Cambridge

From the beginning, Cambridge was a military base and one of the foremost centres for the marketing of agricultural surpluses (notably corn) in the eastern counties. The waterway from Cambridge to the Wash was a major trading thoroughfare, with Bishop’s Lynn serving as the town’s port from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. Stourbridge Fair, held on the outskirts of Cambridge and jointly controlled by its burgesses and the university of Cambridge, was one of the most important in the country. The charters the borough received from King John in 1201 and 1207 consolidated Cambridge as a corporation. Thanks to the charter of 1201, the burgesses also controlled another major fair, held every Rogation Monday at Reach, some 11 miles to the north-east. Like other urban communities, however, Cambridge suffered badly from the Black Death. It has been suggested that almost all of the townsmen living on the northern bank of the river Cam and perhaps half on the south died in 1348-9, and that the town’s permanent population fell from about 4,400 in 1337 to little more than 3,000 40 years later. Considering that there were further visitations of plague in Cambridge during the fifteenth century – Henry VI cancelled a visit in 1442 because of an outbreak – it is highly unlikely that the town’s population regained its pre-Black Death level during our period. The Black Death had serious economic repercussions for many medium-sized towns, since the drastic decline in the population caused a contraction of markets and a labour shortage, both of which were detrimental to urban employers. D.R. Leader, Hist. Univ. Cambridge, i. 15, 16, 35, 211, 212; M. Rubin, Charity and Community in Med. Cambridge, 28, 34-35; VCH Cambs. iii. 2-15, 86-91; x. 227. Unlike other towns of its size, however, the university must have cushioned Cambridge considerably from the worse effects of the fifteenth-century slump. It is not possible to calculate how many students there were before the late 1340s, but their numbers may have risen from 400-700 in the late 1370s to about 1,200-1,300 in the mid fifteenth century. The burgesses stood to gain from this immigrant population because the colleges and halls required supplies and services. Rubin, 36. For the same reason, they would have benefited from the religious institutions situated in or just outside the town, namely the nunnery of St. Radegund, the priory of St. Edmund, and its friaries and hospitals. VCH Cambs. ii. 218-19, 254-6, 269-91, 303-7.

At the same time, the presence of the university was a cause of trouble as well as an economic opportunity. Although the town’s medieval self-government had begun to develop in the early 1200s, this coincided with the growth of the university with its own jurisdictional privileges. From the thirteenth century onwards, there was a series of incidents involving members of the latter institution and the town’s inhabitants, including a major riot in 1322, but the most serious confrontations occurred during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. The Commons 1386-1421, i. 287-8; VCH Cambs. iii. 153. The mayor and several other prominent burgesses participated in the disturbances directed against the university during the revolt and the borough forfeited its franchises as a result. The Crown only partially restored the franchises in 1382, for it transferred jurisdiction over the assize of bread and wine and certain other privileges to the university. The university also enjoyed the King’s favour in the following century and both Henry VI and his queen founded Cambridge colleges. VCH Cambs. iii. 155, 376-9, 408-9. Relations between town and gown remained strained after the great revolt and they were particularly bitter for much of Henry V’s reign. The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 230-1; iii. 527; iv. 796; C.H. Cooper, Annals Cambridge, i. 160-1.

In an effort to assuage the bad blood between town and gown, the practice grew up for representatives from the town and university to confer at an annual ‘Magna Congregatio’ or great congregation. There was a cooling of tensions between the two sides by the later 1420s, since in 1427 the mayor and his council decided to relax the strict penalties previously introduced to deter burgesses from submitting to the university chancellor any actions determinable before the mayor and bailiffs. The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 796. The borough’s MPs nevertheless had a hand in a couple of petitions that the Commons submitted to the King and Lords in the Parliament of 1429, one complaining about an upsurge of robberies and arsons committed in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire and Essex and the other identifying the malefactors as Irish, Welsh and Scottish students from the university. PROME, x. 404-5, 424-5. In subsequent years, however, the university and borough found it possible to co-operate with each other. In 1445, for example, the university agreed to hand over several plots of land to the town to provide ground for a common highway. Cambs. Archs., Cambridge bor. recs., indenture, 1445, City/PB Box X/80. At least one college benefited from the munificence of the burgess and MP, Richard Andrew. He made over some land in St. Botolph’s parish for the foundation of Queens’ College in 1446, and he granted a substantial bequest to its fellows when he drew up his will 14 years later. The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 34-35.

