Leicester

By the fifteenth century Leicester had passed beyond the peak of its medieval prosperity. Rated as the eighth richest borough in England in the tax assessments of 1269, it had declined to 17th by the time of the poll tax of 1377.1 The Commons 1386-1421, i. 474. None the less, economically and administratively, it remained an important place. Its castle was the administrative centre of the duchy of Lancaster honour of Leicester, and this connexion with the duchy explains why, twice in the period under review here, Parliament met in the town. In the winter of 1425-6 the support of the Londoners for Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, in his dispute with Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester, had rendered Westminster unsuitable as a venue, and Leicester was chosen as an alternative location for what became known as the ‘Parliament of battes’ that assembled on 18 Feb. 1426; and later the highly-charged atmosphere in the capital occasioned the summons of the third session of the turbulent Parliament of November 1449 to meet in Leicester on 29 Apr. 1450.2 PROME, x. 276-9; xii. 71, 76-77.

A large part of the borough records for the period under review is lost. The run of the informative mayoral accounts ceases in 1380, and the chamberlains’ accounts which superseded them no longer survive; the records of the town’s merchant guild between 1380 and 1465 are also missing and the proceedings of the portmanmoot, the borough court, have left little trace.3 Leicester Bor. Recs. ed. Bateson, ii. pp. xvii, xlv. There are thus serious difficulties in the way of describing the administrative and commercial history of Leicester in the period under review. It is clear, however, that the reign of Henry VI was not a period of major change in the government of the town, although it was one in which the necessity for modernization made itself felt. Significant innovations were instituted soon afterwards. In 1464 by royal letters patent Leicester was granted its own j.p.s, to be composed of the mayor and four others chosen from their own number by the brethren of the bench (the governing council of 24 from whom the mayor was selected), and a recorder, who was to be an appointee of the Crown. Bye-laws passed in 1466 and 1467 excluded from the ‘common hall’ the un-enfranchised, that is, those who had not been admitted to the guild merchant, an exclusion necessitated by the replacement of the ‘morningspeech’, the meeting of the guild, by the ‘common hall’ as the main vehicle of the borough’s government.4 Ibid. pp. xliv-xlv, 285-6; VCH Leics. iv. 28-29. This process of exclusion took a further step forward in 1489: an act of Parliament obliged the borough community to surrender its ancient voice in Leicester’s affairs to 48 of its number nominated by the mayor and the brethren of the bench.5 Leicester Bor. Recs. ii. pp. xlviii-l, 280-2, 319, 324-5; VCH Leics. iv. 26; CPR, 1461-7, p. 330; PROME, xvi. 61-62.

The reign of Henry VI also marked the apparent abandonment of an administrative experiment that had characterized the preceding period. From the mid fourteenth century the burgesses had made attempts to limit the control exercised by their immediate overlord, the duchy of Lancaster. These bore their most visible fruit when, in 1375, they took their first lease of the firma burgi. After the expiry of this lease, new ones were taken in 1404 and 1423, but there is no record of a further renewal after the end of the last of them in 1433. From that year the bailiff was once more a seigneurial official and the burgesses no longer elected two bailiffs of their own, as they had during the leases. It would, however, be too easy to overstress the importance of the town’s loss of this briefly-held financial independence. The burgesses abandoned the lease because it was financially disadvantageous, a disadvantage which was not outweighed by the removal of the duchy bailiff from the town’s government.6 Leicester Bor. Recs. ii. pp. xxii-vi, 149-52, 219-22, 232-3. Indeed, judging from those the burgesses elected to represent them in Parliament, they enjoyed considerable independence in the administration of their affairs throughout the period under review.

Although there is no record of the townsmen presenting a petition in Parliament during this period, it is possible that one, now lost, was submitted to that of 1426. Among the borough muniments of 1492 was a ‘confirmacione of all the grauntes’ confirmed at that assembly. This no longer survives and there is no other record of it, but it is a reasonable speculation that the burgesses had taken the opportunity offered by the meeting of Parliament in the town to petition for the confirmation either through Parliament or, perhaps more probably, to the Crown directly.7 Ibid. 341.

