Northampton

The near complete loss of Northampton’s records in the great fire of 1675 puts its fifteenth-century history beyond satisfactory reconstruction. The peak of the town’s medieval prosperity had probably been reached in the first years of the fourteenth century, and thereafter followed a long but ill-documented period of decline. This may have begun even before the Black Death, for in the 1330s the burgesses complained to the King and council that a depression in the town’s cloth industry had left them unable to pay the fee farm, fixed as early as 1185 at the high figure of £120 p.a. SC8/161/8032; RP, ii. 85-86; VCH Northampton, iii. 30-31. In the period under review here, the burgesses won some relief. On 11 June 1445, in ‘consideration of the burden laid upon [them] by the fee farm’, they secured a royal grant of two potentially valuable privileges: the mayor was thenceforward to serve as the King’s escheator in the town and the community had licence to acquire lands worth £40 p.a. It is a fair surmise that the townsmen had petitioned for these benefits in the Parliament prorogued only six days before, and although they soon lost them to the Acts of Resumption of 1450-1 the grant was renewed in March 1452. CChR, vi. 44-45; Northampton Recs. i. 77-84; CPR, 1446-52, p. 574.

Eight years later the burgesses seem to have exploited the national political crisis to gain further concessions, although here the focus was institutional reform rather than financial concession. In March 1460, when the militant Lancastrian regime was in control of government, they were granted a charter of incorporation, giving the mayor the power of a j.p. in the borough and exempting the townsmen from appointment as tax collectors outside its precincts. On the previous day the vicar of the church of All Saints and the chaplains of Northampton’s various fraternities had been, on their petition, incorporated as a perpetual college with licence ‘to make statutes for good governance and for divine service for the good estate’ of the Lancastrian royal family. This juxtaposition is significant, and there can be little doubt that at this date Northampton was thought of as Lancastrian in sympathy. Indeed, the burgesses secured their charter of incorporation not only to lessen the burden of the fee farm but for ‘good services rendered ... in resisting certain rebels against the King, and of their charges therein’. CChR, vi. 135-6; CPR, 1452-61, p. 601. This implies that the townsmen had sent a contingent to support the Lancastrians at Ludford Bridge in the previous October.

Thereafter, however, the townsmen changed their allegiance. No evidence survives to illuminate their attitude to the great battle fought on 10 July 1460 on the banks of the river Nene on the town’s southern edge, but, if a near-contemporary poem is to be accepted, a contingent from the town under the banner of a white rat was present on the Yorkist side at Towton. Archaeologia, xxix. 347. Such service would explain the burgesses’ ability to win concessions from Edward IV during his visits to Northampton early in the reign. In May 1462 they were granted a £20 reduction in their fee farm for a period of 20 years, and on the following 10 July they had confirmation of their charters. CPR, 1461-7, pp. 187, 246; Northampton Recs. i. 91-93.

Beyond this story of unspectacular institutional development and minor grants of royal patronage, few other events in the town’s history in these years have left a trace on the surviving records. There is evidence, however, of some serious disturbances there in the early 1440s. On 6 July 1442 the King sent letters of privy seal to the mayor, bailiff and 24 ‘notablest burgeyses’ (in other words, the mayor’s council), complaining of ‘divers rumours and congregacions’ in Northampton ‘so fer forth that therfore the common belle of oure said towne was late rongen to grete distourbance of our peuple there’. The authorities were ordered to inquire into the originators of the troubles and to punish them as an example to others. Ten days later, in the guildhall, the mayor’s council devised penalties for those who should breach the secrecy of its deliberations, and it is a reasonable surmise that the two events are linked. Perhaps a dissatisfied faction on the council had complained to the King of municipal misgovernance, but, if so, no evidence survives to illustrate the details. PPC, v. 191; Northampton Recs. ii. 277.

A year later order does not seem to have improved. On 12 July 1443 a group of eight leading townsmen, including three of Northampton’s former MPs, Thomas Boltesham, then mayor, William Rushden and Henry Stone, found mainprise (each for the other) in Chancery to be of good behaviour until the following Michaelmas term. There can be no doubt that this mutual mainprise was related to an action of trespass brought in that law-term against them and one of the borough’s future MPs, William Hegge, by Edmund, Lord Grey of Ruthin. They, however, do not appear to have been the aggressors. On the same day as they had been required to find surety, the royal council instructed Lord Grey to keep the peace towards the townsmen and all those either entering or leaving the town. The point at issue between Northampton and its powerful neighbour is not recorded, but the immediate disappearance of Grey’s suit from the plea rolls implies that the council’s action was effective in bringing the dispute to a close. CCR, 1441-7, p. 102; KB27/730, rot. 22; PPC, v. 305-6.

