Warwick

As one of the relatively few ‘medietized’ boroughs in England, held, from 1088, by the earls of Warwick, medieval Warwick was notable ‘for the high degree of its dependence on the earls and for its almost complete failure to develop corporate organs of government’.1 VCH Warws. viii. 476. Even as late as the early sixteenth century, its administration remained largely in the hands of a steward and two bailiffs, all nominated by the earl. Not until 1545 did the town receive its first charter of incorporation, and even this conceded only limited powers to the elected officials. The principal factor in this lack of institutional development was the presence of earls in Warwick castle, but another was an economic backwardness apparent in any comparison between the town and its larger and more prosperous neighbour, Coventry. The earl of Warwick during the first part of the period under review here, Richard Beauchamp (d.1439), had sought means to improve his borough’s economic standing, moving the date of the annual fair from Michaelmas to lessen competition and laying plans to facilitate trade by deepening the shallow reach of the Avon between Tewkesbury and Warwick. This, however, had little impact, and to judge from the subsidy returns of the 1520s the town was not among the 40 wealthiest in the country. None the less, in important respects Warwick had a significance denied to Coventry: it was a county town, the meeting place of the county court, the site of the county gaol, and the regular venue for sessions of assize and of the peace.2 Ibid. 476, 480-1; H.A. Cronne, Warwick in Middle Ages (Dugdale Soc. occ. pprs. x), 5-6, 13, 17-19; The Commons 1509-58, i. 213. It also returned MPs to Parliament almost continuously from the 1290s. By contrast, Coventry made no returns between the 1340s and the 1450s.

In the period under review, one change had a significant impact on the town’s parliamentary representation, namely the end of the house of Beauchamp with the death of Anne, infant daughter of Henry Beauchamp, duke of Warwick, in June 1449, and the succession of a northern baron, Richard Neville, to its earldom (in right of his wife, Anne, the late Beauchamp duke’s only sister of the whole blood). Although Neville took over much of the old Beauchamp connexion in both county and borough, he also brought his own men to his new sphere of interest and adopted a hostile attitude to one of the town’s principal burgesses and former Beauchamp servant, John Brome II.

Returns survive for Warwick for 19 of the 22 Parliaments that met during the reign of Henry VI. In these 19 assemblies it was represented by 19 MPs. Ten of them were returned only once for the town (although two of these, John Halton and Thomas Colt, sat for other constituencies), but others were frequent parliamentarians. Nicholas Rody is known to have been returned on nine occasions and both John Brome I and Roger Wootton I on eight each; and the loss of returns, particularly those for five Parliaments between 1413 and 1417 when they were all representatively active, means that each of them was almost certainly elected even more often.

Taken together the 19 MPs represented Warwick on at least 56 occasions (excluding eight elections for other constituencies), in other words, an average of just under three Parliaments per MP. This shows a much higher degree of representative continuity than prevailed before 1399. Thirteen of the 21 known seats from the Parliament of 1386 to that of 1399 were taken by novices, and in only two of 11 assemblies was the borough represented by two experienced MPs. By contrast, the equivalent figures for the Parliaments that met between 1401 and 1459 are 22 out of 66 and 14 of 33.3 In one of these 14 Parliaments, that of 1453, the two MPs were novices in respect of the borough. There are two reasons for this significant increase in continuity from 1399. First, the emergence of three dominant families among the borough’s MPs, those of Brome, Rody and Wootton. Remarkably, to every Parliament between 1410 and 1449 (Nov.), for which the borough’s MPs are known, at least one of the MPs was drawn from these families, and on no fewer than ten occasions both were. Second, a custom appears to have gained strength that at each election the borough should elect one of those who had represented it in the preceding Parliament. This apparent custom is, of course, partly a function of the dominance of the three families, but probably not entirely so. The rule, if such it was, seems to have emerged in the second decade of the fifteenth century, although the loss of returns for several of the Parliaments of that decade makes it difficult to be certain. It is, however, surely something more than coincidence that the election of one of the MPs returned to the previous Parliament occurred on 12 occasions between 1422 and 1455, and in 1433 both MPs from the previous assembly were re-elected.

