The contents of these volumes of the History present, in the main, the findings of an inquiry into the lives and careers of Members of the House of Commons: that is the knights of the shires, citizens and burgesses elected to Parliament by the local communities of counties and towns whose representation was demanded by the Crown. The names of the Members are by no means all known. Through negligence or accident, many electoral returns to particular Parliaments have disappeared, in one or two instances almost completely; and although names are frequently recoverable from the writs de expensis enrolled on the close rolls of the Chancery, this supplementary official source of information is no longer available after 1414 when enrolment ceased. In any case, it was mostly the shire knights, who, having sued out such writs, had ensured that they were formally registered by enrolment; only relatively few townsmen ever did so. Consequently, when serious gaps in the lists of Members occur, these relate mainly to the burgesses and less to the county representatives. Regarding the former, the lists are very defective for roughly one out of three Parliaments in the period as a whole; regarding the latter, for no more than about one in six (mostly late in Henry IV’s reign and early in Henry V’s).
By 1386 over half a century had passed since a Parliament had met to which the Commons—shire knights, citizens and burgesses—had not been summoned; and it had by then become unthinkable for these representatives not to be summoned. But this had not always been the case. Ever since 1254 there had been Parliaments attended by shire knights; and ever since 1265 Parliaments to which citizens and burgesses also had come. During Edward I’s reign, however, officially designated Parliaments to which any representatives had been summoned were in a minority (roughly only a third); and even when a ‘representative parliament’ happened to be called, it was then still possible for only shire knights to be summoned, without any townsmen at all (as in 1275, 1290, 1294 and 1297). Moreover, there was at first some lack of uniformity as to the number of shire knights or townsmen each constituency, county or town, was required to elect to any one Parliament attended by both types of Member, and their number could vary from one occasion to another. For example, in 1275 four knights were summoned along with six or four townsmen; in 1282 again four knights, but only two townsmen; and in 1283 two knights, and, again, two townsmen. Yet it is important to notice that the number of representatives of each type was always specified in the writs of summons, and that no constituency, whether county or town, was ever told to send less than two. (This was doubtless to ensure that if one of them failed to put in an appearance the constituency would not go unrepresented, and perhaps also to provide a measure of control, since they could watch over each other.) So far as the election of representatives to Parliament was concerned, the reign of Edward I was clearly a time of conscious experiment and improvisation. Even so, in its last decade Parliaments attended by representatives were in a majority (nine out of 15), and to most of them (seven of the nine) townsmen, as well as shire knights, were elected. By now each constituency, whether county or town, was only expected to return two representatives, a requirement which henceforward was strictly adhered to (except in the case of the City of London where, in 1355, the number was raised to four). The growing tendency in Edward I’s later years for Parliaments to include these representatives grew even more pronounced under Edward II. Indeed, two out of three of his Parliaments (19 out of 28) were attended both by shire knights and townsmen, two from each constituency. On this now established numerical basis, representation in Parliament of the local communities of counties and towns became a perfectly normal requirement, until well into the 16th century.
The total number of shire knights, citizens and burgesses returned to Parliament obviously depended not simply on how many were summoned from each constituency, but on the number of constituencies themselves. And, whereas the medieval shire knights were returned by 37 counties (all the counties of England save the two palatinates of Chester and Durham), the number of towns represented was always liable to fluctuate.
The regular enrolment, on the close rolls of Chancery, of writs de expensis authorizing the sheriffs to pay shire knights their travelling expenses and daily wages, provides some indication, down to 1414, that their attendance was generally quite exemplary; and, since the writs were usually enrolled on the day of a Parliament’s dissolution, it also suggests that most knights were present throughout the proceedings. In this connexion, it is worth noting that when, during the second of the three sessions of the Parliament of 1406, the Speaker requested the King to license the absence of Richard Clitheroe I, a shire knight for Kent who, as a recently appointed admiral, was required to put to sea at once, he then asked the Lords as well as the King that Clitheroe’s fellow representative might act in Parliament in their two names, just as if both were present.
Although the representatives of cities and boroughs were obviously bound to outnumber those from the shires, it must not be supposed that the numerical superiority of the former ever exercised a determining influence upon the internal workings of the Commons, once shire knights and townsmen had combined to form a separate House. Indeed, weaker in number though the shire knights were, they always constituted the politically stronger and more active element. But when did that combination take place, or when, rather, did it develop?
