As early as the reign of Richard I Hereford had been granted certain privileges in return for an annual fee farm of £40, but incorporation did not come until 1597. The loss of the bulk of the city’s medieval records means that little is known of the operation of its internal government in the intervening period.
A new charter granted on 23 June 1399 significantly extended the independence of the civic authorities, granting them the powers of j.p.s and freedom from interference of the sheriff and other county officials. The Lancastrian period witnessed no further elaboration of the city’s government, although, in 1457, the citizens were exempted by the Crown from nomination, outside the city liberties, to the unpopular office of collector of the fifteenth and tenth.
Little can be said with certainty about Hereford’s economic fortunes in the period under review here, but it appears to have escaped the economic decline that afflicted Shrewsbury.
A feature of Hereford’s internal history in the Middle Ages was the periodically troubled relations between the civic and ecclesiastical authorities, provoked by resentment at the administrative independence of the bishop’s fee, which covered a significant part of the city. Relations had been particularly poor in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, but appear to have been more harmonious in the period under review here.
In terms of illuminating the politics of Hereford the indictments of 1452 are the most revealing. They draw a connexion between the agitations of a group of lesser citizens, headed by one of the MPs, John Weobley, against the rule of the greater, and a rising in the county in support of Richard, duke of York. Their narrative is a straightforward one. On 21 Oct. 1448 Weobley and his adherents violently subverted the mayoral election, convened in the city’s church of St. Peter; on 8 Mar. 1450, after the mayor, John Welford, had arrested one of Weobley’s adherents, Weobley called upon the marginalized Welsh in the city to rise up against the mayor and citizens; and, on the following 19 Oct., as the citizens assembled in the Tolsey to elect Welford’s successor as mayor, a gang of 200 broke in and threatened them with death unless they filled the office with a man of their choosing. The indictments link these disturbances with the Yorkist rising in the county by naming Weobley and other Hereford tradesmen as illegally receiving livery from (Sir) Walter Devereux in January 1452 and as, just before the duke of York’s rising at Dartford, coming together in the city in an illicit gathering for mutual maintenance.
Unfortunately, there is no external evidence to support this narrative, and, as discussed below, some reason to dispute its outline. The indictments of 1457 present a different picture with a Yorkist rising bringing extreme violence into the city. Early in March 1456 Herbert’s kinsman, William Vaughan, was murdered in Hereford by a local man, Thomas Glover. Anxious for immediate vengeance, a Yorkist gang headed by Herbert and Walter Devereux II* entered the city on 15 Mar., intimidated the local j.p.s into taking an indictment of murder against six inhabitants, the most important of whom was a dyer, John Glover, a kinsman of the murderer, and then promptly hanged those indicted. A few weeks later, (Sir) Walter Devereux I imprisoned and extorted money from the mayor, Richard Green.
Returns survive for 19 of the 22 Parliaments of Henry VI’s reign. Twenty-four men represented the borough, only two of whom are known to have sat for other constituencies, namely, Adam Edgeley, who twice sat for Stafford before representing Hereford, and John Dewall, who, after his prospects had been transformed by a fortunate marriage to a Wiltshire heiress, represented that county in the Parliament of 1449 (Nov.). Between them the 24 MPs filled 51 Hereford seats (or 54 seats including returns for other constituencies), an average of a little over two Parliaments per Member. With such a low average, it is not surprising that as many as 15 of the 24 sat for the borough only once. By contrast, four sat on five or more occasions, providing the representative continuity that the city would otherwise have lacked: George Breinton was elected six times between 1413 and 1425, Henry Chippenham the same number from 1406 to 1422, and both William Buryton (between 1420 and 1437) and his son Thomas (between 1442 and 1467) were elected five times.
Despite the preponderance of those returned to a single Parliament, instances of re-election were frequent, numbering nine, with three MPs having three successive returns to their name. Indeed, on two occasions – in 1431 and 1449 (Feb.) – the electors returned the two MPs who had represented them in the previous assembly. This explains why, over the whole period, experienced MPs filled 20 of the 38 known seats, a higher proportion than might be expected in a constituency for which most of its MPs sat only once. Yet this proportion was not a constant. It fell significantly over Henry VI’s reign. Experienced MPs took 12 of 16 seats between 1422 and 1432, and only in a single Parliament, that of 1427, was the city represented by two novices.
Of the 24 MPs, 16 can be identified as permanent residents of the city. Ten of these were drawn from a small elite of city families, namely the Breintons, Burytons, Chippenhams and Falks. The first three of these families had traditions of parliamentary service, having provided the city with MPs as early as the 1380s. Five Chippenhams filled 15 seats between 1388 and 1495; four Burytons 12 between 1383 and 1467; and three Breintons nine between 1382 and 1449. These parliamentary dynasties were a new and short-lived phenomenon in the city’s representation. The only parallels in an earlier period of its representative history were the Strettons, three of whom filled 13 seats between 1330 and 1365, and in a later, the Warnecombes, three of whom represented the city between the 1520s and the 1570s.
