Lincolnshire

Lincolnshire, at nearly 1,700,000 acres, is the second largest of England’s ancient counties, ranking between its much larger neighbour Yorkshire and the slightly smaller Devon. Despite its size, it has a certain geographical integrity. To the east and north it is bounded by the North Sea and the river Humber; to the west by the river Trent (with the inhospitable Isle of Axholme, in the county’s north-west, the only part of it lying to the west of that river); and to the south by the river Welland and a large area of fenland. These physical boundaries break down only in the county’s south-west where it borders Leicestershire and Rutland. J.S. Mackman, ‘Lincs. Gentry’ (York Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1999), 26-27. Within Lincolnshire there were significant geographical and administrative boundaries. It was anciently and unequally divided into three parts. Comfortably the largest of these divisions was Lindsey, the northern region delineated by the rivers Trent, Humber and Witham and covering a little less than three-fifths of the county. The southern region was divided between Kesteven in the west and Holland in the east, the former about twice the size of the latter. Each of these parts, although subject to a single sheriff and escheator, had their own bench of j.p.s. and their own coroners, and this both reflected and reinforced a tendency of landholders to identify more with the part of the county in which they resided than with Lincolnshire as a whole. C. Holmes, Seventeenth-Cent. Lincs. 84; J.S. Roskell, ‘Parlty. Representation of Lincs.’, in Parl. and Politics, i. 58-59; Mackman, 32. The low-lying flatlands of Holland appear to have had a particularly clear regional identity. The lack of good bridging points along the Witham between Lincoln and Boston isolated it from Lindsey; and its rich agricultural lands made it the wealthiest region of the county and gave it a distinct social structure with a large number of prosperous farmers but few wealthy gentry. G. Platts, Land and People in Med. Lincs. 3; Mackman, 38; G.A.J. Hodgett, Tudor Lincs. 4-5.

In the period under review here four peers had their principal residences in Lincolnshire. Ralph, Lord Cromwell, who succeeded to his family estates in 1417, had his main residence at Tattershall in Lindsey. The profits of a successful career, which included long service as treasurer of England between 1433 and 1443, enabled him greatly to extend his estates in Lincolnshire and its neighbouring counties. By his death in 1456 his lands in the county had a clear annual value of over £900. SC11/822, mm. 3-6. Less wealthy but of similar influence was John, Lord (and, from 1440, Viscount) Beaumont, whose main residence was at Folkingham in Kesteven, some 20 miles to the south-west of Tattershall. He made a career at Court, serving successively as constable of England and great chamberlain from 1445 until his death in 1460, and also as chamberlain to Queen Margaret in the 1450s. CP, ii. 62; Oxf. DNB, ‘Beaumont, John’. The other two peers were of less substance. Robert, Lord Willoughby, lived at Eresby in Lindsey, some 14 miles north-east of Tatttershall, succeeded to his family lands in 1409 and died in 1452. He spent most of his career campaigning in France, and was thus largely absent from the county until the late 1430s or, if he fulfilled his intention of going on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, until the early 1440s. CP, xii (2), 663-6; Oxf. DNB, ‘Willoughby, Robert’ . Like Willoughby, Lionel, Lord Welles, who lived at Belleau (about ten miles north of Eresby), and came of age in 1427, spent significant periods abroad. He was lieutenant of Ireland from 1438 to 1442 and deputy to the lieutenant of Calais from 1451 to 1455. His second marriage in 1447 to Margaret Beauchamp of Bletsoe, the widow of John Beaufort, duke of Somerset (d.1444), enhanced both his wealth and political importance, and it was under her brother-in-law, Edmund Beaufort, the new duke, that he served at Calais. CP, xii (2), 443-4; Oxf. DNB, ‘Welles, Leo’.

