Commons 1509-1558

Situated within view of the coast of Kent, Calais under English rule was a town of strategic, diplomatic and commercial importance. The later Plantagenet and Tudor monarchs thought of Calais and its pale, an area amounting to about 150 square miles, as a prestigious barbican to their kingdom and a bridgehead for the reconquest of France. Its part in the Crecy and Agincourt campaigns made it an object of veneration, contemporaries describing it as a jewel. No sovereign could contemplate its loss.

Tournai capitulated to Henry VIII on 23 Sept. 1513 after a short siege. Before departing the King named as governor Sir Edward Poynings, who with a council modelled on that for Calais was to rule the city in conjunction with the existing civic government for a year and a half: Poynings was succeeded by the 4th Lord Mountjoy, and Mountjoy in 1517 by Sir Richard Jerningham. There were four civic councils.

Leland remarked on the fertility of the Radnorshire valleys on the border with England, and on the quality of the wool produced in the east of the county, but Camden could find little to praise, calling the neighbourhood of Rhayader ‘a vast wilderness, dismal to behold by reason of many crooked ways and high mountains’. Radnorshire was one of the counties set up at the Union.

By the mid 13th century the town of Old Radnor had been superseded by that of New Radnor, some two miles away. The borough is said to have had a charter destroyed in 1401 during Owain Glyn Dwr’s uprising but no new one was issued until 1562. In the early 16th century, when the lordship of the borough belonged to the crown as part of the earldom of March, authority was vested in a bailiff and common council. Made the shire town at the Union, New Radnor alternated with Rhayader as the meeting place of the county court until 1543 and with Presteigne for the rest of the period.

Since 1453 Calais and its marches had been, with the exception of the Channel Islands (formerly part of the duchy of Normandy), the sole relic of the medieval empire of the English kings in France. The annexation of Tournai in 1513 seemed to presage a revival of the claims of the crown to its former possessions abroad. Tournai had sent deputies to the parlement of France, and in an attempt to resolve the problems arising from the capture of the city Henry VIII granted Tournai representation in the English Parliament.

The lordship, castle and borough of Haverfordwest, situated at the head of the Cleddau estuary, belonged to the crown. The town perhaps owed its origin to Gilbert de Clare (1110-17) but its first known charter is that of William Marshall (1189-1219). Marshall’s charter was confirmed and modified repeatedly throughout the middle ages and again in 1532, 1547 and 1554. By the early 16th century authority was vested in a mayor and a self-perpetuating council of Twenty-Four, assisted by several municipal officers sworn in before the chancellor of the lordship.

Although Pembroke had been the administrative centre for the earldom of that name since the 12th century, it was not declared the shire town at the Union. The King rejected the proposal by Bishop Barlow of St. David’s that Haverfordwest should be so designated on the score of its geographical convenience, but it was there that the county court usually met. Henry VII, who had been born at Pembroke, had incorporated it in 1485 as the mayor, bailiffs and burgesses, thus making it the first corporate borough in Wales.