Bristol

One of the most important urban settlements in the realm, Bristol vied with York for the position of the second largest urban centre after London. Poll tax returns suggest that it had over 9,500 inhabitants in 1377 although recurrent outbreaks of plague are likely to have ensured that its population was either static or in slight decline during the period under review. Bristol had much to thank for its geography. First, its position on the Avon, close to the junction of that river and the Severn, and its sheltered harbour and quays made it an ideal centre for overseas trade. Secondly, its proximity to the Severn, Wye and other rivers meant that it was a conduit for a very considerable inland trade with the Midlands, south-west and Wales. Thirdly, its location near several contrasting regions (variously important for agriculture, industry and mineral wealth) stimulated its manufactures, ensuring that it was one of England’s chief manufacturing centres. It also enjoyed close connexions and much business with London and Southampton. Thanks to its geographical and economic advantages, Bristol ranked behind only London in wealth among English towns and cities. It regularly lent more money to the Crown than any other urban community apart from the capital, and provided an impressive total of £2,400 to the King between the beginning of March 1424 and the end of January 1453.5 E401/707, m. 16; 713, m. 17; 719, m. 15; 720, m. 18; 724, m. 2; 737, m. 13; 743, m. 14; 747, m. 6; 763, m. 8; 771, mm. 21, 27; 778, m. 1; 786, mm. 18, 20; 830, m. 25.

It was upon commerce alone that Bristol’s importance rested, since it was not a cathedral city, shire town or military centre. The most important source of its wealth was the cloth industry. Cloth was the basis of trade at Bristol, where the export of raw wool was never of any significance. In contrast with some other major English ports, native merchants rather than Hanseatic or Italian foreigners handled almost the whole of its cloth export business.6 Atlas of Historic Towns II ed. Lobel and Johns, 1-2, 11-12; E.M. Carus-Wilson, Med. Merchant Venturers, pp. xv, xxxi, 1-13; Staple Ct. Bks. (Bristol Rec. Soc. v), 74; A.P.M. Wright, ‘Relations between the King’s Govt. and Bors.’ (Oxf. Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1965), 294. Cloth exported through Bristol was shipped to all the main foreign markets with which its merchants traded, namely Gascony and the Iberian peninsula in southern Europe, Ireland to the west and Iceland to the north. Apart from wine, the town’s imports from Gascony included woad, alum, potash, honey, wax and iron, some of which were Spanish in origin. From Spain came wine, iron, oil, woad, salt, fruit, honey and other delicacies, while Portuguese imports included wine, wax, oil and dyestuffs. As for the Irish trade, Bristol’s location made for strong trading links across St. George’s Channel, mainly with the south, south-west and west of Ireland and particularly with the port of Waterford. Fish was almost certainly the most important Irish import, followed by hides and other raw materials. With regard to Iceland, merchants from Bristol were at the forefront of re-establishing ancient commercial links and they were able to gain ascendancy in the Icelandic trade. The island belonged to the king of Denmark and foreigners trading with his territories were supposed to do so only through the staple at Bergen in Norway, a stipulation upheld in the Parliament of 1429, for the sake of the longstanding friendship between England and Denmark. In practice, both the English and Danish crowns frequently sold licences to trade with Iceland directly, and on occasion merchants from Bristol sent vessels there without such authorization. Bristol’s interest in the Icelandic trade was probably encouraged by the town’s general lack of involvement in the Baltic and the Mediterranean, two of the more recent outlets for English textiles. There were, however, attempts to establish direct links between Bristol and the Mediterranean, most notably by the unfortunate Robert Sturmy, whose expedition to the Levant in 1457-8 ended in disaster when Genoese privateers intercepted his ships off Malta on their return home. Piracy in general was always a risk although, of all Bristol’s regular enterprises, the Spanish trade was the most dangerous in that respect.7 Carus-Wilson, 14-17, 21, 23, 28-38, 49-53, 56, 59-64; Atlas of Historic Towns, 12; Overseas Trade (Bristol Rec. Soc. vii), 65-66; PROME, x. 400-1; Oxf. DNB, ‘Sturmy, Robert’.

