Oxford

The history of Oxford in the later Middle Ages is one of decline, even though it was still by far the biggest and most important town in the middle Thames valley and the seat of the oldest university in the realm. According to one estimate, there were some 3,500 townsmen in 1377; according to another, the population of Oxford might not have exceeded 3,000 in the early 1500s. Whatever the true figures, the municipal authorities were regularly to complain about depopulation in the fifteenth century. Excluded from these estimates were scholars and the university’s non-academic employees and dependents. The growth of the university meant that its members had come to comprise a greater proportion of Oxford’s total population than they did before the later medieval period, although they also suffered a fall in numbers after the mid fifteenth century. Hist. Univ. Oxford, iii. ed. McConica, 71; VCH Oxon. iii. 16-17; iv. 15.

The borough’s oldest surviving charter, dated 1155, confirmed the burgesses’ existing rights and liberties, which were enhanced in 1199 when the Crown granted them the farm of their town for £63 5d. p.a. Shortly after the accession of Henry VI, Oxford secured a confirmation of its charter from Henry IV, itself a renewal of previous confirmations of its great charter of 1327. It received another charter in 1453, but, again, this was just another recital and confirmation of earlier charters. The Commons 1386-1421, i. 564; R. Letters to Oxf. ed. Ogle, 35-40, 74-75, 93-95, 106-11. The town also enjoyed the privilege of sending some of its burgesses to assist at coronation feasts, a service which a group of them performed at that of Henry VI in 1429. Oxford’s location in the Thames valley, particularly its proximity to the royal manor of Woodstock, ensured for it more frequent contact with the King and the royal household than many other boroughs. The King is known to have visited the town in September 1438, in February 1439 (to witness a demonstration of the use of Greek fire by a group of German master gunners) and again in October 1451. A few months after the last of these visits, the burgesses received a letter from Richard, duke of York, which came close to inciting rebellion, but they demonstrated their loyalty to the Lancastrian Crown by promptly forwarding it to the King’s Council. Oxford appears to have stayed clear of the political upheavals of Henry VI’s reign, although there was some kind of ‘insurrection’ in the town in early 1461, just before York’s eldest son seized the throne. During the disturbances, members of an academic hall attacked the Yorkist John Radcliffe but it is impossible to tell whether the assault had any political connotations. B.P. Wolffe, Hen. VI, 254, 362, 369; E.W. Hulme, ‘German Wild-fire Experiments at Oxford A.D. 1439’, Bodl. Quarterly Rec. vi. 197-8; PPC, vi. 90-92; VCH Oxon. iv. 21.

Formerly founded upon manufacturing and commerce, by the fifteenth century the economy of Oxford largely depended on the university, the primary consumer of the goods and services provided by the townsmen. One sign of this fundamental change of emphasis is the decline of its weavers’ guild: the guild comprised just two members by July 1439, when it had to admit fullers to its ranks to ensure its survival. VCH Oxon. iv. 45, 47; Hist. Univ. Oxford, iii. 73; CPR, 1436-41, p. 347. The development of the university benefited those townsmen who provided it with goods and services but it was irrelevant as far as municipal finances were concerned, since its scholars and employees were exempt from parliamentary tenths. By the middle of Henry VI’s reign, the borough authorities were vigorously complaining about depopulation and alleging that the poverty of the town had made its assessment for a tenth, just under £92, and its annual fee farm, by then £58 5d., insupportable. Their complaints enjoyed some success, for they gained the support of Thomas Fettiplace* and Richard Restwold*, the knights of the shire for Oxfordshire in the Parliament of 1439-40, and in May 1440 the assessment for tenths was reduced to just over £80. Munimenta Civitatis Oxonie (Oxf. Historical Soc. lxxi), 207. It is wrongly stated in VCH Oxon. iv. 43 that the concession of 1440 related to the town’s fee farm rather than its assessment for subsidies. Two years later, the burgesses petitioned the Crown for a reduction of the fee farm. They claimed that townsmen – as opposed to members of the university – occupied barely one third of Oxford, and that the sources from which the farm was derived (rents, tolls, the profits of borough courts and the like) were yielding barely £20 p.a. The petition was a joint one, presented in conjunction with Oriel College, a royal foundation, which was likewise pleading poverty. It asked the King to sanction an arrangement by which the town would pay part of the farm, £25 p.a., to Oriel in exchange for decayed property, supposedly worth £30 p.a., which the college could no longer afford to maintain. The Crown granted the petition by letters patent of 5 May 1442, but the scheme, which probably proved of little real benefit to the town, was cancelled eight years later. Between then and 1537, when it was reduced to £54, the farm remained at the former rate of £58 5d. VCH Oxon. iv. 42, 52, 53; R. Letters to Oxf. 96-99; Munimenta Civitatis Oxonie, p. xxxix. The calendared version of the letters of May 1442 (CPR, 1441-6, p. 82) mistakenly refers to the fee farm as comprising £40 p.a. Depopulation also featured in a petition Oxford submitted to the Parliament of November 1449. Through it, the townsmen sought an exemption from a statute of 1406 restricting apprenticeships to the children of 20s. freeholders, on the grounds that it had created a shortage of tradesmen in their once prosperous and thriving town, which was now ‘desolate for the more parte’. This was not the first time they had sought such an exemption, for which they had also petitioned during the Parliament of 1429. The new attempt likewise failed, as did another petition about the same matter they submitted to the Parliament of 1455. PROME, x. 374, 415-16; Davies, 146; Munimenta Civitatis Oxonie, p. xxxix.

