The late-medieval history of Lincoln, once a great centre of the cloth trade, is one of decline. In the records of central government the city, ‘appears with depressing regularity as one of the most necessitous of all the urban communities of England’.
Lincoln’s decline was already well established when it secured from the Crown in 1409 its incorporation as a shire, only the sixth borough to do so, following London, Bristol, York, Newcastle and Norwich. This introduced administrative reforms, replacing the bailiffs by sheriffs and allowing the citizens to elect four j.p.s., and instituted a second annual fair, but it must be doubtful that it did much to address the major single problem faced by the city’s governors, namely the increasing financial burden represented by the fee farm.
Inventive solutions thus had to be found, and petitions presented in Parliament were one of the methods the civic authorites employed in that search. In a petition presented to that of 1426 the mayor and community claimed that they had certain revenue of only £14 p.a. to meet the fee farm and the £100 at which they were assessed to contribute to each parliamentary tenth. They asked for what appears to have been the impractical remedy of licence to purchase lands and rents with a clear annual value of £120. Nothing was said as to how the funds necessary to purchase so much property were to be raised, and it is curious that the citizens should plead poverty and then propose a solution that impled wealth. The government, limited in the concessions it could make due to the King’s minority, gave a licence to acquire lands worth only £100, and, more restrictively, insisted that the lands acquired should not be held in chief or by knight service and that a reasonable fine be paid. In the Parliament of 1432 the citizens renewed their request, asking that they might be licensed to acquire lands held in chief and knight service ‘en la supportacion del paiement de la fee ferme’ and that they might hold two additional fairs. The government replied with a limited concession, denying the right to acquire lands held by knight service, appropriating the issues of the purchased land exclusively to the payment of the fee farm, and failing to grant the fairs.
These petitions and the government’s response to them are only part of the story of the city’s attempts to gain relief. Representations made outside Parliament through the agency of Ralph, Lord Cromwell, the greatest of the Lincolnshire magnates, appear to have been more effective. Throughout Henry VI’s minority and into the 1450s Cromwell was an influential figure at court, particularly between 1433 and 1443 when he held the treasurership, and there is good evidence that he took a personal interest in Lincoln’s affairs: the petition the citizens presented in the Parliament of 1426 bears the inscription ‘per dominum de Crumwell’.
No doubt Cromwell’s patronage was a significant factor in securing these concessions, but Lincoln’s campaign for relief was also forwarded by another parliamentary petition. This was not enrolled on the Parliament roll, and is accordingly difficult to date. It describes the city’s plight in the most dire terms – ‘hit to stond in utter desolacion’ without the King’s aid – and asked for licence to ship 60 sacks of wool every year free of customs, and for exemption from fifteenths and tenths, both for a term of 20 years. It has been traditionally dated to the Parliament of 1437 for it was once filed with other petitions securely dated to that assembly.
Despite such generous concessions the citizens continued to press for further relief. During the mayoralty of John Ratheby in 1445-6, the civic authorities presented a petition directly to the King, asserting that Lincoln was, in the dramatic language that they had employed in their earlier petitions, ‘so much impoverished by the withdrawal of the merchants thereof and by a great pestilence therein for a long time continued ... that scarcely 200 citizens dwell therein’. On 13 Mar. 1447, ten days after the dissolution of the Bury St. Edmunds Parliament, this petition received a favourable response. By letters patent the King formally granted two of the concessions the city had long requested: licence to acquire lands worth £120 p.a., even if these were held in chief, and, of much greater practical value, exemption from fifteenths and tenths not on the ad hoc basis that then prevailed but for as long as 40 years.
It is unfortunate that this account of the city’s pleas for aid cannot be verified from its own records. Outside the records of central government, the medieval history of the city is not well documented. The surviving minutes of the common council do not begin until 1511. The principal source for the fifteenth century is the ‘White Book’, a collection of miscellaneous records beginning with a memorandum of those present at a meeting in the guildhall in November 1421.
According to two early sixteenth-century sources, the lists of mayors and an entry copied from an earlier lost register, Henry VI visited the city during John Ratheby’s mayoralty in 1445-6 and on two further occasions in the 31st year of his reign.
Returns survive for 19 of the 22 Parliaments which met during the reign of Henry VI. Of 21 MPs elected, as many as 12 are recorded as having sat only once, and thus the 21 filled only 44 Lincoln seats between them, a low average of Parliaments per MP. Only two represented the city in more than three Parliaments, and both had begun their parliamentary careers before 1422. Robert Walsh, a lawyer, sat in as many as ten, and Hamon Sutton I, the wealthiest of the city’s merchants, in seven, including four consecutive returns from 1422 to 1426. Their parliamentary careers ensured that, until the mid-1430s, there was a high degree of continuity in the city’s representation. Between the Parliaments of March 1416, when Sutton was first returned, and 1435, when Walsh sat for the last time, they filled no fewer than 17 of the city’s 30 recorded seats; and to only one Parliament, that of 1432, was neither of them elected.