Despite its ancient Lancastrian connexions and the support rendered by the burgesses to Henry IV in 1399, the town seems to have favoured the Yorkist cause in the civil-war years. A contemporary poem claims that a contingent from Leicester, marching under their banner ‘the griffin’, was with Edward IV’s army at the battle of Towton.8 Historical Poems ed. Robbins, 217. More significantly, on 5 May 1462, during a visit to the town, that King granted the mayor and burgesses an annuity of 20 marks for the term of 20 years, in consideration of their ‘good and faithful and unpaid service ... cheerfully rendered of late in our behalf against our enemies ... as also of the heavy burden of their no small losses incurred touching such business of ours’.9 Leicester Bor. Recs. ii. 279; VCH Leics. iv. 7. According to a record now lost this grant was made in response to representations made to the new King by the mayor and the two MPs, Thomas Green III and John Roberts†, who had represented the town in the first Parl. of the new reign: J. Thompson, Hist. Leicester, 182. Further marks of royal favour followed: in 1464, as mentioned above, the mayor and burgesses were empowered to elect their own j.p.s.; in the following year they were exempted from the Act of Resumption; and in 1473 they were granted a yearly fair.10 Leicester Bor. Recs. ii. 280-2, 284, 296.

Returns survive for 19 of the 22 Parliaments which met between 1422 and 1460. Twenty-four or 25 men are recorded as representing the borough during the period.11 This figure depends on whether Thomas Green II, a tapicer, represented the borough in 1450, or whether his namesake Thomas Green III, a draper who sat in 1459 and 1461, did so. Twelve or 13 of these sat only once and seven or eight twice, and between them they represented the borough in a total of only 51 Parliaments. None were elected for any other constituency. It is clear that representation was broadly shared between the leading townsmen. The parliamentary careers of John Church, who sat eight times, and Ralph Brasier, who sat seven times, were exceptional, and both began before the period under review here. Of the 20 men who were first returned during the reign of Henry VI, only William Newby is recorded as being elected on as many as four occasions. With representation so widely shared, it is not surprising that the same man was rarely returned to successive Parliaments. The only two examples during the reign of Henry VI are Thomas Waldegrave, who sat in the Parliaments of 1425 and 1426, and Newby, who sat in the next two Parliaments of 1427 and 1429.

This is not to say that the borough frequently elected two MPs without previous parliamentary experience. Until 1450 it was almost routine to return a novice with someone who had sat before. In that year, however, there was a distinct break. No one who represented the borough before 1450 is recorded as doing so afterwards. This apparent divide may owe something to the missing returns of 1439, 1445 and the 1460s, but this cannot be the whole explanation. Two apparent novices were returned to the Parliaments of 1450, 1453, 1455, and perhaps also to that of 1459. Even so this abrupt emergence of a new generation of Leicester MPs was not the occasion for a change in the character of the borough’s representation: the MPs of the 1450s were, like their predecessors, drawn from the ranks of the leading townsmen.

The preponderance of the leading townsmen among the borough’s MPs is more marked in the reign of Henry VI than in the period 1386-1421. This is partly because one class of representative, those who were servants of the duchy of Lancaster before they were townsmen, became much less significant after 1422. For example, both those who held office as the duchy bailiff in the town in the earlier period, Henry Forster† and William Bispham†, were elected to represent the town while in office, Forster on as many as three occasions. None of the four men who held the office during Henry VI’s reign – Richard Manfeld, John Norris*, Richard Hotoft* and Thomas Meryng – sat for the town. If this reflects a new unwillingness on the part of the townsmen to return such men and a new determination to rely on their own kind, it was a passing phase. The old practice was soon resumed: Peter Curteys†, duchy bailiff from 1460 to the late 1490s, sat for the borough on at least eight occasions, and his successor, Robert Orton†, was returned in 1504. Since both these men, like Forster before them, also served as mayor, there is no reason to suppose that they, or other earlier royal bailiffs, were unwillingly elected by the townsmen as MPs.12 A curiosity is here worth noting. After the result of parlty. elections begin to be intermittently recorded in the borough records in 1478, the duchy bailiff is always said to have been elected by the ‘commons’, and his fellow MP by the mayor and brethren: Leicester Bor. Recs. ii. 300, 304-5, 330, 364. This implies the ‘commons’ could easily lose their free choice.

Why then were no royal bailiffs returned between Forster and Curteys? Part of the reason lies in the fact that there was no such officer while the townsmen held the borough at farm from 1423 and 1433, and that thereafter three of the appointees held the office only briefly. This does not, however, explain why Hotoft, who held office almost continuously from 1441 to 1460, never sat for the borough. In his case specific explanations can be adduced. Unlike Forster and Curteys, he was important enough to secure a county seat: before becoming bailiff he had already twice sat for Leicestershire, and he again sat for both that county and Warwickshire in the late 1440s. The other explanation lies in the breakdown of his relations with the leading townsmen in the early 1450s. This may explain why he sat for Warwick rather than Leicester in the Parliaments of 1453 and 1455.