Yet, while there was a greater degree of continuity of the borough’s representation after 1399, in another respect the representative pattern did not change. The majority of the MPs continued to be drawn from the connexion of the lords of the borough, the Beauchamp earls of Warwick. For example, in the period between 1422 and the death of Richard Beauchamp in 1439, only Roger Wootton I cannot, on the available evidence, be connected with the earl in one way or another. Before 1399 the servants of Richard’s father, the ill-fated Thomas Beauchamp, had had a similar prominence.4 The Commons 1386-1421, i. 671.

Although it is clear that the town’s representation, at least for the greater part of the period under review here, was dominated by the leading townsmen, it is not possible to say that its representation was also dominated by its officers. As appointees of the earl, one would imagine that they were prominent among the MPs, but the surviving records rarely reveal their identity. In the period 1386-1421 only John Upton† is known to have been elected to Parliament while serving as the town’s bailiff; and he had no parallel in the period under review. Since, however, only five of the bailiffs for Henry VI’s reign – Upton, John Mayell, Nicholas Rody, Henry Somerlane and Robert Commander – have been identified, this is not a compelling statistic. Similar remarks apply to the stewardship. Nicholas Rody, who did not serve as bailiff until after his parliamentary career was over, was returned on at least one occasion while steward, and Ashby was a former steward when elected in 1459. No other stewards are known.

Better evidence survives concerning the office-holding of the MPs outside the borough. Such a discussion only makes sense in the context of representation if a distinction is drawn between the townsmen among them and the outsiders, who became prominent in the town’s representation late in this period. The many offices held by two of the latter, Colt and Hotoft, have nothing to tell us about the typical profile of one of the borough’s Members. As far as the townsmen MPs are concerned, it was rare for them to hold office outside the town, at least during the course of their parliamentary careers, but it was by no means unknown. Both John Brome II and Bedford found places in the Exchequer through their service to Richard Beauchamp, one of the hereditary chamberlains of the Exchequer: Bedford was one of the Exchequer auditors when returned in 1429 and 1431; and Brome II was clerk of the estreats there when elected in 1432 and 1433. Ruding was a Chancery clerk when elected in 1442, probably owing his place there to one of the county’s MPs in the same Parliament, Thomas Bate*, the brother of another Chancery man, John Bate, dean of Tamworth, and a kinsman of John Kemp, cardinal-archbishop of York (chancellor from 1426 to 1432). Others served as under sheriff of Warwickshire, either before or during their parliamentary careers. Poers had served three terms in that office before his election for the borough; John Brome I was a former under sheriff when returned to the last four of his eight Parliaments; and Roger Wootton I, to the last three of his eight. In addition, Roger Wootton II appears to have been the serving under sheriff when elected to the two Parliaments of 1449.

The prominence of lawyers among the borough’s MPs explains this overlap. There can be no doubt that lawyers played the largest role in the borough’s representation, just as they had done in the first two decades of the fifteenth century. Two of them were men of standing in the profession, finding a parallel in the earlier period in John Weston†. Colt is described in the early 1460s as an apprentice-at-law, implying that he had advanced as far as reading, and John Brome II, a member of Inner Temple, was described in his lost monumental inscription as ‘Nobilis et docti sic regni jure periti’. The probability is that he too was a reader. The only other MP who can certainly be placed in an inn of court is John Rody, who entered Lincoln’s Inn before 1420 and made a modest career as an attorney in the central courts, but it is also possible that the more prominent lawyer, Hotoft, was educated there. Another certain lawyer was Thomas Portalyn, who was described as literati in a charter of 1441. Others can be identified as lawyers, with a fair degree of reliability, by the functions they undertook, namely John Brome I, Halton, Leomystre, Poers and the two Woottons. Eleven of the 19 can thus be more than tentatively identified as men of legal training, and between them they filled 25 of the 38 known seats in the period under review here.5 In the survey for 1386-1421 (ibid.) Nicholas Rody is counted as a lawyer, but it was his kinsman, John, rather than he, who was the Rody at Lincoln’s Inn.