These resident MPs followed a variety of trades. Nicholas Chippenham was a mercer, Henry Chippenham, a grocer, William Mason, a draper, Thomas Newton, a dyer, John Weobley, a tailor, and Thomas Bruyn perhaps a saddler. More significantly, four of the resident MPs were lawyers, namely George and Thomas Breinton, John Buryton and John Pagyn. Such resident lawyers were a new feature in the city’s representation. Earlier the lawyers returned (three, William Jonet†, James Nash† and John Wych†, sat between 1386 and 1421) had tended to be men with their principal interests elsewhere, as indeed were the other lawyers – Dewall, Monnington, Welford, and the uncertain case of William Cornwall – who represented the city in Henry VI’s reign. The rise of the resident lawyer explains why there was an increase in the number of seats filled by men of law. Between 1386 and 1421 four lawyers were elected, taking 12 of the 47 known seats;
More interesting as a group than the permanently resident MPs are the eight – Edgeley, Monnington, the two Cornwalls, Dewall, Welford and probably also the two obscure MPs, Holland and Wyther – who can be broadly counted as outsiders, in that, although most had traceable connexions in the city, they had more important interests outside its limits. Strangely, the balance between the two groups did not change markedly over time. In the electoral history of many boroughs during Henry VI’s reign, MPs whose interests lay largely or exclusively outside the constituency were markedly more frequently returned as the reign progressed, but in Hereford they were an occasional expedient spread evenly over the reign. Although the two MPs of 1459 can be classed as outsiders, their elections are balanced by those of Edgeley, Monnington and William Cornwall in the 1420s.
Of the outsiders, only two – Welford and Otto Cornwall – took a prominent part in the city’s affairs. Welford was a lawyer from Worcester, who in 1441 leased a manor at Bodenham, about six miles from Hereford, and then acquired property in the city, perhaps by marriage. His integration into the city elite is made clear by his election as mayor in October 1449, having represented the city in the previous two Parliaments, and he remained resident in Hereford until his death in 1490 and was buried in the cathedral. Otto Cornwall, a younger son of the knightly family of Cornwall of Burford in Shropshire, came into the city by his marriage to a daughter of Henry Chippenham and was elected mayor in 1467, eight years after he had represented Hereford in Parliament.
For the other six, however, their interest in tHereford’s affairs extended little beyond the desire for a parliamentary seat, and their elections are to be explained by connexions outside the city. John Monnington, a lawyer from King’s Pyon, a few miles to the north-west of Hereford, was elected in 1425 as a servant of his patron, the influential John Merbury*. William Cornwall, MP in 1427, can be less certainly identified as a lawyer, but he too seems to have been returned in 1427 as a servant of another of the leading county gentry, Sir Roland Lenthall of Hampton Court. It is significant here that Merbury and Lenthall had long held by royal grant the city’s fee farm of £40 – reason enough for them to interest themselves in its affairs.
By contrast, no clear reason can be suggested for Dewall’s election in 1433, but he too was a lawyer, living a few miles outside the city at Much Dewchurch. The return of the other three outsiders is yet more difficult to explain. Wyther seems to have come from Ledbury and attested the county election of 1432, but nothing else is known of him. John Holland is also a mysterious figure. He was described as ‘esquire’ when elected in 1459, implying that he was a man of greater account than those usually returned for the city, yet almost nothing is known of him. He did, however, have some connexion with Hereford beyond his election, for he attested its parliamentary elections in 1460 and 1467. More anomalous still is the election in the Parliament of 1423 of Adam Edgeley, a long-standing servant of the great baronial house of Stafford and a yeoman in the royal household. Just before the second session of this Parliament, the citizens secured royal confirmation of their charters, and it may be that they had returned Edgeley on his promise to put his connexions in the Household to securing that goal.
Any discussion of the relationship between Hereford’s MPs and its officers is hampered by the difficulty of identifying the latter. Although a near complete list can be compiled of the city’s mayors, the names of the bailiffs, two of whom were elected for each year, and the common councillors, of which there were, apparently, 36 at any one time, are in the case of the bailiffs largely unknown, and in the case of the common councillors completely so. In the reign of Henry VI only three of the 24 MPs – Henry and Nicholas Chippenham and Richard Falk – are known to have served as bailiff, compared with five of 24 in the earlier period. But these statistics have little meaning. The real figure must have been much higher in both periods. For what it is worth, Nicholas Chippenham was serving as bailiff when elected in 1426, but both Henry Chippenham and Richard Falk are recorded as bailiffs only after the end of their parliamentary careers.