There were thus reasons particular to our period why no royal bailiff was returned, and, in these circumstances, one might suppose that the townsmen would occasionally be disposed to return his deputy. However, of the six men who are recorded as holding this office between 1434 and 1461, only Thomas Hewet and William Clerk were elected, and only Hewet was in office when he sat in Parliament. There are, in short, no examples of men who had parallel careers in the duchy and borough administrations during the reign of Henry VI, and in this sense the pattern of the borough’s representation was rather different from that in the preceding and following periods.

The dominance of this elite throughout the reign of Henry VI (together with the minimal infiltration of outsiders) is reflected in the fact that only four of the MPs did not serve as the town’s mayor at some point in their careers. Of these four, Thomas Burton was not a townsman, although he did have interests in the borough, and two, Thomas Hewet and Henry Walter, held the lesser office of bailiff during the period of the last lease. Aside from Burton, only two of the MPs, John Hewet and William Stringer, are not recorded as serving as borough officers. Given this correspondence between the borough’s officers and its parliamentary representatives, it is not surprising that few who held office as mayor were not returned to Parliament at some point during their careers. Twenty-seven townsmen completed at least one term as mayor during the reign of Henry VI, and only six or seven of them are not recorded as MPs.13 If the MP in 1450 was Thomas Green II, the figure is six. On at least two occasions in the period the burgesses elected the serving mayor as their MP: in 1453, when Wymondeswold was mayor, and to the following Parliament of 1455, when Dalton held the office. The same also happened in 1423 when John Church was elected, although his term of office concluded before the Parliament assembled. Of the 20 or 21 MPs who served as mayor, ten or 11 held the office before they are first recorded as sitting in Parliament, but this figure would probably be slightly lower if the returns were complete. In any event it is clear that the electors showed a very distinct preference for choosing their MPs from the pool of former mayors. Of the 38 seats for which those returned are known in this period, no fewer than 24 or 25 were filled by former mayors, together with one more taken by a man holding office as mayor for the first time. Only in 1422 did neither of the MPs have any experience of the mayoralty. Moreover, in other cases, election as mayor followed very closely upon a first return to Parliament: Walter Pomeroy, who sat for the borough in 1435, was elected mayor in 1436, and Robert Sheringham was an MP in 1459 and mayor in 1460. Again this was a different pattern from that which had prevailed in the period 1386-1421. Then former mayors were far less prominent among the town’s MPs: of 43 seats, only 15 were filled by former mayors (and one by a man in office as mayor for the first time). They did, however, become better represented in the later part of that period, with nine out of 18 MPs returned from 1410 to 1421 inclusive having previously occupied the mayoralty.

This may reflect a narrowing of the borough elite during the fifteenth century, and this is certainly consistent with what is known of changes in the borough’s government. Indeed, it may be that by the reign of Henry VI the MPs were drawn exclusively from the ranks of the brethren of the bench. Clearly all those elected as either mayors or former mayors were serving brethren, and it is probably safe to add to their number those chosen as mayor for the first time within a few years of sitting in Parliament. This leaves only five doubtful cases accounting for six seats – John Hewet, Henry Walter, Thomas Burton, Thomas Hewet and William Stringer – and, with the possible exception of Burton, it is not implausible that they too numbered among the brethren of the bench when they were elected. A slightly later case is highly significant in this context: when, at a ‘common hall’ on 12 Jan. 1478, Curteys was elected for the first time to represent the borough in Parliament, he was simultaneously nominated as one of the brethren of the bench.14 Leicester Bor. Recs. ii. 300.