In return for its self-government, the borough paid the Crown a fee farm of £70 p.a. At the head of the municipal hierarchy were the mayor and four bailiffs, who controlled the town’s revenues and presided over its courts: a court for suits involving land five times a year, a court for personal actions once a week, a court leet twice a year and a court of guild merchant as and when required. The two treasurers collected the rents from houses and lands belonging to the borough; income from tolls, markets and fairs was the responsibility of the bailiffs. The municipal elite largely monopolized the principal offices of mayor, bailiff and treasurer, since after 1419 only those who had previously served as bailiff or treasurer were eligible to take part in elections of borough officials, for which the selection of the electors themselves rested on a process of co-option. Curiously, appointments to these offices occurred at different times of the year. The election of the mayor and the four bailiffs took place every 9 Sept. – they were sworn in at the following Michaelmas – but the treasurers were normally appointed on Hock Tuesday, the second Tuesday after Easter. But the treasurers’ accts. ran from Sept. to Sept. The earliest known reference to the town’s common council, the 24, dates from 1376 but there is little evidence for it prior to its reorganization in 1426. The Cambridge ‘Cross Book’ shows that in April that year the old council resigned and a new election of the 24 took place. First, the mayor and his assessors elected John Knapton, and ‘the commonalty’ another burgess, Richard Bush, and these two then elected a new mayor and eight of the new 24. In turn, these eight chose another eight (among them Knapton and Bush) and the 16 nominated the final eight. Once elected, councillors remained in office until they died, with co-option from the ranks of the town’s burgesses or freemen filling vacancies when they arose. While a potentially ambiguous term, ‘the commonalty’ was almost certainly synonymous with the freemen of the borough and did not apply to other residents of the town. New burgesses swore an oath to protect the liberties and customs of Cambridge, and upon appointment acquired the right to erect a booth, rent-free, at Stourbridge Fair. The son of a resident burgess customarily paid an entry fine of 3s. 4d. if he waited until after his father’s death to seek the freedom of the borough, or double that sum if he became a burgess during his father’s lifetime. The Commons 1386-1421, i. 288-9; The Commons 1509-58, i. 42; Cooper, 174-5.

As the fifteenth century wore on, many boroughs increasingly returned outsiders to Parliament, usually for economic reasons, but the relatively prosperous Cambridge valued and maintained its independence. In 1452, and again in April 1460, the corporation ordered that only residents of the town should represent it in Parliament, upon pain of a fine of 100s., so reinforcing the statute of 1413 requiring MPs to reside in their constituencies, a law which Cambridge had in fact largely heeded in the decades immediately preceding 1422. J.R. Lander, Govt. and Community, 58; Cooper, i. 205; Cambridge bor. recs., ‘Cross Bk.’, City/PB Box I/4, f. 10v; Statutes, ii. 170; The Commons 1386-1421, i. 290. The borough continued to observe it in Henry VI’s reign, when only one of its 32 known MPs of this period, the lawyer John Battysford, was definitely a non-resident. Cambridge was far from unique in this regard but it preserved its independence for longer than other parliamentary boroughs. Until the last quarter of the sixteenth century, its parliamentary burgesses were nearly always resident burgesses. VCH Cambs. iii. 68. It did however introduce a significant economy in September 1424 when it decided to halve the daily wages it paid its MPs from 2s. to 1s. Not without protest, the MPs of 1425 were the first to receive wages at this lower rate. C219/330/22A-B. The Commons 1386-1421, i. 289, incorrectly states that it was first applied to those of 1427. As it happened, Battysford was not really a complete outsider, since he lived at Chesterton just outside Cambridge and his family had originated from the town, to which his duties as a coroner in Cambridgeshire must often have brought him. Yet he was never involved in the administration of the borough and he did not attest any of its surviving returns to Parliament. The evidence of his antecedents places him in a distinct minority for the origins of most of the other MPs are unknown. Only Robert Brigham, whose father and namesake was a former MP and mayor of Cambridge, was certainly a native of the town, although the two Bushes were probably from a local family and Sexton was perhaps the son of a burgess.

