Poole

Sited by a magnificent natural harbour, which was in use from pre-Roman times, the settlement at Poole grew by the mid thirteenth century to be a port of some importance. Its earliest charter spoke of ships sailing from there to foreign parts and of merchants from abroad regularly visiting the town, and presented an impression of far more activity than would pertain in a quiet fishing village. Poole furnished ships and mariners for Edward I to employ in his Scottish wars and for royal campaigns in France in the fourteenth century, most notably for the fleet with which Edward III sailed to Calais in 1346.2 Sydenham, 71, 81, 84, 87. In the early fifteenth century Poole was the base from where Henry Pay, the celebrated naval captain (or notorious pirate) attacked the coast and shipping of Castile and plundered numerous vessels in the Channel – exploits which goaded a combined Spanish and French force into attacking his home port in 1406.3 Ibid. 90-91.

The lordship of Poole descended with the Dorset manor of Canford, which belonged to the earls of Salisbury. In about 1248 William Longespee granted the burgesses a charter by which, in return for a payment of 70 marks, he confirmed their ancient privileges and customs and granted them such liberties and freedom from tolls as were enjoyed by boroughs held directly of the Crown. William Montagu, earl of Salisbury, granted them another in 1371, and his descendant, Earl Thomas, confirmed their privileges in 1411.4 Ibid. 4, 18-19, 45, 90, 154-7, 159-60. Four years later, in June 1415, Henry V assigned to the latter earl the manors and towns of Canford, Poole and Christchurch for the harbourage of the earl’s company awaiting transport across the Channel for the King’s invasion of Normandy.5 CPR, 1413-16, p. 337. Following the earl’s death in 1428 his widow Alice (afterwards countess and duchess of Suffolk) retained a third part of Canford as her dower, but the rest of this estate was inherited by the earl’s uncle Sir Richard Montagu, upon whose death without male issue it passed to the Crown shortly afterwards. In July 1430 John, duke of Bedford, was given temporary custody of two thirds of the estate, only to be formally granted it on 8 July 1433 along with the reversion of the remaining third to hold in tail-male.6 CFR, xv. 326-7; CPR, 1429-36, pp. 297-8.

The date of the grant to the duke is significant, for it was on this same day that Poole was promoted to the status of a head port for the collection of customs and subsidies along the Dorset coast, replacing Melcombe Regis, which was demoted to a creek. Poole’s promotion came in response to a petition sent to Parliament, and was dated the very day that Parliament assembled at Westminster. The petitioners were not specifically named, but they would appear to have been a group of Dorset merchants, headed by the wealthy John Roger† of Bridport, who had suffered severe losses when trading through Melcombe – a port which, being under-populated and difficult to defend, had proved unable to withstand attacks by foreign shipping. They asked for the privileges previously enjoyed by Melcombe to be transferred to Poole, which was comparatively populous and better equipped for defence, and that Poole’s burgesses should enjoy all franchises and liberties currently existing in the much larger port of Southampton.7 SC8/126/6255. For the Commons’ amendment to the petition of the merchants, see C49/21/6. Further, they pointed out that Poole boasted a secure haven for ships, and if walls were built, fortifying the town and harbour, merchants might anchor their ships and discharge merchandise and staple-ware confident that they were safe from attack. The mayor of Poole would be empowered to take recognizances of the staple. According to a schedule attached to the petition, the Commons gave it their approval, with the proviso that Poole should commence to be a head port at the next feast of St. Hilary (13 Jan. 1434).8 PROME, xi. 125-6. The grant being duly made,9 CPR, 1429-36, p. 298; Dorset Hist. Centre, Poole bor. recs., DC/PL/A/1/5/1. henceforth Poole became the principal centre for the collection of customs and subsidies between Exeter and Southampton, and the burgesses elected their own mayor and constables of the staple.10 The staple operated in the 1450s, and customs accounts survive from 1460: C241/246-7; E122/119/2-12.

