Grimsby

The late medieval period was one of decline for the once-thriving port of Grimsby, which, in the fifteenth century, was ‘a small town growing poorer’.1 E. Gillett, Grimsby, 66. The population appears to have fallen from about 2,000 in the late thirteenth century to less than half that figure 200 years later.2 S.H. Rigby, Med. Grimsby, 126-31. By the 1450s, if not before, the burgesses were finding difficulty in raising the fee farm of £50 p.a. due to Ralph Neville, earl of Westmorland, and the further annual payment of £11 which they owed to their neighbour, the Augustinian priory of Wellow. In October 1452 the bailiffs provoked a riot in the town when they made distraint for the payment of £27 10s. as arrears due to the abbey. More significantly, in the early 1460s Edward IV wrote to the earl, at the request of the burgesses, claiming that Grimsby was ‘right greatly impoverished through excessive and importable charges ... and in especial for the importable fee farm that it bearith unto you’.3 Ibid. 116; E5/533. Further evidence of these financial difficulties is provided by the release in 1468 to the borough by four ex-mayors, including Hugh Edon and John Sheriff, of debts totalling nearly £50 on account of ‘the poverty of the commonalty’.4 Grimsby bor. recs., ct. bk. 1/102/1, f. 39v; Rigby, 126. In these circumstances, it is not surpring to find a decline in the number of burgesses, from 70 in 1450 to 49 in 1491.5 HMC 14th Rep. VIII, 241, 266. By this latter date the burgesses were complaining to the Crown that their town was so decayed that they could no longer pay the fee farm. While evidence of urban decay is notoriously difficult to evaluate, these indications of crisis cannot be discounted, particularly as it is not difficult to adduce reasons for Grimsby’s decline. The progressive silting up of its haven diminished its trade, and its fishing industry fared poorly in the face of Dutch competition.6 Rigby, 133-8.

The names of both men who represented Grimsby are known for 18 of the 22 Parliaments which met during the reign of Henry VI, together with that of one of the borough’s MPs in the Coventry Parliament of 1459. Eighteen individuals were returned, taking 45 of the borough’s seats between them.7 This includes Edon’s election to the aborted Parl. of Nov. 1483. Only the two most important of these MPs, namely William Grimsby and Robert Staunton, represented other constituencies: the former sat for Lincolnshire in 1459 having twice represented Grimsby and before doing so again in 1472, and the latter was twice elected for Leicestershire after sitting once for Grimsby. As many as 12 of the 18 were like Staunton in representing the borough only once.8 This 12 includes Cokson, MP in 1429, who had been elected six years earlier but his election had been set aside. But the parliamentary careers of two lawyers ensured that, for the first part of the period under review here, there was a high level of representative continuity: Richard Duffield sat for Grimsby ten times between 1420 and 1435, five of them consecutively, and John Langholm I was elected on five occasions, four of them consecutively, between 1426 and 1433. Thus to every Parliament from 1422 to 1435 the electors chose one or other of their representatives from the two MPs who had sat for it in the previous Parliament. Thereafter, however, continuity declined. There are no further instances of re-election; only six of the borough’s seats were filled by experienced MPs between 1437 and 1460, compared with as many as 15 of 20 from 1422 to 1435; and the Parliaments of 1450 and 1453 were the first since May 1421 to which Grimsby elected two parliamentary novices.

The 18 MPs can, with the notable exception of Staunton, be divided into two categories. The first category consists of resident burgesses, with no significant landholdings outside the town, who belonged to the pool from which its office-holders were drawn. Such men had dominated the representation of Grimsby before 1422, but numbered only eight, taking only 11 seats, during our period.9 Chandler, Cokson, Dene, William Duffield, Edon, Elkington, Peresson, Sheriff. The second category consists of lesser local gentry from the near or immediate vicinity of the town who had an interest in its affairs but were not permanently resident within it. Nine of these represented Grimsby during the reign of Henry VI and filled as many as 25 seats. They were a varied group, although five of them were lawyers.10 Richard Duffield (who was retained by the borough for his counsel) and Richard Fulnetby acted as attorneys in the ct. of common pleas; Thomas Kele, when he sat for the borough in 1435, was a filacer in that court; and Moigne, educated at Gray’s Inn, and John Langholm I, served, albeit not until after they had represented the borough in Parl., on the quorum of the peace. Some were closely enough associated with the town to hold office there, but on the whole they were too involved in wider affairs to play any direct part in the administration of the borough. The most notable of them was William Grimsby, a personal attendant of the King from a family long established in the environs of the town. The only one of Grimsby’s representatives who cannot be placed in either of these two categories is another lawyer, Robert Staunton of Castle Donington in Leicestershire. His election is the only one that can have owed nothing to local factors.

