Named after the Norman keep built on the site of one of the forts of Hadrian’s Wall, Newcastle-upon-Tyne was the chief bulwark of north-eastern England’s defences against the Scots until 1482. It was also the region’s most important port town, dealing in wool and hides, and increasingly in coal, abundant reserves of which lay close to the surface on both banks of the Tyne; in 1560 perhaps 40 per cent of national production came from coal pits near the Tyne and Wear rivers, a proportion which increased substantially over the next century. Economic success brought a rapidly expanding population, probably in excess of 15,000 under the early Stuarts, although 5,000 died in a plague epidemic in 1635-6. Chartered by 1135, the borough expanded its limits and its powers during the Middle Ages, acquiring county status separate from Northumberland in 1400. Under James I it was governed by a corporation comprising a mayor, sheriff and ten aldermen, who were elected by an oligarchic system based on the 12 most important town guilds; the 1604 charter also recognized the existence of a common council of 24 members.
Tyneside coal was sold along the east coast, and across the North Sea in the Low Countries and the Baltic, but its main market lay in London, where consumption rose voraciously after 1580. Shipments of Newcastle ‘seacoal’ doubled between 1580 and 1600, and doubled again (to over 400,000 tons annually) by the 1630s.
As the profits from coalmining accrued to this close-knit group, complaints were made by both Londoners, who complained about excessive price rises, and by other Newcastle men who were excluded from the cartel. The Privy Council ordered investigations during the later 1590s, but in 1600 the Hostmen outflanked their critics with a guild charter which confirmed their monopoly of the coal trade and exempted them from the 1529 Newcastle Act, which meant they were able to load coals directly from the wharves nearest to their pits. In return for these concessions, the Crown secured a duty of 12d. upon every chaldron
The parliamentary election of 1604 saw the return of Sir George Selby, heir to one of the 1583 lessees, and Henry Chapman, a more senior figure who had played a key role in securing the Hostmen’s charter, and who had resolved a dispute with freemen pressing to join the Company only a few weeks before the election. Chapman probably managed the opposition to a bill to modify the 1529 Newcastle Act, promoted by the London corporation, which was rejected at its second reading on 30 May 1604.
For the Newcastle men, however, the main business of the 1606 session was the repulse of another attempt to repeal the 1529 Newcastle Act. Complaints about the price of Newcastle coal rose steadily during 1605: the Londoners boycotted the Tyneside collieries for two months in the spring, in protest at a new cartel agreement among the Hostmen; and while the cartel was suppressed under orders from the Privy Council in July, the issue was still being contested on the eve of the new session.
At the 1614 general election Selby was returned for Northumberland, while Chapman, about to hand control of his business to a nephew, apparently had no interest in re-election. They were replaced at Newcastle by Sir Henry Anderson, son of the 1583 lessee, and William Jenison, founding governor of the Hostmen’s Company, who had previously represented the town in the 1601 Parliament. Both Members were involved in promoting the bill for the enfranchisement of county Durham, but no other local business featured on the parliamentary agenda during the brief session.
At the general election of December 1620, Anderson was again returned as senior Member for Newcastle, but Jenison stood aside, and was replaced by one of Boyd’s most energetic opponents, Sir Thomas Riddell. These two men and the latter’s half-brother, Sir Peter Riddell, represented the borough in Parliament throughout the 1620s, when the Hostmen’s monopoly came under attack from several different interests. In 1621 the main challenge came from a local man, Robert Brandling of Felling, co. Durham, who was returned as MP for Morpeth. While he had paid the unusually large sum of £10 to join the Hostmen’s Company in 1601, Brandling did not belong to the trading cartel which formed the Company’s inner clique. In August 1620 he petitioned against the duties levied upon coal shipments by the Newcastle corporation, objected to the Hostmen’s exemption from the 1529 Newcastle Act, and protested against the fact that the Grand Lease allowed the oligarchs to acquire control of lucrative mines at negligible rents. It was doubtless Brandling who secured the reading of a bill to abolish the corporation’s coal duties and overturn the 1529 Newcastle Act (27 Feb.), which proceeded no further, presumably because of intervention by the Newcastle Members and Exchequer officials. Brandling offered his response on 26 Mar., the day before the Easter recess, by which time the Newcastle MPs had already departed for the north. Moving ‘that the [Hostmen’s] patent for Newcastle coals may be brought in’, Brandling attacked the duty of 12d. per chaldron, and while solicitor general Heath warned against meddling with Crown revenues, and the York MP Christopher Brooke urged to leave the matter until the session reconvened, an investigation was ordered. This never reported to the House, and while the contribution the Newcastle Members made towards the stifling of this complaint can only be conjectured, Sir Thomas Riddell later opposed another bill seeking to impose a levy on Newcastle coal, for the maintenance of Dunwich harbour in Suffolk (3 December).