Returns survive for 17 of the 22 Parliaments which met between 1422 and 1460. The list of the borough’s representatives presents a striking curiosity: none of its MPs was, in these years, elected on more than one occasion, although one of them, Ralph Passenham, had sat earlier, in 1419. So pronounced a pattern can only have been a matter of policy, probably one codified in a lost fiat of local government. This policy would appear to have been inaugurated in about 1400. Earlier in the borough’s parliamentary history multiple returns had been common: Walter de Burgo†, to take the most extreme case, is recorded as representing Northampton on 11 occasions between 1309 and 1332. In the second half of the fourteenth century the number of multiple returns declined, but several men sat for the borough on a handful of occasions. Yet, after the election of John Stotesbury† for the third time in 1391, no one is known to have sat for Northampton more than twice before the mid sixteenth century, and only three other men who sat in the 1380s and 1390s are known to have been elected twice. Thomas Pirie† sat in 1376 and 1388 (Feb.), Nicholas Horncastle† in 1385 and 1395, and William Spriggy† in 1386 and 1393. In this context Passenham’s second election was anomalous: he is the only man known to have sat for Northampton on more than one occasion in the fifteenth century.

The adoption of such a policy implies that individual townsmen were unenthusiastic about parliamentary service; and the policy may have been intended to reconcile this lack of enthusiasm with a corporate desire to exclude outsiders from the borough’s representation. Only if all the leading townsmen shouldered their share of the representative burden could this aim be achieved. Of the 34 men who sat for the borough between 1422 and 1460, only Thomas Compworth was not a townsman, and his return came in 1427 with Passenham. Clearly some exceptional (although unknown) circumstance underlay their election.

The reluctance of leading townsmen to embrace parliamentary representation may have had a financial motive. The town’s unfavourable economic circumstances perhaps meant that its MPs did not receive the prescribed daily rate of 2s. for parliamentary service, but there are no borough accounts against which to test this surmise. These potential financial disadvantages of parliamentary service for an individual MP were not balanced any other advantage. The only evidence that a townsman successfully employed election to Parliament to personal advantage dates from 1429 when John Bosworth, while sitting as an MP, secured a royal grant of the alnage of cloths for sale in his native county and Rutland. To be set against his success, however, is his nomination to the burdensome office of a collector of the tax voted by this Parliament, and the same fate befell John Braunston, while sitting in 1431. It is fair to conclude that none of the MPs was individually influential enough to turn parliamentary service to advantage, and that, within the town, election to Parliament did nothing in itself to enhance status. Rather it was a rite of passage unwillingly undertaken.

The burgesses’s attitude to the office of bailiff seems to have been the same as their attitude to sitting in Parliament. Although the borough records are lost, a complete list of mayors and bailiffs survives for the period under review here in a near-contemporary roll: Northampton Recs. i. 547-59. Its accuracy (save for some misspellings and apparent miss-transcriptions from a lost earlier source) is attested by the incidental contemporary references to the borough officers in the parlty. returns and other sources. Although as many as 26 of the 34 MPs served as bailiff, none of the 26 are known to have occupied the post more than once. John Ilam, bailiff in 1450-1, offers a potential exception if he is to be identified with John Higham, bailiff five years later. In most cases (19 of the 26) that service preceded election to Parliament. In all but one of the seven other cases, election to Parliament followed very soon after the end of a term as bailiff. John Edward and John Makesey were chosen as bailiff in the same year as they sat in Parliament, and the longest gap between the two elections was a mere three years, excluding Passenham for whom it was 12. The majority who held the offices in the reverse order also held them in quick succession. Interestingly, to 16 of these 17 Parliaments, the townsmen returned a former bailiff, and on three occasions (1422, 1435 and 1442), both MPs returned fall into this category. The exception was, as in several other ways, the Parliament of 1427.

In the preceding period, 1386-1421, taken as a whole, the pattern had been rather different. Of the 23 MPs who served as bailiff, as many as 12 did so after sitting in Parliament. The Commons 1386-1421, i. 537, mistakenly gives the figure as 24 rather than 23. The change in the pattern came, however, not in 1422 but some years earlier. In the late fourteenth century former bailiffs were rarely returned to Parliament, but thereafter their return became increasingly common. Indeed, a former bailiff was returned to each of the six Parliaments for which returns survive between 1416 (Mar.) and 1421 (Dec.), and it is a fair speculation that such returns were a matter of conscious policy. It may again be that a lost fiat of local government, dating from about 1415, was its origin.