The impression emerging from the records is that Poole was busy and prosperous in the first half of the century, mainly because of its use as a port of embarkation for armed men deployed for the defence of the Channel Islands and military action in Normandy.11 CPR, 1416-22, p. 319; 1422-9, p. 362; 1436-41, pp. 149, 197, 370, 372; 1446-52, p. 270; 1452-61, p. 55. Ships were requisitioned for service from Poole on a number of occasions in Henry VI’s reign, notably for the sea-keeping force established in 1442.12 CPR, 1429-36, p. 534; 1441-6, p. 105. Following the death of the duke of Bedford without male issue, his great-uncle Henry, Cardinal Beaufort, was granted the manor of Canford and town of Poole for life, in 1436, only to purchase them outright from the Crown three years later.13 CPR, 1429-36, p. 601; 1436-41, pp. 276, 311. The cardinal passed the estate on to other members of his family, such as Edmund, duke of Somerset (d.1455), who used Poole as an assembly-point for their retinues sailing to France, but it was forfeited to the Crown in 1461, following the attainder of Duke Henry.14 Sydenham, 46-47; G.L. Harriss, Cardinal Beaufort, 356, 372-4.

It might be conjectured that the Beauforts, and Duke Edmund in particular, played a part in the revival of Poole’s representation in Parliament in the mid fifteenth century, although no firm evidence of any personal links between them and the MPs of Henry VI’s reign has been discovered. The borough had not been required to elect representatives to the Parliaments of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, despite being instructed to send one or two of its most substantial men to meetings of specially-summoned councils of merchants and shipowners which Edward III called in the 1340s.15 Sydenham, 84-87. In the latter part of Edward’s reign Poole elected Members to the Parliaments of 1362 and 1368, but thereafter it went un-represented for 85 years. Parliament was summoned to meet at Reading on 6 Mar. 1453 at a time of desperate need for taxation to repay loans raised for the re-conquest of Guyenne, the defence of Calais and the keeping of the seas. The total number of seats in the Commons was increased to 288 by the revival of the representation of this borough, along with Bramber and Steyning in Sussex and Coventry in Warwickshire. In the case of Poole the timing of this revival was probably not coincidental. Poole’s lord, the duke of Somerset, was currently in the ascendant as the King’s principal adviser, and he may have actively sought to pack the Commons with men who would support the government’s policies. When the Lower House assembled it contained an abnormally large number of courtiers loyal to the Crown.

Yet nothing has been found to demonstrate whether the initiative for enfranchisement came from the duke or from the burgesses of Poole themselves. The latter must have taken a personal interest in the events unfolding in Gascony, and their shipping and trade depended on a successful outcome of the dispatch in February 1453 of a force to relieve the earl of Shrewsbury. Significantly, William Denys, one of those returned to the Parliament by Poole, had been expected to join that army, but had failed to do so at the last minute. Perhaps the burgesses also saw representation in Parliament as an opportunity to gain concessions from the Crown. If so, they proved correct, for at the end of the second session (held at Westminster in July), they were granted their first royal charter. This permitted them to hold a weekly market on Thursdays and two yearly fairs, each lasting seven days (one beginning on the feast of Saints Philip and James on 1 May and the other on the morrow of All Souls on 3 Nov.). All the proceeds of the fairs were to be retained by the local authorities, which could hear all pleas of trespass and breach of contract brought at fair-time in their own court, the jurisdiction of royal or other ministers being excluded.16 CChR, vi. 122. Later on in the Parliament it was decided that a large sum of money should be provided for the keeping of the seas, and it was ordained on 16 Apr. 1454 that there should be levied a loan from the inhabitants of certain cities and towns, of sums ranging from £300 (from London), to £50 from Salisbury, Poole and Weymouth linked together. The latter three places were to be reimbursed from the subsidy on merchandise exported from Poole and Weymouth.17 PROME, xii. 267; CPR, 1452-61, p. 164.

