bridgnorth, than prevailed in most counties. Although only two of the county MPs, Roger Corbet I and Thomas Horde, were returned for these boroughs, several borough MPs played a part in county administration.