Although Cromwell and Beaumont were very important men, none of the county’s peers were of the first rank, and all, for one reason or another, were absent from Lincolnshire for lengthy periods. This may explain why they appear to have exerted only an intermittent influence over the county’s parliamentary representation. Another explanation may lie in the good relations that persisted between them. As a group they were very closely connected. Willoughby was Beaumont’s uncle; in 1435 his daughter married Welles’s son and heir-apparent (so that on his death in 1452 the baronies of Willoughby and Welles became united); and in the late 1440s he married, as his second wife, Cromwell’s niece, Maud Stanhope. CP, ii. 62; xii (2), 446, 665-6. In CP the marriage uniting Willoughby and Welles is misdated to the late 1440s. In fact, it took place on 26 Sept. 1435: Mackman, 158n. To these ties of kinship were added many of mutual co-operation. Willoughby, for example, named Beaumont as one of the executors of his will, and in 1456 Beaumont named Welles as one of his. Lincoln Diocese Docs. (EETS, cxlix), 61; E211/281. It has been said that in the troubles occasioned by the violent career of William Tailboys in the late 1440s, Beaumont supported him against the three other Lincs. magnates: Mackman, 120-4; J. Watts, Hen. VI and the Politics of Kingship, 220. This is a misinterpretation. Tailboys appealed to Beaumont for assistance in 1448, but Beaumont responded by acting as conciliator not partisan, and he did not thereby compromise his relationship with Cromwell and the others: R.L. Friedrichs, ‘Ralph, Lord Cromwell’ (Columbia Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1974), 243-4. This distinct lack of rivalry meant that the local hustings were never a focus of competition and contention between them.

Other potential influences on Lincolnshire’s representation were in similar partial abeyance during Henry VI’s reign. The bishops of Lincoln had, by this period, become ‘practically inactive in local political affairs’. Mackman, 40. Of greater significance and much more surprising was the declining influence of the Crown. The duchy of Lancaster honour of Bolingbroke, centred on Henry IV’s birthplace the castle of Bolingbroke – a few miles from the Willoughby residence at Eresby – yielded an income of over £1,000 and was the largest single estate in the county. This explains why, under John of Gaunt and Henry IV, the house of Lancaster exercised a significant influence over the county’s representation, but that influence was reduced under Henry VI. In 1415 the honour was put in feoffment for the performance of Henry V’s will, and there it remained until the early 1440s. Thereafter, the honour’s influence in the county was mediated through Beaumont, who was appointed its steward in 1440. Ibid. 36-37; R. Somerville, Duchy, i. 576. The other royal lands in the county, those of the honour of Richmond, were in the hands of John, duke of Bedford, until his death in 1435, and then, again in 1440, Beaumont was appointed steward of the main part of the estate, the ‘Richmond fee’ in the town of Boston. CIPM, xxiv. 545; CPR, 1436-41, p. 401. Two other of the principal towns of the county, those of Grantham and Stamford in Kesteven, were the property of Richard, duke of York, but his broad interests, landed, military and political, meant that he took little interests in Lincolnshire affairs, at least until the end of the period under review here. Mackman, 166-8.

The size of Lincolnshire also militated against magnate influence over its elections. In terms of taxable wealth under the terms of the subsidy of 1450-1 it ranked third behind Yorkshire and Devon of the 29 counties for which returns survive, and thus, not surprisingly, it was home to a significant number of families with the landed income necessary to aspire to a seat in Parliament. A recent survey of the county has enumerated as many as 30 families the heads of which assumed knighthood at some point during the Lancastrian period, and a further 100 families headed by esquires. Ibid. 51, 58-59, 279-80; S.J. Payling, ‘County Parlty. Elections’, Parlty. Hist. xviii. 258. The consequent competition must have diminished the scope for the exertion of external influences over representation. Only in the politically-contentious 1450s did the county’s elections fall under them.

The identity of the MPs for Lincolnshire is known for 20 of the 22 Parliaments which met between 1422 and 1460, and election returns survive for 18 of these. The names of the MPs for the Parls. of 1439 and 1445 are known from the tax comms: CFR, xvii. 142, 149, 326, 332. At least 26 men were elected during this period, and as many of 17 of them are recorded as representing the county only once, a strikingly high percentage. Four of these 17 also represented other constituencies. No MP is recorded as sitting for the county on more than five occasions, although four of the MPs – Sir Thomas Cumberworth, Sir Richard Hansard, Thomas Meres and Walter Tailboys – sat precisely five times. This is probably no more than a coincidence, but the possibility cannot be discounted that it was product of an informal rule, limiting any MP to five returns to prevent one seat becoming monopolized, as Sir John Bussy† had monopolized one in the 1390s. The parliamentary careers of Meres and Tailboys are particularly interesting here, for both sat in five Parliaments over a relatively brief period and then lived long enough to have been elected to others.