Twelve of these 26 bailiffs went on to hold the greater office of mayor, and it seems that a more positive attitude prevailed towards this more prestigious and less financially burdensome office. Thomas Hunt served on four occasions between 1456 and 1481; William Meye and William Rushden both served three times; and four others held the office twice. None of these mayors held the office before serving in Parliament and thus no MP was a former mayor. In three cases the two responsibilities came very close together: Meye was elected mayor only four months after sitting in Parliament; and William Syward and Gilbert Lyster were both chosen about 18 months after their parliamentary service. More typically the gap was between five and seven years but could be very much longer: John Baldeswell, MP in 1423, did not become mayor until 1441; and Thomas Knightley waited as many as 27 years.

This is similar to the pattern in the previous period, when eight of Northampton’s MPs served as mayor, all save one of them between two and 19 years after sitting in Parliament. The exception was John Spriggy, who served the first of his five terms as mayor in 1420-1, before being elected to the Parliament of December 1421. His election is almost unique in conforming to the borough ordinance made at the time of the parliamentary election of 1382. This had laid down that one of the MPs should be the previous mayor provided that he had not sat in Parliament before (‘the office of the mayoralty ... being no hindrance’). The fact that this ordinance was disregarded (save in respect of the election in 1382 of Simon Daventry†, mayor in 1380-1, and that of Spriggy nearly 40 years later), is a further indication of the burgesses’ reluctance to sit in Parliament.

There can be little doubt about the ordinance’s failed purpose. Many of those elected as mayor had served as MPs earlier in their careers and were thus exempt from its terms. But some senior townsmen, ready enough to take office as mayor, had successfully resisted election as MP. The ordinance was designed not, as McKisack suggested, to restrict the choice of the electorate, but rather to force these men to share the representative burden while at the same time increasing the standing of the borough’s MPs. Northampton Recs. i. 248-9; M. McKisack, Parlty. Repn. English Bors. 37. It failed. Between the ordinance and the end of the period under review here, 45 men held the mayoralty, and as many as 19 of them do not appear on the list of MPs. No doubt the number would be fewer but for missing returns (as many as 11 out of 60); nevertheless, since 49 of the 81 known MPs were never mayor and on the reasonable assumption that there were a similar proportion of non-mayors among the lost MPs, it is fair to conclude that a significant minority of leading townsmen avoided parliamentary service. Indeed, the trend towards the return of young townsmen with little or no experience of borough administration gathered pace after 1382. The decision of about 1415, if such it was, to insist on the election of a former bailiff was probably a second attempt to arrest this process.

Incidental references are the only guide to the identity of the town’s coroners. Under the charter of 1200 Northampton had been endowed with the unusually large number of four of these officers. Individual terms of office tended to be lengthy. Thomas Braunfeld, for example, held the office for at least ten years, and John Godwin for at least nine. Three other of the 34 MPs are known to have been coroners, namely William Meye, Thomas Boltesham and Richard Wilscotes. This is too small a sample to say where election as coroner came in the cursus honorum of local government, but the office seems to have been dominated by the leading townsmen with a record of service in the town’s administration. None of the five is recorded as holding the post before their elections as MPs, and hence, as for the period 1386-1421, no MP is known to have been selected from the ranks of the former or serving coroners. The names of only six coroners have been discovered for the period 1386-1421: CIMisc. vii. 177; KB27/641, rex rot. 1. Three of them are recorded among the MPs, but none is known to have held the office before election to Parl.

Since Northampton’s parliamentary representation was firmly in the hands of its burgesses, it is not surprising that few of its MPs held office outside the borough. Compworth, the only outsider to sit for the town, was entirely exceptional in having held office as escheator of the county and as a j.p. of the county quorum. Four of the MPs are known to have served as tax collectors in the county, namely Bosworth, Braunston (both of whom, as mentioned above, were appointed to collect the tax voted in the Parliament in which they served), Knightley and Steer. Only the last was appointed before serving as an MP. This is a similar pattern to that which prevailed in the 1386-1421 period, but none of the MPs is known to have been appointed as tax collector after 1434.

Only two of the MPs, John Bosworth and William Rushden, held the office of alnager in the county and neighbouring Rutland, the first appointed while MP and the second soon after his Parliament. This compares with a figure of three for the earlier period (one of whom was Rushden’s father). Since the cloth trade was Northampton’s principal commercial activity, it is slightly curious that townsmen were not more prominent among the county alnagers. Indeed, more than half of Northampton’s MPs were involved with cloth in one capacity or another: one was a clothmaker; three were fullers; three, dyers; six, drapers; and six, mercers. The other MPs came from a wide range of occupations: three were ironmongers; two, bakers; two, vintners; and one each were drawn from the trades of tanner, smith and goldsmith.

