Nottingham

To John Leland, the Tudor antiquary, Nottingham was ‘a great market town’. J. Leland, Itin. ed. Toulmin Smith, iv. 16. As the location of a major royal castle, in which the Nottinghamshire county court was convened and the assizes held, and as an important outlet for wool produced in its hinterland, it was certainly an important administrative and commercial centre. With a population probably in excess of 2,000, it was twice as populous as nearby Derby. Its economic fortunes in the period under review are, however, a matter of debate. The increase in market rentals in the first half of the fifteenth century can be taken as evidence of prosperity, as can the rebuilding on a grand scale of St. Mary’s church. Thereafter there are signs of decline, but the construction, in the late 1470s, of a new guildhall might be taken to imply that the decline was not dramatic. Centenary Hist. Nottingham ed. Beckett, 85-86: J.A. Mills, ‘Admin. of Nottingham, c.1400-c.1600’ (Nottingham Univ. Ph.D. thesis), 39, 62, 71-72; Nottingham Recs. ed. Stevenson, ii. 298. Another measure of prosperity is the wealth and stature of several of the MPs returned to represent the borough in the Lancastrian period, the most notable of whom was the great wool merchant, Thomas Thurland. Indeed, here the town provides an instructive comparison with nearby Leicester, which, although larger in terms of population, generally returned less substantial men.

Nottingham’s prosperity and importance was also manifest in significant constitutional development. A royal charter of 28 June 1449 gave it the exalted status of a shire incorporate with its own sheriffs, escheator (who was to be the mayor) and a monthly county court, and placed its government on a footing which institutionalised the dominance of its elite. The mayor was to be chosen from the seven aldermen, who, once elected by burgesses, could be removed only in exceptional circumstances. They were to be further distinguished from their fellow burgesses not only by their monopoly of the principal office of town government but by the right to wear ‘gowns, hoods, and cloaks of one suit and one livery, together with furs and linings suitable to those cloaks’ in the same manner and form as the mayor and aldermen of London. Nottingham Recs. ii. 186-209.

The relationship of this group of aldermen to the council established by borough ordinance as shortly before as November 1446 is difficult to discern. This was to consist of the mayor and 12 others ‘chosen to order’, who were to ‘end and dispose of as they thincke meete of all things belonginge to the Commynaltie’. ibid. 424. Little more is known of the council until the following century, but it seems the aldermen did not supercede it but rather were absorbed within it. This council, when it once again emerges into historical view, was made up of the seven aldermen and six common councilmen, who were drawn from ‘the clothing’, itself made up of former chamberlains and sheriffs. A body of former officers had some significance in the town’s constitution during the fifteenth century (in that former mayors and bailiffs formed the franchise for the election of those officers), but the councilmen have left no trace on the records. CIMisc. vii. 469.

There is some evidence to illustrate the town’s part in the civil war of 1459-61. With its royal castle, it was a place of considerable strategic significance for campaigns waged in the Midlands and the north of England. Twelve leading townsmen contributed a total of £23 3s. 4d. in support of the Lancastrian army defeated at the battle of Northampton in July 1460. In the following March the presence in the town of the Lancastrian forces of Henry Beaufort, duke of Somerset, imposed a greater burden: nearly 50 burgesses contributed £140 as a gift to the duke and his servants. Notts. Archs., Nottingham recs. CA7452. This latter exaction may have played a part in determining the inhabitants actively to support the Yorkist cause. According to a near-contemporary poem, a contingent from Nottingham under their banner ‘the George’ was with Edward IV’s army at the decisive battle of Towton. Archaeologia, xxix. 346. What followed gives support to this literary evidence. At Easter 1462 Thomas Babington and Thurland, who were representing the borough in the Parliament then in recess, travelled to Leicester, ‘pro exhibitione unius billae Domino Regi pro rewardo habendo ville’, and their mission was rewarded with both a confirmation of Nottingham’s charters and a reduction of £20 in its annual fee farm of £54 12s. for a period of 20 years. Later, in 1464 Nottingham sent a contingent under the command of one of its sheriffs to take part in the new King’s successful northern campaign. CPR, 1461-7, pp. 186, 243; Nottingham Recs. ii. 248-51, 377; iii. 414. These Yorkist sympathies, however, find little echo in the careers of its parliamentary representatives.

Returns survive for 18 of the 22 Parliaments which met during the reign of Henry VI. Nineteen individuals, none of whom are recorded as having been returned for any other constituency, filled these 36 seats. Eight are recorded as sitting in Parliament on only one occasion, but multiple returns were more common. Indeed, four of the 19 were each returned on as many as five occasions, and, predictably, all four were among the most substantial men to sit for the borough during this period. The representative dominance of the leading men of the town adds to the impression that its government was concentrated in the hands of a small elite even before the administrative reforms of the 1440s.