Between them the 26 MPs were returned for the county on a total of 49 occasions, that is in fewer than two Parliaments per MP. This represents a decline in representative continuity compared with the period 1386-1421, when the average number of Parliaments per MP was just under three. Nevertheless, the real break in continuity came not in 1422 but rather in the early 1440s. Until that date the parliamentary careers of two of those elected five times, Meres and Walter Tailboys, preserved a relatively high degree of continuity, and between 1422 and 1445 there were as many as seven examples of the re-election of one of the MPs from the Parliament immediately preceding. But the last of these occurred in 1445, and thereafter there was a very marked change. No one who sat for the county in 1445 or before is known to have sat for it again. It is impossible to explain this very marked break in terms of demographic factors, since several of those who sat for the county before the mid 1440s were available for election throughout the 1450s. A more attractive explanation is that, as discussed below, the highly-charged political circumstances of the late Lancastrian period placed a new premium on political factors in determining who was returned.

Another change in the pattern of the county’s representation concerned the election of MPs who had previously represented another constituency. No one elected for the county between 1386 and 1429 is known to have done so. Two, John Rochford† and Sir Robert Hilton†, went on to represent other counties after sitting for Lincs., and Sir John Bussy was returned for both Lincs. and Rutland to the Parl. of 1391: The Commons 1386-1421, i. 478. As Henry VI’s reign progressed, however, the election of such men became reasonably common. Of the 22 MPs who sat for Lincolnshire from 1431 to 1460, five had previously been elected for other constituencies. Two had represented one of county’s boroughs: the wealthy merchant, Hamon Sutton, had sat for his native Lincoln in seven Parliaments before election for the county in 1431; and William Grimsby, elected in 1459, had twice sat for Grimsby. Another, Thomas Blount, elected in 1460 after acquiring Lincolnshire lands by marriage, had represented Derby in 1453. The other two were former MPs for counties, namely Geoffrey Paynell for Rutland, and Sir John Byron for his native Lancashire. Between them, these five men are known to have represented other constituencies in 13 Parliaments before sitting for Lincolnshire, and, in addition, William Grimsby went on to represent Grimsby in 1472 and another of the MPs, Robert Constable (Grimsby’s fellow in the Parliament of 1459 and the only other of the county’s MPs known to have represented another constituency), went on to represent Yorkshire in 1478.

A further change in the county’s representation was a very marked decline in the number of seats taken by belted knights. To 12 of the 26 Parliaments for which returns survive from 1386 to 1421, Lincolnshire returned two knights; and to only two Parliaments was no knight returned. The dominance of men of knightly rank continued until the mid 1420s, but from 1427 to 1460 a total of only three knights were returned, taking only three of the 32 seats. This change is too abrupt to be explained, in anything more than part, by the diminution in knightly numbers that was a general phenomenon throughout the Lancastrian period. Rather it betokens a decline in the proportion of the greater gentry of the county who took a place in Parliament.

One thing, however, did not change between the 1386-1421 period and that under review here, namely the preponderance among the MPs of men from Lindsey, the largest of the county’s three divisions. The monopoly of one seat by Sir John Bussy of Hougham in Kesteven from 1388 to 1397 distorts the figures for these years, but during the reigns of the first two Lancastrian Kings the dominance of Lindsey men is clear. They filled 19 of the county’s 30 known parliamentary seats, accounting for nine of its 17 MPs. This pattern became even more pronounced in the reign of Henry VI, with Lindsey men providing 17 out of its 26 MPs and filling 27 out of 40 seats. Indeed, between 1422 and 1460 there were only two occasions on which neither of the county’s Members came from Lindsey, and as many as nine when both did.

Although the preponderance of Lindsey men was a constant through the Lancastrian period (and is also strikingly apparent in the county’s representation in the seventeenth century), the balance of representation between the other two parts of the county, Holland and Kesteven, changed. From 1399 to 1421 Holland men filled 10 of the 30 seats and provided as many as seven of the 17 MPs, with Sir Godfrey Hilton† as the sole Kesteven representative. In the reign of Henry VI the position was reversed. Kesteven accounted for 11 of the 40 seats and seven of the 26 MPs, I have counted Meres among the Kesteven MPs. He had residences at Aubourn (in Kesteven) and Kirton-in-Holland, but appears to have resided at the former during his parlty. career (between 1429 and 1442). Appointed to the Kesteven bench in 1430, he was not appointed a j.p. in Holland until 1448. and by contrast Holland provided only two MPs, Sir Robert Roos and Richard Welby, both of whom were elected only once. While Lindsey’s dominance is partly explained by the high proportion of the leading county families resident there, there is no obvious explanation for the declining role of Holland men in the county’s representation. Yet it was probably something more than accidental, for, as discussed below, there can be no doubt that regional factors played a part in determining the results of individual elections.

