One of the most important cities in late medieval England, Norwich was a centre for regional commerce, the seat of an episcopal see, an administrative base for the sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk and the venue for elections to Parliament of Norfolk’s knights of the shire. Its walls enclosed nearly a square mile in area, making it topographically nearly as large as London, although its population was about a quarter of that of the capital. There were some 6,000 people living there in 1400 – about 25 per cent of the pre-Black Death figure – but this number grew during the fifteenth century. With at least 11,000 inhabitants by 1520, at that date Norwich was the second most populous city in England. The vast majority of these inhabitants were not freemen and it is likely that the wealthiest citizens, from whom Norwich’s rulers were drawn, never comprised more than one per cent of the city’s householders. There were several paths to citizenship, since it was open to the legitimate sons of freemen, to those who had served there as an apprentice for seven years and to those who paid an entry fine. In addition, the mayor and sheriffs had the customary right to nominate men to the franchise.
Apart from the corporation of the city, the Crown and the Church were important institutions with interests at Norwich. A constant reminder of those of the Crown was the King’s castle there, a prominent local landmark like the city’s cathedral. As a defensive structure, it had lost much of its original raison d’être but it served as a royal prison and a base for the sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk. Like the nearby shire-house, the usual venue for elections of the knights of the shire for Norfolk, it was part of the county and exempt from the jurisdiction of the city.
In the early fourteenth century, Norwich was a centre for the manufacture of leather goods and textiles and the production of worsted cloth. The worsted industry expanded during the fifteenth century when the city also earned a reputation for its painted glass. Great Yarmouth, to which Norwich was linked by river transport, was the principal port for the city’s merchants (important enough for the corporation to send a force of 200 men to Yarmouth’s aid in 1457, when it was threatened by naval attacks), although in the later years of Henry VI’s reign they began increasingly to use Bishop’s Lynn. Yarmouth’s economic decline explains this development. By the mid fifteenth century, its primary shipping routes were to Holland and Zeeland, markets in which merchants from Norwich were facing increasing competition from their counterparts in London. Such competition contributed to Norwich’s own economic problems, as did internal divisions within the city.
One measure of these problems is the wages received by Norwich’s MPs. Before 1422, the corporation assigned both Members a generous 3s. 4d. per day, although in the first four Parliaments of Henry VI’s reign it allowed each of them a daily rate of only 2s. During the late 1420s and 1430s, the city’s parliamentary representatives again received wages at the old rate but thereafter its financial difficulties worsened. The men elected in 1453, William Barley and John Jenney, agreed to forswear their wages altogether, and in the latter years of the reign payments to MPs (reduced to 2s. per day by 1460) sometimes fell into arrears. The period 1440-60 is likely to have witnessed the worst of the city’s financial difficulties. Following the civil disturbances that afflicted Norwich in early 1443, the citizens were obliged to pay a substantial fine of 1,000 marks, a penalty that strained their community’s resources.
The system of civic government as it existed in Norwich during Henry VI’s reign dated from its charter of 1404. This made the city a shire-incorporate, completely outside the jurisdiction of the county of Norfolk, with a mayor and two sheriffs replacing the four bailiffs who had governed it before this date. Following a series of internal disputes between its leading citizens, the 24 ‘prudeshomes’, and the commonalty, a composition drawn up by the influential Norfolk knight, Sir Thomas Erpingham, further refined the constitution of Norwich. Dated 14 Feb. 1415, it set down election procedures and the duties of civic officers. It established 1 May as the annual date for the election of the mayor, who took up office at the end of the month, and 8 Sept. as that for the sheriffs, who served from Michaelmas to Michaelmas. Once a citizen had served as sheriff, he was ineligible to hold the office again. The composition also laid down that elections to the 24 and common council should take place in the fifth week of Lent each year. The 24, who were to come in equal numbers from each of the city’s four leets, were to retain their status for life, even though they had to go through the formal process of annual re-election. The mayor, 24 and the common councillors received the right to nominate various minor officials, although the election of the recorder was to take place in a general assembly of the city. In spite of the composition, there were further disputes. Erpingham brought them to the attention of the King’s Council in 1417, prompting the issue of a new royal charter. This confirmed the charter of 1404, ordered that nobody should serve two terms in the mayoralty within the space of three years and renamed the 24 as aldermen, meaning that from henceforth the city’s leets became known as wards. In 1424 the mayor, sheriffs and aldermen drew up an indenture introducing further regulations. Primarily intended to stop quarrelling among the aldermen, these included an injunction to each of the 24 to give the mayor good counsel, to respect the confidentiality of discussions held among themselves, to lend support to each other and to avoid slander. The adjustments of 1417 and 1424 were minor ones and Erpingham’s composition provided the framework for the government of Norwich during the reign of Henry VI and beyond. In practice, service on the common council was almost a requirement for any citizen who aspired to become an alderman, although only a relatively small proportion of common councillors ever attained that status. Councillors not expected to reach the higher rank often filled the office of chamberlain. One of the main duties of the aldermen and members of the common council was to attend meetings of the city’s assembly (usually held in the guildhall), along with the mayor, sheriffs, common clerk and recorder.
