ATKINSON, Robert

The names of the Stafford MPs for the Parliament of 1447 are known only from the endorsement of the electoral writ.2 C219/15/4. While there can be no doubt about the local origins of the first of those named, William Garnet*, a future mayor of Stafford, there is nothing to connect the second, Atkinson, with the borough. Given the unusual circumstances of the Parliament, designed to serve as the forum for the court’s attack on Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, it may be that Atkinson was returned as an outsider connected to the court. An unusually high proportion of royal servants were elected, and, if Atkinson was one of them, he had held a minor place in the King’s service for over 20 years. He was a member of the Household by 1426, and by the spring of 1430, when retained to travel to France on the young King’s coronation expedition, he was described as a yeoman there. Later he served in the domestic office of the ewery as yeoman ‘for the King’s mouth’. As such he was granted, on 8 Nov. 1436 the office of launder of Plumpton in Cumberland.3 E101/408/1, f. 15; E403/693, m. 20; 695, m. 6; CPR, 1436-41, p. 29. This gives a clue to his geographical origins. Atkinson was not a common surname in fifteenth-century England, and there is thus a reasonable possibility that the household servant was a kinsman of John Atkinson, bailiff of Carlisle in 1417, and Thomas Atkinson of Cumberland, pardoned for felony in 1453.4 C219/12/2; CPR, 1452-61, p. 74.

Unfortunately, however, the reasons for identifying the household man with the MP are balanced by two contrary considerations. First, when the borough of Stafford was represented by outsiders, those outsiders were drawn from the local following of the great house of Stafford, earls of Stafford and (from 1444) dukes of Buckingham, and there is no evidence to place the household man in that retinue. Second, the household man (unless he is the MP) does not appear in the records after 1437, and in May of that year he was succeeded as launder of Plumpton by William Shrewsbury, another yeoman of the ewery.5 CPR, 1436-41, p. 65. The MP’s identity must, therefore, remain uncertain.