Bodmin

By the fifteenth century, the borough of Bodmin, which in the eleventh century had been the largest settlement in Cornwall, had been firmly superseded by Launceston and Lostwithiel as the administrative centre of the county. The overlordship of the priory of St. Petrock, to which the town owed its existence, had rendered it unsuitable as a seat of the King’s (or duke of Cornwall’s) estate administration, which had instead established its headquarters at Lostwithiel, and throughout the century the latter alternated with Launceston as the meeting place of the county court. The Commons 1386-1421, i. 295. Nevertheless, Bodmin retained some pre-eminence in terms of its size and wealth, not least on account of its role as a coinage town. In 1334, when the value of a parliamentary tenth and fifteenth was fixed, Bodmin’s assessment at £20 was almost twice as large as that of Truro, the next highest payer in the county, and the commercial decline of the latter borough in subsequent decades only served to increase Bodmin’s relative dominance. Lay Subsidy 1334 ed. Glasscock, 32, 33; E179/87/70B, m. 1d; 87/76, m. 2; 87/85, mm. 2, 3.

Few details of Bodmin’s internal administration are known. The town’s chief officer, apparently from early times elected by the burgesses, was by 1336 known by the title of mayor. He presided over the guild court at the guildhall, and in the first half of the fifteenth century was frequently present in the county court on the occasion of parliamentary elections, perhaps for the purpose of communicating the burgesses’ choice of representatives to the presiding sheriff or under sheriff of Cornwall. Alongside the mayor, other officials known as reeves were recorded in the 1430s and 1450s, and a parliamentary election indenture of 1467 was attested by two men styled bailiffs. J. Maclean, Trigg Minor, i. 235; iii. 682; C219/17/1. These bailiffs were probably the two ‘prepositi’ who were accorded the alternative style to meet the requirements of the sheriff’s writ. It is possible that the ‘reeve’ (or ‘prepositus’) was the officer otherwise known as the borough’s steward, who sat alongside the mayor in the guild court, or in the mayor’s absence deputized for him. CP40/779, rot. 442; 781, rot. 425d; 782, rot. 449d.

The procedure for parliamentary elections followed at Bodmin in this period is obscure. Until 1437 the sheriff of Cornwall recorded the election results from the boroughs both in an indenture counter-sealed by the suitors in the county court electing the knights of the shire and on a schedule accompanying this indenture. Thereafter the borough Members were certified by a schedule alone. Only from 1467 onwards do separate indentures between the sheriff and the borough authorities survive. Even so, there is no reason to doubt that throughout the period here under review Bodmin’s MPs were chosen locally. In 1414 the sheriff had explicitly recorded that he had required the mayors and bailiffs of the boroughs to send him the names of their locally elected representatives, and a ‘testimonial’ drawn up in April 1523, in the context of a dispute between the burgesses and prior of Bodmin, stated that ‘at all times that it shall please the King’s highness to call his court of Parliament that then the mayor and the burgesses, in the town hall, shall choose two burgesses for the King’s Parliament of the burgesses of the town … this hath been used out of time that no mind is’. The Commons 1386-1421, i. 297; 1509-58, i. 46. It seems probable that – as, for instance, at Launceston – a similar procedure was also adopted in the fifteenth century.