Commenting, in his Constitutional History, upon parliamentary developments in the earliest years of Edward III, William Stubbs stated that ‘the definite and final arrangement of parliament in two houses must be referred to this period’.
Nor is there any reason to doubt that, whenever necessary, the knights and burgesses continued to deliberate separately and, moreover, did so for some considerable time to come. When, in September 1353, a great council met to examine the question of the wool staple, and the Commons, having been asked to comment upon the proposed regulations, asked for a copy, one was supplied for the shire knights and another for the citizens and burgesses. Their reply was a joint one, and doubtless finally achieved in common meetings, but discrete discussions at some earlier stage may reasonably be inferred. Significantly under the circumstances, in the following year, when the Ordinances of the Staple came before Parliament for its approval, the knights alone were told at the outset to apply to the chancellor for a copy so they could write down their observations. Again, in 1362, the knights were first examined separately before the Lords regarding a proposal to concentrate the export trade in wool at Calais, although they excused themselves from making a positive reply on the ground that such a matter was better left to the merchants (who, they added, were by no means agreed among themselves).
Whatever the imprecision or ambiguity of the variants—‘la Commune’, ‘la Communalte’, ‘les Communes’—used to designate the Commons in the early years of Edward III’s reign, it is clear that the shire knights, citizens and burgesses were already combining in order to ‘avow’, and to present as their own, petitions which affected the public good (‘communes petitiones’). The adoption and also the formulation of such petitions, which became statutes if they affected the law administered in the courts (having, of course, been first approved by the Lords and accepted by the King), are likely to have produced some measure of cohesion among the different elements composing the Commons. So, too, must their eventually recognized right to consent to grants of taxation, although the subsidies assessed on moveables varied between, on the one hand, the rural areas where fifteenths were paid, and, on the other, the towns where the levies were of tenths. The movement to combine was also prompted by other, general factors. The preference of the churchmen generally for meeting the King’s financial demands in their provincial convocations resulted, during the 1330s, in a withdrawal of the proctors of the lower clergy from active participation in much of the business of Parliament. This doubtless made the other elective elements feel their identity and a common bond as representatives all the more strongly, and the contrast between the elected Commons and the Lords clearer. Very probably, moreover, the Commons were encouraged from above to coalesce. It was obviously convenient for the King on most occasions if he and his Council could deal with knights and burgesses, whether about financial matters, petitions, or anything else, as one body, rather than as distinct groups; it usually saved time; and any practice which expedited parliamentary business was bound to be welcome to all parties, not least the government. As early as 1332, when Parliament assembled at York, the shire knights and ‘les gentz de Commune’ (unquestionably the burgesses) were actually required to treat together; and they were jointly given leave to depart before the magnates. Admittedly, in 1343 the word ‘Communes’ is used, in the Parliament roll, separately from ‘Chivalers’; and in the roll of 1352 a reference occurs to a ‘longe trete et deliberation eues par les Communes ove la Communalte’, which perhaps denotes a meeting of groups needing a conscious effort to bring them together.
Whenever, in the 14th and 15th centuries, the Commons were assigned a particular place in which to assemble (and this happened to be recorded), it was shared by them all. In 1343 the knights of the shires and ‘Communes’ were ordered to meet in the painted chamber of the palace of Westminster (‘et de treter, conseiller et assentir entre eux’ regarding a proposed embassy to Pope Clement VI, ‘et de reporter lour Respons et lour Assent en ... Parlement’). It was here again that in 1352 ‘twenty-four or thirty’ of the Commons were to hold a discussion with a number of magnates, but now ‘lour compaignons de la Commune’ were told to withdraw to the chapter house of Westminster abbey, there to be informed in due course of the discussion. In both 1365 and 1366 the Commons were left together in the painted chamber where, as usual, Parliament had been opened; and in 1368 they were directed to a smaller room in the palace (‘la petite salle’). Five years later, the painted chamber was once more assigned to them, expressly so that they might be near the Lords in the white chamber, in case they should need their advice. Given such a special reason for a meeting of the Commons in the palace, it is hardly surprising that when, in 1376, they were once again told to use the chapter house of the abbey, this was now described in the Parliament roll as ‘lour aunciene Place’ (their former, not necessarily their ancient, place). Since there is some evidence in support and none to the contrary, it looks as if the Commons continued to assemble there until 1395, when they were offered the monks’ refectory as an alternative, and may, perhaps, have chosen it in preference. In 1397, certainly, they met in the refectory; and whenever their place of assembly at Westminster was subsequently noted in a Parliament roll, the refectory, not the chapter house, was allotted them (the last such explicit reference occurring in 1416).