Men with previous parliamentary experience predominated among Nottingham’s MPs, albeit with less emphasis than in the period 1386-1421. On six occasions both of those elected had sat before, and on a further eight one of the MPs was not a novice. Only in 1433, 1442, 1453 and 1459 were two apparent novices elected, but in the last three instances this apparent break from an established pattern is probably to be explained by the lost returns of 1439, 1445 and 1455. The bias in favour of experienced candidates is also expressed in nine instances of immediate re-election, most notably the four successive elections of John Manchester between 1427 and 1432, and the three successive elections of Thurland between 1449 (Feb.) and 1450; as well as by the return of the same pair of MPs, Thurland and Thomas Alestre, to at least three Parliaments.

Nottingham’s representation was dominated by an elite of merchants and lawyers. As many as four MPs (Thomas Alestre, Poge, Plumptre and Thurland), were merchants of the Calais staple; John Alestre, Bradmore (also described as a skinner) Etwell, Halifax, Squyer, Wilford and Wood were merchants on a smaller scale; and another four, Babington, Kniveton, Manchester and Rasyn were lawyers. Between them these men filled 32 of the 36 parliamentary seats, leaving few vacancies for the middling townsmen. The other four seats were filled by two fishmongers (Montgomery and Stable), an ironmonger (Burton), and a patten-maker (Sergeant).

The prominence of lawyers among the borough’s MPs was a continuance of a pattern established in an earlier period. Between 1386 and 1421 lawyers had filled nearly a quarter of the town’s seats, and during the reign of Henry VI they filled ten out of 36. Babington’s election in 1447 marks the beginning of what was to become the frequent practice of returning the recorder. It is possible that there is an earlier precedent: Thomas Mapperley may have been recorder when elected to three Parls. between 1411 and 1413. His family connexions – he was a younger son of Sir William Babington, c.j.c.p. – made him a man of particular importance, but he was not the only lawyer of standing to represent the borough. Kniveton was the receiver of Queen Joan’s liberty in the county when elected for the borough in 1433; and Manchester was the county’s clerk of the peace, a minor official of the duchy of Lancaster and a former under sheriff when first elected for the borough in 1427.

Although all of Nottingham’s MPs, whether merchant, lawyer or tradesman, appear to have been resident in the town when elected, a number of them, including some of the most important, had migrated to the town from elsewhere. This provides another indication of Nottingham’s prosperity: it clearly had considerable attractions as a place in which to base a legal or mercantile career. Babington, from a major gentry family, and Manchester, from a minor one, came from Chilwell and Beaston respectively, both on the outskirts of Nottingham. Two others, both of gentry birth, came from further afield: Kniveton was from Bradley in Derbyshire and Poge came from West Stockwith in north Nottinghamshire. The first three were lawyers, but Poge was a substantial wool merchant. Thurland, from a family of Boston merchants, and William Halifax, who originated from Halifax, were also attracted to the town by its commercial possibilities.

These migrants shared the representation of the town with established families with a tradition of parliamentary service, the most notable of whom were the Plumptres and the Alestres. In this sense, despite the trend towards increasing exclusivity in representation, there was a considerable degree of continuity between this period and that the earlier one of 1386-1421. Then recent arrivals to Nottingham had also taken a significant number of parliamentary seats – most notably Thomas Mapperley†, from Mapperley in Derbyshire, who was the borough’s first recorder – and the town’s appeal as a place of residence, particularly for lawyers, can be traced back at least to the late fourteenth century.

All of the MPs had property in the town, and several of them acquired landholdings in the surrounding countryside. Thurland, the wealthiest of them, purchased estates extensive enough to elevate his family into the ranks of the middling county gentry. In 1449 he acquired the reversion of the manors of Haughton and Gamston in the north of the county, and it was there that his descendants settled. None of the other MPs could match his wealth and he was the only one to acquire manorial lordship. Etwell, however, was also successful in purchasing an estate sufficient to support gentry rank. In the late 1420s he acquired, again in remainder, lands in Kingston-on-Soar and neighbouring vills in the south-west of the county. Significantly, both he and Thurland sent their eldest sons to be educated at Lincoln’s Inn – Etwell’s son Henry was one of the governors there in 1450-1 – and their purchases were probably driven by a stronger desire to enter landed society than that felt by other wealthy merchants of the town. In this context, it is significant that the Alestres, who were far wealthier than the Etwells, do not appear to have been active in the land market and remained resident in Nottingham over several generations. Other MPs held, either by inheritance or acquisition, modest holdings in the immediate vicinity of the town: Bradmore at Sneinton, both Stable and Serjeant at Wilford, Manchester at Beeston and Lenton, and Kniveton slightly further afield at Spondon. Yet others extended their interests through the leasing of tithes: Manchester in Sneinton and Lenton from the priory of Lenton, and Wilford in Bramcote from the prior of Felley. These holdings explain why so many of the town’s MPs were assessed to the subsidies of 1435-6 and 1450-1. Unfortunately, no assessment survives for Thurland, but, judging by these assessments alone, the wealthiest of the MPs were Thomas Alestre and Rasyn, who were both assessed at £20 p.a. E179/238/78, roll 6; 240/266.