Only two of the 21 MPs were significant enough to secure election for other constituencies. Sutton, a very substantial landholder outside the city, was returned for Lincolnshire to three Parliaments in the 1430s. More unusual was the parliamentary career of the lawyer, Thomas Fitzwilliam II. He sat for Lincoln in 1459 before going on to be elected (as a lawyer in royal service) for the Devon borough of Plympton Erle in 1467, Lincoln again in 1478, and London, as its recorder, in four Parliaments between 1483 and 1487 (although one of these Parliaments, that of November 1483, did not meet). Then he gained another distinction: to the Parliament of 1489 he was elected for both London and Lincolnshire, probably gaining the county seat after receiving advance notice that he was to be the Parliament’s Speaker and thus needed the greater dignity of a knight of the shire.
The pattern of Lincoln’s representation changed in the late 1430s: no one who represented the the city in 1437 or before is recorded as having done so after that date. This was partly due to the end of the intense parliamentary careers of Hamon Sutton I and Walsh, but it also betokened a change in the type of MP returned. Until 1437 representation was almost exclusively in the hands of the city’s leading residents, most of whom took some part in its administration. The only exceptions to this rule were Robert Feriby, a lawyer who had acquired property in Lincoln through marriage to the widow of a former MP, and William Markeby II, who, although the son of one of the city’s leading inhabitants, made his own career in London. After 1437, however, several of those returned had their principal interests outside the city. This was a sharp break with a pattern which had long prevailed. In the period from 1386 to 1421 the leading citizens had dominated representation with no fewer than 21 of the 29 MPs serving as mayor. Between 1422 and 1437 the equivalent figure is five of the 11 MPs, but from 1442 to 1460 only two out of ten.
The most striking feature of Lincoln’s representation during this period, both before and after the change in the pattern of the city’s representation in the late 1430s, is the prevalence of lawyers. Of the 21 MPs, as many as 11 were members of the legal profession, and on only two occasions, the Parliaments of 1437 and November 1449, was neither of the representatives a man of law. Three of these, Bolton, Gegge and Markeby II, served as filacers of Lincolnshire suits in the court of common pleas and were Lincoln men by birth, and three others – Clifton, a civil rather than a common lawyer, Shirwode and Walsh – also appear to have been born in the city. The other five, however, can be described as outsiders with varying degrees of association with Lincoln. Feriby, from a minor gentry family from the north of the county, held sufficient property in Lincoln in right of his wife to justify his return, and, although he is not recorded as having held office in the city, he twice attested elections there. Fitzwilliam, the most distinguished lawyer to represent the city, was from a more distinguished gentry family than Feriby. He is not known to have held property in the city, but at the time of his return in 1459 he was almost certainly in office as its recorder. The three other lawyers, all of them returned after 1437, had more remote connexions with Lincoln. Vavasour was a younger son of one of the principal gentry families of the West Riding. At the time of his returns in 1447 and February 1449 he was occupying the post of clerk of estreats in the court of common pleas, and his only links with Lincoln came through Hamon Sutton I, the husband of his sister Margaret. William Stanlowe and John Leynton had an even more remote association with the city. Both were intimate servants of Ralph, Lord Cromwell. There can be little doubt that Stanlowe put himself forward for election in 1442 because his master needed support in Parliament in his dispute with Sir John Gra*; and Leynton’s return in 1450 must also be seen as an aspect of his service to his lord. Yet while Leynton had no traceable connexion with Lincoln beyond his return to Parliament, Stanlowe did at least later play a small part in civic affairs: in 1456 he acted for the citizens in their acquisition of the manor of Canwick under the terms of the letters patent of 1447, and was subsequently appointed to two royal commissions in the city.
In the early sixteenth century one of Lincoln’s seats generally fell to its recorder, and it may be that this custom originated a century earlier and is part of the explanation for this prevalence of lawyers among the city’s MPs during our period. John Bigge†, who sat in four Parliaments between 1411 and 1421, held the office, as too, in all probability, did Fitzwilliam at the time of his return in 1459. Unfortunately, however, these are the only two men known to have been the city’s recorders before 1461, and it is a fair speculation that, if the list of recorders was complete, it would show that Vavasour held the office in the late 1440s and that Walsh, elected to nine of the 11 Parliaments between 1421 and 1435, was Bigge’s successor.
