One of the most important urban settlements in the realm, Bristol vied with York for the position of the second largest urban centre after London. Poll tax returns suggest that it had over 9,500 inhabitants in 1377 although recurrent outbreaks of plague are likely to have ensured that its population was either static or in slight decline during the period under review. Bristol had much to thank for its geography. First, its position on the Avon, close to the junction of that river and the Severn, and its sheltered harbour and quays made it an ideal centre for overseas trade. Secondly, its proximity to the Severn, Wye and other rivers meant that it was a conduit for a very considerable inland trade with the Midlands, south-west and Wales. Thirdly, its location near several contrasting regions (variously important for agriculture, industry and mineral wealth) stimulated its manufactures, ensuring that it was one of England’s chief manufacturing centres. It also enjoyed close connexions and much business with London and Southampton. Thanks to its geographical and economic advantages, Bristol ranked behind only London in wealth among English towns and cities. It regularly lent more money to the Crown than any other urban community apart from the capital, and provided an impressive total of £2,400 to the King between the beginning of March 1424 and the end of January 1453.
It was upon commerce alone that Bristol’s importance rested, since it was not a cathedral city, shire town or military centre. The most important source of its wealth was the cloth industry. Cloth was the basis of trade at Bristol, where the export of raw wool was never of any significance. In contrast with some other major English ports, native merchants rather than Hanseatic or Italian foreigners handled almost the whole of its cloth export business.
Piracy was far from the only problem faced by Bristol’s merchants in this period. Although English cloth exports as a whole doubled in the fifteenth century, Bristol did not fully share in this growth, partly because of its peripheral contact with the developing Baltic and Mediterranean markets. For all that, during the 1440s its cloth exports were rising, while imports of wine from Gascony were flourishing, helped by the five-year truce concluded with France in 1444. The reopening of hostilities and the loss of Gascony just a few years later dealt the wine trade a savage blow. It continued after 1453, but only through special licences and hedged by irksome restrictions. The cloth trade suffered severely as well. As compared with the averages for 1440-50, Bristol’s cloth exports had fallen some 60 per cent by the 1460s when there was widespread unemployment among the town’s weavers. Yet these were short-lived setbacks. Thanks to its location, the variety of its manufactures and the control that its burgesses retained over its commerce, Bristol was better equipped than many English towns to weather the storm.
One mark of Bristol’s economic importance in the later Middle Ages was its charter of 1373, through which it had become a shire incorporate, the first town or city after London to achieve such status. As a result, it acquired a sheriff and independent shire jurisdiction separate from that of Somerset and Gloucestershire and the mayor assumed the additional duties of royal escheator within the new ‘urban county’. Bristol did not gain any further charters of particular note during the period under review although the Crown confirmed all its previous charters in July 1424, and it granted admiralty jurisdiction to the burgesses in 1446.
The mayor, elected every 15 Sept. and formally admitted to office at Michaelmas, headed the municipal administration. According to an ordinance of 1344, candidates for the mayoralty should previously have served as one of the five aldermen of the town. The Crown chose the sheriff from a short-list of three names that the burgesses had sent to the Chancery. He also served for a year, but the method of appointment meant that there was no fixed date for taking up office, and his term rarely coincided exactly with that of the mayor. The other main municipal office was that of bailiff, exercised jointly by two burgesses, elected officials who served from Michaelmas to Michaelmas. By this period, the mayor was invariably also mayor of the local staple, but the distinction between the institutions of town and staple was preserved and, more often than not, the annual terms of the two offices did not coincide exactly. Bristol also possessed a common council, typically drawn from its most substantial burgesses and fixed at 40 members by the charter of 1373. The charter also gave the mayor and sheriff, with ‘the consent of the commonalty’, the right to select its members, even though it was primarily intended as a check to arbitrary behaviour by the mayor and bailiffs when established just a few decades earlier. During the fifteenth century, the council evolved into a body of wealthy merchants that arrogated to itself the task of electing the mayor and other officials.