The burgesses of Oxford already enjoyed important privileges when they first acquired the farm of the town at the end of the twelfth century. By then Oxford possessed a guild merchant (of which they were all members) and a mayor, and the following century saw the development of its later medieval governing structure of a mayor, two bailiffs, four aldermen and a council. Prospective burgesses gained admission to the freedom of the town by joining the guild, which also included ‘foreign’ members residing outside Oxford, sometimes in other counties. Entry to the guild was open to the sons of burgesses, to those who had served a seven-year apprenticeship and to those who had paid an entry fine. At mayoral elections, held every Michaelmas, there were just two candidates, both nominated by the retiring mayor and his council, a system preserving the oligarchic nature of the town’s government. From the mid fourteenth century onwards, the candidates were always aldermen, making that office a sine qua non for prospective mayors. Following his election by the ‘community of burgesses’, the new mayor travelled immediately to London where he was formally admitted to office at the Exchequer, a long-established ritual testifying to the town’s political importance under the Anglo-Saxon and Norman kings. The elections of the other officers occurred in early October, after the incoming mayor had returned from London, although by the end of the fifteenth century the selection of the bailiffs occurred at the same time as the mayor. In practice, aldermen usually served for life, and the annual election of these officers was little more than a formal ritual. The bailiffs were generally younger men whose duties including collecting and delivering the fee farm, inspecting the markets and maintaining law and order. They presided over a weekly court, the hustings, as distinct from the mayor’s court, which also sat on a weekly basis. The most junior of the town’s main officers were the two chamberlains, whose duty it was to collect the town’s rents and its income from the entry fines paid by entering the guild. Serving as a chamberlain was an essential first step for a career in the municipal hierarchy, since ordinarily a burgess would hold that office before becoming a bailiff. For those bailiffs who did not become aldermen there were other opportunities for remaining involved in local administration. Former bailiffs dominated the town council and their ranks supplied the town’s four annually elected surveyors of nuisances. The council, known as the mayor’s council by the mid 1460s, was distinct from the group of 24 burgesses created by a municipal ordinance of 1448, a body which appears to have developed into a ‘common council’. The ordinance of 1448 was also noteworthy for condemning the excessive and expensive feasting occurring at the elections of chamberlains and aldermen. As far as the office of chamberlain is concerned, it would appear that there was keen competition for it between ambitious young burgesses seeking to join the municipal hierarchy. With regard to the aldermen, presumably the ordinance was referring to the filling of vacancies caused by the death of an incumbent rather than to the formal re-election of existing aldermen. The Commons 1386-1421, i. 564-5; VCH Oxon. iv. 49, 58-63; Munimenta Civitatis Oxonie, pp. xxxi, 211; Recs. Med. Oxf. ed. Salter, 44.