In spite of Erpingham’s composition and subsequent reforms to the system of civic government, the 1430s and 1440s witnessed serious friction between the corporation and the cathedral priory at Norwich and further disputes among the citizens. Disagreements between the city and the priory were nothing new (the first known conflict between them occurred in 1272), but those of Henry VI’s reign were largely the fault of the charter of 1404, because it failed clearly to distinguish the respective legal and administrative powers of the corporation and priory. By 1417, the citizens had challenged the priory’s liberties within the city and its rights over certain hamlets outside the walls. The priory responded by accusing them of encroaching on the rights of the Crown, an offence of which they were found guilty before the escheator of Norfolk and Suffolk, Edmund Oldhall†, in October that year. For a long time the citizens refused to accept the findings of Oldhall’s inquiry but they were obliged to yield in the late 1420s. In December 1429, the mayor and prior sealed an indenture of agreement acknowledging the priory’s rights in the city and hamlets and, just over a year later, the city threw itself on the mercy of the King, who imposed fines on the mayor, sheriffs and other citizens for their recalcitrance.
A few years later, rivalries within Norwich’s ruling elite broke out into the open. During the mayoral election of 1433 Thomas Wetherby, the outgoing mayor and leader of one of the city’s political factions, sought to prolong his control over civic affairs by having his ally, William Grey, elected as his successor. His efforts to influence the nomination process proved unsuccessful, since the ‘commons’ of Norwich, whose role it was to put forward the names of two candidates, refused to select Grey. A double election then followed, Wetherby and a minority of the aldermen choosing Grey and their adversaries electing Richard Purdance†. The bishop of Norwich, William Alnwick, was afterwards able to persuade Wetherby to accept Purdance as mayor, but divisions within the city remained as strong as ever. The disputed election was still an issue in February 1434, when the chancellor and William de la Pole, earl of Suffolk, approved a panel of arbitrators to investigate what had happened. Wetherby declined to co-operate with the arbitrators because they included several of his opponents, and in the following March they removed him from the office of alderman and fined him £100. He then refused to pay the fine and in due course he and several of his supporters, among them the city’s common clerk, John Hawk, were stripped of their citizenship. In March 1437 the earl of Suffolk, acting on behalf of the Crown, came to Norwich to resolve the ‘divysyon and debate’ there. Suffolk ordered the citizens to forget past quarrels and to reinstate Wetherby as an alderman, but Wetherby’s opponents – a majority in the city – deeply resented his settlement and old enmities re-emerged at the mayoral election held a few weeks later. The election degenerated into a rowdy confrontation between Wetherby’s faction on the one hand and his opponents on the other. The only account of what happened is contained in a justices’ certification drawn up by Wetherby and several prominent allies, among them the outgoing mayor, Robert Chaplain, and Thomas Ingham. According to this, Wetherby’s political opponents had assembled a large crowd of rioters to prevent him and his supporters from attending the election. The certifiers further alleged that the mob had assaulted Wetherby, Chaplain and other leading citizens, that Chaplain and the city’s j.p.s had dared not, ‘for dred of ther deth’, arrest the culprits, and that a jury was too terrified to indict them. It is almost certain that the intention of these partisans was to annul the election of John Cambridge (one of Wetherby’s opponents) as mayor, for it was necessary to allege riot to overturn an election, and certification was the legal process used in the case of riot. In July 1437 the King’s Council punished the city by revoking its liberties and appointing John Welles II*, a London alderman of Norwich origin, as the city’s warden.
