For a county town, Derby was small, with a population of only about 1,000, about half that of nearby Nottingham. The records of the poll tax of 1377 suggest that in a list of the 42 most important English boroughs it ranked as low as 35th. It did not achieve formal incorporation until 1612, and in the period under review here it was constitutionally less developed than the neighbouring county towns of Nottingham and Leicester.
Aside from the granting of the two charters, there was one very significant episode in the town’s history in this period, indicative of serious tensions either within the borough elite or else between a small coterie of leading townsmen and a wider body of their fellows. When royal justices of oyer and terminer came to the town in 1434, a series of indictments were made against a confederacy of townsmen led by a former MP, Nicholas Meysham. If these indictments are to be taken at face value, on Midsummer day 1430 Meysham and his adherents formed a fraternity of mutual maintenance called ‘St. Mary guild of the Newlond’ with the aim of overturning the customs of the borough and replacing them with others of its own making. Disturbances continued in the following year as the leading townsmen, headed by the Stokkes family, struggled to reassert their position. On 10 May 1433 there seems to have been a major clash in which one Nicholas Gomon allegedly met his death at Meysham’s hands, and on the following Michaelmas day Meysham’s election as bailiff was, it was said, secured by force. By the time the royal justices arrived in the following April, however, the leading townsmen had regained the ascendancy. The borough jury was composed almost entirely of the confederates’ opponents, and their partiality is no doubt reflected in the indictments they laid against Meysham and his faction.
Returns survive for 20 of the 22 Parliaments which met between 1422 and 1460, and 28 individuals are recorded as representing Derby in them. Only one of these was significant enough to secure election for another constituency: in 1467 Thomas Blount was returned for Lincolnshire, where he had lands in right of his wife. As many as 19 of the 28 are recorded as representing the borough only once. Multiple returns were thus infrequent: only two men, both from the borough’s most important family, had lengthy parliamentary careers. Elias Stokkes is known to have sat six times between 1402 and 1429 and he was probably elected even more often for the returns are lost for six Parliaments between January 1404 and October 1416; and his son Thomas is known to have sat on five occasions between May 1421 and 1442. The others who sat more than twice did so within short periods: Thomas Chaterley was returned to three successive assemblies between 1447 and 1449, and it may have been four as the returns to the Parliament of 1445 are lost; Ralph Shore was the town’s MP in four of the six Parliaments from 1419 to 1423; and John Booth sat in five Parliaments in 12 years. Hence, even though the great majority of Derby’s MPs sat only once, these short but active parliamentary careers ensured that there were several instances of immediate re-election. In addition to Thomas Chaterley’s consecutive returns, Booth served in successive Parliaments in both the 1420s and 1430s and Thomas Stokkes was elected to the Parliaments of 1435 and 1437 (and it is possible, given his election in 1442 and the loss of the returns for the Parliaments of 1439 and 1445, that he was returned to five successive Parliaments). Indeed, for a period in the middle of Henry VI’s reign – between 1435 and 1449 – the borough may have pursued a conscious policy of returning one of the MPs who had served in the previous Parliament.
None the less, despite this series of re-elections, there was a lower level of continuity in the town’s representation over the whole period than there had been in the period 1386-1421. Then, only 11 of the 27 known MPs are recorded as sitting only once; and to 19 of 23 Parliaments the borough electors returned at least one Member with experience of the Commons, compared with only 12 out of 20 for the period under review here. It would, however, be wrong to assume that this break in the pattern of the borough’s representation came in 1422. The real change came in 1450, for two parliamentary novices were returned to each of the four Parliaments which met between that date and 1459. Further, this change marked something far more significant than merely a fortuitous decline in continuity. It would not be going too far to say that it betokened the politicization of the borough’s representation, an ad hoc response on the part of the townsmen to the exceptional tensions in the national politics of that decade.
The majority of Derby’s MPs were local merchants and tradesmen. Most numerous were those involved in the leather industry: three, Colman, Hether and Orme, were tanners, and Crabbe was a saddler. Much less well represented than in the period 1386-1421 were those engaged in cloth manufacture: Wolley, a draper, who also sat in the earlier period, Nundy, a mercer, and Swerd are the only examples, compared with at least seven in the earlier period. The others followed a variety of trades: two were spicers, one a smith and the troublesome Meysham a butcher. Only one was a merchant with substantial interests, namely Elias Stokkes, a merchant of the Calais staple, but his son, Thomas, and Ralph Shore are also to be classified as merchants.