One consequence of the town’s prosperity and the burgesses’ consequent assertiveness was that relations between Bodmin and its overlord, the priory of St. Petrock, were often strained. In the mid fourteenth century violence had occasionally flared up between priory and townsmen, and although after the prior confirmed Bodmin’s charters in 1423 and 1424 an uneasy truce prevailed, it may be suspected that incidents such as the supposed assault by the prior and canons and their servants on the influential local gentleman Richard Flamank of Boscarne in 1432 owed something to a breakdown of relations between the priory and its tenants. CPR, 1422-29, pp. 74, 262-3; 1429-36, p. 198. In an already volatile climate, it was perhaps inevitable that the unstable political situation of the early 1450s on a national and regional level might spark renewed trouble. Although there is no definite evidence to prove that the bid by merchants of Bodmin in the autumn of 1453 to expand their privileges at the prior’s expense was directly connected with either the disorder sparked by the earl of Devon’s quarrel with his regional rival William, Lord Bonville*, or the King’s loss of his faculties, it seems at least possible that the particular remoteness of the King’s power at this time was at least a contributory factor. Trouble first broke out in October, while Parliament was in recess, and was provoked, so the burgesses would claim, by the prior’s interference with their accustomed court of law. CP40/781, rot. 425d; 782, rot. 449d. This, however, was only part of the story, for what was really in dispute was the full range of the priory’s seigneurial rights, including the jurisdiction and profits of its court baron and view of frankpledge, the right to the profits and stallage of the fairs and weekly market in the town, the right to the fish in the Dunmere (claimed by the prior as his privilege and by the townsmen as a common fishery), the title to a plot of common land claimed by the priory in which the town’s tanners had dug cess pits, a right of way through the garden attached to the priory’s ‘Crosshehous’, the prior’s right to build on an enclosed part of the cemetery of Bodmin’s parish church, and the flooding of various gardens after the priory diverted the water supply into ‘Maynardes pond’. KB27/788, rot. 88. In November and December several of the burgesses were discovered fishing in the prior’s fishery and at least one of them, John Michell, was apprehended by the prior’s servants at St. Anne’s chapel near Dunmere bridge and stripped of his clothing, knives and dagger. CPR, 1452-61, p. 308; CP40/779, rot. 606; 781, rot. 315; 782, rot. 406. The infractions nevertheless continued. In the early months of 1454, so the prior complained, groups of townsmen broke the weir of the priory mill, stole the priory’s goods, and continued to help themselves to fish. CPR, 1452-61, p. 308. The conflict simmered on for much of the year, but it was on 28 Dec. that it escalated dramatically, when Bartholomew Trott, probably then mayor, was attacked by an armed mob, ostensibly at the prior’s bidding. CP40/779, rots. 606d-607d; 781, rots. 313, 317, 320; 782, rots. 112d, 401, 404. The matter now came before the King’s justices, CP40/779, rot. 556d; 781, rot. 319. and in July 1455 Trott’s complaints led to the appointment of a high-powered commission of oyer and terminer headed by Lord Bonville, the steward of the duchy of Cornwall, and including the royal justices John Fortescue*, Walter Moyle and Nicholas Aysshton*. Just days before this commission was issued, Trott had been returned to the Parliament which was to assemble at Westminster on 9 July (and indeed, if mayor, had returned himself). It is unlikely that the commissioners ever carried out their task. Throughout the month all of them were kept at Westminster by the business of the Parliament, and when Parliament was prorogued for the harvest it did not take long for the situation at Bodmin to descend into further violence. Throughout September the townsmen under the leadership of Trott, now back from Westminster, staged a concerted campaign of intimidation against the canons, breaking into the priory church and disrupting divine service at regular intervals. CPR, 1452-61, pp. 255, 308. In parallel, they lodged a counter claim in the courts, maintaining that the prior was unjustly preventing them from holding their mayor’s court as accustomed. CP40/779, rot. 442; 781, rot. 425d; 782, rot. 449d.

On 17 May 1456 the burgesses mounted a final concerted attack, in the course of which a mob broke down the priory gates and church doors and dragged off two of the canons in full view of their horrified fellows and prior. They were perhaps motivated by a separate, but probably connected, incident, in which a week earlier the former mayor James Flamank had been assaulted by some of the prior’s lay servants. CPR, 1452-61, p. 309; CP40/782, rot. 309. On 12 July new commissioners were appointed to settle the dispute, including, as previously, Bonville, Fortescue, Moyle and Aysshton, as well as the prothonotary John Wydeslade*, but now also given an element of tangible local force by the addition of Lord Fitzwaryn, Sir John Colshull* and John Arundell of Lanherne, some of the wealthiest landowners in Cornwall. The commissioners committed the final arbitration to Chief Justice Fortescue and Justice Aysshton, who on 22 Aug. pronounced their judgement, which was highly favourable to the priory. The arbiters confirmed the prior’s right to his courts, his fishery, and all the disputed property and rejected the townsmen’s claim to any rights of way or fishing. The burgesses had their guild merchant formally confirmed, but were denied any jurisdiction or powers of arrest, beyond the most basic oversight of trade. They were allowed the right to collect stallage from all merchants attending their market, but in return had to double their annual payment to the prior of 13s. 4d. in lieu, and were charged with the upkeep of the stalls to the west of the pillory, as well as becoming subject to certain restrictions regarding the building of new stalls. KB27/788, rot. 88. The resultant truce was, nevertheless, at best an uneasy one, and in early 1459 the prior’s servants once more clashed with a group of Bodmin gentry and tradesmen, headed by Richard Flamank, whose livestock they had impounded on priory land near Dunmere bridge for outstanding payments of customary fees – a fresh squabble which continued into the 1460s. CP40/798, rot. 112; C1/33/29.