As well as defending their own interests, the 1621 MPs also played a part in the wider debate about the decay of trade, which centred on two other commodities traded at Newcastle, corn and wool. A bumper harvest in 1620 led to calls for an embargo on grain imports, but at the second reading of a bill to this end on 8 Mar. 1621 John Lister of Hull and Sir Thomas Riddell both warned that Baltic merchants were often unable to find anything but Polish rye in exchange for their northern cloths. Riddell also observed that if an import ban was fixed at a particular price level, a merchant might buy in good faith, only to find the price of grain had fallen by the time his cargo reached England. He repeated the same arguments when the bill was reported on 17 May, and a host of similar objections from other merchants ensured that the measure was sent back to the committee, never to return.
The Hostmen’s dispute with Brandling was settled in April 1622, when his son Sir Francis* was co-opted into the Company’s new cartel arrangements, but the family still refused to pay the 12d. per chaldron duty, and their factor, John Brandling, was prosecuted in the Exchequer. He quickly settled the arrears owed to the Crown, but declined to join the Hostmen’s Company, and his stand probably explains why his brother Sir Francis, MP for Northumberland in 1624, unsuccessfully called for all northern mineowners to gain admission as Hostmen in the Commons (19 May). The same session saw a fresh petition against the Hostmen’s monopoly (9 Apr. 1624), and the Company was sufficiently concerned to recruit the services of attorney-general Coventry to ensure that their charter was exempted from the provisions of the Monopolies’ Act, which passed into law at the end of the session. Under pressure, the Brandling family subsequently withdrew from the coal trade, and an Exchequer decree of June 1625 upheld the Hostmen’s monopoly.
During the 1624 session a further dispute over coal duties erupted over the countess of Bedford’s 1619 patent for the levying of a duty of 2d. per chaldron of coal imposed by a statute of 9 Henry V.
Finally, the dispute over Boyd’s coal survey patent simmered throughout the 1620s. On 5 May 1621 Robert Snelling of Ipswich – the mariners of which port handled much of the London coal trade – warned that Boyd’s surveyorship had been assigned to Roger Langford, another of Lennox’s clients; this protest was referred to the committee of grievances, which apparently quashed the new grant.
Nothing more was done during the brief parliamentary session of 1625, but in the following year two bills were tabled in the Commons. The first, to prevent the use of false measures for seacoals – presumably intended to confirm Sharpeigh’s patent – received two readings (16, 20 Feb. 1626), but proceeded no further. The other, to punish Sharpeigh for reviving his patent, was first read on 27 Mar., but its progress was delayed by Buckingham’s impeachment, and it was not committed until 1 June, too late to progress any further before the dissolution. In the meantime, the grievances’ committee was prompted to seek belated cancellation of 1,200 bonds Boyd had taken for payment of the survey duty in 1616-18, although these efforts were presumably also frustrated by the dissolution.
By 1626 factional squabbles over the technicalities of the coal trade were overshadowed by the stresses of war, particularly the depredations visited upon the coal trade by enemy privateers. A sortie of Spanish privateers from Dunkirk in October 1625, while primarily aimed at the Dutch herring fleet, also wrought havoc upon the east coast coal trade, and shortly before Parliament met in January 1626 the Deptford Trinity House recommended the arming of Newcastle colliers. Edward Whitby of Chester raised the subject in the Commons on 16 Feb., when Sir Peter Riddell moved to consult Elizabethan precedents.
Parliamentary complaints were designed to ensure that the Crown paid for coastal protection from existing revenues, but as Buckingham, the lord admiral, protested when confronted in the Lords on 1 Apr., the Navy’s budget allowed only £22,000 for coastal defence; he recommended the appropriation of the duty charged for measuring of coal by the London corporation. This suggestion was ignored, but the Navy, stung into action by these criticisms, assigned a squadron of six ships to coastal defence at Easter 1626. The loss of £300,000 worth of subsidies at the dissolution of June 1626 meant that funds quickly ran short, and coal shipments declined to a new low during the winter of 1626-7, but from May 1627 Sir John Savile* encountered more success in raising funds by a levy of 6d. per chaldron on northern coal. This duty raised £953 over six months, but was unpopular with the colliers, who had armed themselves and organized their own convoys, and was dropped shortly before a new Parliament convened in March 1628.
Disputes over the Forced Loan, arbitrary imprisonment and billeting left little room on the parliamentary agenda for other complaints, but on 7 May 1628, with an angry dissolution seemingly imminent, alderman Thomas Hoyle of York protested about the lack of coastal defences, and Sir Thomas Riddell raised the questions of shipping losses, and alleged plans for a further 2s. per chaldron imposition on coal. On 4 June, just after the king’s first, unsatisfactory answer to the Petition of Right, an account of English shipping losses included 26 from Newcastle, and when Buckingham’s failure to protect merchantmen was raised as part of the Remonstrance debate of 9 June, Sir Peter Riddell renewed complaints about Dunkirkers and the recently abandoned 6d. per chaldron imposition. These complaints had some impact: after the end of the session, Savile’s squadron was assigned Yorkshire subsidy revenues for its maintenance; and the colliers were forbidden to sail without naval escort. However, until the end of the war, the shipowners remained unenthusiastic about any new levy on coal for coastal defence.
in the freemen
Number of voters: several hundred