Of the 26 MPs, 13 served at least one term as sheriff of the county. This excludes Newport, who was appointed but refused to act. It was thus not uncommon for Lincolnshire to be represented by one of its former sheriffs, although, as in the case of continuity of representation, different situations prevailed either side of 1445. Of the 28 seats from 1422 to 1445 as many as 14 were taken by former sheriffs, and both seats were so filled in the Parliaments of 1425, 1431 and 1439; but of the 12 seats in the remainder of the period, only in the Parliament of 1449 (Feb.) was the county represented by a former sheriff. Byron, when he sat for the county in 1447, had held the office in Lancs. but not Lincs. While a high proportion of the MPs held the shrievalty, a yet greater proportion served as j.p. because each of the three parts of the county had its own bench. As many as 19 of the 26 were appointed at some point in their careers as j.p.s in at least one of those parts. Of these 19, as many as 12 had been appointed before their first election to Parliament, and it is thus not surprising that 20 of the 40 seats were filled by serving Lincolnshire j.p.s. Again, however, there is a distinction drawn between the earlier and later parts of Henry VI’s reign. Of the 28 seats in the Parliaments of 1422-45, as many as 17 were taken by j.p.s. and in five Parliaments, including four successive ones from 1437 to 1445, both seats were. By contrast, j.p.s took only three of the 12 seats from 1447 to 1460. Not surprisingly, holders of the least important of the major offices of local administration, that of escheator, were less well represented among the MPs. Only five of the 26 held this post, but, since four of them served before they first represented the county in Parliament, in the early years of the period the county was not infrequently represented by one of its former escheators. They took nine seats between 1423 and 1442, with both seats being taken by former escheators in the Parliament of 1439. Further, Meres was elected in 1429 as the serving escheator. After 1442, a former escheator was returned only once, when Grimsby was elected in 1459.

There was an occasional correspondence between parliamentary service and appointment to office. On three occasions in the period under review here, the Crown chose its sheriff from those who had sat in the Parliament immediately preceding the annual November appointments, namely John Pygot in 1432, Meres in 1437 and Sir Mauncer Marmyon in 1448, and, just after the end of the period, Blount was pricked in 1461 after sitting in the 1460 Parliament. In addition, Meres was nominated to the bench for the first time when an MP in the Parliament of 1429 and as escheator for the second when serving in that of 1433. These instances, however, are two few to imply cause and effect, and, if any MP used his parliamentary service to lobby for administrative office, it was Meres alone.

The Lincolnshire MPs of the period 1386-1421 enjoyed, as a group, ‘a degree of prosperity which many of their parliamentary colleagues had cause to envy’. The Commons 1386-1421, i. 479. The more complete evidence available for the income of the representatives of Henry VI’s reign supports this conclusion, but it also shows that, in the second part of the period under review here, men of relatively modest means were not infrequently returned. Four of the 26 MPs were, at the time of their returns, men of exceptional wealth and richer than any of those who had represented the county earlier in the century. William Tailboys, due to his family’s acquisition of the Umfraville of Kyme lands in 1437, had an income in the region of £500 p.a.; and Humphrey Bourgchier, at the time of his election in 1460, held, as husband of one of the coheiresses of Ralph, Lord Cromwell, estates worth about £400 p.a. Of similar wealth was Constable, who was not only the head of one of the principal gentry families of the East Riding but, in 1451, inherited the extensive Lincolnshire properties of his great-uncle, Sir Thomas Cumberworth; and Sir John Gra, who, when he sat for the county in 1422, had an annual income of over £300, largely derived from his wife’s Swillington inheritance.