Piracy was far from the only problem faced by Bristol’s merchants in this period. Although English cloth exports as a whole doubled in the fifteenth century, Bristol did not fully share in this growth, partly because of its peripheral contact with the developing Baltic and Mediterranean markets. For all that, during the 1440s its cloth exports were rising, while imports of wine from Gascony were flourishing, helped by the five-year truce concluded with France in 1444. The reopening of hostilities and the loss of Gascony just a few years later dealt the wine trade a savage blow. It continued after 1453, but only through special licences and hedged by irksome restrictions. The cloth trade suffered severely as well. As compared with the averages for 1440-50, Bristol’s cloth exports had fallen some 60 per cent by the 1460s when there was widespread unemployment among the town’s weavers. Yet these were short-lived setbacks. Thanks to its location, the variety of its manufactures and the control that its burgesses retained over its commerce, Bristol was better equipped than many English towns to weather the storm.8 Atlas of Historic Towns, 11-12; Carus-Wilson, 41, 43; C.D. Ross, Edw. IV, 363, 368; P. Nightingale, A Med. Mercantile Community, 485; C.R. Burgess, ‘Wills and Pious Provision in Late Med. Bristol’, EHR, cii. 839.

One mark of Bristol’s economic importance in the later Middle Ages was its charter of 1373, through which it had become a shire incorporate, the first town or city after London to achieve such status. As a result, it acquired a sheriff and independent shire jurisdiction separate from that of Somerset and Gloucestershire and the mayor assumed the additional duties of royal escheator within the new ‘urban county’. Bristol did not gain any further charters of particular note during the period under review although the Crown confirmed all its previous charters in July 1424, and it granted admiralty jurisdiction to the burgesses in 1446.9 The Commons 1386-1421, i. 404; Bristol Chs. ed. Latimer, 98, 102-3. Burgess status came to sons of freemen automatically; otherwise, those seeking this status could acquire it by serving an apprenticeship, by paying an entry fine or by marrying a widow or daughter of a freeman.10 W. Hunt, Bristol, 86.

The mayor, elected every 15 Sept. and formally admitted to office at Michaelmas, headed the municipal administration. According to an ordinance of 1344, candidates for the mayoralty should previously have served as one of the five aldermen of the town. The Crown chose the sheriff from a short-list of three names that the burgesses had sent to the Chancery. He also served for a year, but the method of appointment meant that there was no fixed date for taking up office, and his term rarely coincided exactly with that of the mayor. The other main municipal office was that of bailiff, exercised jointly by two burgesses, elected officials who served from Michaelmas to Michaelmas. By this period, the mayor was invariably also mayor of the local staple, but the distinction between the institutions of town and staple was preserved and, more often than not, the annual terms of the two offices did not coincide exactly. Bristol also possessed a common council, typically drawn from its most substantial burgesses and fixed at 40 members by the charter of 1373. The charter also gave the mayor and sheriff, with ‘the consent of the commonalty’, the right to select its members, even though it was primarily intended as a check to arbitrary behaviour by the mayor and bailiffs when established just a few decades earlier. During the fifteenth century, the council evolved into a body of wealthy merchants that arrogated to itself the task of electing the mayor and other officials.11 Ibid. 83, 85-86; The Commons 1386-1421, i. 404; Staple Ct. Bks. 60.

Among the duties of the bailiffs, who were the mayor’s assistants and chiefly concerned with financial business, was the collection of the town’s fee farm. At the beginning of Henry VI’s reign, the farm belonged to Henry IV’s widow, Joan of Navarre. In November 1408 she had leased it (exclusive of the castle) to the burgesses for some £125 p.a. (that is, £182 7s. 10d. minus £58 11s. 6d. in customary payments and alms she had excused them). The lease was for the term of her life, meaning that it ran until her death in 1437. There was considerable bargaining when the burgesses obtained a new lease from the Crown in May 1439. The King had granted the stewardship of the court of the tolsey and market at Bristol to his carver, Sir William Beauchamp*, in the previous November. Just four months later, Sir William had surrendered the office in return for 20 marks p.a. from the town’s petty custom, an annuity that he was to receive for life or until the Crown found an office of equivalent value to the stewardship. Having regained the stewardship, the King used it as a carrot in his negotiations with the burgesses, offering to make it part of the farm, provided that they agreed to an increased farm of £160. His tactics appear to have worked: although the lease of 1439 set the farm at only £102 15s. 6d., the burgesses undertook to pay another £57 4s. 6d., making a total of exactly £160. The lease was for 20 years but the burgesses secured a renewal at the same rate for a further 60 years in 1446, an arrangement that stood until the accession of Edward IV.12 Hunt, 55; Bristol Chs. (Bristol Rec. Soc. xi), 54-55; CPR, 1436-41, pp. 220, 286.