Looking at the borough’s representation in a wider chronological perspective and ignoring variations in the level of representative continuity, a set pattern is apparent from the beginnings of parliamentary history to 1450. Townsmen or men with a close and immediate interest in the town’s affairs were exclusively returned; and it was consequently rare for one of Warwick’s MPs to sit for another constituency. The exception was a period in the first half of the fourteenth century when, between 1308 and 1348, five men – William de Sutton†, John Sotemay†, John de Croupes†, Robert de Warwick† and Roger de la Laund† – were returned for both Warwick and the county. But these men represented not, as might be expected from an analogy with later periods of parliamentary history, the infiltration of a county elite into the representation of the borough, but rather the reverse. All five, although they had interests in the county, were predominantly Warwick men. In any event they were manifestations of a brief phenomenon.6 Coss cites them amongst examples of county MPs drawn from relatively humble men in the 1320s and 1330s, which he suggests is a new and general phenomenon at that date: P.R. Coss, Origins of the English Gentry, 197-8. If so, it was a practice only briefly maintained. In the period 1386-1449 only one of the 40 borough MPs was elected for another constituency or constituencies, namely John Weston. With the possible exception of John Brome II and Colt, he was the most important man returned by the borough: a prominent Lincoln’s Inn lawyer who rose to the rank of serjeant-at-law. His returns for Warwick, Worcester and Worcestershire were an expression of his close association with Earl Richard, and his return for Warwick was justified by his connexions within the town (he was, for example, steward of St. Mary’s college there).

In 1450, however, there came a marked break in the historic pattern of the borough’s representation. To the Parliaments of the next decade were returned men of a type unknown in the borough’s earlier representative history. Three men were returned who sat for constituencies as varied as Bletchingley and Cumberland, together with two others who had no real connexion with the borough. Strikingly, only two of the seven MPs known to have represented Warwick in the 1450s were townsmen. This dramatic change is to be attributed to two related factors, the one local and the other national. The local was the end of the house of Beauchamp and the succession of Neville, who as a northern lord had interests very different from his predecessors. This new dispensation was bound, on these grounds alone, to have an effect on the borough’s politics and consequently upon its representation, but this effect was multiplied by the escalating tensions in national politics, which were, in themselves, connected with Neville’s succession to the earldom. That succession was disputed by powerful opponents in the persons of his wife’s three half-sisters and their husbands, notably Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset, and John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury. This introduced a new element of rivalry in Warwickshire politics, a rivalry that had a particular manifestation in the borough. The new earl was determined to remove John Brome II, a townsman whose importance extended beyond the borough, from the chamberlainship of the Exchequer to which he had been appointed by Henry Beauchamp, duke of Warwick, and his dispute with the rival claimants to the earldom came to centre upon this office. The result for Warwick was an escalation of disorder there and what might be termed the politicisation of its representation.

The first election to witness a change in the nature of the borough’s representation was that to the Parliament of November 1450. It came at a time of crisis of both national and local affairs, the one determining the return of one MP, the other that of his colleague. During the previous summer Brome had been the victim of a series of attacks upon his property and servants at the hands of John Poers and the two bailiffs of Warwick, Henry Somerlane and Robert Commander, who were acting with the tacit approval of Neville. The election of Poers in an indenture witnessed by the two bailiffs is to be seen in this context: he was returned as an opponent of Brome, who, on 7 Dec., towards the end of the first session of the Parliament, was contentiously removed from the chamberlainship by the earl in favour of Colt, a northern lawyer in the service of the Nevilles.

The probable explanation for the election of the other MP, John Halton, a lawyer with no previous connexion with Warwick and the first pure carpet-bagger to represent the borough, lies in the crisis in national affairs produced by the return of Richard, duke of York, from Ireland in the previous September. In 1442 Halton had sat for Bletchingley, owing his election to the lord of that borough, Humphrey Stafford, duke of Buckingham, by whom he was retained; but by 1450 he had entered into the service of one of the leading Warwickshire gentry, the mercurial and unstable Robert Arderne*. Although there is no direct evidence to connect either him or Arderne with the duke of York at this date, they both subsequently proved themselves strong adherents of his cause, and there is no reason to doubt Halton’s desire to forward that cause explains his return for the borough. York was anxious to secure the election of his supporters to Parliament, and Halton, presumably with Arderne’s aid, responded to the call by securing election for Warwick.