Among the duties of the bailiffs, who were the mayor’s assistants and chiefly concerned with financial business, was the collection of the town’s fee farm. At the beginning of Henry VI’s reign, the farm belonged to Henry IV’s widow, Joan of Navarre. In November 1408 she had leased it (exclusive of the castle) to the burgesses for some £125 p.a. (that is, £182 7s. 10d. minus £58 11s. 6d. in customary payments and alms she had excused them). The lease was for the term of her life, meaning that it ran until her death in 1437. There was considerable bargaining when the burgesses obtained a new lease from the Crown in May 1439. The King had granted the stewardship of the court of the tolsey and market at Bristol to his carver, Sir William Beauchamp*, in the previous November. Just four months later, Sir William had surrendered the office in return for 20 marks p.a. from the town’s petty custom, an annuity that he was to receive for life or until the Crown found an office of equivalent value to the stewardship. Having regained the stewardship, the King used it as a carrot in his negotiations with the burgesses, offering to make it part of the farm, provided that they agreed to an increased farm of £160. His tactics appear to have worked: although the lease of 1439 set the farm at only £102 15s. 6d., the burgesses undertook to pay another £57 4s. 6d., making a total of exactly £160. The lease was for 20 years but the burgesses secured a renewal at the same rate for a further 60 years in 1446, an arrangement that stood until the accession of Edward IV.
Seventeen men represented the town in the period under review. This is a precise total even though the election returns for the Parliaments of 1439 and 1445 have not survived, since the fine rolls supply the names of the MPs in those assemblies. Most of the 17 were either certainly or probably natives of Bristol. Only three of them, John Langley, originally from Wiltshire, Richard Trenode, who was of Cornish descent, and Richard Forster, who came from Somerset, were certainly born outside the town, although Philip Meede was probably another Somerset man. Forster’s original home parish of Stanton Drew lay just a few miles south of Bristol, and Wraxall, reputedly that of Meede, was also not far away. Whatever their origins, all the MPs resided at Bristol all or part of the time, so presenting a similar picture to both the three and half decades before 1422 and the mid Tudor period.
There were many bonds among the MPs, who frequently had private dealings with each other as business associates, executors, feoffees or kinsmen. There was also something of a history of service in Parliament among some of the established families at Bristol, indicating that (as in previous decades) they saw securing a seat in the Commons as a desirable objective.
All of the MPs were merchants for at least part if not all of their adult life. Even Young, who made his name as a lawyer, began his career in trade and continued to engage in it long after entering the legal profession, perhaps until the end of his life. Yet his half-brother, William Canynges, one of the greatest of the town’s late medieval merchants, did not remain in trade until the end of his days, choosing to enter the Church in his later years. Thanks to his profession and landholdings, Young was a ‘gentleman’ while Norton, sometimes acknowledged as an ‘esquire’, was perhaps just as much a member of the landed gentry as a townsman. At least three of their fellow MPs, John Sharp V, William Pavy and Richard Forster (also known as an ‘esquire’) were ‘gentlemen’ as well as merchants. Whether ‘gentlemen’ or not, the 17 as a group were men of considerable substance. Only in the case of Forster is there a hint of more humble beginnings, in spite of the status he came to enjoy after settling in Bristol, since a royal pardon issued to him in mid 1437 suggests that he began his career as a draper in his native Somerset.
