Heytesbury was a small town on the road between Warminster and Salisbury and on the edge of the royal forest of Selwood. Hoare, Hist. Wilts. i. (Heytesbury), esp. 82; Wilts. Arch. Mag. xxiii, map betw. pp. 282-3. Although it lay within the southern spur of the Wiltshire clothing area along the river Wylye, by the seventeenth century it does not seem to have been of great economic importance. It was not among the 14 towns proposed in the early 1630s as centres of regulation of the cloth trade. Ramsay, Wilts. Woollen Industry, frontispiece (map) and cf. p. 87n. None the less, it had some standing as the centre of a hundred which had active courts and in which such local notables as the Herberts, Seymours and Ludlowes had landed interests. Wilts. RO, 101/51A, f. 1. A parliamentary borough since 1449, it had never been incorporated, and was dominated by a succession of local gentry, notably the Hungerfords and, in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth century, the Thynnes. Hoare, Hist. Wilts. i. Heytesbury, 122; HP Commons 1509-1558; HP Commons 1558-1603; HP Commons 1604-1629. A hospital founded in 1472 by Margaret, Lady Hungerford, remained perhaps the town’s most notable feature; this may have contributed to a description of it in the 1650s as ‘an ancient mansion place of the family of Hungerford’. VCH Wilts. iii. 337-40; E. Leigh, England Described (1659), 209 (E.1792.2).
In the second quarter of the seventeenth century the manor changed hands several times. By 1640 it was in the possession of Thomas Moore*, a 21-year-old with, unsurprisingly, no record in local administration. None the less, on 17 March he apparently had no difficulty in securing election to Parliament alongside Sir John Berkeley*, a soldier and courtier whose brother Sir Charles Berkeley† a Somerset landowner and Selwood Forest official, had represented the borough on the previous three occasions thanks to Thynne nomination. The pair were ‘unanimously’ returned by the bailiff and 12 burgesses, eight of whom signed with a mark and two of whom, remarkably, were women. C219/42 pt. ii, no. 70. Elizabeth Crayford or Craford, whose name was also on the October indenture, had been admitted on 28 March 1639 by the hundred court to the customary tenancy in Heytesbury held by her late husband, George Crayford (bur. 4 Nov. 1638), for the duration of her widowhood. Wilts. RO, 101/51A, f. 5v; Heytesbury par. reg. Agnes Tarry (d. betw. 1653-6), who apparently exercised a vote only once, held a parallel tenancy, granted on 14 October 1639 following the death of her husband William Tarry (bur. 30 Mar. 1639). Wilts. RO, 101/51A, f. 8; Heytesbury par. reg. She was his executor and the inheritor of his goods, but there is no record of their trade or social standing. PROB11/180/540; PROB11/260/213.
In a county where opposition to government policies – especially in relation to the clothing industry – had notable support, Berkeley’s closeness to the court probably counted against him in the autumn. On 31 October about 16 burgesses elected Moore again, together with Edward Ashe*. The latter was a younger brother of John Ashe*, the greatest clothier in the south west of England, and was himself a very prosperous London draper. He may already have set in train the negotiations which led to his acquiring the manor from Moore in 1641, and his means and interests may have made him a well-nigh irresistible force in the locality. Hoare, Modern Wilts. i. Heytesbury, 117-18. Although Berkeley was to sit again for the borough in 1661, this otherwise marked the beginning of a century in which the Ashes dominated its parliamentary representation. VCH Wilts. v. 132-54; HP Commons 1660-1690; HP Commons 1690-1715; HP Commons 1715-1754.
With sometimes as many as three family members simultaneously in the Commons and at least two sitting on major committees, they were also a powerful force in 1640s and 1650s Parliaments. It was also almost certainly their influence which secured from the House in 1646 the augmentation of the salary of the minister of Heytesbury, Mr Gracious Francklyn, using revenues formerly belonging to the dean of Salisbury, and the minister’s subsequent appointment as master of the almshouse and hospital. CJ iv. 493a, 586a. A parliamentary survey of March 1652 indicated that, although Edward Ashe was still domiciled in London, he held courts leet; Mr Carter of Warminster was his steward. Wilts. RO, 1159/13. However, Heytesbury was not represented in the first two protectorate Parliaments, and the Ashes found seats elsewhere.
Edward Ashe having died in 1656, in January 1659 at least 18 voters returned his elder brother John and his youngest brother Samuel Ashe*, who had set himself up in the county two years previously with the purchase of an estate at Langley Burrell, near Chippenham. C219/48. It was evidently not John’s preferred seat, but in any case, he died soon afterwards. On 12 February the Commons ordered the issue of a writ for a by-election. CJ vii. 603a. No further action appears to have been taken, however. Thomas Moore had retained sufficient local proprietorial influence to be re-elected to the Convention in March 1660, but the other man returned, John Joliffe helped sustain the Ashe interest through a period when it was temporarily compromised by a minority and by civil war allegiance. HP Commons 1660-1690.
