County

The petition of the inhabitants of the county palatine of Chester for its own and the city’s representation in Parliament was granted by the Act (34 and 35 Hen. VIII, c.13) passed during the second session of the Parliament of 1542. The petition had been occasioned by the abolition of the parliamentum of the county court at Chester castle, without the approval of which no laws and taxes had been imposed in the county palatine, but the claim was probably influenced by the recent enfranchisement of Wales.

The knights for Cambridgeshire were elected at a county court held in Cambridge castle by the sheriff of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire. Of the 32 returned between 1510 and 1558 the names of 12 are lost, and of the ten Parliaments for which the names of the knights are known three lack election indentures. The indentures, in Latin, throw no light on the process of election: about 30 electors are usually named, with more than 40 listed early in 1553 but less than 20 a year-and-a-half later.C219/18B/12, 19/17, 20/14, 21/14, 22/12, 23/15, 24/14.

The Buckinghamshire elections were held at the county court at Aylesbury by the sheriff of Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire: a bill to separate the two counties was introduced into the Commons in the Parliament of April 1554 but not enacted. The 16 knights whose names are known all had land in the shire, although some of them were seated elsewhere, Sir Andrew Windsor in Middlesex, Sir John Dauntesey in Oxfordshire and Edmund Verney in Hertfordshire; a few lived in London.

The Berkshire elections were held at Abingdon under the direction of the sheriff of Oxfordshire and Berkshire. The two shires had the same sheriff until 1567 and many gentlemen had interests in both, as well as in Buckinghamshire. In Berkshire itself there was no resident temporal peer and before the reign of Elizabeth no family powerful enough to dominate the shire. Until the Dissolution the major landholders, next to the crown, were the great Benedictine abbeys of Reading and Abingdon.

Near enough to London for government servants to have their chief residences there, Bedfordshire was controlled by three or four inter-related families; some of them, like the Mordaunts, were long-established in the county and others, like the Gascoignes and the St. Johns, more recent arrivals. Eight of the ten known knights could be included in one family tree. All ten held land in Bedfordshire, nine served on the commission of the peace there and seven were sheriffs of Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire.

Since the 13th century the confederation of the Cinque Ports had been made up of the five ’head ports’ of Dover, Hastings, Hythe, New Romney and Sandwich, and the two ’ancient towns’ of Rye and Winchelsea. They had originally come to be linked together for the performance of a common duty, namely, to supply ships for the service of the Crown both in defence against invasion and in the protection of cross-Channel traffic. The provision of 57 ships for 15 days’ service to the King every year was treated as a corporate duty, each Port being assigned a proportion of the whole.

Returns for Yorkshire are extant for all but four of the 32 Parliaments which met between 1386 and 1421, those for 1410, 1413 (Feb.), 1416 (Oct.) and 1417 now being lost. Unfortunately, the identity of Sir Alexander Lound’s colleague in the second Parliament of 1414 is not known either, although the names of 29 shire knights in all have survived.

Returns for Worcestershire have survived for 28 of the 32 Parliaments of the period, leaving gaps for the three consecutive assemblies of 1410, 1411 and 1413 (Feb.), as well as for that of 1416 (Oct.). In all, 27 men are known to have represented the shire between 1386 and 1421. Although over a third (11) were elected just once for this constituency (ten of them only ever being returned on that one occasion), the rest were elected two or more times and some of them appeared quite frequently.

For the 32 Parliaments assembled during the period 1386-1421, returns for Wiltshire are missing for only three, and the names are known of 35 Members. Of these, as many as 20 represented the county just once, no fewer than 12 of them only ever being elected to Parliament that one time. But although these figures might suggest that the Wiltshire electors set little store by parliamentary experience, other factors point to the opposite conclusion.

Returns for Westmorland survive for 28 of the 32 Parliaments which met during our period. No fewer than 35 shire knights represented the county between 1386 and 1421, an unusually large number which illustrates clearly enough how hard it could be to find suitable candidates ready to undertake the long journey from Westmorland to London. The problems of travel (especially in winter) made some of the local gentry reluctant to seek election unless they had strong personal reasons for so doing.