Just as most as of the MPs had business interests in the town, it is probably also true to say that most were natives of Derby. There is, however, some evidence of migration into the town. Meysham may have hailed from Little Eaton, a few miles north of Derby, but better examples are provided by Booth and Wolley. Booth was from a minor gentry family of Lancashire and came to the town because his kinsman Henry Booth* found for him a bride with interests there. Wolley appears to have been born in Cheshire, coming to Derby in the service of James Tuchet, Lord Audley.
The MPs of the late 1440s and 1450s are of a different character to the townsmen who dominated the borough’s representation for the bulk of the period. The new MPs were of two different types. First, there were men from Derbyshire families: Thomas Blount was a younger brother of one of the principal men of the county, Walter Blount*; Agard, Bradshaw and Wylne were drawn from more modest landed families living near the town; and Lovet came from an obscure family from the north of the county. Second, there were townsmen who had made their careers outside the town. John Brydde was a prominent local lawyer who had been both under sheriff and clerk of the peace before his elections in 1455 and 1460; Richard Chaterley was a filacer in the court of common pleas when elected to the Parliament of November 1449; and his probable brother, Thomas, was elected to three successive Parliaments in the late 1440s as a yeoman of the royal household. Before the elections of Brydde and Richard Chaterley lawyers had played little part in Derby’s representation. Between 1386 and 1447 only two represented the town, namely Richard Brown†, clerk of the peace in Derbyshire, who sat in 1420, and Elias Tyldesley, an attorney in the common pleas, elected in 1437.
The loss of the borough records, through a fire in 1841 and a flood in 1932, means that anything like a complete list of the town’s officers is beyond reconstruction.
Two MPs are known to have held other borough offices: John Stokkes served as one of the coroners and was probably in office when twice returned to Parliament in the 1420s; and Tyldesley was town clerk by 1452 and may have been in office when elected in 1437. Although appointment to burdensome royal commissions to levy the fifteenths and tenths voted by Parliament cannot be accounted a borough office, those townsmen included upon them were named because of their place in Derby’s affairs. Four of our MPs were so named: Robert Smith in 1419 and 1431, Ralph Shore in 1428, Elias Stokkes in 1432 and William Orme in 1434. These incomplete figures are enough to justify the conclusion that, as in other county towns, the townsmen who sat for Derby were predominantly drawn from the same group as its officers. None the less, the infiltration of the gentry into its representation in the 1450s meant the degree of overlap between the town’s MPs and its officers was lower than in the period 1386-1421, when 17 of the 27 MPs are known to have held office as bailiff.
Most of the surviving returns disguise the reality of the parliamentary election process in the borough. Between 1417 and 1423 the sheriff of Derbyshire merely incorporated the names of the borough MPs into the county return, naming no borough attestors and falsely implying that the county electors were responsible for both. Thereafter he alternated between either sending a separate borough indenture, to which he himself was a party, or appending a few borough attestors to an indenture covering both county and borough elections. The latter more common form, the first example of which dates from 1432, implies that both elections took place at the same time (or at least on the same day) in the county court, but this is another false implication. A joint indenture for county and borough dates the elections to the second Parliament summoned in 1449 to 23 Oct., but two other documents returned by the sheriff into Chancery show that the borough election was not held until 29 Oct., when the bailiffs drew up their own indenture of election in response to a mandate to elect sent by the sheriff a day earlier.
It is not difficult to see why the first of the survivals should relate to the Parliament of November 1449. Revealingly, whatever form the sheriff employed for the two constituencies of Derbyshire, he also employed for those of Nottinghamshire, the other county of his bailiwick. This Parliament was the first called after Nottingham had been elevated to a shire incorporate, its sheriffs receiving and returning their own writ of summons and sending their own electoral indenture into Chancery. It was no doubt this that prompted the sheriff to send into Chancery the bailiffs’ indenture for the only borough now remaining in his bailiwick. His example was followed by the next sheriff before the joint indenture form was readopted in 1453.