Given the dominance of the elite, it is not surprising to find that many of Leicester’s MPs came from families established in the town for at least one generation. The Brasiers, Charites and possibly also the Clerks were resident there by the early thirteenth century, and the families of Loughborough, Fisher alias Furnes, Sheringham and Stringer, although more recent arrivals, can be traced in the town before the period under review. Others, however, were more recent newcomers. Among these were some of Leicester’s wealthier MPs. William Wigston appears to have come from Aylestone, a few miles to the south of Leicester, and quickly established business interests more extensive than those of any of the burgesses. As a merchant of the Calais staple, he laid the foundations of a family whose members soon became the leading holders of property in his adopted town. William Wymondeswold was from a minor gentry family resident near the county’s border with Nottinghamshire, and appears to have married a townswoman; John Reynold hailed from Atherstone in Warwickshire, and John Pykwell from Sileby, a few miles to the north of Leicester. More doubtful is the case of William Pacy, but it is likely that he came from Great Easton in the south-east corner of Leicestershire. None the less these men, at the time of their elections to Parliament, were in no sense outsiders. They all made Leicester their home and were well-established burgesses before becoming MPs.

There can be no doubt that the borough’s MPs were as a body closely associated one with another not only in their administrative duties but also in their personal affairs. Unfortunately, since so little evidence survives of the latter, particularly of their relationships by marriage, their mutual connexions can only be very partially reconstructed. John and Thomas Hewet may have been father and son, and William Clerk was probably married to Ralph Fisher’s sister. An unusual reference shows that Thomas Dalton and William Wigston were pupils together at the grammar school in the town (together with John Pacy, son of another MP), and their association was a long one for they sat together in the Parliament of 1455 and Dalton’s widow married Wigston’s son Roger.

Little is known of the MPs’ incomes, but several were clearly men of some substance. Six of them, together with the widow of another, appear in the Leicestershire subsidy returns of 1435-6. John Reynold was assessed at as much as £20; Ralph Brasier at £13; and John Church, John Loughborough, William Newby, Adam Racy and Margaret, widow of John Pykwell, at £5, the minimum assessable sum.15 E179/192/59. Some of this income was derived from property outside the town, for both Reynold and Brasier are known to have had lands, albeit modest ones, elsewhere in the county, as it seems did Burton, Racy, Sheringham and Wymondeswold. There is, however, little direct evidence of Leicester MPs putting the profits of commercial careers to the purchase of country estates, for those MPs cited above owed part at least of their country estates to inheritance. Certainly no townsman of the period acquired property significant enough to lift him above the ranks of the lesser gentry. Interestingly, however, two of Leicester’s MPs appear to have become embroiled in embarrassing legal difficulties through acquisitions of property outside the town. In the 1430s Charite and Grantham found themselves claimed as villeins: the former by Henry, Lord Grey of Codnor, as appurtenant to the manor of Evington, a few miles to the east of Leicester, the latter by Sir Richard Hastings* as appurtenant to that of Newton Harcourt, a few miles further to the south. There is no evidence to suggest that they were not freemen and both proved their status as such. The likely explanation is that they had unwisely purchased property held in villein tenure, and, as relatively wealthy townsmen, were being made to pay for their error.

Such deterrents to purchase, together with the restricted market in land, explain why some MPs preferred to lease property both within the town and further afield. Charite himself leased lands at Bromkinsthorpe, in the immediate environs of Leicester, from the abbey of St. Mary de Pratis together with property in the town itself from one of the local gentry, Thomas Walsh of Wanlip. Further afield William Newby leased wood in the park of Sir Ralph Shirley† at Staunton Harold and he may also have leased the Leicestershire property of the priory of Jesus of Bethlehem, Sheen. Others benefited from leases of the duchy of Lancaster’s property in the town: Sheringham took a lease of a croft in Horsefair and Pacy a garden in the Saturday Market. Better documentation would undoubtedly reveal other examples.

A study of Leicester’s MPs reveals something of the commercial history of the town. Judging from what can be discovered of the occupations of those returned, the most significant business activity was trade in cloth and this is confirmed by other evidence.16 Trans. Leics. Arch. Soc. xxv. 85-88. At least five MPs – Fisher, Grantham, Thomas Green III, Pacy and Sheringham – were drapers, and another, Dalton, was a mercer. Seven more – Brasier, Charite, John Hewet, Newby, Pykwell, Wigston and Wymondeswold – are given the less precise designation of merchant, but only Wigston, as a merchant of the Calais Staple, is known to have had extensive mercantile interests.17 The versatile Wymondeswold also appears as grocer, chandler and spicer, and Newby as an ostler. The recorded trades of the other MPs are various: Thomas Hewet was a bowyer; Loughborough, a spicer; Pomeroy, a mason; Clerk, a fishmonger, as, early in his career, was Sheringham; and Racy, a glover. Given what is known of the representative history both of the borough during a later period and of other boroughs during Henry VI’s reign, lawyers are conspicuous by their absence. The early sixteenth century provides a striking contrast, for then more than half of the borough’s known MPs were men of legal training.18 The Commons 1509-58, i. 130.