To these men, whose wealth would have singled them out from others in the Commons, must be added a further seven who enjoyed an income of over £100 p.a., sufficient to number them among the most prosperous of that body. The annual income of five of these is provided by the tax returns of 1436: Roos at £165 6s. 8d.; Cumberworth £160; Walter Tailboys £159 0s. 8 ¾d.; Sir William Tirwhit £130; and Sutton £105. One other MP, not assessed in 1436, enjoyed a comparable income: Byron, who held lands in Lancashire, Lincolnshire and three other counties, probably received annual revenues well in excess of £100. A second group of ten MPs had lesser incomes that were still sufficient to make them liable for distraint of knighthood. Several of the Lincolnshire MPs who fall into this category were assessed in 1436. The wealthiest were Meres and Welby, both assessed at 100 marks p.a., and Pygot at £60 (he was also heir to further lands assessed at £28). Below them were Paynell assessed at £45; and Marmyon, Patrick Skipwith and Robert Sheffeld, each at £40. To them must be added Richard Waterton, who, although only assessed at 40 marks p.a., had by the time of his return inherited lands in right in his wife that were at least as valuable as those he already held; Blount, who when returned in 1460 held by marriage the lands of a former MP, Sir Thomas Hawley†; and Hansard, whose widow and eldest son were assessed at a total of £72 p.a. in 1436.

It is a little surprising that so many men from this second rank of gentry should be returned in place of men better qualified by wealth to represent the county. Of the 11 landholders assessed at £100 or more in the Lincolnshire tax returns, five are not recorded as having sat in Parliament. Philip Tilney, Sir John Willoughby, Sir John Bussy, John Haytefeld and Richard Pinchbeck. A sixth, Sir Godfrey Hilton, had sat for the county in May 1421. But if the exclusion of a significant number of the county’s major landholders is surprising, far more so is the return of six men whose income was less than that demanded by the statute of 1445. The return of two of these can be explained in terms of family connexions. Although not wealthy themselves they were closely related to men who were. John Tailboys, assessed at 40 marks p.a. in 1436, was the younger brother of Walter Tailboys, and John Neville, assessed at only £20 p.a. and that on lands he held in right of his wife, stood heir apparent to an estate valued at £81 p.a. The return of the other four, however, can only be explained in political terms, and it is significant that all four were elected in the contentious national political climate of the 1450s. Grimsby, elected to the Lancastrian Parliament of 1459, held in his own right lands worth no more than a few pounds a year, and he owed his return to his place in the Household (although it was partly justified by the income he drew from office and the modest estate he had recently acquired jure uxoris). Thomas Fitzwilliam was assessed at only £10 p.a. in 1436; and his return in 1453 was probably due to a combination of his connexions with the royal household and the local patronage of Lord Cromwell. The other two stand out even more starkly from their fellows. Fitzwilliam’s colleague, John Truthall, assessed at only £9 p.a., was probably a Cornishman by birth, and owed his position in his adopted county entirely to his lord, Viscount Beaumont. John Newport was also not a Lincolnshire man by birth and he owed his lands in the county to his wife, a widow of the Hawleys of Girsby. He made for himself a controversial career in Grimsby politics and his return for the county in 1450 is extremely puzzling.

None the less, although some of Lincolnshire’s MPs were men of attenuated means, all appear to have had property in the county at the time of their elections. Indeed, all but six of them also held lands elsewhere at some point in their parliamentary careers in places as distant and varied as Northumberland and Berkshire. The six who had lands confined to the county were Blount, Fitzwilliam, Newport, Skipwith, John Tailboys and Welby. If any conclusion can be drawn from the distribution of these estates, it is that, as far as the county was represented by its MPs, it had stronger connexions to the north and west than to the south. As many as 13 of the MPs had property in Yorkshire and six in Nottinghamshire, compared with only nine in the five counties – Leicestershire, Rutland, Northamptonshire, Cambridgeshire and Norfolk – to the south.

With respect to the age of the MPs, it was rare for anyone over 50 to be elected, although two such men, Byron and Marmyon, were elected in 1447, another peculiar aspect of this singular return. As a result, few parliamentary careers were cut short by death. Indeed, as many as ten of the 26 MPs survived for more than 20 years after their last recorded return, and only six died within five years of that return. Similarly, only six died within 15 years of first sitting (one of these, Bourgchier, died in battle, and another, Waterton, may have done so). These figures provide a striking contrast with the equivalent figures for the period 1377-1421. Then as many as 16 of the 32 men who sat for the county died within 15 years of their first election, and 12 within five years of their last. Roskell, 56. There can thus be little doubt that the MPs of Henry VI’s reign were, as a group, younger than their predecessors.