There is less evidence than one might expect for the occupations of the MPs, although it is likely that most were tradesmen and several of them were minor landowners. Richard Hunnyng dealt in grain, which the Crown licensed him to export from Bishop’s Lynn, yet he was also a ‘spicer’, as probably was Richard Andrew who used that term as an alias. Blakamour was a tailor, Cook a skinner, Say and Sexton butchers, Tame a fishmonger, Togood a ‘pikemonger’ and Croft a ‘yeoman’. Knapton and Belton were merchants although the latter appears to have possessed some legal expertise and also enjoyed the style of ‘gentleman’ commonly afforded to lawyers. Only Battysford and Hancheche, however, were certainly men of law. There is no evidence that the obscure Semer, who was qualified to act as an auditor, followed a trade. Wealth is also difficult to estimate although subsidy assessments survive for over a third of the MPs. Brigham, a member of one of the borough’s most prominent families, owned real property in Cambridgeshire worth at least £12 p.a., and Battysford held lands worth £11 per year in the early 1450s. Richard Andrew, Richard Bush and Roger Faconer were also men of reasonable substance, since each of them possessed lands valued at £10 p.a. in 1436. For the purposes of the same subsidy, Wedgwood paid tax on lands worth £8 p.a., Dore on holdings worth £6 p.a. and Hunnyng on property valued at £5 p.a. A decade and a half later, subsidy commissions rated Richard Sexton (although it is possible that he was a namesake of the MP) as a landowner with holdings worth ten marks p.a. and found that Belton, Togood and Plomer held lands worth £5, £4 and 40s. per year respectively. While the extent and full value of Hancheche’s landholdings is unknown, his wife inherited the manor of Caldecote in Newport Pagnell in Buckinghamshire, along with other holdings there and in Calverton in the same county, from her relative, William Caldecote. According to Caldecote’s inquisition post mortem of 1439, these estates were worth a mere £3 p.a. or so, very probably an underestimate. CIPM, xxv. 359-60; E159/216, brevia Trin. rot. 25d. As for the MPs for whom there is no subsidy or inquisition post mortem evidence, those who served as mayor probably came from the ranks of the richest burgesses, since the fourteenth century saw a tendency for mayors to emerge from among the most wealthy and influential. The Commons 1386-1421, i. 288.

In some towns shrinking population and revenues, coupled with economic decline is likely to have affected their government because members of the local oligarchy became reluctant to take on the time-consuming and expensive burdens of office. Lander, 20. In Cambridge, however, a majority of the MPs held office in the borough at some point in their careers, the only exceptions being the obscure William Dore and John Say and the lawyer John Battysford. A willingness to participate in borough affairs bears further testimony to Cambridge’s relative prosperity and its ability largely to preserve its independence as a parliamentary borough. The borough of Huntingdon presents a notable contrast, as it was ailing economically and half of its known MPs of this period did not serve in its local administration. The economic and demographic crises of the fourteenth century also badly hit Bedford, another parliamentary borough of not many miles distance, although a clear majority of its known Members did hold municipal office there. Nine of the 32 Cambridge MPs served as mayor, of whom just two, Wright and Brigham, had already exercised the mayoralty before entering Parliament. Wright combined the positions of MP and mayor, for he took up his seat in the Commons while serving in his penultimate term in the latter office. At least 25 of the MPs were bailiffs at some stage in their careers, nearly all of them more than once. While the office was important and involved judicial responsibilities in the borough’s courts, previous tenure of it appears not to have affected a burgess’s chances of election to Parliament since over half of the 25 became bailiffs only after beginning their parliamentary careers. Two of the MPs, Richard Bush and William Spencer gained election to Parliament while in office as bailiff although Spencer’s term as such was nearly over when he took up his seat. It is possible that Sexton was likewise elected while bailiff, if he rather than a namesake was the bailiff of 1427-8. At least six of the MPs served in the lesser position of treasurer, all beginning their terms before entering Parliament, but the evidence for this office is very patchy, since many of the fifteenth-century treasurers’ accounts have not survived. Rankyn was treasurer when returned to the Commons in 1422, as were Plomer and Heyreman when elected together a decade later. One of the 32, John Keynsham, stands out because he sat in the Commons over 20 years before he appears to have held borough office, suggesting that he gained election to Parliament at a much younger age than most of his fellow MPs. It is also likely that John Knapton was a comparatively young man when he first entered Parliament in 1406.