It is hard to discern the factors that may have determined the results of individual elections, but one seems to have been the tension prevailing between the burgesses and Hotoft, as the duchy bailiff, in the mid-1450s. At a ‘common hall’ on 7 Nov. 1455 Hotoft was said to have, ‘ex maliuolo corde et malicia’, unjustly indicted the mayor and the community in divers courts of the King, and as a result it was decided that all these unjust actions should be defended ‘tanquam materie et querele tote communitati ville ... tangentes et pertinentes’. It is very likely that one of these actions was a bill sued against the mayor, Thomas Dalton, by the county sheriff, Thomas Berkeley†. Berkeley complained that on the previous 7 June at Sewstern in the north-east of the county Dalton had collected as many as 500 malefactors with the intention of killing him, but had settled instead for assaulting him and then imprisoning him for two days. These events explain Dalton’s election to the Parliament which met in July.

Yet while the town’s relations with the duchy could occasionally be a source of dissension, it could also be a source of strength and support for the burgesses. This is illustrated by the only other occasion in the reign in which the result of an election was determined by conflict between the town and an external authority. The return of William Newby to represent the borough in the Parliament of February 1449 appears to have been intended to forward a case against its neighbour, Edward Grey, Lord Ferrers of Groby. In the previous April a jury of townsmen, headed by Thomas Burton and Newby himself (and including five other MPs), indicted Grey of illegally distributing livery in the town. His response was to embark on a campaign of intimidation against the inhabitants, which included a violent assault on Newby. It is unlikely to have been coincidental that, while this Parliament was in session, Queen Margaret, who held the honour of Leicester as part of her dowry, ordered Grey to pay Newby 100 marks in compensation and to ‘be goode lorde’ to him and other of her tenants. These examples confirm that, despite their apparent willingness to surrender the firma burgi, the burgesses were strongly protective of their independence, able both to exploit their closeness to the duchy as a protection and to resist an overbearing duchy bailiff.

This protectiveness may also partly explain why there is so little indication of external interference in Leicester’s parliamentary elections. Indeed, on only one occasion can it be speculatively suggested that such interference had a part to play in determining who was returned. Thomas Burton was elected to represent the borough in the Parliament of 1447, in which the royal court planned to destroy the waning political influence of Humphrey, duke of Gloucester. Burton was not an outsider –both he and his putative father held property in the borough and it is significant that he headed the borough jury in April 1448 – but nor was he a townsman. To John, Viscount Beaumont, he owed his appointment to the important office of receiver of the honour of Leicester, and there is no doubt that Beaumont, as a prominent courtier, was then anxious to secure the election of his servants (as he successfully did, for example, in Leicestershire and Grimsby). Yet, leaving this example aside, it is the lack of evidence of the steward’s intervention in the borough’s elections which distinguishes this period from the sixteenth century. Then the steward’s influence, especially when he was a member of the Hastings family, was pervasive.19 Ibid. i. 130-1; The Commons 1558-1603, i. 193-4.

Combining the evidence of the surviving electoral returns with that provided by the borough archives, it is possible to say something about electoral practice in the borough. By 1478 it was the established custom for one MP to be chosen by the mayor and his brethren, and the other by the ‘commons’, but one can only speculate as to this custom’s antiquity and to the form of election it superseded.20 Leicester Bor. Recs. ii. 300. The records occasionally provide glimpses of a wider democracy at work: the mayor’s account of 1338-9 refers to both MPs as ‘chosen by consent of the community’ and the shrieval election return of 1407 describes an election made ‘per totam communitatem tocius burgi’, similar words to those employed in the return of 1411. Moreover, the mayor’s account of 1343-4 suggests that shortness of time meant that the election was made by the mayor and jurats, thus implying that in normal circumstances a wider body of townsmen participated in the electoral process.21 Ibid. 45, 60; C219/10/4, 6. These glimpses allow no more than the tentative conclusions that, in the fourteenth century, the election of both MPs was normally the responsibility of the ‘community’, but that, early in the next century, this responsibility became restricted to only one of the Members.