Little of significance can be said about the relationship between election to Parliament and the holding of office in the borough. Of the eight resident burgesses, six held one or more of the borough offices, the exceptions being Chandler and William Duffield, and five of these had done so before their first election to Parliament. Of the nine MPs whose main interests lay outside the borough, only three held office, and only one, John del See, had done so before first election. There was occasionally a relationship between representation and the serving officers: Edon, in 1455, and Sheriff, in 1459, were returned while mayor; in 1432 Fulnetby was elected when bailiff; and Dene, in 1450, and Edon, in 1460, held office as coroner when returned.

Experience of borough administration was not, however, an important factor in determining the result of elections. The frequent election of outsiders meant that, of the 18 MPs, only five held the mayoralty, and aside from the two seats filled by serving mayors, only three more were taken by former ones. Similarly only five seats were filled by former bailiffs, aside from the single one taken by a serving bailiff in 1432. As a result, only a relatively small proportion of those active in Grimsby’s administration ever represented it in Parliament. For example, of the 22 men who served as mayor during the Lancastrian period, only six represented the town in Parliament.11 Roger Grainsby†, Simon Elkyngton, Richard Fulnetby, John Dene, Hugh Edon and John Sheriff. In addition another mayor, John Newport, sat for Lincs. For a list of mayors: HMC 14th Rep. VIII, 288-9.

The official returns for Grimsby are uninformative about electoral procedure. With one exception, they take the form of an endorsement of the writ of summons addressed to the Lincolnshire sheriff with the names of those elected for the borough, their mainpernors and the bailiffs, who acted as returning officers. The exception is an indenture in respect of the Parliament of 1459, drawn up between the county sheriff, on the one part, and the mayor, John Sheriff, who was himself returned, and 11 prominent burgesses as the attestors, on the other (it makes no mention of the bailiffs).12 C219/16/5.

The deficiencies of the official returns, however, are more than adequately counterbalanced by the evidence of electoral practice surviving among the borough archives. Poll lists for seven parliamentary elections between 1455 and 1487 are to be found in the court rolls and the earliest of the borough’s court books.13 These are printed in Rogers, 217-20. The printed poll of Jan. 1484 is in error in omitting the names of the last two electors: Grimsby ct. bk. 1/102/1, f. 28v. There is also a partial poll list for the election of 13 Jan. 1489: ibid, f. 54. Only one of these dates from our period: on 1 July 1455, eight days before Parliament was due to assemble, 29 electors, each having two votes, voted for seven candidates, four of whom, including the mayor, Hugh Edon, were also numbered among the electors. The Household servant, William Grimsby, comfortably topped the poll with 20 votes, even though the parliamentary summons had been issued in the wake of the Yorkist victory at St. Albans, but the second seat was very closely contested: Edon polled 11 votes, William Est, a former mayor, nine, John Langholm II, who had sat for the borough in the previous Parliament, eight, and a future mayor, Richard Asseby, seven. The other two candidates fared less well: John Newport II*, who had sat for Lincolnshire in the Parliament of 1450, secured two votes and William Yerburgh, who had represented Grimsby in the same Parliament, only one.

Later poll lists take a similar form with the number of electors varying from 22 to 31 and always including the mayor, and of candidates attracting votes between three and five. Clearly the MPs were generally elected, at least from 1455, by the majority verdict of the burgesses present in the borough court, and in the absence of evidence to the contrary it is reasonable to assume that the franchise comprised all the burgesses. As remarked above, their number was in decline during the second half of the fifteenth century, but the number of electors did not show a parallel decline, implying that a growing proportion of the burghal body was coming to vote.

The period under review here was one of transition in electoral practice. In the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries parliamentary elections had been made by a jury of 12, but by the late 1440s a wider franchise was emerging. The election to the Parliament of 1447 was made in the common hall before the mayor and coroners by 25 burgesses; and although the next election, held in January 1449, was again made by a jury of 12, the next documented election, that of 1455, was the poll of 29 electors.14 Rigby, 102; Grimsby ct. rolls 1/101, 27 Hen. VI; Rogers, 217. The probability is that this expansion of the franchise was based on the practice adopted for the annual election of the mayor and bailiffs. By 1434 at the latest these were made by 36 burgesses drawn in three groups of 12 from specified areas of the town.15 Grimsby bor. recs. 1/101, 13 Hen. VI; roll of election of mayor and bailiffs, 1/310/1.