The declining fortunes of the English in France in Henry VI’s reign meant that fewer of the MPs pursued military careers, however brief, than had been the case in the period 1386-1421. The most distinguished soldier who sat for the county after 1422 was Tirwhit, but he had begun his parliamentary career under Henry V and did not continue to serve abroad after that King’s death. Aside from Tirwhit, four other MPs are recorded as having been present at Agincourt, namely Gra and Roos (who sat together in the Parliament of 1422), John Tailboys and Cumberworth (although he is a slightly doubtful case). Moreover, of these five only Gra, who served on the Calais expedition of 1436, is known to have seen military service after Henry V’s death. Just two other MPs are to be numbered with Gra: Pygot, who may have fought in France in the last years of Henry V’s reign, probably also took part in the 1436 expedition, and Marmyon, who served under John Stourton II*, Lord Stourton, at Rysbank in 1450.

The descent into civil war in the 1450s meant that it was more common for our MPs to experience military action at home than in France. The MPs in the Yorkist Parliament of 1460, Bourgchier and Blount, were both partisans of that cause. The former (the duke of York’s nephew) is known to have fought for York at Northampton and the second battle of St. Albans, and although the latter’s military activity is not documented, his Yorkist credentials were impeccable. Both men were substantial beneficiaries of Edward IV’s patronage, and Blount was the first Lincolnshire sheriff of the new reign. Constable, sheriff of neighbouring Yorkshire at the same time, is another of our MPs who can, rather more equivocally than in the case of the other two, be described as a Yorkist. Although a servant of the Percys and an MP in the notorious Coventry Parliament, he fought for Edward IV in the northern campaign of 1462-3 and was another beneficiary of his patronage. Significantly, however, these three men, although they held lands in the county, originated from outside its borders, and there is probably particular significance to be found in the return of two outsiders in 1460. This implies that the house of York lacked support among the leading native gentry. In his study of Lincs., Mackman identifies only two Yorkists among the leading gentry of the county, namely Sir Henry Retford and Richard Hansard (the MP’s gds.), both killed at the battle of Wakefield, together with Sir William Skipwith, who abandoned the Yorkist cause in 1459: Mackman, 166-8.

It is certainly easier to find Lincolnshire men who took up arms on behalf of Lancaster. Most notable among these are Henry VI’s Household esquire, William Grimsby, who, attainted in 1461, spent most of the 1460s in exile and fought at the battle of Tewkesbury, only abandoning the Lancastrian cause after that defeat; and William Tailboys, who was knighted at the second battle of St. Albans, went on to fight at Towton, and was captured and executed by the Yorkists in July 1464. To these notable Lancastrians is probably to be added Waterton, who may have fallen at Towton in the retinue of Lionel, Lord Welles. Moreover, two other of our MPs, Fitzwilliam and Newport, were later to be implicated in the Lincolnshire rising of March 1470, as were the sons of Meres and Truthall. That those Lincolnshire men who committed themselves to one side or the other in the dynastic struggle should have chosen the Lancastrians is to be explained in terms of the loyalties of the two leading baronial families of the shire, Beaumont and Welles. The polarization the commitment of these families introduced into the political affairs of the county may have meant that fewer of its MPs were able to avoid active commitment in the struggle than was the case in many other places.

With so many Lincolnshire families qualified by wealth to represent their shire in Parliament, one would not expect to find a significant degree of family tradition in parliamentary service. Only four of the 28 families who provided the county’s MPs between 1377 and 1421 had supplied any before 1377, while descendants in the direct male line of barely one in four of these families sat for the county after 1421. Roskell, 55. Comparative figures for our period show a greater degree of family tradition: of the 22 families from which our MPs were drawn, probably as many as 18 had provided an MP earlier, although only a minority for Lincolnshire, while direct descendants in the male line of nine of our MPs sat after 1460, again not always for the county. Given the fragility of male lines in late medieval England, these figures suggest a significant degree of family continuity in parliamentary representation and imply that this continuity became more pronounced as the fifteenth century progressed.

This continuity did not, however, preclude the election of men whose origin lay outside the county. Although 18 of the 26 MPs came from well-established Lincolnshire families, seven of the remaining eight were imports who owed their lands in the county either to their grandmothers (as in the case of Constable), mothers (Byron and Gra) or wives (Bourgchier, Blount, Neville and Newport). Anomalously, the Cornishman Truthall owed his place in the county entirely to baronial patronage.

The number of substantial gentry resident in the county explains why comparatively few of its seats were taken by men whose qualifications for election lay in a legal training rather than land. Only three such men – Sheffeld of Lincoln’s Inn, Welby of Gray’s Inn and Meres – were returned in Henry VI’s reign, although, as they took eight seats between them, lawyers were better represented among the county’s MPs than they had been in the 1386-1421 period.