The formal election indentures made by the sheriff and instituted by the famous statute of 1406 hardly yield a clearer picture. In some respects, the evidence they provide is positively misleading. For example, the election of 1478 is recorded in the ‘Hall Book’ (a minute book of council meetings between 1467 and 1553) as taking place in the ‘common hall’ on Monday 12 Jan., but the formal election indenture, which names those elected for both county and borough, is dated 11 days earlier and implies that the borough election took place at the same time and at the same venue, namely the county court, as the shire election. Indeed, with only a few exceptions, this is the implication of all the returns for the period under review. In most the sheriff simply appended a list of townsmen at the end of the list of the county attestors (although sometimes he named no townsmen) and said nothing about separate elections. Occasionally, however, the formal return is more revealing, with separate indentures for the borough. Important here is the borough indenture of 1411: this is dated Friday 23 Oct., 15 days after the county election, and witnesses an election made by the common assent of the town ‘in aula ville’.22 C219/10/6. Unfortunately, the separate borough indentures for the elections to the Parls. of 1435, Feb. 1449, 1450 and 1453 are unrevealing. The last three are clearly the sheriff’s response to the statute of 23 Hen. VI c. 14, which had insisted on the return of separate indentures for boroughs. This confirms what later records make clear, namely that the borough elections were held in the guildhall rather than the county court, and there can be little doubt that this was a well-established practice by 1411.

Although the shrieval returns are generally uninformative about both the place and date of the borough’s elections, there is a significance to be attached to the names of townsman appended to the returns. It is probable that they identify not those townsmen who were present in the county court when the county MPs were elected but rather those present at the borough election. Since the borough election was sometimes held after that for the county it is less likely that those named were a deputation sent to the county court to witness the result of the borough election. This result may have been communicated to the sheriff in the form of an instrument naming some or all of those present at that election, and that the sheriff delayed drawing out the election indenture until he had received this instrument. On those occasions where no borough attestors are named – 1427 and 1459 – it may be assumed that none were notified to the sheriff.23 In Feb. 1449 the sheriff omitted to name either county or borough attestors: C219/15/6. Excluding these omissions, the number of borough attestors named in the shrieval returns varied between three in 1447 to 16 in 1450. The mayor was omitted from the list more often than not. This was probably because the borough notified the result of the election to the sheriff in the form of an indenture between the mayor and electors, and the sheriff generally chose to list only the electors on the official return. Indeed, variations in the number of those named implies that either he or the mayor failed to list all the leading townsmen present when the election was made.

The high status of the attestors is made clear by the high degree of overlap between the MPs and those who regularly attested. Only three of the 24 or 25 MPs do not appear as attestors at least once, and most are named many times. Newby attested as many as 12 returns between 1421 and 1453;24 He also attested the Leics. return in 1435, the only occasion in our period in which a Leicester MP appears as a county attestor: C219/14/5. Brasier and Loughborough both attested nine; and Waldegrave and Reynold seven each. Further, at each election a significant number of attestors were drawn from the ranks of the former mayors. For example, all four of the attestors to the election of 1433 were former mayors, and six out of eight to that of 1436. Clearly then a significant proportion of attestors were drawn from the ranks of the brethren on the bench, and it is tempting to suggest that the mayor, when making his return to the sheriff, named only the brethren who were present at the election. We know, however, that the wider community of the burgesses also had a part to play in the electoral process, and that the named attestors are therefore only a minority, albeit a socially significant one, of those present at the elections.25 The separate borough indenture for 1467 names as attestors the mayor, 11 ‘burgesses’ and 12 others: C219/17/1. The ‘burgesses’ are clearly brethren of the bench. Indeed, by the 1460s the large numbers who attended such occasions was giving the borough authorities cause for concern.26 Leicester Bor. Recs. ii. 285-6. What cannot be determined is how the election was made. If both MPs were elected by general acclamation, the potential for disturbance was considerable. Perhaps it was for this reason that, at an unknown date before 1478, the wider community was restricted to the election of only one MP. Even before the imposition of this restriction there was another. The dominance of the brethren of the bench clearly implies that the electorate had a limited choice as to whom they returned.

Leicester maintained its electoral independence in this period. Representation was dominated by the leading townsmen, with former mayors particularly prominent among those it returned, and lawyers were conspicuously absent from the list of its MPs. There is little evidence that the elections were influenced successfully either by the duchy of Lancaster or by the local baronage (save, perhaps, in respect of Burton’s election in 1447 which he may have owed to Viscount Beaumont). This provides a contrast to both earlier and later periods when the duchy’s influence was marked.