Poole sent MPs to two more Parliaments of Henry VI’s reign – those of 1455 and 1460 – and was presumably also represented in that of 1459, for which the returns for Dorset and its boroughs are no longer extant. The few remaining details of the electoral process are open to interpretation. The names of Poole’s MPs in the Parliament of 1453 were simply written at the very end of the schedule which accompanied the shire indenture to Chancery, as the last of the Dorset boroughs to be listed.18 Only one of them is now legible: C219/16/2. For the following Parliament, that of 1455, the schedule again listed the names of those elected for Poole after those for the other seven boroughs. Furthermore, on this occasion although the sheriff also returned a composite indenture for the Dorset boroughs (listing them in the same order they appeared on the schedule), Poole was excluded from it.19 C219/16/3. There is, therefore, a distinct possibility that the names of the MPs for Poole were not entered on the bottom of the schedule when the county court assembled at Dorchester, but rather at a later date, after the returns for Dorset had reached the Chancery at the beginning of the Parliament. Significantly, both the men returned for Poole in 1455 were Chancery officials: the one, John Skelton, being the spigurnel there; the other, Thomas Bayen, being a close associate of John Faukes, a master in Chancery and, furthermore, the clerk of the Parliaments. Similarly, in 1460 Poole was once more left off the composite indenture for the knights and burgesses of Dorset, and again listed last on the schedule. On this occasion the Chancery clerk Bayen was returned along with a Dorset lawyer, Thomas Hussey II.20 C219/16/6. Hussey was a younger son of Thomas Hussey I*, another man of law and a friend of John Newburgh II*, who was elected as a knight of the shire. It cannot have been entirely coincidental that several more of Newburgh’s feoffees and associates were returned for Dorset boroughs to this particular Parliament, summoned in the wake of the Yorkist victory at the battle of Northampton. Together, Hussey and the rest formed a cohesive group in the Commons, but to what political purpose remains unclear.

Poole was not represented in this period by any of its known mayors or officials of its staple.21 Sydenham, 154-60. Hussey’s mother had inherited property in Poole, so it is likely that he was personally known to the burgesses, but the other three recorded MPs were strangers to the town and its inhabitants. William Denys, the esquire returned in 1453, lived some distance away at Combe-Raleigh in Devon, a manor he had acquired through marriage to an heiress. At the time of his return he was engaged in litigation over his wife’s inheritance in that county, and was on friendly terms with the two knights of the shire for Devon, whose election at Exeter he attended. Like them, he belonged to the affinity of Sir William Bonville*, Lord Bonville, to whose bastard son he married his daughter (the wedding may even have taken place while the Parliament was in progress), so it may be that it was in Bonville’s interest that he secured election, and Poole’s lord, the duke of Somerset, might well have looked favourably on the return of an associate of one of his own allies. Denys’s fellow MP (whose identity is not known) may have been John Skelton, for the two men were linked together in transactions completed during the second session. Skelton, who was definitely returned to the next Parliament, in 1455, had earlier lived at Lambeth, where he was in the service of Cardinal Kemp, and as spigurnel in the Chancery probably continued to reside close to Westminster. Thomas Bayen, who sat for Poole in both 1455 and 1460, was also a stranger to the local community. Coming from Rye in Sussex, he was regularly engaged in the business of that and other of the Cinque Ports, which took advantage of his employment as a clerk in Chancery to further their concerns. Like Denys and Skelton he had no known connexion with Poole or its burgesses, but of his interest in Parliaments there can be no doubt. Shortly after representing Poole in 1460-1 he was appointed under clerk of the Parliaments (that is, clerk of the Commons), a post he was to keep for at least 36 years. Bayen acquired expert knowledge of the workings of the Commons before his election as an MP in 1455, but technically he, like the other three, was a novice when returned for Poole. Besides sitting for this constituency, he sat for Rye in 1459 and possibly also in 1470, and Hussey went on to represent Salisbury (in 1470) and Shaftesbury (in 1478).

The names of Poole’s representatives in the first Parliament of Edward IV’s reign are not known, but it may have been through their efforts at Westminster that in January 1462 the mayor and burgesses obtained letters patent of the new King confirming those granted in 1433, which had given Poole the status of a head port and a staple.22 CPR, 1461-7, p. 74. This status found further confirmation in the Parliament of 1463-5. In a Commons’ petition regarding the effects on Calais and its marches of evasion of the Calais staple (both because of licences for particular merchants to do so and because of smuggling), it was requested that all wool shipped out of England after Easter 1465 should be loaded only at nine named ports where there was a royal weighing beam and resident collectors of customs; those nine included Poole.23 PROME, xiii. 234-6.