None of the MPs were men of any significant wealth or standing outside the town. The richest was probably Thomas Hunt, a draper, who was said, in a petition to the chancellor, to have died leaving goods worth £1,000. C1/106/20. This was almost certainly an exaggeration (as was so often the case in petitions), but that he was distinguished from his fellow townsmen by wealth is implied in his four elections as mayor. At least two other MPs were men of some substance, again if one may judge from the evidence of Chancery petitions: William Meye, mayor on three occasions, was rich enough to endow his sister with a portion of £140 on her marriage to another of the town’s MPs, Henry Stone; and the son of William Hayrofe claimed to have property in Northampton worth £20 p.a. C1/28/157; 97/69-70. At the other extreme was John Church, a fuller, who towards the end of his life was saved from penury by his fellow burgesses. In 1453 they informed the fraternity of the guild of the Holy Trinity in Coventry (which Church had joined in his more prosperous younger days) that his infirmity meant that he now needed its charity. The fraternity responded by awarding him an annual pension of two marks payable by the quarter.. Recs. Guild Holy Trin. Coventry (Dugdale Soc. xix), 47-48.

None of MPs, excepting Compworth, either inherited or purchased significant property interests outside Northampton. Only Hunt appears to have had commercial interests extensive enough to purchase lands in fee outside the town, and he did not do so until after he had represented it in Parliament. The lawyer, Edwin Stannop, may have owed his landholdings at Far Cotton and Hardingstone to purchase, but no record survives to prove this conjecture.

While all the MPs, again excepting Compworth, were burgesses of Northampton, this is not to say that all of them were born there. Only four of the 34 had putative fathers with a traceable role in the government of the town, namely Bertram, Rushden (both of whom appear to have been the sons of former MPs), Tiryngham and Meye. Very little is known of the origins of the other MPs, and it is not surprising to find evidence that some of them were immigrants to the town. Boltesham may have hailed from a family of lesser gentry settled at Kilsby; more speculatively, Knightley may have been related to a more prominent family settled at Fawsley; and Gilbert Lyster may have originated from Banbury. Much more interesting, however, is the evidence that two MPs, William Michell and William Hegge, were not of free birth. In 1442 Michell successfully embarked on collusive litigation as protection against the claim that he was a villein appurtenant to the manor of Watford, about ten miles to the north-west of Northampton; and in the following year Hegge did the same with respect to a claim from the manor of Grimscote, a few miles to the south-west. KB27/725, rots. 7, 31; 730, rot. 53d.

The surviving returns are uninformative about the election process in Northampton. They generally take the form of an indenture between the mayor and two bailiffs, on the one part, and the county sheriff, on the other, witnessing an election made ‘ex communi assensu eiusdem ville’ but not naming the attestors. A variant was a bald certification by the mayor and two bailiffs that, on receipt of the warrant directed to them by the county sheriff, they had caused to be elected two MPs, ‘per assensu tocius communitatis ville’ (for example, in 1429). Only one list of borough attestors survives, and that from an earlier period: on Monday 16 Dec. 1409, in the guildhall (‘Gialdam’), at least 24 townsmen, including the three borough officers, witnessed the election of the borough’s MPs. C219/10/5. Thereafter, however, the county sheriffs no longer troubled to return the list of borough attestors into Chancery, although there can be little doubt that such lists were compiled by the borough officers for each election. The dorse of the 1472 writ refers to an indenture sent by the bailiffs to the county sheriff and returned by the latter into Chancery, but this no longer survives: C219/17/2.

If the franchise was defined, whether in respect of parliamentary elections or of the annual hustings for the mayor and bailiffs, no evidence survives before 1489. In that year, however, an act of Parliament defined the franchise for the latter as the mayor and bailiffs, those who had formerly held those offices, and 48 other ‘of the most wise discrete and best disposed’ men of the town chosen by the mayor and brethren (namely, the former mayors). The avowed purpose of this act was to prevent the recurrence of the disturbances previously occasioned by an excessive participation in such elections. Whether these problems had also applied to parliamentary elections does not appear. Northampton Recs. i. 101-3.

Only in the election of Stannop to the Parliament of 1455, summoned in the wake of the Yorkist victory at the first battle of St. Albans, can the operation of political factors be discerned in determining the result of any of the borough’s elections. Significantly, he did not conform to the pattern established among the borough’s MPs. He was not, as nearly all the others were, a tradesman at the beginning of his career, and thus some special circumstance probably informed his election. Since later evidence identifies him as a Yorkist – he may even have fallen on the Yorkist side at the battle of Northampton – it is likely that he sought election because of his sympathy with that cause.

Northampton’s representation presents some clear and unusual features. Outsiders were, as befitting a county town, generally excluded from its representation, yet this was not because the leading burgesses were enthusiastic parliamentarians. An attempt by the borough authorities in 1382 to oblige the town’s former mayors to assume part of the representative burden met with failure. By the period under review here, part of that burden had been successfully transferred to the body of former bailiffs, and it was they and the younger burgesses who sat for the borough in Parliament, with the proviso that no MP could be obliged to serve more than once.