All the candidates for Higham Ferrers in this period were resident within the county, except Dacres and Rudd, and they owned property in the town. Under the charter of 1556, the franchise was granted to the mayor, aldermen and ‘burgesses’ but whether this was limited to the ‘select burgesses’, i.e. the corporation, was subject to interpretation. Both candidates in 1660 had previously been elected for the borough, Dacres as long ago as 1626, Harby as a recruiter.
For most of the period control of Brackley was disputed between the proprietary interests of the Egertons and Wenmans, on the one hand, and the natural interests of the Crews and the Lisles on the other. The Egertons had been lords of the manor since 1592, and the 2nd Earl of Bridgwater was much offended when he learnt on 13 Mar. 1660 that all but six of the corporation had already promised their votes without reference to him. His steward pointed out that the Earl did more than anyone else to ‘support your magistracy’ and that his estate paid the highest rates.
Higham Ferrers, a small market town incorporated in 1556, was part of the duchy of Lancaster. During this period, the town was governed by the mayor, seven aldermen and 13 capital burgesses. There was also a steward of the borough, a duchy official, who among other duties, heard each new mayor’s oath of office. The borough had the right to send one burgess to each Parliament.
The government of Northampton consisted of the mayor; his brethren, a body of former mayors who began to be called aldermen during the reign of James I; two bailiffs; the former bailiffs who, as late as the 1590s, were still being referred to as the ‘24’; and the ‘48’, the popular elementin the assembly. As at Leicester, the ‘48’ had been created to replace the general body of commons whose ‘great divisions, dissensions and discords’ had hindered the assembly’s work. The mayor and his brethren could replace individual members of the ‘48’ whenever they wished.
At the creation of the diocese of Peterborough in 1541 most of the possessions of the former monastery were divided between the new bishop and the dean and chapter. The lordship of the liberty or soke of Peterborough went to the bishop, while the urban community, now a city, passed into the hands of the dean and chapter. Not long afterwards, in 1576, Bishop Scambler surrendered his lordship over the liberty and it was granted the following year to Lord Burghley.
The borough of Brackley, together with the large manor of Brackley and Halse of which it formed part, belonged for most of the sixteenth century to the Stanley family, earls of Derby. It was little more than a proprietary borough and almost certainly, as in later years, the mayor was appointed by the lord of the manor acting through his steward. The ‘Eagle and Child’ insignia of the Stanleys was used as the town’s common seal.Bridges, Northants. i. 143, 148; Baker, Northants. i.
Medieval Peterborough was controlled by its Benedictine abbey and in 1493 Henry VII granted to the abbot’s bailiff all such rights as elsewhere pertained to the sheriff. The original ‘burgesses’ or burgage tenants of the ‘vill of Burgh’, the capital of the abbot’s demesne, were doubtless craft workers and tradesmen supplying the needs of the monastery or attracted by the market where, as in the abbey fairs, the abbot’s tenants had trading privileges.
Once a mesne borough of the earls of Northampton, Northampton had long been in the lordship of the crown. The town had lost its military importance and although it was still the venue for the county court its wool and cloth trades were in decline and had not yet been succeeded by the leather industry. The fee-farm due to the crown, once £120, was fixed in 1514 at £98.
Higham Ferrers, a small market town on the main road from London to Leicester, lay within a duchy of Lancaster lordship. The borough had been founded in 1251 by two charters from William de Ferrers, 5th Earl of Derby, but the second of these, together with later documents, had been lost when on 14 Mar. 1556 Queen Mary granted incorporation as the mayor, aldermen and burgesses. The new charter was ostensibly granted, first, because ‘the mayor, burgesses and commonalty ...
By the early 16th century Brackley, once prosperous as a wool staple, was small and poverty-stricken. Leland noted ‘divers rows of housing ... about the quarters of the castle, now clean down’; he found the ‘castle plot’ but could not see ‘any piece of a wall standing’ and the former Wednesday market was ‘now desolated’. On the other hand, the dissolution of the monasteries and chantries did not seriously affect the town, since the lands and buildings of the most important chantry, the hospital of St. James and St.