Seventeen men represented the town in the period under review. This is a precise total even though the election returns for the Parliaments of 1439 and 1445 have not survived, since the fine rolls supply the names of the MPs in those assemblies. Most of the 17 were either certainly or probably natives of Bristol. Only three of them, John Langley, originally from Wiltshire, Richard Trenode, who was of Cornish descent, and Richard Forster, who came from Somerset, were certainly born outside the town, although Philip Meede was probably another Somerset man. Forster’s original home parish of Stanton Drew lay just a few miles south of Bristol, and Wraxall, reputedly that of Meede, was also not far away. Whatever their origins, all the MPs resided at Bristol all or part of the time, so presenting a similar picture to both the three and half decades before 1422 and the mid Tudor period.13 The Commons 1386-1421, i. 405; The Commons 1509-58, i. 94. As a group, they formed a strong attachment with the town, and the great majority of them sought burial there. Thomas Young, buried at the fashionable church of the Greyfriars in London, where he pursued so much of his successful legal career, is the only definite exception.

There were many bonds among the MPs, who frequently had private dealings with each other as business associates, executors, feoffees or kinsmen. There was also something of a history of service in Parliament among some of the established families at Bristol, indicating that (as in previous decades) they saw securing a seat in the Commons as a desirable objective.14 The Commons 1386-1421, i. 405. Young and William Canynges were half-brothers and their wives were the daughters and coheirs of John Burton. Both were also the sons of MPs for Bristol, as was Thomas Norton, although the two Sharps were the only father and son to sit for the town in the period under review. There was also a Meede-Sharp connexion, since Meede’s wife was the sister of John Sharp III and his son married a daughter of Sharp’s son, John Sharp V. Furthermore, Forster and John Shipwarde arranged marriages with members of the Norton family. For all their attractions, such alliances were not always successful, and the Norton-Shipwarde connexion brought nothing but trouble to Shipwarde in his later years.

All of the MPs were merchants for at least part if not all of their adult life. Even Young, who made his name as a lawyer, began his career in trade and continued to engage in it long after entering the legal profession, perhaps until the end of his life. Yet his half-brother, William Canynges, one of the greatest of the town’s late medieval merchants, did not remain in trade until the end of his days, choosing to enter the Church in his later years. Thanks to his profession and landholdings, Young was a ‘gentleman’ while Norton, sometimes acknowledged as an ‘esquire’, was perhaps just as much a member of the landed gentry as a townsman. At least three of their fellow MPs, John Sharp V, William Pavy and Richard Forster (also known as an ‘esquire’) were ‘gentlemen’ as well as merchants. Whether ‘gentlemen’ or not, the 17 as a group were men of considerable substance. Only in the case of Forster is there a hint of more humble beginnings, in spite of the status he came to enjoy after settling in Bristol, since a royal pardon issued to him in mid 1437 suggests that he began his career as a draper in his native Somerset.

Although evidence for the trading activities of some of the 17 is extremely scanty, most of them exported cloth and some of them shipped wine from France and Iberia, as well as iron and woad, two other Spanish imports. Bristol’s merchants, including several of the MPs, also traded with Iceland (off which Canynges had the misfortune to lose a ship), and Ireland, both major sources of fish. Elsewhere, Burton and Trenode took advantage of Henry V’s conquest of Normandy, jointly procuring a royal licence allowing them to re-export wine to the duchy’s ports in 1419. The duchy was one of the less regular trading destinations for Bristol merchants, as were the Low Countries, with which Robert Russell, already commercially active before the end of the fourteenth century, had dealings. There is also some evidence for Russell’s domestic business concerns, which extended to Shrewsbury, Hereford and Monmouth as well as the nearer Chippenham and Dunster. His business partners included Burton and Trenode, and the trio purchased wheat and barley worth 100 marks for supplying the people of Bristol in early 1429, only for a band of malefactors to ambush and plunder the vessels carrying the grain down the Severn. It was perhaps no coincidence that Trenode subsequently stood for election to the Parliament of that year, one of the assemblies in which the Commons submitted a petition for free navigation on that river. In common with many of their fellow townsmen, several of the MPs had commercial dealings with London. Trenode spent his early career as a ‘taverner’ and ‘vintner’ there, and in 1441 Canynges joined the Grocers’, the City Company of which his brother Thomas Canynges* and half-brother John Young* were already members. The trade in goods was not the only potential source of profit, since Burton, Trenode and Thomas Fish participated in the lucrative business of transporting pilgrims to the great Spanish pilgrimage centre of Santiago de Compostela. All three were shipowners although not on the same scale as William Canynges, one of the greatest in England of his time.

