Commons 1422-1461

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.

Situated in the Thames valley and a centre for agriculture and the wool and cloth trades, Chipping Wycombe was the only parliamentary borough in Buckinghamshire in Henry VI’s reign. Along with Aylesbury, it was one of the two most important towns in the county but it was not of any great size. In the late fourteenth century the borough had about 700 inhabitants (the wider parish of Wycombe had some 900), but there was at least some depopulation during the first half of the fifteenth and, perhaps, beyond.

One of the smaller English counties, Buckinghamshire had two main distinctive regions, divided by the steep chalk hills of the Chilterns. Low-lying valleys interspersed with hills and many rivers and streams lay to the north of that escarpment; here the raising of livestock predominated. To the south was that part of the county situated in the Thames valley. It was generally level and its rich soils were well suited to arable farming.

Despite Wallingford’s economic decline and dramatic depopulation in the late fourteenth century, which accelerated in the years that followed, it remained a focus of royal power in the Thames valley as the caput of the honour of Wallingford and St. Valery and the site of a castle which continued to be a royal residence, if only on occasion. From 1423 the castle formed part of the dower of Henry VI’s mother, Katherine de Valois, who held it until her death in 1437. Repairs were undertaken in 1424, and four years later it was deemed suitable as a summer home for the young King.

The largest and most important town in Berkshire, Reading made full use of its good communications by road and river to develop its trade in cloth, the town’s economic mainstay. Leland’s comment in the sixteenth century that Reading ‘standith chiefly by clothyng’ clearly also applied in our period. J. Leland, Itin. ed. Toulmin Smith, i. 111. The population and wealth of the town are difficult to estimate, but it seems to have fared well in the fifteenth century. There are no overt signs of decline, and it may be significant that whereas the mayor was paid five marks p.a.

As its name implies, New Windsor was a new town, albeit one built as long ago as the twelfth century. Saxon Windsor, which had become a royal residence as early as the ninth century, occupied part of the site of the present Old Windsor, three miles downstream, but because it was low-lying and ill-suited for defence in about 1070 William I erected a fortress on the chalk cliff above the Thames, this being the only strong point in the valley between London and Wallingford where one might be built.

With its boundary in the north and east defined by the river Thames, Berkshire fell into three natural divisions. The Vale of the White Horse in the north provided fertile corn-growing land and meadows. Pasturage on the chalk downs above Wantage fed sheep producing high quality wool for export to the Low Countries and laid the foundation of Berkshire’s later pre-eminence as a ‘rich cloth-making county’; important centres of cloth manufacture developed at Abingdon, Reading and Newbury. Stretches of woodland and royal forests in the east furnished timber and recreational activities.

The only parliamentary borough in medieval Bedfordshire, Bedford was the most important urban settlement and administrative centre in the county. Principally a market town for the produce of local agriculture, it was also a regular venue for the county’s shire courts, assizes and sessions of the peace. Its burgesses enjoyed commercial ties with London and it lay sufficiently far from the capital for them to exist as an independent trading community in their own right.

One of the smallest English counties, Bedfordshire generally possessed more variety in architecture than landscape. Nevertheless, the downs above Dunstable in the south, part of the Chilterns, provided an obvious contrast with the more low-lying remainder of the county, and the flat countryside in the north-east was little different from that of neighbouring Huntingdonshire. N. Pevsner, Buildings of Eng.: Beds., Hunts. and Peterborough, 15; P. Bigmore, Beds. and Hunts. Landscape, 21, 23, 25.