Chippenham

Lying next to the river Avon in west Wiltshire, Chippenham appears to have grown up around a hunting lodge of the West Saxon kings. It had a parliamentary history stretching back to 1295 and was a town of some consequence before the Black Death. The plague probably accounts for a severe decline in its population to about 250 in the later fourteenth century. Its bridge over the Avon made it an important route centre and its modest prosperity in the later Middle Ages rested on trade. The poll tax return of 1379 indicates that at that date its more affluent burgesses were generally merchants or victuallers, the latter no doubt catering for passing travellers, and that smaller numbers of townsmen were tailors or leather-workers.1 The Commons 1386-1421, i. 690.

It was not until the reign of Queen Mary that Chippenham received a charter. As a result, it was a borough by prescriptive right only and it appears not to have possessed a guild merchant during the Middle Ages. Apart from the odd deed, its medieval records are lost and there is little evidence for its administration. At its head was a bailiff, a Crown appointee rather than a nominee of the burgesses or one of the local manorial lords. Once a single royal lordship, Chippenham comprised several constituent manors and lordships, of which the chief were the manors of Sheldon (along with the appurtenant lordship of Chippenham hundred) and Rowdon. Sheldon had belonged to the Gascelyns from the mid thirteenth century until 1424 when Christine Gascelyn, the last surviving member of that family, and her husband Edmund Hales sold it to Sir Walter Hungerford† for £1,000. Created Baron Hungerford in January 1426, Hungerford augmented his interests at Chippenham in 1434 when he bought Rowdon from another heiress, Margaret Erleigh, and her then husband Sir Walter Sandys†. For the remainder of Henry VI’s reign and beyond, the Hungerfords maintained strong links with the borough, of which their purchases had made them de facto lords. In 1442 Lord Hungerford and his son, Sir Robert, obtained licence to found a perpetual chantry there, and various members of the family, including Thomas Hungerford*, used Rowden as their residence.2 Ibid. 690-2; The Commons 1509-58, i. 219; Wilts. Arch. Mag. iii. 28, 32; CPR, 1441-6, p. 151. The Hungerfords exercised considerable local influence, and several of those who represented the borough in the Commons in the period under review were associated with them.

The names of 19 of Chippenham’s MPs in Henry VI’s reign have survived, although there are gaps in the evidence. First, the returns of 1425, 1439, 1445 and 1459 for the county and boroughs of Wiltshire are either incomplete fragments, in which Chippenham does not feature, or are no longer extant. Secondly, only the Christian names of the MPs of 1455, both called John, have survived.3 It is possible that one or both of them could have been one or both of two of the 19, John Fowler and John Wyng. Neither of them could have been John Langley, by then dead; it is unlikely that John Dykeman and John Ludwell were still alive at that date; and John Burreley sat for Bath in 1455. Thirdly, the schedules attached to the returns for the Parliaments of 1426, 1429 and 1431 are complete but do not include Chippenham. Likewise excluded were Old Sarum in 1426 and 1429 and both Cricklade and Ludgershall in 1429. At the bottom of each of the three complete schedules is a blank space, possibly to allow for later additions, but in all likelihood the missing boroughs did not return burgesses to the Parliaments in question. This would not have been an unprecedented state of affairs for Chippenham, since there is no evidence that it sent MPs to any Parliament held from 1314 to 1361. For the rest of Edward III’s reign, its representation was intermittent and, while it returned MPs much more regularly after the accession of Richard II, the evidence for its parliamentary representation in the period 1390-1421 is almost completely lacking.4 The Commons 1386-1421, i. 691.