Halton’s return broke the pattern of the borough’s representation, and the election of 1453 saw the return of two more carpet-baggers. One was Colt, the new earl’s choice as chamberlain of the Exchequer, who, as a Neville servant, had represented Carlisle in the Parliament of 1449 (Nov.) and was to represent Cumberland in that of 1455. Shortly before the election Brome had presented to the King and council a long petition against Somerlane and his other persecutors; and it was perhaps in response that Somerlane and Commander attested Colt’s election. More surprising than the election of Colt is that of Richard Hotoft, who had already represented his native Leicestershire in four Parliaments and Warwickshire in one. It is remarkable to find such a man elected for a borough. The explanation lies in the complex dynamics of the electoral situation in 1453. This strongly favoured supporters of the Court and so explains why the Warwickshire election of 1453 saw a marked departure from the established pattern of the county’s representation in that neither of those returned (Henry Filongley* and Thomas Boughton*) was a retainer of the earl of Warwick. This, in turn, explains the earl’s determination to get his own men returned for the borough. The able and experienced Hotoft, retained by the duke of Buckingham and an officer of the duchy of Lancaster, had recently added the earl to his portfolio of patrons, probably as a product of his wife’s kinship with the Hugfords, who were among the leading servants of the earl in Warwickshire (Hotoft’s stepdaughter had married John†, son and heir of Thomas Hugford*, in the early 1440s). His election to the Parliament of 1453 is the first indication of this realignment of his political sympathies, and his immediate re-election for the borough to the Yorkist assembly of 1455 suggests that his ties to the Nevilles were, potentially at least, strong enough to draw him into opposition to Henry VI’s government.7 He may have had a particular motive for seeking election in 1455, for, as duchy of Lancaster bailiff of Leicester, he was in dispute with some of the leading burgesses there, headed by Thomas Dalton*, elected for Leicester to the same Parl.

Hotoft’s fellow MP for Warwick in the Parliament of July 1455 was another of the earl’s legal servants, Thomas Portalyn. Nothing is known of Portalyn’s geographical origins, although he appears to have been born into the service of the Beauchamps, by whom his putative father, Edmund, was retained. From 1436 to 1446 he served the last two Beauchamp earls as steward of the household and receiver-general, and he then shifted easily into the service of the Neville earl for whom he was acting as receiver-general by the autumn of 1453. There can be no doubt that he was returned as a carpet-bagger at the earl’s behest, particularly as the earl, having taken up arms for York against the King at the first battle of St. Albans in the previous May, wanted the support of the Commons as he and York tightened their hold on royal government. Portalyn, as a leading Neville servant, had probably been present at the battle, and this may have given him a personal motive for finding a seat.

In this context there may be something significant in an apparent irregularity in the return. The names of Hotoft and Portalyn have been added in a blank left in the original indenture, Hotoft’s being written over an apparent erasure. A further curiosity is provided by the endorsement of the writ: Portalyn’s name is a later addition in the same hand as added his name to the indenture, but Hotoft’s name is in the same hand as the rest of the endorsement. It thus appears that, after the name of only one of Warwick’s MPs (now erased) had been written in the indenture, the name of Hotoft was endorsed on the electoral writ as one of the borough MPs. Only then did the choice fall upon Portalyn, and as a result his name was added to that of Hotoft on the dorse of the writ while, at the same time, his name and Hotoft’s were written into the electoral indenture, occasioning the erasure. This adds to the impression that the MPs were the earl’s own choice and not that of the borough electors.8 C219/16/2.

The next election, to the Parliament summoned to assemble at nearby Coventry in 1459, was held in very different circumstances. The earl had fled to Calais after the humiliation at Ludford Bridge. His influence in abeyance, a courtier, the poet George Ashby, took one of the Warwick seats. Although Ashby was a Warwickshire man by birth, his connexions with the borough were tenuous. In the late 1440s he had briefly served as its steward, but he owed his appointment to the patronage of the queen, who then had the wardship of the short-lived daughter and heiress of the duke of Warwick, and there is no evidence that he played an active role in town affairs. Indeed, by 1459 he seems to have largely cut his ties with Warwickshire, shifting his local interests to Middlesex. In short, his election owed everything to the prevailing national political circumstances. He was a longstanding servant of the Lancastrian royal house, but of particular relevance to his election was his personal relationship with Queen Margaret, now leader of the Lancastrian cause. He had been part of the embassy that had brought her to England and since that time he had acted as her signet clerk. As such he was, as far as the Lancastrian regime was concerned, a very welcome choice as MP.9 There are some parallels between Ashby’s return and that of William Ilshawe†, an adherent of the royalist Sir William Bagot†, to the Parl. of 1397 (Sept.), another held when the earl of Warwick was in political disgrace.