If the beginnings of the practice of returning the recorder as one of the MPs is one explanation for the prevalence of lawyers, another may be the frequency with which the civic authorities employed Parliament as the forum to petition for royal favour. On 24 Jan. 1424, a week after Parliament had reassembled, Lincoln was granted confirmation of its charters, and it would be surprising if Feriby, then a Lindsey j.p. and representing the city for the first and only time, did not play an active part in obtaining both this confirmation and that granted to the city’s weavers a fortnight later.
Of the ten MPs who were not lawyers, two were merchants of the first rank: Hamon Sutton I and Roger Knight were merchants of the Calais staple (if not at the beginning then during the course of their parliamentary careers), who profited enough from the wool trade to invest in landed property outside the city. Two others, John Rous and Henry Tamworth, had their principal trade in cloth, and Rous was sufficiently wealthy at his death to leave £300 in cash to his widow. The other six are more difficult to categorize. Robert Sutton and Hamon Sutton II might be best described as urban gentry, since, during their parliamentary careers, they were successively heirs-apparent to a country estate worthy of a wealthy esquire. Three of the others, William Markeby I, John Ratheby and John Blyton, might be similarly described. Markeby and Ratheby were among the principal landowners within the city, and there is no evidence to suggest that they had significant mercantile interests. Blyton never held civic office and inherited a small estate at Ashby-cum-Fenby near Grimsby. He may, however, have followed a trade, for, on one occasion, he is described as an armourer. The other MP was a less substantial man: William Gressington was variously described as chapman, fishmonger and gentleman.
The financial standing of the MPs is only very partially revealed in the surviving sources, for no assessments survive for the city for the income taxes of 1436 and 1451. Five of the MPs, however, were assessed elsewhere in respect of the former. Two appear in the Lincolnshire returns: Hamon Sutton I was assessed on an annual income of as much as £105, making him a man of exceptional wealth not only in the context of Lincoln’s representation but also in that of boroughs in general, and the lawyer Feriby on a respectable income of £20 p.a. Another lawyer, Markeby II, was assessed in London at £41 p.a., an income largely derived from his wife’s estates. Assessments survive for two others because they defaulted when summoned to appear before the Lincoln commissioners and were later assessed in the Exchequer: Markeby I gave his annual income as £14 p.a. and Blyton as £5.
The relationship between service in Parliament, on one hand, and in civic administration, on the other, is obscured by significant gaps in the record of the city’s officers. There is a list, compiled in the early sixteenth century, of mayors and sheriffs, which can be amended and corrected from the Exchequer records.
It is revealing that, of the 21 MPs, only three, Ratheby, Clifton and Tamworth, held the shrievalty and all three did so before their elections to Parliament. This implies that the office was a junior as well as an unpopular one, and that men of sufficient status to secure election to Parliament were generally able to avoid it. The mayor was a more senior post, and seven of the 21 MPs held it, with Rous and Markeby I each doing so twice. Five of the seven were elected as mayor before they were elected to Parliament, with six seats being taken by former mayors. The much greater overlap between the mayors and the MPs in the earlier period is largely to be explained by the consideration that outsiders had not then become a factor in the city’s representation.
The infiltration of outsiders explains why the number of MPs who served as mayor was matched by the number who were county j.p.s at some point in their careers. Three of these – Hamon Sutton I and II (in Lindsey) and Vavasour (in the East Riding) – were only appointed after the end of their Lincoln parliamentary careers, but two were elected as serving j.p.s, namely Feriby (in Lindsey) in 1423 and Stanlowe (in Kesteven) in 1442, and another, Fitzwilliam, in 1459 as a recently-removed Lindsey one. Interestingly, the other j.p., Walsh, was named to the Kesteven bench when sitting for Lincoln on the tenth and last occasion.
Three of the MPs held office as the Lincolnshire escheator: both Feriby and Stanlowe served before representing the city in Parliament, and Hamon Sutton I was named to the office while representing Lincoln in the Parliament of 1423. The latter was the only MP to act as the Lincolnshire sheriff, although he did not do so until after his last election as a city MP.
