Bridport

The borough of Bridport was situated near Lyme Regis in west Dorset, at the confluence of three small rivers, the Brit, the Simene and the Asker, which enter the English Channel at West Bay, two miles to the south of the town. Bridport owed its early prosperity to its importance as a centre for rope manufacture, a trade which had flourished since the early thirteenth century; but from the sixteenth century the town was in decline, with the harbour silted up and the rope trade undermined by rules limiting the right of manufacture to guild members.1Historic Towns in Dorset, 23-8. This concern for tight control of the town’s affairs, displayed by the ruling oligarchy in its rope monopoly, remained a feature of Bridport’s political structure in the seventeenth century: the 1619 charter of incorporation restricted the government of the town to 15 capital burgesses, who elected two bailiffs from their number and chose the borough’s recorder.2Dorset RO, DC/BTB/K7. The same small group formed the voting-body in parliamentary elections – a situation which provoked an investigation by the parliamentary committee of privileges in 1628, which upheld a claim that the electorate should include the commonalty.3Hutchins, Dorset, ii. 11-12. The corporation seems to have taken little notice of this ruling, however: the elections in 1640 were again decided by the 15 burgesses alone.4Dorset RO, DC/BTB/EF3; C219/42/89. The dominance of the ruling clique was also encouraged by the town’s religious zeal. A conventicle had been established in Bridport by 1613, under the influence of John Traske and John Sacheverell, and this was strongly supported by the burgesses.5HP Commons 1604-29. The widespread support for puritanism among the townspeople can be seen in their enthusiasm to support both the voluntary collection for the Palatine Protestants in 1620 and the church collections for 5 November in the later 1630s, which far outstripped those for other feasts and commemorations.6CSP Dom. 1631-3, p. 198; Dorset RO, DC/BTB/CD9: accts. for 1638-9, 1639-40. The appointment of a Laudian, Silas Bushell, as rector in 1634 (under the patronage of a local landowner, Giles Stoodley), provoked a series of cases of non-attendance at church by a sizeable group of townsmen, including some of the capital burgesses.7Walker Revised, 129; Dorset RO, DC/BTB/M8: accts. 1641-2; DC/BTB/ M17: presentments, 1640-1.

The religious inclinations of Bridport’s dominant mercantile families no doubt encouraged the corporation to court the political patronage of the ‘godly’ gentry of the neighbourhood. The town’s first recorder (appointed under the charter of 1619) was the local grandee, Sir John Strode†. Strode was retained as counsel for the town, and received numerous gifts and rewards from the borough during his 21-year tenure of the post.8Dorset RO, DC/BTB/M2: accts. 1632-42. In the Jacobean and early Caroline Parliaments, the borough looked to the local gentry to represent its interests, rather than electing MPs from among the ranks of the corporation. Apart from Strode, Bridport’s MPs before 1629 included Sir Richard Meller†, John Browne I* of Frampton and Sir Lewis Dyve†, all of whom were connected with the Trenchard family.9HP Commons 1604-29. The Trenchards, jealous of their electoral patronage in the borough, may also have had a hand in confining the franchise to their friends in the corporation. Certainly, the two MPs elected for Bridport in the Short Parliament elections of March 1640 were members of this group: Thomas Trenchard and Sir John Meller.10Bayley, Dorset, 20. The elections for November 1640 also saw the choice of a Trenchard relative – Giles Strangways – alongside the town’s new recorder, Roger Hill II*, who also had impeccable puritan credentials.11Dorset RO, DC/BTB/J3: indenture of appointment, 1 Aug. 1640. Strangways and Meller would later join the king during the civil war, but Bridport kept in contact with the Trenchard clan (which wielded a dominant influence on the county committee of the 1640s), and was especially close to Hill.12Dorset RO, DC/BTB/M2: accts. for 1641-2, 1646.

With the religious views of its leading citizens and principal political patrons, Bridport’s opposition to the crown in 1642 comes as no surprise. From the spring of that year, the bailiffs were monitoring the growing national crisis, collecting proclamations about popery, the defence of Hull, and other matters.13Dorset RO, DC/BTB/M2: acct. for 1641-2. The corporation introduced new religious practices in the summer; a series of fast days was instituted from May, and in July the godly divine, Robert Tuchin, was appointed as lecturer for the town.14Dorset RO, DC/BTB/CD9, unfol.; Bayley, Dorset, 435. Shortly afterwards one of the burgesses, Nicholas Sampson, organised the townsmen into a defensive force, which was given legal authority by the House of Lords on 22 August.15LJ v. 312a. In the days that followed the bailiffs’ accounts include payments ‘when our volunteers went to Dorchester’ to join the county forces.16Dorset RO, DC/BTB/M2: accts. for 1641-2. In September ammunition was purchased, and further provision made for the town militia, and the town was voted £10 for fortifications by the county treasurer in November.17Dorset RO, DC/BTB/M2: accts. for 1641-2; Bayley, Dorset, 132n. A watch was instituted by the corporation in December 1642.18Dorset RO, DC/BTB/H6: order of 14 Dec. 1642. But the expected assault did not come, as the royalists under the marquess of Hertford moved no further south than Sherborne Castle.