In the decades leading up to the Reformation, the rivalry between priory and town continued periodically to flare up, and at some stage even the payment of the town’s parliamentary burgesses became an issue. In 1402, a royal writ de expensis had ordered the townsmen to pay their representatives at the customary rate of 2s. per day, but it is not clear that this rate was normally paid. It nevertheless seems that whatever wages were paid were raised on a case by case basis from the borough’s inhabitants, and it was probably one such levy which was at issue in the 1520s, when the evidence cited in the town’s dispute with the prior stated that Bodmin’s MPs would serve ‘at the mayor and burgesses’ charge and cost, and thereof no penny at the prior’s charge’. CCR, 1402-05, p. 127; The Commons 1509-58, i. 46.

The names of Bodmin’s MPs are known for 17 of the 22 Parliaments of Henry VI’s reign; none have been discovered for the assemblies of 1439, 1445, 1450, 1459 and 1460. Twenty-eight individuals divided these 34 seats between them. As was the case in many other constituencies, as a body these men were not a homogenous group. If there was, however, one overarching factor that characterized Bodmin’s representation in this period, it was surely the burgesses’ desire to be represented by some of their own number. Indeed, it was probably the same growing self-confidence that brought the men of Bodmin into conflict with their ecclesiastical overlord that induced them increasingly to select men with strong local ties (rather than the landed gentlemen with interests throughout Cornwall who had dominated the borough’s representation under the first two Lancastrians), at the very time when other urban constituencies increasingly returned outsiders. The Commons 1386-1421, i. 297-8. No fewer than ten of the borough’s 28 representatives in the period under review, accounting for 14 of the 34 seats for which Members’ names are known, certainly fulfilled the statutory requirement for residence. A further group of nine were probably deemed to qualify as local by virtue of their part in the life of the town, although they resided in the neighbouring parishes of St. Tudy, St. Columb Major, St. Austell and St. Merryn. Even in the troubled final years of the reign, when Bodmin, like other boroughs, came under pressure to return men supportive of one political faction or another, the burgesses contrived to reserve at least one of their seats in each Parliament for one of their own number. Thus the ‘carpetbaggers’ elected (who included the earl of Devon’s under steward, the Devon lawyer William Bishop, in November 1449, the former marshal of the court of King’s bench, John Gargrave, in 1453, and the Suffolk lawyer William Bedston in 1455) were accompanied to the Commons by the former mayors Thomas Lanhergy and Bartholomew Trott, and the leading local merchant John Cock.

By contrast with their preference for local candidates, it is not clear that the men of Bodmin set much store by the prior parliamentary experience of their representatives. Of the 28 known MPs, as many as 23 only represented the borough once in this period, although three of them had previously sat for Bodmin during the first two decades of the fifteenth century. Moreover, just four of the men who sat for Bodmin in Henry VI’s Parliaments had begun their parliamentary careers in other constituencies. John Cork had represented Helston and Liskeard, Thomas Cokayn had sat for Lostwithiel, John Polruddon had found his first seat at Truro, while William Bishop was elected at Launceston before serving the townsmen of Bodmin. This is not to say that continuity in parliamentary representation was of no apparent concern to the Bodmin electorate. The years from 1422 to 1432 saw no fewer than ten of the 16 available seats filled by men with prior experience of the Commons, and on at least two occasions Members were directly re-elected (William Penfoun in 1431 and Adam Peyntour in 1432).

By contrast, the remainder of the reign saw a high degree of fluctuation in Bodmin’s representation, with only Lanhergy, who had first sat in 1437, returned for a further term in the Commons in February 1449, and then immediately re-elected to the second Parliament of that year. While – as far as it is possible to tell – for 12 MPs their return for Bodmin remained their only experience of the Commons, and a further eight men sat just twice and five three times, Cokayn and Cork each served in four Parliaments, and Otto Tregonan could claim to be the most committed parliamentarian among them, for he sat in the Commons on no fewer than seven occasions between 1410 and 1425. If four men had gathered experience in other constituencies before their election at Bodmin, rather more found seats elsewhere subsequently. Cokayn was elected for Lostwithiel in 1426 and 1429, Nicholas Jop alias Bokelly represented the same borough in 1453, and Walter Moyle, William Penfoun, John Nicoll and Nicholas Roche were returned respectively for Liskeard, Launceston, Helston and Truro. Uniquely among Bodmin’s Members, the notorious Richard Tregoose rose to sit as a knight of the shire some 14 years after his first return. Only the complete outsider Bedston represented a constituency beyond the Tamar, going on to sit for the boroughs of Wallingford and Oxford in 1460 and 1467 respectively.