The importance of regional factors in determining Lincolnshire’s representation is made clear by an analysis of attestors to the elections in terms of place of residence. For the number of attestors from each part of the county at each election: Payling, 253. The analysis was made possible by Alan Rogers’ biographical index of Lincs. attestors: Lincs. Archit. and Arch. Soc. iii. 41-79; iv. 33-55; v. 47-58; vi. 67-81. Three elections stand out as worthy of particular notice in this regard. On 6 Oct. 1427 two Lindsey men were returned in an indenture attested by the exceptionally high number of 119 electors, about 90 per cent of whom came from Lindsey. Very different was the geographical compostion of the county court which, on 31 Mar. 1432, returned two men from Kesteven. Nearly 90 per cent of the attestors were from that part of the county, a statistic made the more remarkable when one considers that only on two other occasions, on both of which a Kesteven man (Meres) was returned, were any more than a handful of Kesteven attestors present at any election. Equally interesting is the indenture of 5 Oct. 1450 which attested the return of one Member from Lindsey and, exceptionally, one from Holland. The electors were equally divided between these two parts of the county with only two coming from the unrepresented Kesteven. These three returns leave no doubt that there was a very close correlation between electors and elected. At no Lincolnshire election in which two Lindsey men were returned was there a significant number of attestors from the other two parts of the shire. Indeed, of the 255 attestors to the four elections between 1423 and 1427, when two Lindsey men were elected on each occasion, only a paltry 18 can be identified as coming from Kesteven or Holland.

These statistics are open to more than one interpretation. If the attestors to an election were drawn overwhelmingly from one part of the county, this might indicate either that the only candidates were from that part or merely that the successful ones were. If the first, then a further conclusion follows, namely that attendance at the county court on election day was determined by either a widely-diffused knowledge of the identity of the candidates, or else that those present were brought to the county court by, or came in the interest of, those candidates. On this interpretation, the large number of attestors named in the indenture for 1427 suggests a contest, but one which involved only candidates from Lindsey. If the second, then the attestors named reflect not the general attendance at the county court but only those who supported those returned.

These statistics also raise the intriguing question of whether the preponderance of electors from one part of the county when two MPs from that part were elected reflects some sort of community feeling within the individual parts of the county, or merely shows that, in any election, the bulk of the electors would be drawn from the neighbours of the successful or only candidates. A map of the residences of the electors from 1427 and 1432 gives some support to the first explanation in that the electors were drawn from throughout Lindsey in 1427 and throughout Kesteven in 1432, and not just from the vicinities of the homes of those elected. Payling, 254. The evidence of the indentures thus gives some support for the idea that within ‘the community of the county were the communities of its three regions’. Roskell, 58.

It is another curiosity of Lincolnshire’s indentures that the leading gentry appear to have absented themselves from the county’s election to a greater degree than in most shires, a reflection perhaps of the county’s size and the resulting inconvenience of travelling to the county court on the part of those who lived a long way from Lincoln. In the 18 surviving returns for the reign of Henry VI, knights are named as attestors on only six occasions. It is probably significant that they appear in five of the six indentures which list 50 or more attestors, an indication perhaps that they only came to the election when a contest was in the offing. Since, however, no more than three knights (of perhaps a dozen resident in the county at any one time) are ever named, it is clear that even a contest would call out only a relatively small proportion of the county elite.

Just as the overlap between the electors and the county’s belted knights was slight, so too was that between the electors and elected. Of the 26 MPs only 12 are named as attestors in the surviving indentures, compared, for example, with 20 out of 23 and 18 out of 21 in neighbouring Nottinghamshire and Northamptonshire respectively. Of these 12, most appear no more than twice. Exceptional is John Tailboys, who attested 11 elections between 1425 and 1453, heading the list of attestors on seven occasions, and it may be that he was one of the county’s coroners during these years for generally only coroners are found as attestors so frequently. Four other MPs attested more than two returns: Fitzwilliam, Sutton (both of whom appear six times), Meres and Waterton (each four times). Sutton’s appearances are readily explained by his residence in Lincoln, but Fitzwilliam lived some 40 miles distant on the coast at Mablethorpe.