This joint form was clearly a conflation of two indentures witnessing elections generally held on different days. Sometimes, however, the sheriff departed from the common practice and made no attempt to conflate the two indentures, returning two: one between himself and the county electors, the other between himself and the borough attestors.
Just as the elections were held on different dates, they were also held in different locations. The borough elections of 1411 and 1425 were said to have been made ‘in plena curia burgi’ and that of 1472 in the guildhall, and there is every reason to suppose that the guildhall rather than the Derbyshire county court was the general venue.
The borough indentures of October 1449 and 1455 allow the election process to be observed more closely. In 1449 the sheriff’s single indenture names 13 county attestors and 21 borough attestors (including the town’s bailiffs), all of whom were, in the standard form of such indentures, said to have been present in the county court on 23 Oct., witnessing the election of both the county and borough returns. But, as we have seen, the borough election was not held until six days later, and thus the indenture cannot have been drawn up until after the sheriff had received notification of the result of this election. In these circumstances, it is natural to assume that the indenture sent by the bailiffs to the sheriff in response to his mandate was the source for the names of the borough attestors appended to the misdated shrieval indenture. It was, however, not the only source. The bailiffs’ indenture names 33 burgesses, inclusive of the two bailiffs themselves. Of these 15 are also named on the sheriff’s indenture but so are six further names omitted from the notification. From what source did the sheriff draw them and on what basis did he omit more than half of those named on the bailiffs’ indenture? The same question is posed by the 1455 return. The sheriff’s indenture takes the common form, naming 20 county attestors and 17 from the borough, but a separate bailiffs’ indenture (unfortunately badly damaged) gives a different list of borough attestors.
One can only speculate as to the reason for these discrepancies. If only a small number of burgesses had been named in the sheriffs’ returns it would be tempting to suggest that they were a deputation of townsmen sent to deliver the borough indenture to the sheriff, but it is hard to believe that as many as 21 burgesses (as in the indenture of 1449) were needed to perform this task. A more likely explanation is that, when the county election was held, the sheriff and his clerks took the trouble to note the names of burgesses then present in the county court in the knowledge that, once they had received the result of the borough election, they would need to name some townsmen in the joint indenture and that the bailiffs’ indenture was not always an adequate source for these names.
These doubts about the relationship between those borough attestors named on the shrieval indentures and those townsmen who made the election make it difficult to draw any firm conclusions about the parliamentary franchise. The 33 burgesses named in the bailiffs’ indenture of October 1449 shows that a larger number played a part than is implied in the sheriff’s indentures. They also suggest that the town’s parliamentary franchise was wider than that which applied in the case of the election of bailiffs, which took place each Michaelmas Day and was, according to an indictment of 1434, customarily made by 24 ‘de magis idoneis probis et sufficientibus personis’ of the borough.
The factors determining the personnel of the town’s representation showed a clear pattern over the period under review here. At its beginning, between the Parliaments of 1422 and 1429, the most important factor was the dispute between the influential lawyer Henry Booth, a near kinsman of the townsman, John Booth, and the coheiresses of the Derbyshire knight, Sir Philip Leche†. This produced petitions in the Parliaments of 1423, 1425 and probably 1429 – on the last two occasions brought by Henry’s opponents – and Henry clearly exerted himself to ensure that his cause had support there. His election to represent the county in 1423 and 1425 was matched by that for the borough of John Booth, who also sat in the assembly of 1429. While it would be wrong to suggest that Henry foisted his kinsman on the town electors, John was no doubt motivated to put himself forward for election by a desire to serve Henry’s interests. In the case of John Stokkes, returned to the Parliaments of 1422 and 1427, the motivation was more direct. Like Henry, he too was one of Sir Philip Leche’s executors and, although he was less centrally involved in the dispute, it is surely more than coincidental that both his returns to Parliament came at a time that the dispute was in active agitation.