So far as the institutional development of Parliament is concerned, the corporate identity of the Commons was one of the main achievements of the 14th century. In this formative period of the history of the Lower House, shire knights, citizens and burgesses had come to work habitually together. Even so, these different categories (‘gradus’), reminiscent of the earlier organization of Parliament, continued to survive in the terminology of the Parliament rolls. Such formal distinctions reflected, of course, the bases of representation: the local communities of county, city and borough. Indeed, the word ‘Commons’ itself, which is most often used to describe them in the Parliament rolls (in French, ‘Communes’, or Latin, ‘Communitates’) meant not that the Commons were either commoners or the representatives of common (in the sense of plebeian) people, but rather that they represented communities.
Of course, the counties, cities and boroughs thus represented in Parliament were, institutionally and in their traditions and modes of social life, very different. The shires were the chief, and among the oldest surviving, local administrative areas of the kingdom and, having been originally imposed upon it or taken over by the Crown, they conformed to a largely uniform scheme. Each operated through its shire court, and all were now administered for the Crown by identical officials: a sheriff, an escheator, coroners and j.p.s. The towns, on the other hand, having for the most part achieved separate financial and jurisdictional arrangements with the Crown, regulated their internal affairs independently of their shires; and, moreover, they did so through officials and institutions—mayors, bailiffs, borough courts, common councils, merchant guilds and so on—which, being the product in each case of a peculiar historical evolution, varied from place to place. The distinction between counties and towns rested upon even more fundamental differences. The prosperity of the countryside was dependent upon the successful exploitation of the soil, that is upon what the land produced in crops and timber and sustained in flocks and herds. More people lived in the countryside than in the towns, but the latter naturally enjoyed the benefits of a greater concentration of population. This afforded more scope for the specialization of economic function, and the affluence of the towns partly derived from the wider variety of sources of livelihood: skilled craftsmanship (whether or not controlled by guild regulations); trade in shops and markets; provision of taverns and hostelries; availability of commercial facilities (including credit); and, in the larger towns, a plethora of churches and other ecclesiastical establishments, which not only enriched the quality of religious and social life there, but in so doing attracted considerable financial investment, in the form of gifts of property, rents and ready money (alms and testamentary bequests). The economic stability of the rural areas depended upon the gentry as lords of manors and overlords of tenants (both free and unfree), while that of the towns (however oligarchical or unrestricted their constitutions) lay with their merchants, tradesmen and artisans: an apparently basic distinction between the different communities whose parliamentary representatives made up the Lower House.
However, just as countryside and town were, naturally, economically interdependent, so too those who directly controlled the economies of one or the other tended to overlap socially, if only at the edges. A country gentleman might own a house, and perhaps even join a religious guild in a nearby town; a merchant might buy a manor or land within reach of his town, so that he and his family could enjoy at first hand the pleasures and satisfactions of rural life; either of them might marry off children into the other’s family; and a lawyer, who quite probably was himself of gentle birth, country-bred and a landowner, would, in his professional capacity, serve the interests of townsmen as well as those of members of his own class, thus helping to bridge the social divide. The difference in social esteem between those who lived by the sweat of other men’s brows and tradesmen, merchants, or lawyers, who at least earned their own keep, long outlived the Middle Ages. Admittedly, in our period gentry, merchants, and lawyers all shared a common designation: in the view of those who, if only elementarily, sought to define the nature of contemporary society, they were lumped together as ‘mediocres’. Only some of them were ‘middlemen’ in the modern economic sense of the word, but all were of the middling sort, standing far above the common people but well below the great ones of the land. Even so, within the broad band of ‘mediocrity’, the country gentry as such enjoyed a recognized superiority of social status, largely deriving from ancestry and their position as landowners. This was a fact of life, reflected in the higher standing of the shire knights among the Commons in Parliament: having been elected by their fellow gentry and other freemen, they indirectly represented the interests of their class in general.