The late 1430s also witnessed a renewal of the city’s quarrel with the priory and the emergence of disputes between the citizens and other ecclesiastical institutions. The priory had the upper hand in one important respect, since it could refer to the indenture of 1429 in any legal proceedings. It was perhaps this fact that persuaded the corporation to seek a new agreement with the priory in October 1441, when the mayor, sheriffs and aldermen bound themselves to submit all their quarrels with ecclesiastical opponents to the arbitration of the earl of Suffolk. The earl’s award, dated the following 23 June, proved extremely unpalatable to the city. Suffolk decided that the citizens should tear down their recently erected water-mills on the river Wensum, since these were prejudicial to the interests of the prior and the abbot of St. Benet of Hulme, and that the prior should enjoy reasonable jurisdictional rights in Norwich. The citizens procrastinated, just as they had done after Edmund Oldhall’s inquisition of 1417, and they had still not accepted the award when the corporation met on 25 Jan. 1443 to discuss whether to seal it. Passions ran high at this assembly, which ended in chaos after a group of citizens seized the common seal to forestall any such ratification and marched upon the priory. The disturbances which followed (subsequently known as ‘Gladman’s Insurrection’ after one John Gladman, who was said to have ridden through the city in the guise of a ‘king’, encouraging the inhabitants to riot), lasted until John Mowbray, duke of Norfolk, was able to enter the city, restore peace and arrest the ringleaders a week or more later. These ringleaders included Robert Toppe, William Ashwell and other aldermen, but certain prominent citizens were not involved, since among those assaulted by the rioters were Thomas Wetherby (regarded as an ally of the priory) and his associate, Thomas Ingham. In the wake of the disorder, Wetherby seized the opportunity to act against those of his enemies implicated in it. He and the abbot of St. Benet charged them before the King and his Council with insurrection; as a result, William Henstead received a summons to London where he suffered several weeks’ imprisonment. According to one hostile account, Wetherby and his allies took control of the city while Henstead was in prison, and implemented Suffolk’s unpopular award of June 1442. Wetherby was also blamed for the appointment of Thomas del Rowe*, who acted as the city’s attorney in early March 1443, when a commission of oyer and terminer charged with investigating the recent disturbances arrived at Norwich. Del Rowe quickly abandoned any plea in defence (deliberately so according to Wetherby’s opponents) and sought the King’s mercy. On 14 Mar. the Crown again seized the liberties of Norwich and appointed Sir John Clifton as the city’s governor. It also imposed a collective fine of 3,000 marks (subsequently reduced to 1,000) on the citizens and ordered individual rioters to pay fines totalling some £1,500. The liberties remained in the King’s hands until late 1447, a sign that the government reacted far more strongly to the disturbances than it had to the relatively minor fracas of 1437.
The citizens received a formal pardon for their offences in a new charter of 17 Mar. 1452. Like that of 1404, it failed to define the city’s jurisdictional boundaries, a curious omission, given that the lack of such a definition (not finally made until 1556) had caused so much trouble between the city and the priory. Yet the loss of their liberties had taught the citizens a lesson and Norwich was a far quieter place in the second half of the fifteenth century. Another contribution to peace was a settlement negotiated by the city’s recorder, William Yelverton*. Drawn up ten days after the new charter, this became known as ‘Yelverton’s Mediation’. It stipulated that the outgoing mayor should serve a year as the alderman of Norwich’s guild of St. George, that the aldermen of the city should become members of the guild and that those on the city’s common council should enjoy that privilege if they desired it. It also merged the guild of the Annunciation (also known as ‘Le Bachery’) into that of St. George. Members of both guilds had taken active roles in the disturbances of the past and uniting them with the corporate body of the city was an effective way of bringing these institutions under control.
Elections to Parliament did not cause the same trouble as those for the mayoralty, an office of much greater significance for the citizens than the position of MP. Unlike many other constituencies, the name of every MP for Norwich in Henry VI’s reign, 23 in all, has survived. Seventeen election indentures for the city during this period still exist (those for the Parliaments of 1431, 1437, 1439, 1445 and 1459 do not, but other sources supply the names of the men who sat for the city in those assemblies).
