Commons 1422-1461

In general, the Midland counties lack geographical definition, but Derbyshire provides a partial exception. The High Peak serves to divide it from its northern neighbour, Cheshire; and, in the medieval period, the forest of Charnwood in Leicestershire was a barrier of sorts to the south. Further, some three-quarters of its borders are delineated by rivers, principally the Erewash and Dove, which define boundaries with Nottinghamshire and Staffordshire respectively. Politically, however, the fifteenth-century county had a more divided aspect.

Although not formally incorporated until 1637, the city of Carlisle long held privileges of self-government. These were codified in a charter of 1352, which amplified and confirmed the rights the citizens held under charters dating back to the reign of Henry II. Their right of election of the principal city officials – a mayor and two bailiffs – was acknowledged, as was their exemption from the jurisdiction of the county sheriff. CPR, 1350-4, pp. 232-3; H. Summerson, Med. Carlisle, i. 296-8; ii.

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.