Although evidence for the trading activities of some of the 17 is extremely scanty, most of them exported cloth and some of them shipped wine from France and Iberia, as well as iron and woad, two other Spanish imports. Bristol’s merchants, including several of the MPs, also traded with Iceland (off which Canynges had the misfortune to lose a ship), and Ireland, both major sources of fish. Elsewhere, Burton and Trenode took advantage of Henry V’s conquest of Normandy, jointly procuring a royal licence allowing them to re-export wine to the duchy’s ports in 1419. The duchy was one of the less regular trading destinations for Bristol merchants, as were the Low Countries, with which Robert Russell, already commercially active before the end of the fourteenth century, had dealings. There is also some evidence for Russell’s domestic business concerns, which extended to Shrewsbury, Hereford and Monmouth as well as the nearer Chippenham and Dunster. His business partners included Burton and Trenode, and the trio purchased wheat and barley worth 100 marks for supplying the people of Bristol in early 1429, only for a band of malefactors to ambush and plunder the vessels carrying the grain down the Severn. It was perhaps no coincidence that Trenode subsequently stood for election to the Parliament of that year, one of the assemblies in which the Commons submitted a petition for free navigation on that river. In common with many of their fellow townsmen, several of the MPs had commercial dealings with London. Trenode spent his early career as a ‘taverner’ and ‘vintner’ there, and in 1441 Canynges joined the Grocers’, the City Company of which his brother Thomas Canynges* and half-brother John Young* were already members. The trade in goods was not the only potential source of profit, since Burton, Trenode and Thomas Fish participated in the lucrative business of transporting pilgrims to the great Spanish pilgrimage centre of Santiago de Compostela. All three were shipowners although not on the same scale as William Canynges, one of the greatest in England of his time.
The evidently very wealthy Canynges expended much of his wealth on rebuilding St. Mary Redcliffe, his home parish church at Bristol, on his benefactions to the college at nearby Westbury-on-Trym, of which he became dean after entering the Church, and on the chantries and the almshouse he founded in the town. He also built a very fine town house for himself backing on to the Avon. Shipwarde was another considerable charitable benefactor, in his case to his parish church of St. Stephen, where he funded large-scale building works, most notably the construction of a new tower. He also provided for the founding of a chantry in his will, as did Burton, Henry Gildeney, John Sharp III, Norton, Pavy, Meede and Forster, of whom the last, like Canynges, founded an almshouse in Bristol. As well as a sign of wealth, such projects were a display of conventional piety and orthodox faith, notwithstanding later medieval Bristol’s reputation as a significant centre of lollardy.
William Canynges appears to have accumulated landed estates of greater significance than did most of his fellow MPs, none of whom was a particularly large landowner. No inquisition post mortem or subsidy assessments for him have survived but he was supposed to have settled lands in Bristol and Somerset worth £100 p.a. on his surviving son, John, and daughter-in-law, Isabel, the daughter of Thomas Middleton, an esquire from the latter county, in 1464. Canynges’s half-brother, Thomas Young, invested part of his wealth in real property outside Bristol. Situated in Gloucestershire, Somerset and Wiltshire, these estates are impossible to value but were respectable rather than spectacular acquisitions. Norton inherited property in the city of Worcester, valued at £5 p.a. for the purposes of the subsidy of 1431, and lands in Somerset (probably worth at least £40 p.a.) from his father. Most of the holdings of those of the MPs with lands outside Bristol lay predominantly near the town or elsewhere in the south-west of England, although John Sharp III appears to have had an interest in estates in the east Midlands, possibly in the right of his wife.
Save for Norton, all of the MPs held municipal office at Bristol. Nine of them served one or more terms as mayor, as probably would have some of their fellows, had not death removed them from the scene.
Borough offices were not the only positions of responsibility that the MPs exercised at Bristol. All of them, save Langley, served on at least one ad hoc commission for the town, usually after they had entered Parliament for the first (or only) time. Furthermore, some of them served the King as customs officials there and others, notably Young, held county office under the Crown elsewhere. Russell, Langley and, apparently, one of the John Sharps served as deputy butler at Bristol, but through the appointment of the chief butler of England rather than the Crown. In any case, only Langley took up the office (which he relinquished a few months after the Parliament of 1426) before he had sat for the town in the Commons. Young is the sole man among the 17 known to have served in the administration of the duchy of Lancaster. His prominence as a lawyer ensured for him employment in the duchy at a regional and national level and in London, although not before his first election for Bristol in 1435. Although he rose to high office in the King’s courts at Westminster, he did not do so until the reign of Edward IV, after his parliamentary career was over.