By no means all the MPs for Norwich in the three and a half decades before 1422 were natives of the city and the same holds true for the 23 as a group. Only Alderford, Dunston, Gerard and Eaton were definitely born at Norwich or its immediate vicinity although the chances are that the parents of Barley, Chaplain, Cutler, Henstead and Moneslee were from the city. Cook and Drolle were certainly originally from elsewhere in East Anglia, as perhaps were Ingham and Wetherby. Unlike many smaller urban communities, however, the city never elected any complete outsiders to Parliament, even though it is possible that John Dam and John Jenney, both non-native lawyers, did not actually reside there when returned to Parliament. Without exception, all of the known MPs for Norwich in the years 1386-1421 were freemen of Norwich at the time of their elections, and the same is the case with regard to the great majority, if not all, of the 23. One possible exception is Jenney. Although he had forged close ties with the city some years before representing it in the Parliament of 1453, there is no evidence of his formal admission as a freeman in its surviving records. These ties included Jenney’s marriage to one of Thomas Wetherby’s daughters, but evidence of family traditions of parliamentary service among the 23 in general is even scantier than it is for their predecessors from the earlier period.
In spite of his family connexion with Norwich, Alderford was a lawyer rather than a typical citizen, as were Dam, Eaton and Jenney and, very probably, Gerard. Lawyers commonly counted as members of the gentry, and Gerard came to enjoy recognition as an ‘esquire’, as did Alderford, who made a good marriage to the daughter of Sir Ralph Shelton†. Of those of the 23 who pursued a trade, the majority were mercers (the most prestigious craft in the city),
Several of the other MPs also possessed lands outside the city, mainly within close proximity of Norwich although Chyttok and Drolle had holdings in Suffolk. As far as property within Norwich is concerned, there is a little information about actual places of residence. Alderford owned a house called ‘le Stonhalle’, Brown lived in ‘The Greyhound’ in the parish of St. Stephen’s, Toppe resided at Dragon Hall (a hall house fronting the river Wensum), and William Barley lived at ‘Strangers Hall’ near the church of St. John Maddermarket. Testimony to their owners’ wealth, Strangers Hall and Dragon Hall stand to this day. The fortunate survival of returns for the subsidy of 1451 provides useful evidence of the incomes from land of just over half of the MPs. Even if underestimates, these assessments are at least a good indication of their relative standings in landed terms towards the end of the period under review. Robert Toppe and Wetherby’s widow, Margaret, top the list. According to his assessment, Toppe derived an income of £20 p.a. from his lands, although after his death there were claims that the yearly income from his Norwich holdings alone amounted to twice that sum. The assessment for Margaret, who enjoyed a life interest in the bulk of her late husband’s estates, found that she possessed lands worth the same amount: presumably, Wetherby must have owned lands worth at least that amount as early as 1430, when he was first distrained for knighthood. According to the same returns, Dam received an annual income of £13 from his lands and fees, which other records show included his retainer of £5 p.a. as recorder of Norwich. The respective assessments of the other MPs who contributed to the subsidy of 1451 are £14 (Draper), £10 (Gerard), £6 (Ashwell, Drolle and Henstead), £5 (Brown, Ingham and Segryme), £4 (Barley) and £2 (Cutler). There also survives a valuation of Ingham’s lands for the purposes of a subsidy of the early 1430s. According to this, he then possessed real property worth £6 p.a., £1 more than his assessment of 1451, but it is likely that he had settled some of his holdings on his son and heir by the later date. Of course, assessments of landed income provide only a very incomplete picture of the MPs’ total wealth, and most of them must have been far wealthier than the large majority of the citizens and other inhabitants of the city. With the possible exception of Richard Deverose, all held a place in the upper echelons of civic society at the time of their first or only elections to Parliament. There is other, more anecdotal evidence that the 23 as a group were rich men in local terms. Among those MPs for whom there are no such assessments, Moneslee was of sufficient standing to apply to the Papal Curia for the privilege of keeping a portable altar in his household several years before he first entered the Commons. He also possessed the wherewithal to lend significant sums of money to the Crown. Dunston was likewise already a citizen of considerable substance when he began his parliamentary career. He was active in the trade with the Low Countries before the end of the fourteenth century, both importing and exporting goods through Great Yarmouth. To take another example, the lawyer John Alderford and his wife could afford in the late 1420s to donate 220 marks to the college of St. Mary in the Fields.
In common with almost all of the 23, Alderford first came to hold municipal office before sitting for Norwich in the Commons: as in the period 1386-1421, the electorate was in the practice of returning MPs with some experience of civic administration.