Yet other qualifications besides landowning all but guaranteed the shire knights a dominant position in the Lower House. As individuals, they not only enjoyed the prestige conferred by gentility, but were mostly either knights or esquires, as well as being armigerous. In a period when involvement in war was almost a necessary condition of a popular and acceptable foreign policy, many of the county representatives, whether knights or esquires by rank, themselves followed the profession of arms, at least for a time. Moreover, far from being small-scale landlords, several owned manors and estates which vied in value and geographical spread with those held by lesser members of the titular nobility. Some of them were even allied by close kinship and by marriage with the peerage; indeed, a few were themselves to enter its ranks. Most of them were important, too, because they were appointed to the provincial and other local administrative offices of the Crown, acting as sheriffs, escheators, coroners, j.p.s, custodians of royal castles and lordships and the like. Many also helped manage the property and serve the interests of the great magnates of their neighbourhood, from whom they sought ‘good lordship’, personal protection and support, sometimes at the expense of legal propriety, and from whom they received the fees and favours due to valuable retainers. It was in this environment of ‘bastard feudalism’ that so many of the shire knights made their bid for personal and family aggrandisement. Involvement in parliamentary service played a more than symbolic part: it counted as an objective in itself, and as a means of achieving other ends. A significant proportion of shire knights, not least the lawyers, had proper parliamentary careers, attending numerous Parliaments; and a few of them, by successive re-elections, did so continuously, sometimes for quite lengthy periods. Such experience, once gained, became itself something of a qualification. Of course, general as well as personal factors helped to determine the part played by the shire knights in the House of Commons. Not only as belonging to the upper social ranks of their communities did they represent the counties, which together provided the basic framework of the provincial administration of the kingdom (while at the same time remaining proudly conscious of their own separate identities), but they represented also the landed interest upon whose successful management of the rural areas the national economy depended. Whether these qualifications were of a personal or general nature, they combined to ensure that the knights would dominate the proceedings of the Lower House, and, indeed, would exercise a greater influence upon the affairs of Parliament as a whole than the more numerous representatives of the urban communities. This state of affairs is confirmed by evidence from a variety of sources, literary as well as official, from chronicles as well as from the rolls of Parliament.
Whereas, when considering the events of particular Parliaments, all the extant chronicles of the time refer to the representatives collectively as ‘the Commons’, some of them occasionally describe the shire knights as being so especially active as virtually to constitute a distinct element. Thomas Walsingham, precentor and historiographer of the abbey of St. Albans, is particularly noteworthy in this respect. In his Chronica Majora, he begins his long relation of the events of the Good Parliament of 1376 by stating that it was the knights (‘milites de comitatibus’) who, by divine inspiration, but after careful discussion, refused to answer Edward III’s demands for a general tax until counselled by the Lords. When, later in the Parliament, John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, attempted to suppress the Commons’ impeachment of William, Lord Latimer, the King’s chamberlain, he himself actually entered a gathering of the knights (‘coetus militum’), so the chronicler says, in an effort to bring this about. Since the duke intended, once the next Parliament had met in January 1377, that it should reject the enactments of its predecessor, one of his first steps was to interfere in elections to the Commons: significantly, according to Walsingham, he was solely concerned with the choice of county representatives. His alleged objective was to have nominees of his own arbitrarily substituted for shire knights of the Good Parliament, thus replacing the men who had been active in the cause of reform; and as a result of his intervention no more than a dozen knights were re-elected.
Although no other contemporary writer mentions so often, or so emphatically, the particular role of the shire knights, such references as do occur elsewhere tend to strengthen the impression left by the St. Albans chronicler. The author of the Anonimalle Chronicle of the abbey of St. Mary of York, who wrote in detail of some episodes of the Good Parliament of 1376 (showing his informant to be fully conversant with parliamentary procedure), mostly refers indiscriminately to the elected Members as ‘les communes’. However, in this account also, the knights are sometimes clearly distinguished from the rest of the Lower House: the chapter house of Westminster abbey was, for example, given up for meetings ‘a les chivalers et communes’; and such speeches there as are briefly reported in the chronicle were made by knights, who went to the lectern to speak. Moreover, when, at the end of the same ten-week-old Parliament, a feast was held to celebrate the dissolution, the knights alone were the hosts, the burgesses being among their guests.