It is occasionally possible to discern why a particular individual should have been elected to a particular Parliament. In the Parliament of 1429 Walter Tailboys presented a petition against Sir John Keighley in the course of their dispute over the manor of Theddlethorpe, and it was no doubt this dispute that prompted his candidature both in respect of this Parliament and perhaps also the previous one. Similarly, it seems likely that Paynell sought a seat in 1432 to forward his claim as heir male to the Paynell patrimony against the heir general. Further, there can be no doubt that Byron, whose interests in the county were secondary to his more significant interests in Lancashire, sought election in 1447 because he was under threat from charges of malfeasance laid against him as sheriff of Lancashire. His tenure of that office disqualified him from legally seeking election there, and he probably owed his Lincolnshire seat to the reluctance of better-qualified candidates to seek a place in a Parliament that promised to be divisive.

No doubt better evidence would reveal similar personal motives, but it is more important to discern those instances when the identity of the MPs was determined by ties of service to Crown and baronage. Several of the MPs had close ties to the Crown. Two were particularly close to Henry VI: Cumberworth was one of the young King’s knights; and Grimsby, as a Household esquire, was one of his personal attendants during his period of mental collapse in the mid 1450s. Others were more peripherally attached to the Household: Blount, Neville and William Tailboys are named on the surviving lists of Household esquires; Fitzwilliam is occasionally styled ‘King’s esquire’; and Sutton was, late in his career, a King’s serjeant. In the case of Sutton, who did not enter royal service until after his last Parliament, and Blount, who was returned as a supporter of York rather than Lancaster, their royal service was unrelated to their parliamentary careers. Both Cumberworth and Tailboys, although returned as royal servants, were among the most important men in the county and well able to command election in their own right, and there is no evidence that they sought election to their Parliaments to gratify their royal master. However, the elections of the other three, none of whom were members of the county elite, are to be explained, at least in part, by their service to the Crown. It is difficult to see why Neville should have been elected to the Parliament of February 1449 but for his place in the Household; and, given the unusually high proportion of royal servants elected to the Parliament of 1453, it is likely that the election of Fitzwilliam was related to his status as a royal esquire (although he seems not to have had a place in the Household). In Grimsby’s case, it can be said unequivocally that he would not have been returned to the strongly-partisan Lancastrian Parliament of 1459 but for his place about the King.

A similar anlaysis in respect of the connexions between the MPs and peers reveals a similar picture. Most had baronial connexions of one sort or another, but only a minority of these determined the course of their parliamentary careers. Chief among those that did was Truthall’s close association with Viscount Beaumont, without which he would not have been elected to the Parliament of 1453. Beaumont, as a prominent courtier, was no doubt anxious to have his own men in an assembly that marked the recovery of the Court’s fortunes after the duke of Suffolk’s fall. John Tailboys was one of the handful of men in the inner circle of Cromwell’s affinity; and his election to the Parliament of 1439 is to be seen as a function of this service, for it was in this Parliament that Sir John Gra petitioned against Lord Ralph’s unlawful detention of the manor of Multon Hall. It is also probable that Waterton was elected to the Parliament of February 1449 as a servant of Lord Welles, but, as remarked above, it appears that the county’s resident magnates exercised only an intermittment influence on its representation.

At two elections, the one at the beginning of the period and the other at the end, a connexion with a great peer from outside the county appears to have influenced the county’s representation. Sir Robert Roos was returned to the Parliament of 1422 as one of the principal annuitants of Humphrey, duke of Gloucester; and Bourgchier and Blount were elected to the Yorkist Parliament of 1460 as servants of the duke of York.

Lincolnshire’s MPs formed a diffuse group. In part this was because of the contrasting pattern of its representation between the first and second half of the period under review here. After the mid 1440s the county began to return men from below the ranks of its leading gentry as political division at the centre came to place a new premium on political factors in determining who was returned. It is noteworthy that all four of those who had less than the income required to qualify them for a seat, namely Newport, Truthall, Fitzwilliam and Grimsby, were elected in the 1450s. It is also striking that, of the ten men known to have represented the county between 1447 and 1460, nine are recorded as doing so only once. Exceptional political circumstances thus tended to both depress social standing of MPs as a body and diminish the degree of continuity in the county’s representation.

Before the mid 1440s a very different patterm had prevailed, one that was more representative of what had gone before. Then there appears to have been competition for seats among a relatively large class of landowners qualified by wealth to represent their native county, and there may have an informal rule restricting any MP to five returns.