Borough

Totnes was incorporated in 1505, and received confirmations of charters in 1547, 1554 and 1559 showing the usual arrangement of a mayor (who acted as returning officer at parliamentary elections), recorder, and council of burgesses. However, in the last quarter of the sixteenth century the more prosperous merchants embarked upon a campaign to restrict effective power to themselves, and, after a struggle which rent the town, they succeeded in reconstituting the corporation in the hands of 14 of the ‘more substantial burgesses’ and a wider body of lesser burgesses.

Elizabethan Plymouth, a prosperous and fast expanding port, had a governing body consisting of a mayor, 12 aldermen and 24 common councilmen, selected from the leading merchant families. There was also a recorder. The mayor and aldermen—sometimes called the privy council—conducted the town’s affairs and chose its Members of Parliament. In 1570 it was ordered that ‘only such men as be town dwellers and of the council of the town’ could be elected MPs; but this proved impracticable. A decree of 1601 required Members to be freemen of the borough. Wages were paid occasionally to the local men.

Though the borough of Plympton Earl (or Erle as it eventually became) had existed since the twelfth century, it obtained a charter of incorporation only in 1602.J. Brooking Rowe, Hist. Plympton Erle, 2, 79, 95, 117, 362. A stannary town, the local tin mining families of Strode and Southcote provided a number of its Members.

Bere Alston was jointly owned by the marquesses of Winchester and the lords Mountjoy and first returned Members in 1584. Enfranchisement was probably granted as a mark of favour to the 7th Lord Mountjoy, who succeeded to the title in 1581. Charles Blount, the new peer’s brother and heir, was rising in favour at court by 1583 and may well have played a part in the affair.

Dartmouth was governed by a mayor, who acted as returning officer, and a council of bailiffs and burgesses. Thomas Gourney (1571,1572) was a Dartmouth merchant and ex-mayor and Thomas Southcote (1559) owned property in the borough. Otherwise elections at Dartmouth, until his death in 1585, were dominated by the and Earl of Bedford, lord lieutenant of the county. Edward Yarde (1559) was later to become Bedford’s agent; Sir John More (1563) had fought with him at St. Quentin.

Tudor Exeter, a prosperous city with a population rising to perhaps eight or nine thousand, was the economic and political centre of the south-west. The grant of county status in 1537 meant that it had its own sheriff and, by the Elizabethan period, its own lord lieutenant. The government of the city was in the hands of the chamber, a self-perpetuating body of 24 councilmen, recruited for the most part from the wealthiest merchant families. The chamber provided the mayor and the sheriff each year, while eight of their number, together with the recorder, enjoyed the rank of alderman.

Elizabethan Barnstaple, dependent for its wealth on the enterprise of its merchants and seamen, was a prosperous and fast-growing town. An ancient borough, it was first incorporated in 1557, when Queen Mary’s charter placed the government of the town in the hands of the mayor and a common council of 24 capital burgesses, two of whom were to be called aldermen. This body was dominated by the wealthier merchants. There was also a recorder, an honorary official whose duties were performed by deputy.

Little is known about the government of Derby before James I’s charter of 1612 By the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign, however, there were certainly two bailiffs, a recorder and chamberlain. The office of steward has not been found before the 1590s, but the absence of local records makes it impossible to say when it first appeared. Members of Parliament were chosen by the freemen and, judging by the surviving returns for the Elizabethan period, the bailiffs acted as returning officers.

According to an ordinance issued by the ‘commons’ of Carlisle in 1445 and confirmed by the charter of 1566, the city government was vested in the mayor and 11 other ‘worshipful persons’, who should choose 24 ‘able persons’ to join them in electing the mayor.

For centuries the lordship of Tregony had belonged to the Pomeroys, a Devon family. Hugh Pomeroy died in 1565 and was succeeded by an 11 year-old son, also Hugh, who became the ward of a local gentleman. Other neighbouring families included the Penkevells, who were later to acquire Tregony by marriage, and the Trevanions.Vis. Devon, ed. Vivian, 607; Vis. Cornw. (Harl. Soc. ix), 177, 240; CPR, 1558-60, p. 272; Wards 9/138, f.