Commons 1422-1461

By the fifteenth century Leicester had passed beyond the peak of its medieval prosperity. Rated as the eighth richest borough in England in the tax assessments of 1269, it had declined to 17th by the time of the poll tax of 1377. The Commons 1386-1421, i. 474. None the less, economically and administratively, it remained an important place. Its castle was the administrative centre of the duchy of Lancaster honour of Leicester, and this connexion with the duchy explains why, twice in the period under review here, Parliament met in the town.

Leicestershire was a county of below average size and wealth. At about 527,000 acres, it ranked 28th of the 39 ancient counties; among the assessments for the 1451 subsidy its total assessable wealth ranked it 19th of the 29 counties for which figures are available. S.J. Payling, ‘County Parlty. Elections’, Parlty. Hist. xviii.

Lancashire had several distinctive features that influenced its parliamentary representation. Although not agriculturally rich, it was home to a significant number of gentry families of knightly rank. This was a function both of its size – it was the sixth largest English county – and the distribution of property within its borders. The landholdings of neither the aristocracy nor the Church were extensive, and thus an unusually high proportion of property, perhaps as much as three quarters, was in the hands of the gentry. M.J.

Situated on a bend of the Medway where Watling Street crossed that river, Rochester dated back to the time of the Romans who built the first bridge across the river between it and Strood. It was also one of the earliest English cathedral cities: shortly after his conversion to Christianity, King Ethelbert of Kent built a church there and it was one of the first episcopal sees created by St. Augustine in 604.

Pre-Roman in origin, Canterbury had emerged as the capital of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Kent by the sixth century. King Ethelbert granted his palace there to St. Augustine in 597, so ensuring the city’s place as the first and long unrivalled centre of Christianity in England. At the beginning of the fifteenth century, Canterbury was a sizeable settlement of 12 parishes and an estimated population of some 4,000. Lacking in any industrial specialization in this period, it flourished as a regional market for east Kent and as one of the leading centres of pilgrimage in western Europe.

Late medieval Kent was a fertile and prosperous county of contrasts and diverse communities. Its cities of Canterbury and Rochester and its Cinque Ports of Sandwich, Dover, Hythe and New Romney were relatively cosmopolitan and influenced by a constant influx of visitors, among them foreign merchants, soldiers, royal officials and the pilgrims making their way to Canterbury, one of the leading pilgrimage centres in western Europe. Some of Kent’s rural areas, the High Weald, the Isles of Thanet and Sheppey and Romney Marsh, by contrast, were relatively isolated.

In spite of its advantageous location in a fertile valley where Ermine Street, the main road connecting London with the north-east, crossed the river Ouse, Huntingdon was already in decline before the Black Death. The consequences of the plague were extremely serious: a charter Edward III granted to the burgesses in 1363 observed that its ravages and other ‘sudden adversities’ had left one quarter of the town uninhabited. Huntingdon was never the sole trading centre for Huntingdonshire, owing to the proximity of St. Ives and its important annual fair.

One of the smallest of all English counties, Huntingdonshire bounded Cambridgeshire, with which it shared its sheriff and escheator, Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire and the soke of Peterborough. Its geography was by no means uniform, for the gently rolling countryside in the Ouse valley to the south and the wolds in the west provided a real contrast to the fenland in the north-east. Outside the fens, the Ouse valley’s soils were considerably more fertile than the marginal agricultural land in the west.

There were few natural boundaries between Hertfordshire, a small county well suited to arable farming, and neighbouring Essex, Middlesex, Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire. Its proximity to London and Westminster ensured that it attracted a steady stream of immigrants, among them servants of the royal household, bureaucrats of central government departments and lawyers.

John Leland, writing in the 1530s, gave a confused and confusing account of the town of Leominster. He found it ‘meatly large’ with ‘good buyldinge of tymbar’, and remarked that it had once flourished through a clothmaking industry fed by local wool of exceptionally high quality. Yet, he continued, ‘of later dayes’ the town’s prosperity had been compromised when, after complaints by the citizens of the borough’s commercial rivals, Hereford and Worcester, its Saturday market had been moved to Friday.