The election returns, made ‘in pleno commitatu civitatis’, took the form of an indenture drawn up between the two sheriffs of Lincoln, acting as returning officers, and a group of attestors, generally headed by the mayor, and sometimes styled ‘cives’. In the 19 surviving returns for Henry VI’s reign, the number of attestors varied from 18 in 1432 to 60 in 1427, with an average of about 28. A group of former mayors, on occasion as many as seven, are named after the serving mayor in the bulk of these returns, and the consistency with which they are listed (although they were never identified specifically as such) shows that, as a group, they had a significant place in the city’s administration. It is thus a fair speculation that some irregularity attached to those elections from which they were absent. In only three returns – those for the Parliaments of 1429, 1447 and 1449 (Feb.) – are no former mayors named, and it is probably more than coincidental that these returns account for three of the five from which the serving mayor is absent.
The indenture for the Parliament of 1447 is particularly distinctive. Not only does it list, at 50, an unusually large number of attestors, but a far higher percentage of the electors than the norm were attesting an election for the first and only recorded time.
Further evidence concerning the conduct of parliamentary elections is provided by the ‘White Book’. This records the names of all those present in the guildhall for the election of the mayor and sheriffs on 14 Sept. 1423. Coincidentally, this was the same date on which a parliamentary election fell due. While 145 citizens are recorded as present for the former election, only 23 attestors are named in the parliamentary return. This might be taken to imply that, while a comparatively wide franchise applied to the elections of mayor and sheriffs at this date, the parliamentary franchise was more restricted. Yet, if so, it is difficult to explain why some important citizens present at the mayoral election, including two future MPs, Clifton and Shirwode, are not named among these 23.
The more likely explanantion is that a fairly wide franchise prevailed in respect of both types of election, and that the parliamentary indentures record only a proportion of the electors present. Unfortunately the language of the returns does not help in the resolution of the problem. The fact that the list of attestors is not followed by the ‘et multis aliis’ so frequently found in election returns supports the idea that the attestors alone were responsible for the election, as do the returns of 1450 and 1459 which simply state that the attestors, then present in the guildhall, elegerunt those returned.
It remains to ask how large was the potential electorate. In November 1421 240 named citizens attended the guildhall to confirm the important order concerning the use of the common seal;
The majority of those of Lincoln’s MPs who were resident there appear frequently among the attestors: Markeby I attested no fewer than 13 elections; and four others – Hamon Sutton I, Tamworth, Knight and Rous – attested between seven and nine each. Eight of the other MPs of the period attested 25 elections between them. Five of eight who did not attest – Stanlowe, Leynton, Fitzwilliam, Vavasour and Markeby II – were essentially outsiders, and of the other three, Gegge was probably too busy with his office in the common pleas and the two younger Suttons had few opportunities to attest during their brief careers.
As many as seven of the 21 Lincoln MPs attested Lincolnshire elections. For Feriby, who attested as many as six of them between 1416 and 1433, and Stanlowe, who attested the county election held a week before he was returned to represent the city, their appearance in the county returns reflected their established place among the shire gentry.
Given the number of ‘outsiders’ who represented the city we might expect to find indirect evidence of interference in the city’s electoral process. Certainly Stanlowe and Leynton were returned because they were servants of Lord Cromwell, who, after the financial allowances he had helped the city win during his period as treasurer of England, had a call on the electors’ co-operation. However, the other ‘outsiders’ returned do not appear to have owed their election to any lay baronial interest, nor is there anything to suggest that the successive bishops of Lincoln, of which there were as many as five in Henry VI’s reign, interested themselves in the city’s representation. Indeed, it may be that the most significant influence was that of Hamon Sutton I. Not only did he and his two sons fill nine of the 38 known seats, but it can be plausibly argued that two of the ‘outsiders’ owed their election to him: Vavasour was his brother-in-law, and Fitzwilliam was one of the feoffees for the implementation of his will.
There was a marked change in the pattern of Lincoln’s representation in the late 1430s. Until 1437 representation was dominated by the leading citizens; but thereafter men from outside this group came to take an equal part in representation. This might be taken to imply a decline in enthusiasm for election to Parliament on the part of those citizens, as too might the beginnings of the practice by which one of the seats was assigned to the recorder. One explanation for this decline, if such it was, may have been a reduction, due to mounting economic difficulties, in the city’s ability to pay the standard parliamentary wages of 2s. a day. Unfortunately, however, almost nothing is known of the city’s payment of wages in this period.
None the less, the most notable feature of the city’s representation in the longer term, is not that, despite this early infiltration of outsiders and a serious economic crisis, the city went on to lose its electoral independence, but rather that it largely retained it throughout the Tudor period. Of the 15 MPs elected between 1509 and 1558, only two were non-residents. Thereafter the increasing interest in the city’s representation of the Manners, earls of Rutland, successors to the Lords Roos, saw a greater number of outsider nominess elected, although by no means to the total exclusion of residents.