Westbury

The manor of Westbury on the Wiltshire border with Somerset lay at the heart of the hundred of the same name. By the mid fifteenth century, the town, in common with many of its neighbours, was becoming prominent as a centre of cloth manufacture,1 VCH Wilts. iv. 134; viii. 168. and as a consequence of growing commercial importance its markets and fairs proliferated. At the end of the thirteenth century, Westbury HAD possessed two weekly markets, held on Tuesday and Friday, and two annual fairs, respectively lasting for three and seven days, around the feasts of All Saints and St. John ante portam Latinam.2 Ibid. viii. 175. On 2 Dec. 1460, the day after Henry VI’s last Parliament had been prorogued for Christmas, the lords of Westbury (Katherine, widow of Sir John Chideock*, Sir Thomas St. Maur and John Willoughby†) secured the King’s signature for a grant of an additional market on Thursdays and three more fairs around the feasts of St. George, Whitsun week and the Exaltation of the Holy Cross.3 Ibid.; C81/1477/28.

Partly as a result of late medieval Westbury’s commercial success in the period under review, the parish church of All Saints underwent extensive reconstruction. Perhaps the most important single augmentation was the building of a new chapel on the north side of the church by William Westbury (d.1448), a justice of King’s bench, and his brother John†. The Westburys’ foundation in 1437 of a chantry at the altar of St. John the Baptist and St. Thomas the Martyr was endowed with lands and rent in Westbury and Honeybridge (in North Bradley) worth £10 p.a. At this time, the parish (which was co-extensive with the hundred of Westbury) was said to count 1,000 communicants on Easter day. In 1496 Edmund Leversedge, who asked to be buried in the chapel of St. John, bequeathed £100 to found a fraternity in honour of Corpus Christi.4 VCH Wilts. viii. 176-81.

The township that was to become the parliamentary borough was never incorporated, and in the absence of evidence to the contrary is thought to have consisted of only that part of the larger urban settlement subinfeudated in burgage tenure. By the fifteenth century, the over-lordship of the manor had become divided as a result of successive partitions. At the death of Sir John Pavely in 1361 the title to the manor fell to his two daughters, Alice, wife of Sir John St. Loe†, and Joan, wife of Sir Ralph Cheyne†. By the mid 1440s, Alice’s line was represented by her great-grandson Sir John Chideock (d.1450) and her great-great-grandson Sir Thomas St. Maur, while Joan Cheyne’s title had passed to her great-grand-daughter Anne Cheyne, the wife of John Willoughby. Chideock’s two daughters and eventual coheiresses had respectively married Anne Cheyne’s maternal uncle, the courtier William Stafford*, and William Stourton*, son and heir of John Stourton II*, later Lord Stourton, the treasurer of Henry VI’s household, and there can be little doubt that the motivation for the borough’s enfranchisement in 1449 lay with them. Westbury never received a royal charter, beyond grants establishing the markets and fairs, and the initiative for inducing the burgesses to return MPs by means of a shrieval precept lay with the county sheriff of the day, namely John Norris* another leading courtier.5 There is a curious historiographical tradition that dates the enfranchisement of Westbury to 1448, when no Parliament met or was summoned: VCH Wilts. v. 74; viii. 185-6; The Commons 1509-58, i. 232.

Little is known of either the internal governance of the borough, or of the conduct of its parliamentary elections. A portmoot was in evidence by the mid fourteenth century, and by the 1550s Westbury possessed a mayor, perhaps the same officer previously known as the lords’ portreeve. It was, however, the lords’ steward who under the terms of Henry VI’s charter of 1460 was to oversee the markets and fairs and preside over the court.6 VCH Wilts. viii. 175, 186; The Commons 1509-58, i. 232. Whether any of these officers played a part in the conduct of parliamentary elections is not clear. In 1449, when Westbury first returned MPs to the Commons, the sheriff of Wiltshire sealed separate indentures with each of the boroughs in his shire. Two such indentures survive for Westbury before 1461, although the second (for 1455) is a mere fragment. The indenture of 1453, sealed at Westbury on 26 Feb., the day before the county court met at Wilton to choose the knights of the shire, stated that the borough’s MPs had been elected by ‘the burgesses of the borough’. The indenture was sealed by two townsmen, Thomas Walys and Thomas Knyght ‘in the name of all burgesses’, probably on account of the lack of a common seal.7 C219/16/2. The recurrence of some names among the parliamentary sureties of the elected men is an indication that a small number of burgesses did indeed conduct formal elections. Thus, Knyght was named among the sureties of Westbury’s MPs in 1450, while John Taillour’s name occurs in both 1449 (Feb.) and 1450.8 C219/15/6; 16/1. Yet, their efforts may have been in vain, for from the outset the Westbury returns regularly show signs of tampering: the name of one of the MPs, John Notte, was inserted into the indenture of 1453 after another name had been erased. Likewise, for the Parliaments of 1449 (Feb.) and 1459 both of the borough’s MPs were inserted over erasures into the schedule of names and sureties which accompanied the sheriff’s indentures, and for that of 1449 (Nov.) this was true of at least one of them, Thomas Skargill.9 C219/15/6, 7; 16/2, 5.