While it is unlikely that Young had already entered the service of Edward’s father, Richard, duke of York, in 1435, his connexion with York had a very important bearing on his activities in the mid fifteenth-century Parliaments he attended. He was a Member of those of 1450 and 1455, both summoned at times of political advantage for the duke, and he probably owed much to his links with York for his election as a knight of the shire for Gloucestershire in 1460, since he was by no means a firmly established member of the gentry of that county. It is worth noting that his half-brother, William Canynges, also associated with the Yorkists, gained election alongside him in 1450 and 1455. Notwithstanding Young’s links with York, it was only natural that such a prominent lawyer also found employment with other great lay magnates. Yet there is no evidence that any of them influenced his parliamentary career in the same way as his primary patron, and the same holds true with regard to the connexions, putative or otherwise, between others of the 17 and the nobility. It is possible, for example, that Shipwarde had links with the Lords Berkeley like his son and namesake. The younger John Shipwarde fell under suspicion of having sent armed assistance to the Berkeleys in 1470, prior to their celebrated private battle with the Talbots at Nibley Green, just over 20 miles north-east of Bristol. Meede, whose daughter Isabel had married Lord Berkeley’s younger brother Maurice, was likewise accused of supporting the Berkeleys at Nibley Green. His link with the Berkeleys cannot have had any bearing on his parliamentary career, which was already over when Isabel married Maurice, unless in a negative sense of in some way preventing his re-election to the Commons after the dissolution of the Parliament of 1460.
As in the previous three and a half decades,
The repeated election of Young alone ensured considerable continuity in the parliamentary representation of Bristol between the later 1430s to the mid 1450s. Furthermore, the returns of Burton, Gildeney, Levedon, Power, Russell, John Sharp III and Trenode provided further continuity early in Henry VI’s reign, and the re-election of Meede, John Sharp V and Shipwarde in its later years. Four of the MPs, Burton, Gildeney, Russell and Trenode, first entered Parliament in the reign of Henry V, but, with the apparent exception of John Sharp III, none of the MPs sat in Edward IV’s reign. The burgesses of Bristol appear to have valued parliamentary partnerships, a feature of the town’s representation in this period. Burton and Levedon sat together in 1422 and 1423, and Young and John Sharp V in three Parliaments in a row (1447, February 1449 and November 1449). The half-brothers Young and Canynges were the MPs in 1439, 1450 and 1455, and Shipwarde and Meede the men elected in 1459 and 1460.
The shire court at Bristol was the usual venue for parliamentary elections. If it was not due to meet between the summoning and opening of a Parliament it was the duty of the sheriff of the town to make ad hoc arrangements. In 1426, for example, he had the writ of summons publicly proclaimed and then, with the assent of the mayor and others, he and the ‘more discreet & sufficient’ of the burgesses met in the guildhall and elected Gildeney and Langley. The election of that year is also noteworthy in another respect, since the Chancery sent Bristol a writ of summons that failed to acknowledge that its parliamentary burgesses were also knights of the shire. In response to the omission, apparently the result of scribal carelessness, the municipal authorities entrusted the MPs with a petition of protest, through which they secured letters patent reaffirming their town’s status as a county in its own right.
With the exceptions of Gildeney, Langley and, most notably, Young, there is very little evidence for the activities of Bristol’s representatives once they had arrived at a Parliament. During that of 1429, however, the MPs for Bishop’s Lynn wrote to their mayor reporting that their counterparts from London, Bristol, York, Hull and elsewhere were planning to lobby the knights of the shire for ‘a restriction of the subsidy’ (pro restricione subsidii). Although not recorded on the Parliament roll, negotiations of this type must have taken up a considerable amount of time and energy.
Alone among the MPs, Young’s activities in Parliament, especially that of 1450-1, particularly stand out. Although he was no doubt a diligent representative for Bristol, those activities, as recorded, had nothing to do with the town. During the Parliament of 1447, the Exchequer rewarded him for his ‘labours and diligence’ on ‘divers matters’ for the King’s profit.