In spite of the town’s well-developed administrative structure, its officials did not enjoy complete control at Oxford since the university possessed extensive jurisdictional rights of its own. Inevitably, there were conflicts, notwithstanding the many commercial ties between the two sides, and these often ended to the disadvantage of the townsmen. Most notably, they incurred the blame for the riot of St. Scholastica’s Day 1355, following which the university gained a new charter and extensive extra privileges. Attempts by the chancellor of the university, Thomas Chace, to usurp what remained of the corporation’s jurisdiction over the town’s markets and to prevent it from collecting stallage provoked the first major dispute of Henry VI’s reign. During this costly dispute of 1428-32, the university sought the support of the duke of Bedford, the earl of Warwick and various bishops; the town that of Cardinal Beaufort. During the accounting year 1429-30, the chamberlains collected an aid of £12 6s. 8d. from their fellow townsmen in aid of the town’s legal costs against the university, although this was insufficient to cover the expenses, which amounted to £21 17s. 7d. No fewer than 80 townsmen rode to London in connexion with the quarrel in this period, probably to present a petition. The burgesses also went to the trouble of consulting Domesday Book, an exercise costing 20s. ½d., and of returning their mayor Thomas Coventre to the successive Parliaments of 1429 and 1431. The eventual outcome of the dispute, victory for the town, owed much to Coventre’s diligence. The Commons 1386-1421, i. 566; VCH Oxon. iii. 10-11; Epistolae Academicae Oxon. i (Oxf. Historical Soc. xxxv), 42-43. A second major dispute between the two sides came to a head some 30 years later. This did not end so favourably for the townsmen, who made several important concessions when the ‘diverse disssencyons and contraversyes’ were resolved in February 1459. As recorded in an indenture drawn up on the 23rd of the month, there were three main points at issue. These were the university’s right to deal with any of its members arrested by the town’s authorities on suspicion of felony or treason, a privilege it enjoyed by grant of Henry IV; its claim to try all pleas involving one of its own; and its right to punish townsmen for assaults and other offences committed on its premises. With regard to the first of these points, the mayor and burgesses were unable to gainsay a royal privilege, although the university did agree that goods and chattels forfeited by guilty scholars should go towards the town’s fee farm. As for the second, they were likewise obliged to acknowledge that all members of the university, whether scholars or non-academics, were exempt from the jurisdiction of the town, although the university agreed that its members should render account to the bailiffs for any open merchandizing they pursued there. Finally, it was recognized that the chancellor should try breaches of the peace where one of the parties was a member of the university, and the town cases where both parties were townsmen or laity from outside Oxford, but only if the town’s officers made the initial arrest. If the arresting officer was from the university, jurisdiction belonged to the chancellor, although any suit brought by a party injured in such an affray was to be determinable before the mayor and bailiffs. Epistolae Academicae Oxon. ii (Oxf. Historical Soc. xxxvi), 343.

The mayor at the time of the agreement of 1459, Robert Wood, is one of 22 men known to have sat for Oxford in Parliament during Henry VI’s reign. The loss of the borough’s returns to the Parliaments of 1439, 1445 and 1455 means that the names of those who represented it in those assemblies have not survived. As a result, any analysis of Oxford’s parliamentary representation in this period has necessarily to rely on incomplete evidence. It is not impossible that Oxford had as many as 28 MPs in this period, although it is likely that some of the unknown Members were from the group of 22.

In common with their counterparts in the three and a half decades preceding 1422, not all of the MPs were natives of the town or even permanent residents there and, as in the earlier period, the parliamentary representation of Oxford did not generally run in families. The Commons 1386-1421, i. 567. However, members of the Dagvile and Wythigg families (of whom Thomas Dagvile was the son of a fourteenth-century MP for Oxford) provided MPs for six of the Parliaments of Henry VI’s reign, and Oliver Urry was the son-in-law of another of the 22, William Newman. Even though the Dagviles and Wythiggs were among the town’s leading families, it is unlikely that Oxford was dominated by local dynasties at the end of the Middle Ages. It is worth noting that none of its wealthiest burgesses assessed for taxation in 1524 bore the same surname as any of the MPs of Henry VI’s reign. D.M. Sturdy, ‘Topography of Med. Oxf.’ (Oxf. Univ. B.Litt. thesis, 1965), ii. 83-85. Of the 22, William Brampton, John Fitzaleyn and John Estbury were originally from outside Oxford, as perhaps were Newman, Thomas Swan, Robert Spragat and Urry. Throughout his life, Brampton maintained a connexion with his native Burford in the Oxfordshire Cotswolds, and he chose to be buried there rather than at Oxford. By contrast, Thomas and William Dagvile were definitely natives of Oxford, a category that almost certainly included Richard and Thomas Wythigg, Thomas Bailey and, possibly, Robert Wood.