Enough, however, is known of the mayors for a few remarks to be made. As the fifteenth century progressed, multiple consecutive terms in that office gave way to single ones. Early in the century mayors tended to serve for several consecutive terms. John Mey, for example, was mayor for most, if not all, of the period from 1405 to 1419 and then again from 1423 to 1430, when he was succeeded by George Breinton who held office until 1434. But in the second half of the century it was rare for a mayor to serve even a double term. None the less, despite this change in the pattern of mayoral service, mayors were no more common among the city’s MPs in Henry VI’s reign than they had been in the period 1386-1421. Eight of the 24 MPs of the period under review here are known to have served as mayor, compared with nine of 24 in the earlier one.
As many as seven of the MPs held office in county administration. Several of these appointments came only after the MP had sat for the borough. Thomas Breinton, when a j.p. of the quorum and escheator in Herefordshire, was a much more significant figure than the young lawyer who had represented the city in 1449; and Dewall, who held the same two offices in distant Wiltshire, had not yet acquired his lands in that county when he sat for Hereford in 1433. Nor had either Welford, the only one of the MPs to hold a shrievalty, and John Buryton, the only one known to have been under sheriff, held those offices before their first or only election for the city. Others, however, had experience of county office either before representing the city or during their careers as Hereford MPs. Welford was a j.p. of the quorum in Herefordshire when elected for the city for the fourth time in 1460; both Otto Cornwall and John Monnington had been Herefordshire escheators before representing the city; and Thomas Buryton held the same office after the first of his five elections.
There was an overlap between the leading citizens and the lesser county gentry. Indeed, six of the city’s permanently resident MPs – the two Breintons, Thomas and William Buryton, Nicholas Falk and Henry Chippenham – can be accounted as numbering among the county’s lesser gentry. Henry Chippenham was assessed on an income of as much as £10 in the subsidy return of 1451 and held the manor of Litley, near the city. George Breinton had land in the north of the county at Yarpole and Orleton (together with further property at nearby Richard’s Castle in Shropshire), to which his putative son, Thomas, added land at Wellington, a few miles to the north of city, and perhaps also the manor of Stretton Sugwas, where his descendants made their home. The Burytons were landowners at Stoke Lacy, to the north-east; and Nicholas Falk inherited a significant, but scattered estate from his mother, which he alienated, although he appears to have retained her manor of Bockleton in Worcestershire.
The loss of the city’s financial records means there is little evidence in respect of the payment of parliamentary wages. Half the expenses of the MPs appear to have been levied on the inhabitants of the King’s fee, and the other half on those of the bishop, canons and Hospitallers, but the question was probably a disputed one. In the reign of Henry VIII the council of the marches in Wales decreed that the residents of the bishop’s fee were liable to contribute, probably in response to their refusal to do so.
The second assembly at which recorded difficulties occurred was the multi-sessioned assembly of 1453-4. Perhaps here too the MPs, John Welford and John Buryton, had agreed to serve at a fixed fee rather than a daily rate, but, if so, it was an agreement which, after the Parliament had proved to be lengthy, they disregarded, later claiming against the mayor £16 10s. each, that is, the full daily rate of 2s. for the whole assembly.
The only evidence for the mode of election is the electoral indentures returned into Chancery in compliance with the statute of 1406. Between 1407 and 1423, with one exception, the returns for Hereford took the form of a schedule stating that the mayor and certain named citizens had made the election. The exception – the return of 1407 – is an indenture drawn up between the mayor on the one part, and various citizens on the other. From 1425 the returns took on a new form, that of an indenture between the county sheriff on one part, and the mayor and electors on the other. Yet another form of indenture emerged in the 1460s, drawn up between the county sheriff and the mayor on the one part, and named electors on the other, witnessing the election made in the guildhall by the attestors. But there is nothing to suggest that this was anything more than a change in the way in which the county sheriff chose to communicate the result of Hereford’s election into Chancery. It is probably the case that the result of every city election was communicated to the sheriff in the form of an indenture between the mayor and citizens and that this was redrafted in the sheriff’s office, before 1425 into a schedule and after that date into an indenture to which the sheriff was party.
The indentures, as one might expect from this form, were not sealed on the day of election, for there was no reason why the sheriff should have been present in the guildhall when the citizens made their choice. In 1429, for example, the election took place on 30 Aug., but the indenture was not sealed until 7 Sept. Similarly, in 1447 the election was held on 24 Jan. and the indenture not sealed until 4 Feb.