Far fewer MPs held those offices in Cambridge which were Crown rather than borough appointments. A minority of burgesses, of whom the mayor of the time was always one, were j.p.s in the borough, although from the 1440s onwards more of them than hitherto occupied a place on the peace commissions. Of the eight Members who served on the bench, only Brigham and Wright, both of whom were on it throughout their time in the Commons, became j.p.s before embarking on their parliamentary careers. Just a few of the MPs held Crown office outside the borough, with just three of them doing so prior to sitting in the Commons. Hunnyng was controller of customs at Bishop’s Lynn some years before his election in 1433, Brigham served on a commission of array for Cambridgeshire shortly before sitting in the Commons of 1436 and Battysford was a coroner in Cambridgeshire when he entered the Parliament of 1442, a position he would continue to hold for over another four decades. Not long after leaving Parliament, the latter also took up office as clerk to the county’s j.p.s, another responsibility he would exercise for over 40 years.

Battysford was also the only MP who certainly entered the service of a great lord, in his case Richard, duke of York. While in the main preserving its independence, the borough of Cambridge did have dealings with powerful outsiders from time to time. In 1428 (or late 1427), for example, the mayor and burgesses spent £2 10s. 11d. providing a night’s lodgings, along with breakfast the next morning, for John, Lord Tiptoft†, and his lady. In the same period, they made cash payments to Tiptoft’s minstrels, as well as those of the duke of Gloucester, Lady Abergavenny and John Holand, earl of Huntingdon. Cambridge bor. recs., treasurers’ acct., 1427-8, City/PB Box X/70/6. It is unclear whether Battysford’s attachment with York predated his parliamentary career, since the earliest proof of it is the indictment of him and other of the duke’s followers for conspiracy at Royston in the autumn of 1450. Earlier, three of his fellow MPs may have participated in the dispute in Cambridgeshire between Tiptoft, the most active lord in the county in the first half of Henry VI’s reign, and the young Sir James Butler, the future earl of Wiltshire. At the time of this quarrel, which occurred in the late 1430s and early 1440s, it is possible that William Tomays was a follower of Tiptoft and Richard Bush and Richard Wright supporters of Butler. Even so, any such involvement had no bearing on their parliamentary careers, since by then Bush’s was long over while those of Tomays and Wright were several years away.

By Henry VI’s reign, Cambridge was a parliamentary borough of long standing, having regularly returned MPs since 1295. The Commons 1386-1421, i. 289. While the names of 32 MPs have survived, it is possible that it returned as many as 40 burgesses to the Commons in this period, since its returns to the Parliaments of 1439, 1445, 1459 and 1460 are now lost. In spite of the gaps in the records, most of its Members were never re-elected within the period under review: there were too many of them for that to have been possible. Of the eight who certainly sat more than once, a majority concluded their parliamentary careers in the first half of the reign. Knapton sat in as many as four Parliaments, while Topcliffe and Wedgwood (and possibly Belton) were Members of three. Only Topcliffe sat in consecutive Parliaments, those of 1419 and 1420. Two other MPs, John Bush and Richard Andrew, first entered Parliament before 1422. John Croft is the only Cambridge burgess known to have sat in the Commons under both Henry VI and Edward IV but gaps in the records for the latter’s reign raises the possibility that others among the 32 likewise sat after the period under review. While there are also gaps in the evidence for 1386-1421, it is clear that, collectively, Cambridge’s MPs in that period possessed greater parliamentary experience. Two of them sat at least five times, another seven and one of them as many as eight. Furthermore, in 18 of the 24 Parliaments of these years for which there is evidence, at least one of the borough’s Members had sat before, and in no fewer than eight of these assemblies neither burgess was a newcomer to the Commons. Ibid. 289-90. By contrast, in just six or seven of the 18 Parliaments of the reign of Henry VI for which there is a record of who sat for Cambridge was the borough represented by at least one Member with previous experience, Seven if John Belton sat in 1450; otherwise six. and in only one of these 18 assemblies, that of 1423, had both men sat before.