These examples show that matters of no interest to the majority of the townsmen could exert a powerful influence over who was returned to represent the borough. It seems, however, that, by the late 1420s, the apparently easy dominance of John Booth and the Stokkes family over the town’s representation was giving rise to resentment. Given what was to come later, it is probable that Meysham’s election in 1427 was a manifestation of that resentment. The conflict between Meysham and his adherents, among whom numbered Nundy, Orme and Colman, on the one hand, and the small coterie of the town’s governors, headed by the Stokkes family, John Booth and Roger Wolley, on the other, did much to inform Derby’s parliamentary representation in the 1430s. The former faction was in the ascendant at the time of the 1432 election, for Orme and Colman were returned. They then used their influence as MPs to have two of their rivals, Elias Stokkes and John Spicer, appointed to the burdensome office of tax collector in the following September. At the next hustings, for the Parliament convened to meet on 8 July 1433, the electoral initiative lay with the other party. John Booth was returned with Robert Sutton, another probable opponent of Meysham. As MPs, they resorted to the trick earlier employed by their rivals, securing the nomination in February 1434 of Orme and another of Meysham’s followers, John Chester, as tax collectors, and they no doubt also supported the petition presented to the Commons by the widow of Nicholas Gomon, who had allegedly met his death at the hands of Meysham and his adherents.
The elections of the later part of the period present a very different aspect. Mere personal interests and borough rivalries gave way to wider political considerations as the main determinant of elections. These can first be discerned in the return to the Bury St. Edmunds Parliament of 1447, at which the royal court planned to act against Humphrey, duke of Gloucester. The townsmen returned Thomas Chaterley, who, although seemingly a local man, was also a yeoman of the royal household, and no doubt it was this service which prompted him to stand for election both to this assembly and the two that followed.
The operation of wider political considerations of a different sort is even more strikingly apparent in the election to the Parliament of 1450 when the choice of the electors fell on two servants of one of the leading men of the county, Walter Blount, who was probably already active in the Yorkist interest and was to concern himself in the borough’s elections for the rest of the decade. Both MPs were from minor gentry families, and one of them, Thomas Agard of Foston, had only the most tenuous connexion with Derby. Blount’s influence was again exerted in 1453 when his younger brother, an esquire of the royal household, was one of those returned. The other MP on this occasion, Robert Wylne, was also a Household man, albeit in the lesser capacity of yeoman. He came from a family on the borders of gentility settled at Melbourne in the south of the county, and although his family had had some earlier connexion with Derby he could no more than Thomas Blount be described as a townsman. The election to the next Parliament, held in the aftermath of the Yorkist victory at the battle of St. Albans, again saw the exclusion of the burgesses. The lesser of the two men elected, Edmund Lovet, lived at Woodhouse in the north of the county and, beyond his election to represent it, had no connexion with the borough. He was returned as a servant of John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, a substantial landholder in north Derbyshire, who was anxious for support in the Commons after the equivocal role he had played in the campaign leading to the battle. Lovet’s fellow MP, John Brydde of Locko just outside the town, was a more substantial man and had connexions with the town close enough to justify his election as its MP. Nevertheless, he is more accurately characterized not as a townsman but rather as a prominent county attorney (who had but recently relinquished office as clerk of the peace in Nottinghamshire). It is also a reasonable speculation that his readiness to stand in 1455 owed something to an association with his neighbour Walter Blount.
Only in 1459 did representation fall back into the hands of the townsmen, but even here one can discern a circumstance beyond the ordinary. In the election indenture the last five letters of the surname of one of those returned, John Burgh (a man so obscure that he makes no other appearances in the surviving records), together with the name of his fellow MP, Henry Swerd, have been added over an erasure. It may be that the ‘John B’ to which ‘urgh’ has been added was originally ‘John Brydde’; that Brydde and whoever was elected with him refused to serve because of the controversial nature of the forthcoming assembly; and that the electors or the bailiffs, of whom one was Brydde’s son, substituted the names of two of the lesser townsmen.
The evidence of the returns for the period between 1447 and 1460 suggests that the leading townsmen, in marked contrast to their attitude in the earlier part of the period, were happy to avoid election to Parliament because Parliament had become a place of political contention. They were thus ready to accept nominations from external interests for whom potential contentiousness was an incentive rather than a disincentive. Walter Blount took full advantage. This surrender of electoral independence proved to be temporary. It was not the beginning of the process by which the borough’s representation fell into the hands of the local gentry. The town was large enough to resist this infiltration in the long term, and, although its representation is poorly documented from the 1460s to the 1540s, it is clear that representation fell back, for the most part at least, into the hands of the burgesses.