The names of Westbury’s MPs are known for six of the seven Parliaments that met between the borough’s enfranchisement and Henry VI’s deposition. Eleven men shared these 12 seats between them: only Colville is known to have been returned on successive occasions. Nevertheless, over a third of Westbury’s representatives secured return to the Commons more than once, albeit in the service of other constituencies. Thus Benger, and perhaps Booth, sat at least twice, respectively finding their second seats at Great Bedwyn in 1467 and Cricklade in 1455; Skargill sat in a total of three Parliaments, representing Great Bedwyn and Bridport as well as Westbury; while the most distinguished parliamentarian among Westbury’s MPs was undeniably Thomas Freeman, who between 1432 and 1463 sat in no fewer than nine Parliaments, representing besides Westbury, his home city of Salisbury, Old Sarum and Calne. A few of Westbury’s representatives could in addition claim familial traditions of parliamentary service: two of the most arguably ‘local’ men among them (Benger and Colville) followed their fathers into the Commons, although of the remainder only Skargill could cite a family tradition in the person of his father-in-law. No such tradition was involved when Roger Kemys was returned for Westbury in 1450 in the company of his father John* (the latter as a knight of the shire for Gloucestershire), for both of them were apparently newcomers to Parliament.

Taken as a body, Westbury’s MPs in this period were a disparate group, probably rendered more so by the frequency with which the burgesses’ own choice seems to have been set aside. Thus, alone among their number Colville could claim to fulfil the statutory requirement for residence in his constituency, while of the rest only Benger, Freeman and perhaps Notte even came from Wiltshire. Kemys hailed from neighbouring Gloucestershire, but the remainder were complete outsiders: Booth, a Derbyshire-based scion of a Lancashire family, normally lived on his wife’s estates in Bedfordshire, Gaunsell and Grygge came from Norfolk, and Hende and Skargill, a Yorkshireman by extraction, lived in Essex.

Men of law predominated among this group of carpet-baggers. Kemys had trained at the Middle Temple and Booth at Gray’s Inn, while Colville, who served as clerk of the court of the honour of Trowbridge, Benger, appointed to the quorum of the county bench, and perhaps also Grygge were qualified lawyers. As men of business, they naturally attracted a range of Crown appointments, but only Colville, Freeman and Hende held offices that were likely to bring them into contact with the inhabitants of Westbury. Freeman had held a range of civic offices, including the mayoralty, in Salisbury, and served as a royal commissioner and customs officer there and in the port of Southampton prior to his return for Westbury, while Hende held the keepership of Cranborne chase in Wiltshire. In terms of their wider administrative experience at the time of their return, Hende, currently joint warden of the Exchange and Mint in the Tower of London, had served several terms as sheriff of Caernarvonshire and Essex and Hertfordshire, Skargill had been escheator in the two latter counties, and Kemys had been appointed a commissioner in his native Gloucestershire. While sitting in the Commons at Coventry in 1459, Booth was appointed escheator of Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire.

There can be little doubt that external patronage was the dominant factor in the choice of the men who ultimately filled Westbury’s parliamentary seats. In this, the royal household took the lead: Skargill was a yeoman (and later usher) of the King’s chamber and Hende was a King’s esquire and marshal of the hall, while Booth was connected to the Court by his kinship with Bishop Laurence Booth, the queen’s chancellor. Other magnates may have also made their influence felt: Grygge was a member of the circle of John de Vere, earl of Oxford, while Gaunsell was a retainer of Thomas, Lord Scales. It is interesting that there is only limited direct evidence of the influence of Lord Stourton over Westbury’s parliamentary representation. Of the King’s retainers returned for the borough, only Skargill took his seat during Stourton’s treasurership of the household, and of the remainder only Notte is thought to have possessed direct links with the peer and his family.