Commons 1509-1558

From 1461 Canterbury was a county in itself, an elected sheriff replacing the former bailiff. In 1498 a new charter remodelled the governing body headed by the mayor; the number of aldermen was doubled to 12 and the common councilmen reduced from 36 to 24. By the beginning of Henry VIII’s reign the earlier quarrels between the corporation and successive archbishops over their liberties had largely subsided, but a clause saving the archbishop’s rights was repeated in the confirmatory charters of 1522 and 1548. Civic records survive from the period.J. Brent, Canterbury, 108; C.

John Leland’s enumeration of the ‘commodities’ of Kent as ‘fertility ... rivers, havens with ships ... royal castles and towns’, to which he added ‘the faith of Christ there first restored’, touched on features which helped to shape the county’s history in the Tudor period. Besides prosperous farming and fisheries, the county had a flourishing cloth industry based on its native sheep, while its long coastline and many harbours, nodal points of traffic with the Continent, made it of first importance in maritime affairs. Defence by sea and land loomed large during the period.

Little can be said about the municipal history of Huntingdon in the early 16th century owing to the paucity of its records. The town’s link with the duchy of Lancaster dated from 1267 when its fee-farm of £45 had been included in Henry III’s grant of the duchy to Edmund Crouchback: Richard III reduced the fee-farm by 21 marks. Although favourably situated ‘on the highway from the north to London by means of the river Ouse’, by 1500 the town had been overtaken by St. Ives as the centre of local trade.

Indentures of election for Huntingdonshire survive for all Parliaments from 1542 save those of 1545 and 1558: they are in Latin and several are in poor condition. The elections were held at Huntingdon castle and the indentures are in the usual form between the sheriff of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire and named electors varying in number between 13 and 29.

St. Albans grew up under the protection of the Benedictine abbey and remained under the lordship of the abbot until the abbey was surrendered in 1539. A borough in the Domesday survey, the town was hampered in its constitutional development by the insistence of successive abbots on the servile status of the inhabitants. It returned Members to at least ten Parliaments between 1310 and 1337, but the concessions extracted from a weak abbot in 1327 were revoked by his successor.M. Beresford, New Towns in the Middle Ages, 326; VCH Herts. iv.

The Hertfordshire elections were generally held at Hertford, but at least one seems to have taken place at Waltham Cross. Of the 14 knights of the shire identified, all held land in the county and most had inherited it; among the four newcomers, Sir Henry Parker and John Purvey (whose parentage is unknown) acquired their Hertfordshire estates by marriage, Sir Ralph Sadler and Francis Southwell through public service.

Leland described Leominster as ‘meetly large’, with ‘good building of timber’. The wool produced in the area was of such high quality that it was known as ‘Leominster ore’, and the borough had a prosperous clothmaking industry as well as being, according to the Edwardian chantry commissioners, ‘the greatest market town within the county of Hereford’.

Leland noticed that the walls and gates of Hereford ‘be right well maintained by the burgesses of the town’, although the castle ‘tendeth toward ruin’. By 1509 the city was a flourishing market for the produce of the surrounding arable and orchard districts and for the renowned Herefordshire wool; early in the 16th century clothmaking was an industry there.

The Herefordshire elections were held at Hereford castle by the sheriff. No individual or family was powerful enough to dominate the shire and the only magnate who might have done so, Walter Devereux, 3rd Lord Ferrers, created Viscount Hereford in 1550, was too preoccupied with his interests elsewhere; his grandfather and great-grandfather had sat for Herefordshire but his own sons entered the Commons for other counties.

By 1509 Winchester had been in decline for two centuries. Leland remarked on the number of old buildings in the city, with its many churches and hospitals, and the ancient walls, and Winchester was included in the Act for urban renewal of 1540 (32 Hen. VIII, c.18). A petition of 1450 claiming that over 900 houses had fallen down was probably exaggerated, but in 1524 the city had only 329 taxpayers with another 266 or more in the suburbs.