A particularly interesting source of information derives from entries concerning the composition of parliamentary committees appointed to perform specific tasks, upon which Members of the Lower House were required or allowed to serve. Shire knights were at least numerically preponderant. This was so in a Parliament of 1340 when 12 knights, as against six burgesses, joined a committee of lords and royal justices set up to deal with petitions. When, in the Parliament of January 1380, a commission of inquiry into the state of the King’s household and of the royal administration in general was appointed, three shire knights (including the Speaker) were chosen, along with three merchants, of whom only one, however, was an MP at the time. The commission created in January 1398, to complete, with the authority of what proved to be Richard II’s last Parliament, the business left over from the short, final session at Shrewsbury, was comprised of ten lay peers and six shire knights, first among whom was the Speaker, Sir John Bussy. The only parliamentary commissions of which we have notice in the 15th century (and which were far less important than that of 1398-9) were all set up during the long Parliament of 1406. On 3 Apr. (the last day of the first of the Parliament’s three sessions), the Speaker, Sir John Tiptoft, referring to the government’s failure to reach an agreement with the merchants about the safe-keeping of the sea, proposed that the articles of negotiation should be engrossed, and a committee of certain MPs appointed to treat with the King’s Council. Those duly nominated to settle matters included Tiptoft himself and five other knights: given the nature of the business in hand, the omission of parliamentary burgesses is especially noteworthy. Then, on 19 July following (at the close of the second session), in response to a request for the discharge of the two special treasurers for wars appointed in the Coventry Parliament of 1404, the chief baron of the Exchequer and a peer were appointed to view the relevant accounts, and the Commons were allowed to add other auditors from among themselves. Their nominees comprised five shire knights but only one representative from a town, who had, in fact, been returned for the City of London. A third committee of the 1406 Parliament was set up on 22 Dec. (the day of dissolution), its purpose again being to assist at the enactment and engrossment of the Parliament roll; and when the Commons asked the Upper House to propose some of its own members, they themselves submitted the names of the Speaker and nine other shire knights with, in addition, only two townsmen, both of whom were London MPs (including the one previously asked to act as an auditor).
The parliamentary records proper also provide evidence about the composition of deputations sent by the Commons to the Lords, which, although admittedly less complete, points in the same direction. Normally, of course, the Commons communicated with the Upper House through the Speaker, but if, for some reason, a deputation were to take a message without him, it would at least be led by another knight. For example, in November 1423, during Henry VI’s second Parliament, when the Commons wished to thank the duke of Gloucester (the King’s commissary) and the other lords for having given them news of the negotiations for the release of King James I of Scotland, and to ask to be informed about the conclusion of the matter, they sent no more than five delegates, all of whom were knights, one acting as spokesman. This is the only instance of such a proceeding in pre-Tudor Parliament rolls where all the members of the deputation are named. In the few other reports of similar delegations the compiler of the official record was content to supply at most the name of the leader, who was invariably a shire knight. Thus, at Leicester in 1426, Roger Hunt*, one of the Huntingdonshire knights and himself a former Speaker, headed a party sent to complain to the Lords about their dissensions before the Commons had actually elected a Speaker. In November 1455, when Henry VI was said to have relapsed into insanity, the lawyer, William Burley*, a representative for Shropshire, along with ‘a notable nombre’ of the Commons, urged the Lords to re-appoint the duke of York as Protector no less than three times in the space of five days.
Furthermore, there is a strong possibility that the Speaker’s election was invariably announced in the Upper House by one of the shire knights. Before the Tudor period, this individual’s name is given in the Parliament roll only twice, but each time a knight declared the election: in 1427, Richard Baynard*, Member for Essex, himself a former Speaker; and in 1437, (Sir) John Hody*, who was sitting for Somerset.
The high standing of those presenting the Speaker on these later occasions might be taken to imply that, if they had not actually nominated him in the first place, they and their fellow shire knights were bound to have exercised considerable influence on his election. Indeed, the possibility of the Speaker’s having once been chosen by the knights alone cannot be entirely ruled out. In this connexion, it may be recalled that, in alluding to the election of Sir Thomas Hungerford*, a retainer of John of Gaunt, as Speaker in Edward III’s last Parliament, Thomas Walsingham writes as if he had been elected simply by a majority (‘a majori parte’) of the shire knights.
In view of the superior standing of the shire knights, it is hardly surprising that the Speaker, whose primary function was to represent all the Commons in the Upper House, and so personify their corporate unity, was throughout the medieval period chosen exclusively from among the county Members. It was not, in fact, until 1533, during the Reformation Parliament, that a burgess is first know to have been elected to the chair, in the person of Humphrey Wingfield, who was sitting for Great Yarmouth.† as a shire knight when the latter was made a peer in December of that year. If so, he would thus have ceased to sit as a parliamentary burgess long before his election as Speaker.