Whether, however, Ashby was also the choice of the Warwick burgesses must be highly doubtful. In the election indenture his surname has been added in a different hand from the rest of the document and over an erasure of a longer name. This implies that the return was tampered with, although, since his Christian name is not an addition to the original draft of the indenture, it is unlikely that his surname has been added over that of another. The likelihood is that his surname was unfamiliar to the local scribe and thus miss-spelt in the original draft, thus occasioning the erasure. Even so, the suspicion remains that he was the nominee not of the townsmen but of the sheriff, Henry Filongley, another royal servant, particularly as the return takes the form of a joint indenture for shire and borough naming no burgesses among the 15 attestors (although, since a few other returns for the county and borough take this form, this is suggestive rather than conclusive).10 C219/16/5. Perhaps the borough authorities had not responded to Filongley’s precept to hold an election to what was from their point a view a particularly controversial assembly. The earl’s supporters in the town could not safely accept election to what was bound to be a strongly Lancastrian assembly, and anyone else who took the seat risked the earl’s enmity should Yorkist fortunes recover. Indeed, Ashby may have suffered just that: he later complained that his imprisonment in the Fleet in the early 1460s was, ‘By a gret commaundement of a noble lord, To whom I must obey for hys gret myght’, probably an oblique reference to the Neville earl. If the borough did indeed fail to make an election in 1459 this might explain why the choice as Ashby’s partner fell on Roger Wootton II, who had represented it on four occasions in the 1440s. The sheriff, with no borough MPs certified to him, may have chosen him because he was present at the county court as one of Warwickshire’s coroners.

In view of the attachment of the borough’s lord, Richard Neville, to the Yorkist cause and his influence over the borough’s elections, it might be expected that the political sympathies of the Warwick MPs during the civil war of 1459-61 would have lain with York. Yet, of the nine MPs who lived into or through this civil war, only Colt, whose ties with the borough were tenuous in the extreme, can be identified as a militant Yorkist. He is known to have fought at the battles of both Wakefield and Towton. By contrast, Portalyn, who, like Colt, had represented the borough as a Neville servant, seems to have distanced himself from the earl as civil war approached and was later to be indicted for conspiring with adherents of Lancaster. Hotoft was similarly equivocal. Although he owed his election for the borough to Neville, he also had strong connexions with the duchy of Lancaster and Humphrey Stafford, duke of Buckingham, and he did not prosper after 1461. Two other of the MPs, Ashby and John Brome II, were Lancastrian: Ashby suffered imprisonment and perhaps also exile after Edward IV’s accession; and Brome was a leading Lancastrian servant in the late 1450s who, although he escaped attainder in 1461, never recovered his influence thereafter. More tentatively, John Glover, one of the few townsmen friendly to Brome, can also be identified as Lancastrian in sympathy. In 1460, presumably through Brome’s influence, he had been nominated as one of the auditors of the duke of York’s forfeited lordship of Denbigh and his career as a minor Exchequer official ended abruptly with the accession of Edward IV. For the three others who lived into the civil war – Richard Bedford, John Poers and Roger Wootton II – there is no evidence to identify them with either York or Lancaster. In so far as any conclusion is justified by this patchy evidence, it is that the town of Warwick did not openly espouse the cause of its lord during the civil war.

Finally, there is the question of what part the MPs played in the House of Commons itself. It is very rare to have any information on this subject, but Colt is an exception. While sitting for the borough in the Parliament of 1453, he instigated the duke of York to bring a bill in the Exchequer against Thomas Thorpe*, then Speaker, and laboured to have the defendant condemned in heavy damages and imprisoned. The best speculation is that Thorpe, as a baron of the Exchequer, had incurred his hostility by favouring John Brome II’s claim to the chamberlainship. For the rest it is difficult to discern the operation of personal motive, aside from the desire to serve a lord, in determining why a particular MP was elected at a particular time.

With the exception of the inferences that might be drawn from the occasional irregularity, the election indentures reveal little about the process of election in the borough. Some of them name the MPs for both county and borough with a single undivided list of attestors, implying that a single election returned both sets of MPs. There is, however, ample evidence that this was not the case. During the dispute over the Warwickshire election of 1427, the undisputed principle was stated that the townsmen of Warwick, because they returned their own representatives, had no part in the county election.11 KB27/677, rex rot. 5. Other indentures make this point clearly. Some, although joint indentures naming both the county and borough attestors, divide, with varying degrees of clarity, the attestors into those for county and those for the borough. The division of responsibility is made very explicit in the indenture of 2 Oct. 1419: the county election is said to have been made by 18 named attestors, ‘per assensum multorum aliorum comitatis comitatus predicti’, and the borough election by six other attestors, ‘per assensum plurimorum Burgensium Burgi predicti’.12 C219/12/3.