While Brampton owed his occupation as a wool merchant to his connexion with Burford, a centre for that trade, Thomas Coventre is the only real example of a merchant of the sort who once dominated the municipal oligarchy. Reflecting the changed economic base of Oxford, most of the MPs derived their livelihoods from the service trades of which the university was the main customer, although it is possible that Fitzaleyn, Bailey and Skyres were lawyers. Contemporaries recognized both Fitzaleyn and Skyres as ‘gentlemen’, although four of the more typical burgesses, Coventre, William Dagvile, Newman and Swan, likewise enjoyed that status. In local terms at least, most of them were undoubtedly wealthy; Brampton, for example, died a very rich man. The only information as to income relates to William Herberfeld and Thomas Wilde. According to their assessments for the subsidy of 1436, they respectively held lands worth £10 and £5 p.a. but there is no evidence for incomes (almost certainly far greater) that they derived from their business activities. Several of the other MPs were landholders as well. At the time of their elections, for example, Fitzaleyn owned real property in north Oxfordshire and Estbury held lands in the right of his wife in Oxfordshire, Berkshire and Wiltshire. Furthermore, the Dagviles possessed holdings at Abingdon in Berkshire and Thomas Wythigg at Barton to the east of Oxford, and it is likely that John Mitchell had interests in west Oxfordshire.

Although nearly all of Oxford’s medieval archives have disappeared, other sources reveal the names of almost all the medieval mayors and bailiffs. First, the extensive notes that the seventeenth-century antiquarians Brian Twyne and Anthony Wood made from the archives have survived. Secondly, there are the records of the university and its constituent colleges and local institutions like Osney abbey, the largest landowner in Oxford. Thirdly, the records of the town’s parishes and of central government are also extremely useful. Except for the obscure Members of 1459, John Kennington and Reynold Skyres, all of the 22 served in the administration of the borough, so presenting a very similar picture to the period 1386-1421, when only one of the known MPs for Oxford did not exercise municipal office. Ibid. Each of the 20 other Members from the period under review served as bailiffs of Oxford and 11 of them became mayor. All of those who attained the mayoralty held the office for two or more terms. The list of aldermen is far less complete, but it supplies the names of most of those who held the position in Henry VI’s reign, including 12 of the MPs. The evidence for the office of chamberlain is far scantier. Only four of the 22 definitely served as such, although it is likely that most, if not all, of the bailiffs were previously chamberlains, given that the latter position was a first step for a career in the administration of the town. But it is possible that Fitzaleyn, who rose extremely rapidly through the town’s hierarchy in a short space of time, was never a chamberlain. One of the MPs, Urry, is atypical in as much as he ended up serving in the relatively lowly position of mayor’s serjeant or mace-bearer, perhaps after encountering financial misfortune.

In the three and a half decades before 1422, a burgess’s initial election to Parliament generally occurred only after he had served as a bailiff and before he had become an alderman. The Commons 1386-1421, i. 567. During the period under review, by contrast, most of those of the MPs who became aldermen attained the rank before beginning their parliamentary careers. Otherwise, Parliament was – as in the earlier period – generally the preserve of the older, more established burgesses, those who had already embarked on a career in municipal administration. Each of the four known chamberlains among the 22 held that office before entering the Commons for the first time, as did the great majority of the bailiffs. The mayoralty presents a different picture, since eight of the 11 mayors among the MPs had already entered the Commons when initially taking up that office. The eight included Wood, a Member of the Parliament of 1453 when he began the first of his six consecutive terms as mayor. In the period 1386-1421 it was rare for a serving bailiff or mayor to gain election to Parliament, Ibid. but it was more common in Henry VI’s reign for holders of these offices to combine them with a seat in Parliament. Estbury and Newman were contemporaneously bailiffs and MPs (as had been Coventre in Henry IV’s reign) and Wood was not the only Member to sit in Parliament while mayor. Bailey, Coventre and Thomas Dagvile all did so within the period under review and, later, William Dagvile was mayor throughout his time as an MP in the Parliament of 1467. Whether the increase in elections to Parliament of serving officers of the borough arose from a growing reluctance of the burgesses of Oxford in general to enter the Commons, it is impossible to say.

Offices by appointment of the borough were not the only positions of responsibility that burgesses might exercise. As a matter of course, the Crown appointed mayors of Oxford to the commission of the peace for the town, and at least four of the 22 (Thomas Dagvile, William Offord, Spragat and Robert Walford) served it as a coroner there, although only Spragat did so while a sitting MP. It also placed Bailey, Coventre, William Dagvile, Herberfeld, Offord, Spragat and Wood on ad hoc commissions, but none of them save Spragat received an appointment to one of these bodies before entering Parliament and only Coventre was a commissioner in the wider county of Oxfordshire as well. Of the six MPs who served in the lowlier position of a tax collector in the town or county, most did so before embarking on their parliamentary careers. At least one of the 22, Fitzaleyn, found employment as a verderer in the royal forests of Stowood and Shotover to the east of Oxford – as probably did Bailey – but it is unclear whether he held that office when elected to the Parliament of 1450.