In common with the period 1386-1421, lawyers formed the largest single grouping among Bodmin’s MPs, accounting for at least nine of the 28, while a further group of roughly similar size, of whose profession or trade nothing is known, may have also included men with some legal training. Several of the lawyers were men of some distinction. Moyle rose through the ranks of his profession to become a justice of common pleas and later in life served as a trier of petitions in Parliament. Cokayn, a lawyer of lesser standing, nevertheless served at the end of his life as recorder of London. Yet men-of-law were somewhat less pre-eminent than previously among Bodmin’s representatives, who in this period also included two mercers and a chapman, while the lawyer John Nicoll and John Polruddon also had interests in the tin trade, as did Tregoose and Roche.

It was in keeping with the burgesses’ prediliction for electing their fellows to Parliament that a substantial proportion of Bodmin’s Members had either held town office before their first return for the borough, or were to go on to do so, sometimes for several years in a row. Thomas Brown, Thomas Luccombe, John Nicoll and Bartholomew Trott had all served as mayors of Bodmin before first being elected to Parliament by their neighbours; Nicoll, Flamank and Lanhergy were elected mayor after having served in the Commons, and Lanhergy was elected one of the borough bailiffs not long after his return home from the Parliament of 1437. Trott perhaps shared with Nicoll the distinction of having presided over his own election to the Commons, although he could at least cite as an excuse the double crisis of the violent disorder in the south-west caused by the earl of Devon’s quarrel with Lord Bonville and the townsmen of Bodmin’s simultaneous dispute with the priory of St. Petrock.

Another consequence of the regular return of ‘insiders’ was – as far as it is possible to tell – a relative absence of outside influence on Bodmin’s parliamentary elections, although individual MPs did nevertheless have ties with their more powerful neighbours. Cork, Polruddon, Roche and Tregonan were connected with the ‘great’ Arundells of Lanherne and Richard Tresithney with that family’s cadet branch of Trerice. Denbold, Tregoose and Wyse had links with Thomas Courtenay, earl of Devon, and William Bishop, the earl’s under steward, may even have owed his election to the earl’s influence. Just two of Bodmin’s MPs are known for certain to have had close ties with the local priory (Nicoll served as the prior’s sub-bailiff of the hundred of Pyder in the late 1430s, and Cork was steward of the priory estates), but both of them were busy administrators with multiple connexions throughout Cornwall, and Nicoll was in any event a firmly established member of the Bodmin town community who frequently served as mayor.

Equally, even if the Crown’s influence was only rarely felt in the choice of Bodmin’s MPs, many of them nevertheless played a useful part in the administration of their shire. Prior to their returns for Bodmin, Luccombe, Nicoll and Tregonan had been collectors of parliamentary subsidies, Cork, Nicoll and Tregonan had been appointed to royal commissions, and Flamank had briefly served as controller of customs in the Cornish ports. Moreover, at the time of their elections, Nicoll and perhaps Tregonan were serving county coroners, Polruddon belonged to the sheriff of Cornwall’s staff, and Cork was a member of the quorum of the county bench. They, as well as Cokayn, Jop alias Bokelly, Moyle, Penfoun, Roche, Tregoose and Wyse, went on to hold a variety of offices later in their careers, but a direct connexion with their parliamentary service can be tentatively suggested only in the case of Jop alias Bokelly, whose appointment as escheator of Devon and Cornwall followed soon after the dissolution of the Parliament in which he had represented Bodmin, and in those of Tregonan and Luccombe who were, unusually, appointed to collect taxes which they had themselves approved as Members of the Commons. Away from Cornwall, Bedston and Gargrave served as royal officials in other regions, and Cokayn was a j.p. in Mdx. It is interesting that, as far as it is possible to tell, Bodmin’s MPs had no direct connexions with the administration of the duchy of Cornwall, although subsequent to their respective returns Nicoll served as the prior of Bodmin’s sub-bailiff of the duchy hundred of Pyder, and Tregoose was employed as a bailiff by the earl of Devon during his stewardship of the duchy.