On other occasions the process of division is taken a step further: for the Parliaments of 1407, 1413 (May), 1435, 1449 (Feb.), 1450, 1453 and 1467, the sheriff returned a separate borough indenture. And yet there may be something misleading about even these separate indentures for they are all dated at the county court on the same day as the county indenture, inviting the conclusion that the elections took place on the same occasion. It may be that the organs of self-government in fifteenth-century Warwick were so under-developed that this was indeed the case, but it is equally possible that, as in other boroughs, the borough held a separate election and notified the result to the sheriff. Significant here is the consideration that, whether the borough election was witnessed into Chancery by a joint indenture or a separate one, a similar number of attestors are named. Leaving aside the anomalous indenture to the Parliament of February 1449, which names no electors, the separate indentures name between six and 12 burgesses; and the joint indentures identify between four and 12 attestors for the borough. This raises two possibilities. First, a separate indenture was drawn up between the sheriff and the borough attestors for every election, and either returned into Chancery or the names from it copied into a joint indenture. The second possibility is more interesting: the list of borough attestors, whether in the separate or joint indentures, was derived from a written notification of the result of the borough election sent by the bailiffs to the sheriff. This certainly seems to have been the case in Leicester, the other borough for which the sheriff of Warwickshire and Leicestershire was responsible.

Whatever the case, the surviving returns give a fairly clear picture of the most important attestors. Several men appear repeatedly. Thomas Estop, long-serving master of the important guild of the Holy Trinity, for example, is named in all but one of the seven surviving list of borough attestors between 1421 (May) and 1437; and William Hopkins†, bailiff of the borough at least from 1408 to 1418, in all but two of the eight between 1413 and 1426. The significant overlap between the lists provides a basis for speculation in respect of the process of election. After the incorporation of 1545 the borough was governed by a common council consisting of a bailiff, recorder and 12 principal burgesses, and this body was responsible for the election of the MPs. The indentures for the period under review here suggest that a similar body, informally constituted, may have existed much earlier, exercising the same responsibility to the exclusion of the generality of the town’s burgesses. Significantly, none of the indentures name more than 12 attestors, and those for the Parliaments of 1421 (May), 1426, 1435 and 1467 name precisely that number. Moreover, there are some striking parallels between the first three of these lists and those indentures of intermediate date that list fewer than 12. The 12 named in the indenture of 1421 (May) account for six of the eight names in the indenture for the next Parliament, seven of ten in the indenture for that of 1422, and four of six for that of 1423. This hardly demands the conclusion that the elections were all made by a body of 12, the membership of which altered slightly year by year, and that this body is imperfectly reflected in the indentures; none the less, it is a reasonable inference from limited evidence.

The interests of certain of the townsmen MPs outside the borough are also reflected in the county election indentures. Four of Warwick’s MPs from our period appear among the county attestors. Nicholas Rody routinely did so: he is recorded as attesting eight county elections between 1420 and 1453, and it is probable that he attended as one of the most intimate servants of Beauchamp and then Neville. The same may also apply to another Beauchamp servant, Richard Eton, who attested five county elections from 1421 to 1437. The other two were John Brome II, an attestor in 1442, and Roger Wootton II, present at the county elections in 1453 and 1455. It is important to note that they were not present as burgesses of Warwick, for the burgesses qua burgesses were explicitly excluded from any part in electing the knights of the shire (if one may draw an inference from the disputed Warwickshire election of 1427). Wootton attended as county coroner; by 1442 Brome held the manor of Baddesley Clinton and other land in the county; Eton had property in Coventry in right of his wife; and Rody inherited land in Whitnash.

Few boroughs present a starker change in their pattern of representation than Warwick. In 1450 the long-established dominance of townsmen, most of them connected to the Beauchamps, gave way to a more irregular pattern with the return of several carpet-baggers. A combination of circumstances brought this sudden change about: the end of the house of Beauchamp gave the town a new lord from a distant part of the country; the difficult transition from one lord to another was made the harder by the new lord’s hostility to the leading townsman, John Brome II, seemingly over office in the Exchequer; and as national political tensions increased in the 1450s the new lord, himself intimately involved in these tensions, successfully sought to secure the election to Parliament of his own men from outside the borough.