Commons 1422-1461

The county of Cumberland, at nearly a million acres the eleventh largest county, was both geographically and politically isolated. Distant from Westminster, it was bounded on the north by a narrow border with Scotland, to the north and west by the Solway Firth and the Irish Sea, and to the east by the Pennines. To geographical isolation was added economic backwardness. Heavily dependent on pastoral farming, the economy suffered both from Scottish raids and the general depression that afflicted the north throughout the first half of the fifteenth century. P. Booth, ‘Landed Soc. in Cumb.

Truro was an ancient borough that could trace its privileges back to the mid twelfth century. Situated at the heart of the western tin-mining district of Cornwall, in the later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries the town was an important centre of the trade in the metal. In the second half of the fourteenth century, however, the deterioration of the town’s harbour and the rise of a number of rival ports along the river Fowey seriously affected Truro’s economic prosperity.

The borough of Lostwithiel was founded at some point before 1194 by a member of the Cardinan family, then the leading landowners in central Cornwall. When the Cardinans failed in the male line in the mid thirteenth century, the family’s heiress sold a substantial part of her estates, including the caput honorum of Cardinham, to Sir Oliver de Dynham, while the remainder, including Lostwithiel and the nearby castle of Restormel, came into the hands of Henry III’s brother, Richard, earl of Cornwall.

The ancient borough of Liskeard, documented some decades before the Norman Conquest, lay at the heart of the synonymous manor which from the thirteenth century formed part of the estates of the earldom (and subsequently the duchy) of Cornwall. As a consequence most of the town’s privileges originated in grants by successive earls and dukes of Cornwall, although they were subject to periodic confirmation by the reigning monarchs, including that of Henry VI in May 1446. Cornw. RO, Liskeard bor. recs., B/LIS/8; CPR, 1441-6, p.

Founded in the eleventh century by Robert, count of Mortain, the borough of Dunheved had by the fifteenth century become the most important of the three townships then in existence on the site of modern-day Launceston. Dunheved was then owned by the duchy of Cornwall, whereas its lesser neighbours, Launceston St. Stephen and Newport, continued under the over-lordship of the local Augustinian priory of St. Stephen. Count Robert’s removal of the market from its Saxon site at St.

The westernmost parliamentary borough in England, Helston had first sent burgesses to the Commons in 1298 and owed the continuation of its representation throughout the Middle Ages more to its status as a duchy of Cornwall borough and focal point of the duchy manor of Helston-in-Kerrier than to any particular economic or strategic importance.

By the fifteenth century, the borough of Bodmin, which in the eleventh century had been the largest settlement in Cornwall, had been firmly superseded by Launceston and Lostwithiel as the administrative centre of the county. The overlordship of the priory of St.

To many contemporaries, England’s westernmost county seemed a wild and forbidding place. In the early fourteenth century an archdeacon of Cornwall had complained about the ‘marvellous’ people of the county, characterized by rebelliousness and resistance to reform and correction, calling it ‘nedum in mundi finibus, set ... in finium finibus’; Reg. Grandisson ed. Hingeston-Randolph, i.

From the beginning, Cambridge was a military base and one of the foremost centres for the marketing of agricultural surpluses (notably corn) in the eastern counties. The waterway from Cambridge to the Wash was a major trading thoroughfare, with Bishop’s Lynn serving as the town’s port from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. Stourbridge Fair, held on the outskirts of Cambridge and jointly controlled by its burgesses and the university of Cambridge, was one of the most important in the country.

Administratively bound to neighbouring Huntingdonshire, with which it shared its sheriff and escheator, that part of Cambridgeshire which came under the King’s immediate jurisdiction during the Middle Ages was relatively small. It consisted only of the southern half of the county, or county proper, since the thinly populated fens in the northern hundreds of Wisbech and Witchford made up the bishop of Ely’s liberty of the Isle of Ely, which was not part of the administrative county of Cambridge.