The evidently very wealthy Canynges expended much of his wealth on rebuilding St. Mary Redcliffe, his home parish church at Bristol, on his benefactions to the college at nearby Westbury-on-Trym, of which he became dean after entering the Church, and on the chantries and the almshouse he founded in the town. He also built a very fine town house for himself backing on to the Avon. Shipwarde was another considerable charitable benefactor, in his case to his parish church of St. Stephen, where he funded large-scale building works, most notably the construction of a new tower. He also provided for the founding of a chantry in his will, as did Burton, Henry Gildeney, John Sharp III, Norton, Pavy, Meede and Forster, of whom the last, like Canynges, founded an almshouse in Bristol. As well as a sign of wealth, such projects were a display of conventional piety and orthodox faith, notwithstanding later medieval Bristol’s reputation as a significant centre of lollardy.15 C.R. Burgess, ‘A Hotbed of Heresy?’, in The Fifteenth Cent. III ed. Clark, 52-53.

William Canynges appears to have accumulated landed estates of greater significance than did most of his fellow MPs, none of whom was a particularly large landowner. No inquisition post mortem or subsidy assessments for him have survived but he was supposed to have settled lands in Bristol and Somerset worth £100 p.a. on his surviving son, John, and daughter-in-law, Isabel, the daughter of Thomas Middleton, an esquire from the latter county, in 1464. Canynges’s half-brother, Thomas Young, invested part of his wealth in real property outside Bristol. Situated in Gloucestershire, Somerset and Wiltshire, these estates are impossible to value but were respectable rather than spectacular acquisitions. Norton inherited property in the city of Worcester, valued at £5 p.a. for the purposes of the subsidy of 1431, and lands in Somerset (probably worth at least £40 p.a.) from his father. Most of the holdings of those of the MPs with lands outside Bristol lay predominantly near the town or elsewhere in the south-west of England, although John Sharp III appears to have had an interest in estates in the east Midlands, possibly in the right of his wife.

Save for Norton, all of the MPs held municipal office at Bristol. Nine of them served one or more terms as mayor, as probably would have some of their fellows, had not death removed them from the scene.16 e.g. Power, who died in office as sheriff in the summer of 1437. Most of the mayors among them took up the office after beginning their parliamentary careers. Only Burton combined the responsibilities of mayor and MP, gaining election to the Parliament of 1423 while serving in the former position. Assuming the ordinance of 1344 was observed, each of the nine mayors would have served as an alderman before attaining the mayoralty. Rather unusually, Forster’s second and third terms as mayor were consecutive but the reason for his immediate re-election is unknown. Thirteen of the MPs served as sheriff (in no cases for more than one term and in most instances before they had begun their parliamentary careers), and nearly all of them as bailiff. Typically, the latter office was a first step on the cursus honorum. Of those known to have held it, only Walter Power did not do so before his election to the Commons. John Sharp V was also somewhat exceptional as a bailiff, given that he served a second term in the office following the dissolution of his last Parliament. At least a dozen of the 17 held office in the local staple, six of them before gaining election to their first (or only) Parliaments. Finally, Young was recorder of Bristol for over a decade, although he did not take up that position until several years after embarking on his parliamentary career.

Borough offices were not the only positions of responsibility that the MPs exercised at Bristol. All of them, save Langley, served on at least one ad hoc commission for the town, usually after they had entered Parliament for the first (or only) time. Furthermore, some of them served the King as customs officials there and others, notably Young, held county office under the Crown elsewhere. Russell, Langley and, apparently, one of the John Sharps served as deputy butler at Bristol, but through the appointment of the chief butler of England rather than the Crown. In any case, only Langley took up the office (which he relinquished a few months after the Parliament of 1426) before he had sat for the town in the Commons. Young is the sole man among the 17 known to have served in the administration of the duchy of Lancaster. His prominence as a lawyer ensured for him employment in the duchy at a regional and national level and in London, although not before his first election for Bristol in 1435. Although he rose to high office in the King’s courts at Westminster, he did not do so until the reign of Edward IV, after his parliamentary career was over.