While most of the 19 were probably Wiltshire men, only John Dykeman and William Haukessok feature as attestors in the surviving returns of the county’s knights of the shire of this period, and two of them, Walter Clerk and Walter Sergeant, appear to have come from other parts of the country. It is not clear if any of the MPs was a native of Chippenham itself, of which only John Wyng was definitely a resident. Of those who resided elsewhere in Wiltshire, Henry Bottenham lived at Wilton, Dykeman at Wilton and nearby Great Wishford, Walter Parke at Upton Scudamore near Warminster, William Basyng at Brinkworth and Haukessok at Somerford. Of the three who certainly lived outside the county, John Langley resided at Bristol, William Styrope at Berkhampstead in Hertfordshire and Clerk at Southampton. ertsHertH

The extent of residency outside the borough suggests that most of the MPs were not typical burgesses. Only Clerk and Langley, both outsiders, definitely engaged in trade. John Ludwell and Styrope were lawyers, and it is possible that Bottenham and Sergeant were either also members of that profession or possessed at least some legal training. Lawyers were commonly members of the gentry, and Sergeant may have been a ‘gentleman’ late in life. Three others of the 19 were of the gentry or its fringes: Haukessok, who married a grand-daughter of Sir Philip Fitzwaryn†, was an ‘esquire’, Parke was from a minor gentry family and Dykeman was a ‘gentleman’ as well as a ‘yeoman’. By contrast, while there are many gaps in the evidence for the parliamentary representation of Chippenham in the decades immediately preceding 1422, it would appear that until the last decade of the fourteenth century its MPs were typically resident burgesses pursuing trades. As the examples of some of Wiltshire’s other boroughs demonstrate, Chippenham was far from unique in these changes in its representation. By the beginning of the fifteenth century, Cricklade was increasingly returning residents of higher social status, including lawyers and members of the local gentry, and few of Malmesbury’s MPs in Henry VI’s reign were typical townsmen, even though most were not strangers to the county. Calne presents a similar picture but Devizes was more resistant to (although not immune from) such developments. Local cloth merchants or manufacturers dominated its seats until the end of the 1420s, and for the remainder of the reign its clothiers usually supplied one of its MPs.

It is likely that the only certain resident among the 19, Wyng, was one of the least substantial of these men and the Southampton merchant, Walter Clerk, one of the wealthiest. The lawyers among them probably enjoyed relatively considerable earnings, and returns for the subsidy of 1451 recorded that Haukkesok held lands worth £7 p.a. and Basyng’s annual landed income was just £2. It is possible that Parke was from a family of more significant landowners, since the same returns found that a lady who was perhaps his mother possessed property worth as much as £20 p.a. Other evidence shows that Dykeman came into holdings a few miles north-west of Salisbury worth £3 p.a., along with rights in Grovely forest, through his second wife.

Owing to the loss of municipal records, there is no evidence of any borough offices that the MPs might have held. Outside the borough, just three of the 19 certainly served in local government at a county level. First, Langley served as bailiff of Bristol, a shire incorporate, in 1418-19. Secondly, Sergeant became alnager of Wiltshire and Salisbury shortly before entering his last Parliament in 1435, a position he had lobbied for and then held at farm from the Crown. Thirdly, Clerk was prominent in the administration of his home town of Southampton after it had become a shire incorporate like Bristol in 1447. There is no evidence that any of the 19 served on the Crown’s estates in Wiltshire or with institutions like the duchy of Lancaster, although Styrope did find employment at Westminster, as a filacer of the court of King’s bench.

At least two of the 19, Thomas Child and John Burreley, appear to have owed their places in the Commons to their membership of the royal household. Child, apparently the man appointed yeoman of the King’s buckhounds in late 1447, was elected to the Parliament of 1453, an assembly summoned when the Court was enjoying an upturn in political fortune, while Burreley was probably ‘John Burley’, a valet of the chamber and yeoman of the Crown. It is also conceivable that John Fowler was an outsider who owed his seat in the Commons to royal patronage, since there were one or more Household servants of that name in the first few decades of the fifteenth century.