At least ten of the MPs sat in more than one Parliament, but there is no evidence that any of them ever represented another constituency. Coventre was exceptional in that he was returned no fewer than 16 times, although Offord, Wilde and Brampton were each elected to the Commons on four occasions and both Thomas Dagvile and Newman on three. Coventre, Offord and Brampton first entered Parliament before 1422, as early as in the reign of Henry IV in the case of Coventre. Only William Dagvile certainly sat for Oxford after the end of Henry VI’s first reign but there are large gaps in the evidence for the town’s representation in the later fifteenth century. During the first decade of the reign, Oxford always returned at least one burgess with prior parliamentary experience and in four of the seven elections held in this period (those for the assemblies of 1422, 1425, 1426 and 1431) both of the men returned had previously sat in the Commons. Thereafter, there was certainly only one Parliament, that of 1435, in which neither MP was a newcomer. The missing returns of 1439, 1445 and 1455 notwithstanding, it would appear that less seasoned parliamentarians increasingly came to represent Oxford as the reign progressed. Neither the hugely experienced Coventre, nor the three next most experienced Members, Offord, Wilde or Brampton, were returned to the Commons after the mid 1430s, and (as far as the evidence goes) none of the ten MPs who sat in the Parliaments of 1433, 1437, February and November 1449 and 1459 had sat before. It is impossible to say with certainty whether this trend was due to an increasing reluctance among members of the municipal hierarchy to enter the Commons. Nevertheless, the obscurity of Kennington and Skyres, the men elected to the Parliament of 1459, might suggest that the more established residents of the town had no desire to sit in such a partisan and controversial assembly.

Oxford was among a group of parliamentary boroughs that held their elections away from the shire court and afterwards notified the sheriff of the result. M. McKisack, Parlty. Repn. English Bors. 58. All but one of the surviving election indentures from the first half of Henry VI’s reign, that of 1435, bear the names of the mayor, bailiffs, several aldermen and other burgesses. Usually there were a dozen such attestors, although the indenture for 1426 lists 24 names and those for 1433 and 1442 list 28 and 23 respectively. Possibly, elections for the latter three Parliaments had involved a contest or some other element of controversy and it was felt necessary to have a greater degree of validation than usual. The indenture of 1435 simply declares that the mayor, bailiffs and ‘whole community’, all unnamed, had chosen the MPs. As for the extant indentures for elections held after 1442, either these omit all names (1459), or record only those of the mayor and bailiffs (1447 and both elections of 1449) or include just that of the mayor (1460). Whatever their wording, the extant indentures reveal nothing of the actual procedure at elections, which were held at the guildhall. Even if all the burgesses formally participated, it is quite possible that their role was simply to affirm candidates selected by the mayor and his council. Elections were nevertheless free, in the sense that there is no evidence of outside interference, whether from the Crown, great magnates, the university or any of the religious houses holding property in the town.

There is no direct evidence for the activities of any of the 22 while in the Commons but several of them must have played a part in preparing parliamentary petitions relating to Oxford. It is likely that Coventre and Offord had a hand in the Commons’ complaint of 1422 about the behaviour of Irish students, not least because the borough returned Coventre to several Parliaments to defend the town’s interests against the university. The petition in question accused the students of wanton lawlessness in Oxford and elsewhere in the Thames valley and further alleged that they had menaced anyone in authority who had tried to take action against them, including the bailiffs of Oxford. It also claimed that the bailiffs had fled the town for fear of the miscreants, meaning that they were unable to collect its fee farm or perform any of their other duties. The King was asked to evict all Irishmen from the realm, save for senior members of the universities, those with English benefices or an English parent, or those of good repute residing in English towns and cities. Although the Crown granted the request, it subsequently permitted the university to admit law-abiding Irishmen who could produce ‘lettres testimoniales’ guaranteeing their good behaviour. PROME, x. 57-58. Whatever the role of Oxford’s MPs in the petition of 1422, it is very likely that Coventre and his fellow in the Parliament of 1429, Richard Wythigg, presented another concerning apprenticeships at Oxford to the latter assembly. Similarly, the same matter must have been a primary concern for its representatives in the Parliaments of November 1449 and 1455, to which the town submitted like petitions.