Whether these changes had any impact on the pattern of representation is another matter. If there was any possibility that a disappointed candidate for one of the county seats might seek election for the city, then there was sense in holding the county election first, but, aside from John Abrahall*, MP for the city in 1419 and later for the county, the city and county MPs were drawn from different pools. The probability is that the changed relationship between the two elections from about 1450 was simply a matter of the abandonment of an unnecessary convention. On two occasions, however, the city election appears, very deliberately, to have been held first: in both 1417 and 1450 it was held on the Friday before the county election. The second of these was convened in controversial circumstances, that is, at the end of a week that had begun with a disturbed mayoral election, but one can only speculate as to why that should have altered the timing of the parliamentary election.
The indentures generally name between 11 and 14 attestors, but occasionally they imply that those named comprised only some of those who took part. The 1429 election, for example, was said to have been made by the mayor and 11 attestors ‘ex assensu aliorum conciuium suorum’; and that of 1447 by the mayor, John Fuster, and five named attestors by the assent of other unnamed citizens.
Seventeen of the 24 MPs are recorded as attesting elections in the city, appearing on 68 occasions between them, with Henry Chippenham alone attesting as many as 20 indentures. Of the seven who are not, all but Newton fall, unsurprisingly, into the category of outsiders, only two of whom, Holland and Welford, were Hereford attestors. It is more interesting to observe that five of the permanent residents – George Breinton, Thomas and William Buryton, Nicholas Falk and Henry Chippenham – appear as attestors to county elections, an expression of their landed interests outside the city.
Before the 1450s, it is difficult to identify occasions where an MP’s ties with an influential figure outside the city had a bearing on his election. It may be, as remarked earlier, that Monnington was elected in 1425 and William Cornwall in 1427 as servants of two leading local gentry, Merbury and Lenthall respectively. Additionally, Thomas Buryton was in receipt of a fee which Thomas Spofford, bishop of Hereford, granted him in 1448, but before he was elected to the two Parliaments of the following year Spofford had retired, and there is no sign that his episcopal successors exerted influence over the city’s representation in Henry VI’s reign.
This pattern of electoral independence, with only the occasional exertion of influence from outside the city elite, changed, as it did in other similar constituencies, in the 1450s. (Sir) Walter Devereux I may have had a hand in the election in 1450 of John Weobley and Thomas Bruyn, both of whom were to be involved in a Yorkist-inspired rising in Hereford two years later. Devereux himself represented the county in the Parliament, and the context of both his election and those of the city MPs was the recent return of the duke of York from Ireland. If the 1452 indictments are to be accepted at face value, this election must have been held in very tense circumstances. Only four days before, the mayoral election had allegedly been violently disrupted by the intervention of a group of lesser citizens, and it is, therefore, odd that Weobley, supposedly the head of the disaffected citizenry, and Bruyn should have been returned by attestors drawn almost exclusively from the city elite (of the 14 attestors, five had served as mayor and five as MP), at hustings presided over by another of that elite, John Fuster, the mayor whose election the disaffected had tried to prevent.
The influence of Devereux may again have been exercised in 1453, for one of those returned was John Buryton, who went on to support the county’s Yorkists in their raid on Hereford in the spring of 1456. If the identity of the city’s MPs was known for the next Parliament, which met in the wake of the Yorkist victory at the first battle of St. Albans, it would no doubt show that they were Yorkist in sympathy. The following Parliament, however, met in the very different circumstances occasioned by the humiliating retreat of the Yorkists after the battle of Ludford Bridge in October 1459, and this was reflected at the Hereford hustings. One of those returned, Otto Cornwall, was a committed Lancastrian and had probably been present at that confrontation as he was later to be at the battle of Mortimer’s Cross; and the other MP, John Holland, had been among those accused of conspiring to secure false indictments against the Yorkists when royal commissioners came to the city in April 1457. National political fortunes, however, quickly turned once more, and John Welford, a committed Yorkist, was elected to represent Hereford in the Yorkist Parliament of 1460.
The representation of Hereford was shared, albeit unequally, between the leading citizens and a group of men, who, although they had interests in the city, were principally characterized by their interests outside it. The periodic election of men from this second category imply that the enthusiasm of the local elite for parliamentary service occasionally waned, leaving vacancies both for these outsiders as well as for citizens below the elite. This was particularly true of the 1450s when Hereford’s representation became politicized, largely because of the influence of the city’s Yorkist neighbours, the Devereux family. Yet the infiltration of these outsiders should not be allowed to obscure the fact that Hereford remained predominantly local in its representation both in this period and beyond. Indeed, it later developed a reputation for strong electoral independence, with the common councillors enjoying, under the terms of an ordinance said to date from early in the reign of Henry VIII, an effective monopoly of representation.