The known MPs of the nearby borough of Bedford in this period were more experienced parliamentarians than those of Cambridge. In only three of the elections for which the returns for Bedford have survived did that borough return two novice parliamentarians; at another seven, at least one of the men elected had sat for it in the assembly immediately preceding. It is possible that Cambridge put less emphasis than other boroughs on returning men with previous parliamentary experience and more on sharing the task of representing it in the Commons. It did however achieve a certain degree of continuity of representation, in as much that some of those who sat more than once had parliamentary careers concentrated within a relatively short space of time. Topcliffe’s three Parliaments, for example, spanned a period of only some four years, and the couple in which Richard Andrew sat just two. On the other hand, Knapton took up his seat in his final Parliament a quarter of a century after his first, and Croft’s parliamentary career spanned some 23 years.

Parliamentary returns for Cambridge, like those for other boroughs, testified results and did not describe elections. The town was not a shire-incorporate with its own sheriff, so it fell to the sheriff of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire to send a precept instructing it to hold an election when the King called a Parliament. In due course, the attestors for the borough appeared at the county court at Cambridge castle and formally declared the names of the burgesses elected to Parliament. The court then recorded the names of the Members and attestors on a separate return from that for the county, a procedure that a statute of 1445 made compulsory for all boroughs. At every election predating 1447 for which returns survive, the borough’s returns bear the same date as those for the county. For the Parliament of 1447 the Chancery issued the original writs of summons on 14 Dec. 1446, and on the following 5 Jan. the county court duly returned William Cotton* and John Morys* as the knights of the shire for Cambridgeshire. On 20 Jan., however, the Chancery issued fresh writs changing the Parliament’s originally intended venue of Cambridge to Bury St. Edmunds although not its opening date, 10 Feb. There is no evidence of a fresh election for the county, the Members for which remained Cotton and Morys; yet the indenture for Cambridge bears the date 3 Feb. 1447 and it is unclear whether it replaced another made before the cancellation of the original writs of summons. After 1447, all bar one (that for the Parliament of November 1449) of the borough’s surviving returns bear a later date than those for the county, a week later in the case of that for the Parliament of 1450. Yet the indentures for the borough simply reported an election that had already occurred outside the county court. An ordinance the corporation made in 1452 reveals something of the procedure used both before and after that date. It directed that a majority of the burgesses should choose the MPs in the guildhall, ‘and not one for the bench by the mayor and his assistants and another by the commonalty, as of old times hath been used’. Its purpose was probably to reduce the role of the ‘commonalty’ in elections, but how inclusive this term was is unclear. The beginning of the next century seems, however, to have seen a revival of former custom. By then it was again the practice for the mayor and his assistants (presumably the bailiffs) to nominate one burgess and the commonalty another, whereupon those two chose the eight men who actually elected the MPs. J.S. Roskell, Commons of 1422, 28-31, 35; M. McKisack, Parlty. Repn. English Bors. 35. According to the 1455 return, it was the custom of the borough for eight burgesses to attest an election. Eight was, indeed, the usual number named on the indentures, although as few as six were listed in the return for the second Parliament of 1449 and as many as 22 attested the election of 1453. Most of the MPs themselves attested at least one parliamentary election for the borough during their careers. John Battysford, a resident of the county rather than the borough, was among those who did not attest any of the surviving returns although he did witness as many as eight returns of the county’s knights of the shire during the reigns of Henry VI and Edward IV.

Given that all of the MPs, save Battysford who lived nearby, resided in Cambridge, the borough could depend on them to work in its interests. In each case where evidence of their expenses survives, both Members had the same attendance records, some of which are impressive: in 1422, for example, Richard Bush and Simon Rankyn received expenses for the 45 days they spent in travelling to and from and attending a Parliament lasting 40. Four years later, when Parliament sat for 65 days, the borough allowed Stephen Barber and John Bush wages for 71. One task for the MPs, assisted where necessary by other responsible burgesses, was the furthering of parliamentary petitions. As already noted, the borough’s representatives may have played a part in a couple of petitions that the Commons submitted to the King and Lords in 1429. The MPs for Cambridge, particularly when Parliament met at Westminster, also took the opportunity to conduct business on behalf of their town outside the Commons chamber. In 1422, for instance, Richard Bush and Rankyn, along with several members of Cambridge’s ruling common council, engaged in negotiations with Bishop Wakeryng of Norwich in London. Cambridge bor. recs., treasurers’ acct., 1422-3, City/PB Box X/70/1.