Whatever the electoral practice adopted, an influential factor in determining the town’s representation was the burgesses’ need to find Members who would serve for a good deal less than the 2s. a day to which borough MPs were theoretically entitled. Indeed, Grimsby’s declining finances meant that this need became increasingly pressing over time. In 1394, for example, the borough had paid one of its MPs 20d. a day and the other 18d. a day. The latter rate was the usual payment during the 1390s, but the MPs in the Parliament of 1417 were paid at only 12d. and 10d. a day.16 Rigby, 101. The longer Parliaments of the 1420s brought additional strain: the Duffield brothers, who sat in the Parliament of 1423, were paid at the daily rates of 12d. and 8d., and yet, since they had to be paid for a total of as many as 123 days, the total cost in wages amounted to £10 5s., far more than for the shorter Parliaments and higher daily rates of, for example, the 1390s. The agreement concluded with those returned to the Parliament of February 1449 – that they would serve for 40s. each whatever the duration of the Parliament – was an attempt by the borough to place a ceiling on the price of representation and, given the length of the Parliament, was, from the point of view of the town’s finances, a very fortunate bargain.17 Grimsby chamberlains’s accts. 1/600/11; ct. rolls, 1/101, 27 Hen. VI.

The surviving assessments for the payment of the MPs to the Parliaments of November 1449 and 1459 suggest that, without such bargains, the cost of representation in assemblies which lasted over more than one session would have been extremely burdensome. On each occasion there were nearly 200 contributors to the levy, divided into four groups according to their place of residence within the town, and yet the total sum raised was only about £6 in the first instance and £7 in the second. And while the brevity of the Parliament of 1459 meant that the sum raised was sufficient for generous payments, that of November 1449 was in session about 150 days and the unfortunate Members can only have received a few pence a day.18 Grimsby bor. recs., assessments for parlty. expenses 1/612/1, 2 (formerly 1/800/1, 2).

The premium this placed on finding men prepared to serve cheaply explains why the burgesses so often returned lawyers – as many as 20 of Grimsby’s 36 seats were so filled – but another important consequence of this financial imperative was the opportunity it provided for external influence in the borough’s elections. On 15 Dec. 1448 the courtier and Lincolnshire peer, John, Viscount Beaumont, wrote to the mayor and burgesses that, ‘yt may like you for my sake in your eleccion for your Burgesses of your said town to graunte your good will and voys to [my right trusty and welbeloved servaunt Rauff Chaundeler]’.19 HMC 14th Rep. VIII, 250. Although this polite request did not secure Chandler’s return on this occasion, the viscount’s influence was a significant factor in other elections. In 1447 the election of Richard Duffield had been set aside in favour of Beaumont’s servant, Robert Staunton, while in 1453 Chandler himself was returned.

Such magnate involvement in Grimsby elections was a new phenomonen in the late Lancastrian period, and it was subsequently to become much more significant. At this date it could still be successfully resisted. For example, at the election of 1455 John Newport II polled only two votes despite the fact that he was in receipt of an annuity of ten marks, charged on the town’s fee farm, from Ralph Neville, earl of Westmorland. Later, however, mounting financial pressure obliged Grimsby to surrender its parliamentary independence. In the latter part of the fifteenth century an arrangement was reached with the next earl, under which the borough would return one of his nominees in return for a £20 commutation of the fee farm.

Grimsby’s economic decline had an obvious and significant impact on the town’s parliamentary representation: it led to a reduction in the number of wealthy townsmen, with the result that the electors had to look for its MPs to the local gentry or the associates of those magnates with an interest in the town’s affairs. The Lancastrian period thus marked the beginning of the process by which the borough’s representation came to be increasingly dominated by non-townsmen. That process went further in the sixteenth century: of the 15 or 16 representatives of the borough between 1509 and 1558, just five were townsmen, and, remarkably, of the Elizabethan MPs only one, John Bellow†, was resident in the town.20 The Commons 1509-58, i. 136; 1558-1603, i. 198.