While Styrope sat in his final three Parliaments as a Member for Chippenham while holding the office of filacer, it is impossible to ascertain whether his tenure of this position played any part in his election to those assemblies. It is almost certain that he owed his appointment as filacer to his patron, Lord Hungerford, a friend of the chief justice of King’s bench, John Fortescue*. Given Hungerford’s seigneurial position at Chippenham, it is also very likely that the non-resident Styrope owed his parliamentary career to that lord as well. Styrope was not alone in serving Hungerford. Both Sergeant, his fellow MP in 1432, 1433 and 1435, and Haukessok, his associate in 1437, were likewise followers of that lord, as probably was Parke, with whom he sat in 1442. Furthermore, Wyng, who resided at Rowden, where one of the Hungerfords’ principal manors in Wiltshire lay, was almost certainly returned to the Commons in 1449 through the patronage of that lord, while Basyng was associated with Sir Edmund Hungerford*, one of Lord Walter’s younger sons. Finally, it is possible that William Weston and others of the MPs of uncertain identity possessed Hungerford connexions as well. In short, the Hungerfords appear strongly to have influenced the parliamentary representation of Chippenham, at least during 1432-50, the period in which all of their followers or putative followers among the MPs sat for the borough. Curiously, there is little evidence that they attempted to wield like influence at Cricklade, where they also enjoyed seigneurial rights.

There is no proof of links between the 19 and other important patrons, whether lay or ecclesiastical, although it is possible that Dykeman owed his election in 1423 to an association with Humphrey, duke of Gloucester. It is also worth noting that Langley took up office as the deputy at Bristol of Thomas Chaucer*, chief butler of England, a powerful figure at the centre of English political life, almost immediately after sitting for Chippenham in the Parliament of 1422. At least one of the 19 appears to have secured a seat in the Commons in pursuit of his own particular interests, since there is little doubt that Clerk’s exclusion from the municipal administration of his home town of Southampton prompted him to seek election to the Parliament of 1460 in another constituency. How he came to stand for Chippenham is difficult to explain, although he had a connexion with Wiltshire in the person of his wife’s brother-in-law, John Hall II*, who sat for Salisbury in that assembly and may in some way have helped him to secure his seat.

As far as the evidence goes, Styrope, who represented Chippenham in at least seven Parliaments of the 1430s and 1440s, was easily the most experienced parliamentarian among the 19. Ludwell, another member of the legal profession, was returned to the Commons on at least four occasions – although only once for Chippenham – while Sergeant was an MP for Chippenham in the three consecutive Parliaments of 1432, 1433 and 1435. At least nine of the MPs sat once for Chippenham and once for another borough, with three of them, Langley (a Member for Bristol in the Parliament of 1426), Clerk (a burgess for Southampton in that of 1455) and Burreley (returned for Bath in 1455) representing constituencies outside Wiltshire as well as Chippenham. Only Ludwell definitely sat before 1422 (as a burgess for Old Sarum in the last two Parliaments of Henry V) and there is no evidence that any of the 19 gained election after the period under review.

For over half of Henry VI’s reign the formal parliamentary elections for Chippenham and the other Wiltshire boroughs occurred in the county court, to which these communities had sent delegates for that purpose, and where the names of the men chosen were recorded in a schedule attached to the indenture of return for the county’s knights of the shire. In reality, the boroughs had almost certainly chosen their representatives locally before the county court met, although by what means is unknown. While administratively convenient for the sheriff, this system was open to abuse because it was easy for him to omit from the schedules the names of any burgesses whom he (or others for whom he was acting) did not wish to see returned and to insert those of other candidates instead. Following its abolition by a statute of 1445, a new system of drawing up separate indentures for each borough, not necessarily bearing the same date as that for the county, came into being, although there are just two extant indentures for Chippenham predating 1461. For the Parliaments of 1453 and 1455, they throw no light on the local election process. The indenture of 1453, made between the sheriff of Wiltshire, Edmund Stradlyng, on the one hand and the ‘burgesses of the borough of Chippenham’ on the other, declared that Oliver Wilcotes and Thomas Child were the men elected. It named just two other burgesses, John Stere and John Harryes, presumably officers of the borough, who attached their seals in the name of all their fellows. By contrast, the indenture of 1455 included a list of attestors, but damage to this document is such as to make it impossible to tell how many of them there were, and the complete names of only three of them are fully discernible. The identity of those elected is unknown, since only their Christian names are visible on the indenture.5 C219/16/2, 3.