As one might expect, the four MPs who were certainly lawyers received appointments from the Crown to various ad hoc commissions in Norwich or elsewhere in East Anglia and eastern England. A clear majority of the other MPs also served on such commissions, mainly but not exclusively within the city, and in several cases as commissioners to distribute allowances for the taxes that the Parliaments in which they had sat had granted to the King. Alderford, a member of several such commissions in Norfolk and Suffolk as well as Norwich, both before and during the period under review, also served a term as escheator of those counties in the latter part of Henry V’s reign. Wetherby was another of those placed on commissions outside the city, in his case for Great Yarmouth during the late 1430s. These commissions were not his only association with the port in an official capacity, since just over a year before his election to his second Parliament in 1437 he took office as a customs collector there, an office he still held throughout his time as a Member of that assembly. It seems likely that his Yarmouth appointments were an attempt by the Crown partially to divert his attention away from Norwich and its factional infighting.
On one occasion while quarrelling with his enemies in the corporation of the city, the disruptive Wetherby sought the protection of the duke of Norfolk. The duke was not the only nobleman with whom he had dealings, for he had become a retainer of the influential Ralph, Lord Cromwell, within a year of Henry VI’s accession if not earlier. At some stage before 1422, Wetherby had also entered the service of Sir John Clifton, the head of one of the wealthiest gentry families in East Anglia. Such associations can only have made a more formidable adversary for his opponents. Ingham, Wetherby’s political ally and fellow MP in the Parliament of 1429, likewise had a connexion with an important lord, in that he served Cromwell’s friend and kinsman by marriage, Sir William Phelip, Lord Bardolf, as a feoffee. The lawyers among the 23 also had dealings with magnates, whether lay or ecclesiastical, in the course of their professional careers. Both Alderford and Eaton served the abbots of St. Benet of Hulme, the former as a proxy in several Parliaments and the latter as steward, in spite of the periodic quarrels between the city and that religious house. Sometimes the corporation itself sought the ‘good lordship’ of powerful outsiders. These included Thomas Beaufort, duke of Exeter, in the mid 1420s; Phelip, to whom it sent gifts of bread, wine, cherries and other provisions in the mid 1430s; and the King’s uncle, Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, given 40 marks when he visited the city in 1440.
On other occasions, however, the citizens did not appreciate the intervention of outsiders in civic affairs. Following the death of William de la Pole (by then duke of Suffolk) in 1450, for example, several city juries presented that both he and his retainers had oppressed the inhabitants of Norwich for many years.
As in the three and a half decades prior to 1422, the city recognized the advantages of continuity in parliamentary representation,
The guildhall was the venue for the city’s parliamentary elections. Every election for which there is an extant return took place on a Monday and – where there are also surviving returns for Norfolk to the same Parliament – never on the same day as (and usually after) that for the county’s knights of the shire. The parties to the indentures of return were the city’s sheriffs on the one hand and the two coroners, the mayor and various named citizens on the other. The number of attestors varied from election to election: apart from the sheriffs, there were only 15 in 1422, as many as 34 in both 1432 and 1460 and nearly 60 in 1455. There is no evidence of a contest on the latter occasion, but the factional differences arising from local politics must have played a part at some elections. It was, for example, probably no coincidence that both of the men returned to the Parliament of 1439, the first to meet after the troubles of 1437, were opponents of Thomas Wetherby. Most of the indentures identify the coroners and mayor (but not the aldermen) by their rank but reveal nothing about the actual election process. It would appear that they were no more than a formal endorsement of a prior election (in which the mayor, sheriffs and aldermen played no part) in the city’s ‘common assembly’.
A majority of the 23 themselves participated as attestors in parliamentary elections for the city. Apart from the four definite lawyers, only Wetherby certainly witnessed returns of knights of the shire for Norfolk, testimony to his interests and connexions in the wider county. As with their counterparts from most other constituencies, there is no evidence of the activities of the MPs once they had entered Parliament. It is nevertheless likely that Norwich and its representatives had a hand in at least three Commons’ petitions of immediate interest, two of 1442 and 1445 concerning the weaving of worsted cloth in the city and the wider county of Norfolk, and a complaint of 1455 about the allegedly excessive number of attorneys practising in Norfolk, Suffolk and Norwich.