While it is unlikely that Young had already entered the service of Edward’s father, Richard, duke of York, in 1435, his connexion with York had a very important bearing on his activities in the mid fifteenth-century Parliaments he attended. He was a Member of those of 1450 and 1455, both summoned at times of political advantage for the duke, and he probably owed much to his links with York for his election as a knight of the shire for Gloucestershire in 1460, since he was by no means a firmly established member of the gentry of that county. It is worth noting that his half-brother, William Canynges, also associated with the Yorkists, gained election alongside him in 1450 and 1455. Notwithstanding Young’s links with York, it was only natural that such a prominent lawyer also found employment with other great lay magnates. Yet there is no evidence that any of them influenced his parliamentary career in the same way as his primary patron, and the same holds true with regard to the connexions, putative or otherwise, between others of the 17 and the nobility. It is possible, for example, that Shipwarde had links with the Lords Berkeley like his son and namesake. The younger John Shipwarde fell under suspicion of having sent armed assistance to the Berkeleys in 1470, prior to their celebrated private battle with the Talbots at Nibley Green, just over 20 miles north-east of Bristol. Meede, whose daughter Isabel had married Lord Berkeley’s younger brother Maurice, was likewise accused of supporting the Berkeleys at Nibley Green. His link with the Berkeleys cannot have had any bearing on his parliamentary career, which was already over when Isabel married Maurice, unless in a negative sense of in some way preventing his re-election to the Commons after the dissolution of the Parliament of 1460.

As in the previous three and a half decades,17 The Commons 1386-1421, i. 405. re-election was a recurring feature when Bristol returned MPs during the period under review. At just one election, that of 1453, neither of the men chosen had previously attended the Commons. By contrast, most of the MPs for neighbouring Gloucester appear to have sat just once. A town with about half the population of Bristol, the economic difficulties Gloucester encountered in this period may have made members of its municipal elite increasingly reluctant to enter the Commons. Young was easily the most experienced parliamentarian among the 17, since between the mid 1430s and mid 1450s he sat for Bristol in no fewer than ten Parliaments, nine of them consecutive. While unusual, this large number of re-elections is readily explicable. As a prominent lawyer who had strong family connexions with London, Young was frequently in the City and at Westminster, the venue for most Parliaments, meaning that it was far less of an inconvenience for him to serve as an MP than it was for most of his fellow burgesses. Furthermore, there were obvious advantages for Bristol in having such an able man of affairs as a representative, even if he sometimes pursued other agenda, most notably his espousal of the cause of Richard, duke of York, in the Parliament of 1450-1. Of the other MPs, Burton represented the town in five Parliaments, John Sharp III in four, Canynges, Gildeney, Power, Russell, John Sharp V, Shipwarde and Trenode in three and Fish, Roger Levedon, and Meede in two. Only four of them, Forster, Langley, Norton and Pavy, sat for Bristol just once, but Langley was not a newcomer to the Commons in 1426, since he had sat for the Wiltshire borough of Chippenham in 1422. Apart from Langley, only Young, who entered his eleventh and final Parliament in 1460 as a knight of the shire for Gloucestershire, definitely represented a constituency other than Bristol.

The repeated election of Young alone ensured considerable continuity in the parliamentary representation of Bristol between the later 1430s to the mid 1450s. Furthermore, the returns of Burton, Gildeney, Levedon, Power, Russell, John Sharp III and Trenode provided further continuity early in Henry VI’s reign, and the re-election of Meede, John Sharp V and Shipwarde in its later years. Four of the MPs, Burton, Gildeney, Russell and Trenode, first entered Parliament in the reign of Henry V, but, with the apparent exception of John Sharp III, none of the MPs sat in Edward IV’s reign. The burgesses of Bristol appear to have valued parliamentary partnerships, a feature of the town’s representation in this period. Burton and Levedon sat together in 1422 and 1423, and Young and John Sharp V in three Parliaments in a row (1447, February 1449 and November 1449). The half-brothers Young and Canynges were the MPs in 1439, 1450 and 1455, and Shipwarde and Meede the men elected in 1459 and 1460.

