Commons 1422-1461

Unique among the shires of England, Sussex was distinguished by its division into rapes. This split the county into six units: from west to east the rapes of Chichester, Arundel, Bramber, Lewes, Pevensey and Hastings, with their borders running from north to south. Each rape possessed distinct seigneurial characteristics and a castle as its seat of governance. Although the castle at Chichester had been demolished in the thirteenth century, by the period under review the city was well established as the focus of both county and diocesan administration.

Southwark’s origins may be traced back to the construction of the first London bridge by the Romans, and the settlement owed its subsequent growth to the combined importance of this river crossing and of the evolving city on the northern bank of the Thames. The town’s position on the doorstep of the metropolis allowed it to develop into a flourishing, if largely unregulated, centre for the manufacture of a wide range of commodities, many of which found their way into the shops and markets of the city.

The borough of Reigate owed its existence to the construction of a castle in the eleventh century by William de Warenne, earl of Surrey, on its strategically important site on the road through the Holmesdale valley. By 1276 the earls were holding a weekly market at Reigate, and within a few years the Crown also recognized their right to three annual fairs.

The town of Guildford owed its prosperity, and arguably even its very existence, to its strategic position on the ‘Great Way’, the principal thoroughfare from London to the south coast. No details of its foundation have come to light, but even a century before the Norman Conquest it was of sufficient commercial importance to possess a royal mint.

Gatton was among the smallest of the boroughs represented in Parliament in this period, and even at the close of the nineteenth century scarcely more than 200 inhabitants were recorded there. Yet like that of Reigate, its close neighbour, the site of Gatton had been occupied for many centuries before the borough began to send representatives to Parliament. Since the Roman period Gatton had been connected with the other settlements at the foot of the North Downs by the principal east-west road which ran along the Holmesdale valley.

Farnham had grown up in the west of the county, next to the river Wey and on the major road from Southampton to London. Lordship of the synonymous manor and hundred had passed into the hands of the bishops of Winchester as long before as the seventh century, and Farnham’s status was noted by the compilers of the Domesday Book, who observed that ‘St. Peter always held it’. VCH Surr. ii.

Bletchingley was, aside from Gatton, the smallest of Surrey’s six parliamentary boroughs. Its status as a seigneurial borough restrained both its economic and constitutional development. Geographical expansion was hampered by the two large deer parks created by its early lords, the Clares, and the burgesses gained few of the trappings of self-government.

The main lines of medieval traffic through Surrey were based upon the old Roman roads crossing the north-west side of the county from Hampshire to London and running from the capital towards Kent in the south-east. These facilitated the movement of trade and military retinues between the Thames valley and the coast on either side of the county’s core, the former to Southampton and Portsmouth, and the latter to the Cinque Ports.

Situated at the head of the Orwell estuary in east Suffolk, Ipswich was one of the oldest ports and parliamentary boroughs in England. Its population appears to have remained stable in the fifteenth century, at perhaps just under 3,000, although it remained considerably smaller than nearby Colchester. Among the most prosperous East Anglian boroughs in this period, Ipswich had a close connexion with the Low Countries, from where a number of its residents originated.

An important settlement in Anglo-Saxon times, Dunwich was one of England’s largest ports by the twelfth century, but its story in the later Middle Ages is one of steady and irreversible decline. Its most serious problem was its location on a rapidly eroding stretch of the east coast. There were probably no serious losses of land to the sea in the early years of the fifteenth century, but by then the town had already suffered considerable damage.