In fact, Bridport’s lowland site, lack of walls and small harbour rendered the town of little military value during the civil wars. Bridport was occupied by both sides, depending on the ebb and flow of the war, but did not suffer the destruction caused by sieges and skirmishes at Poole, Wareham, Weymouth or Lyme Regis.19Hutchins, Dorset, ii. 5; Bayley, Dorset, 130-1. In December 1645 the recruiter election to replace the ejected Giles Strangways brought in as the new MP Thomas Ceely, the hero of the Lyme siege. For the election, the electorate had now expanded to include the commonalty, apparently breaking the franchise monopoly of the capital burgesses, and perhaps indicating that Trenchard influence in Bridport was starting to decline.20C219/43/158-9. Nevertheless, other appointments within the borough show that the old ruling clique had not lost its dominant position. In January 1647, after lobbying by the corporation, the Committee of Plundered Ministers agreed to pay salaries of £100 to the town minister and the lecturer: both posts were now held by Robert Tuchin, who had been lecturer in Bridport since 1642, and was appointed a trier for Dorset in 1646.21Dorset Standing Cttee. ed. Mayo, 156, 182. In 1649 John Eaton, ‘a very ingenious and delicate preacher’, and a stern opponent of the Levellers and other sectaries, was appointed as rector of Bridport.22Calamy Revised, 177; CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 375. Eaton was clearly a man favoured by the corporation, and in 1654 the bailiffs and burgesses petitioned Oliver Cromwell* for the augmentation of his salary.23CSP Dom. 1654, p. 248. Similarly, the corporation’s appointment of another minister, Henry Parsons, as schoolmaster in 1657 was followed by moves to increase his stipend.24Calamy Revised, 382; CSP Dom. 1657-8, p. 112. The care taken by the burgesses to establish suitable ministers in Bridport reflects not only their conservative religious outlook, but also their continuing control over the town government.

The political views of the ordinary townsmen during this period are less easily discerned. Despite pockets of royalist sympathy in the borough in the early 1640s, and a brief visit to the town by Charles Stuart, during his flight from Worcester in 1651, Bridport seems to have conformed to successive regimes readily enough.25CSP Dom. 1641-3, p. 364; Bayley, Dorset, 362-3. Yet the electoral influence of the Trenchards seems to have declined by the late 1650s, and the borough started to look closer to home for its parliamentary representation. The 1659 elections saw the return of two men with local connections: Edward Cheeke, a landowner and government official from nearby Stanton St Gabriel, and John Lea, another local commissioner, who was the first townsman to be elected to serve Bridport in Parliament for many years. Both men had supported the local major-general, John Disbrowe*, and were presumably supporters of the protectorate. The restored Rump and the military rule that followed it did not gain any support in Bridport: in late 1659 the corporation supported calls for a free Parliament, and when the secluded Members returned to the Commons in February 1660, the bailiffs proclaimed the good news publicly, and paid for the church bells to be rung.26Dorset RO, DC/BTB/M4: accts. for 1659-60. The elections for the Convention, held on 16 April, again included the commonalty in the franchise, and returned local landowners, Henry Henley* of Colway, and John Drake† of Trill.27Dorset RO, DC/BTB/EF3, unfol.; C219/49, unfol. The continuing power of the ruling clique came to abrupt end with the visit to the town of the commissioners for regulating corporations in October 1662. The commission, whose membership included the former Bridport MPs, Sir Gerard Naper and Giles Strangways, imposed the oaths of supremacy and allegiance, and on their refusal (presumably on religious grounds) removed eight of the 15 burgesses, and also dismissed Roger Hill as recorder.28Dorset RO, DC/BTB/H1, p. 469; DC/BTB/J3: order of commrs. 7 Oct. 1662. In Hill’s place, the commissioners appointed John Hoskyns, who had been Sir John Strode’s deputy recorder before 1640.29Dorset RO, DC/BTB/H1, p. 470.