The shire court at Bristol was the usual venue for parliamentary elections. If it was not due to meet between the summoning and opening of a Parliament it was the duty of the sheriff of the town to make ad hoc arrangements. In 1426, for example, he had the writ of summons publicly proclaimed and then, with the assent of the mayor and others, he and the ‘more discreet & sufficient’ of the burgesses met in the guildhall and elected Gildeney and Langley. The election of that year is also noteworthy in another respect, since the Chancery sent Bristol a writ of summons that failed to acknowledge that its parliamentary burgesses were also knights of the shire. In response to the omission, apparently the result of scribal carelessness, the municipal authorities entrusted the MPs with a petition of protest, through which they secured letters patent reaffirming their town’s status as a county in its own right.18 Ibid. 404; PROME, x. 207, 317; Bristol Chs. 118-21. There were 30 attestors at the election of Gildeney and Langley in 1426. In the other extant indentures of this period such witnesses ranged in number from as few as 21 in 1432 to as many as 35 in 1447, but with no significant fluctuations from one election to another where there are no breaks in the series. Among the MPs themselves, only Norton did not witness any of the surviving indentures for fifteenth-century Bristol, and some of the 17 attested elections on a very regular basis. From 1432, the well-known Act of 1429 restricting the franchise in county elections to 40s. freeholders was observed at Bristol, the only urban county specifically to state its adherence to the Act in its returns. In keeping with the trend towards oligarchic control of the town, all of the 17 were drawn from its elite, making them well able to bear the common council’s decision in 1450 to set the wages of its parliamentary representatives at 2s. each per day, a considerable reduction from the generous rate of 5s. Bristol had allowed its MPs in Henry V’s reign.19 M. McKisack, Parlty. Repn. English Bors. 51-52; The Commons 1386-1421, i. 404-5; Gt. Red Bk. of Bristol, i (Bristol Rec. Soc. iv), 128; E13/134, rots. 2, 2d.

With the exceptions of Gildeney, Langley and, most notably, Young, there is very little evidence for the activities of Bristol’s representatives once they had arrived at a Parliament. During that of 1429, however, the MPs for Bishop’s Lynn wrote to their mayor reporting that their counterparts from London, Bristol, York, Hull and elsewhere were planning to lobby the knights of the shire for ‘a restriction of the subsidy’ (pro restricione subsidii). Although not recorded on the Parliament roll, negotiations of this type must have taken up a considerable amount of time and energy.20 Norf. RO, King’s Lynn bor. recs., translation of hall bk., 1422-9, 1450, KL/C 7/29, p. 279; McKisack, 131n, 143. It is very likely that Bristol’s representatives in 1429, John Sharp III and Richard Trenode, also took an active interest in a Commons petition concerning free navigation on the Severn, given that the river was so important for the town’s inland trade and that Trenode had recently suffered at the hands of malefactors disrupting the traffic along it. Similarly, the MPs of 1427 and 1431 must have taken a similar interest in petitions on the same subject submitted in those Parliaments. One might also speculate that a couple of the items on the agenda of the Parliament of 1453 were of direct interest to Bristol’s representatives in that assembly, Shipwarde and Pavy. First, the Commons agreed a new type of grant, the levying of 20,000 archers to serve the King for six months, a force to which Bristol was to contribute 91 men. Secondly, just before it closed, the Parliament decided that the realm’s leading towns and cities should provide loans for the keeping of the seas, £150 in the case of Bristol.21 PROME, x. 361, 409, 470-1; xii. 236-42, 264-8; CPR, 1452-61, pp. 163-4.

Alone among the MPs, Young’s activities in Parliament, especially that of 1450-1, particularly stand out. Although he was no doubt a diligent representative for Bristol, those activities, as recorded, had nothing to do with the town. During the Parliament of 1447, the Exchequer rewarded him for his ‘labours and diligence’ on ‘divers matters’ for the King’s profit.22 E403/765, m. 16. The issue rolls do not reveal what those matters concerned but they were probably considerably less significant than his support for his patron, Richard, duke of York, in the Parliament of 1450-1. In late May 1451, just before the dissolution of that assembly, he took the risk of advocating York as contingent heir to the throne, most likely by means of an oral petition. His action was probably the cause of the abrupt ending of the Parliament, and the government punished him for his audacity by sending him to the Tower. Just over four years later, during the Parliament of 1455, Young presented a potentially constitutionally significant petition to the Commons. Appealing for recompense for the physical and financial losses he had suffered while in the Tower earlier in the decade, he also asserted that his imprisonment had breached the Commons’ ‘olde liberte . . . to speke and sey in the hous of their assemble as to theym is thought conuenyent or resonable withoute eny maner challenge, charge, or punycion’. Whether Young sincerely believed in freedom of speech for the Commons, or was merely acting in the interests of himself and his patron is a moot point. Yet the petition, which tacitly repeated the claims he had advanced earlier on behalf of York, placed his fellow MPs in something of a dilemma. They could seek to advance their privileges by supporting it but at the risk of condoning what he had said in 1451. It was with some adroitness that the Crown referred the matter to the lords of the Council, to provide for the petitioner as they thought fit. By this means, any possibility of a royal confirmation of a supposed right of the Commons was averted and the privilege Young claimed for the Lower House was not officially recognized.