Loss of records means that the list of Nottingham’s office-holders is incomplete. Most of the chamberlains’ accts. and mayoral rolls for the period no longer survive, and the long series of borough ct. rolls ends in 1455. The most serious loss is the ‘Red Book’, destroyed by fire in 1724, in which decisions concerning town government were recorded. The names of nearly all the mayors, bailiffs and sheriffs (as the bailiffs became after the charter of 1449) are known, but only very fragmentary lists can be made of the chamberlains and coroners. The charter of 1399 had empowered the mayor and recorder, together with four burgesses to be chosen by the mayor, to act as j.p.s within the town, but almost nothing is known of the identity of those selected by succeeding mayors. All that can be said is that the choice was made from a small group of leading townsmen and that the same men probably served for lengthy periods. Thomas Alestre, Plumptre, Richard Samon† and Thurland, all former MPs and mayors, were j.p.s in 1443 and 1446: Nottingham Recs. ii. 408, 409; KB9/254/44. The charter of 1449 transferred the powers of the j.p.s to a group of seven aldermen and here again the records fail. The identity of the aldermen has to be reconstructed from diverse sources and nothing like a complete list can be made. The aldermen in Mar. 1451 were Thomas Alestre, John Ilkeston, Kniveton, John Orgrave, Plumptre, Richard Samon and Thurland, and it is virtually certain that they constituted the original body elected in 1449: Nottingham Recs. iii. 408. Plumptre resigned in the late 1460s; Alestre and Thurland served until their deaths in 1471 and 1474 respectively.

None the less, despite these omissions, all but two of the borough’s 19 MPs are recorded as holding administrative office in the town: 12 served as mayor, ten as bailiff, three as chamberlain, two as coroner, two as clerk of the statute merchant, and one as recorder. For the offices of chamberlain and coroner these figures must be significant underestimates. Manchester, the lawyer, and Montgomery, who seems to have died young, are the only MPs not recorded among the borough officers, and even they may have served in some capacity, for both appear as attestors to Nottingham’s parliamentary elections, a role which appears to have been restricted to former officers.

In view of the dominance of leading townsmen over Nottingham’s representation, it is not surprising to find few examples of mayors who were not elected to Parliament at some point during their careers, and there would probably be even fewer if returns were complete. Of the 18 men who held the office during the reign of Henry VI, only four are not recorded among the MPs. Of these the most surprising omission is John Orgrave, four times mayor between 1435 and 1457, related by marriage to the wealthy Alestres, and one of the original body of seven aldermen chosen after the 1449 charter. The dominance of the elite, in respect of both mayoralty and parliamentary representation, is further reflected in the fact that several MPs served multiple terms as mayor. John Alestre and his son Thomas were both mayor five times and are recorded as MPs on four occasions each; and Thurland served six terms as mayor and is known to have sat in five Parliaments.

This, however, is not to say that the MPs were predominantly drawn from the body of former mayors. Election to Parliament seems generally to have preceded a first term as mayor, an indication of the relative youth of those elected MP for the first time: of the 12 men who appear in both capacities, eight sat in Parliament first. For several a first experience of the two roles came very close together. Poge, Squyer and Thurland were elected as mayors within a year of their first Parls.; and Halifax was elected as MP within a year of the end of his first mayoralty. As a result, only 13 of the town’s 36 known seats were taken by former mayors. There are signs that the borough authorities saw this as too small a proportion. A borough ordinance passed in the 15th year of Henry VI (September 1436-7) and recorded in the lost ‘Red Book’ laid down that ‘nullus Burgensis sit electus pro Parliamento nisi sit de liberata Majoris’ on pain of losing his parliamentary wages. Nottingham Recs. ii. 423-4. This had an impact on representation, but it was only a brief one. Between 1422 and 1435 seven out of 20 parliamentary seats were filled by former mayors; from 1437 to February 1449 the proportion rose to six out of eight, the exceptions being the recorder, Babington, in 1447, and Thurland in 1442. Thereafter, however, the ordinance appears to have been either generally disregarded (or else, most improbably, those MPs who were not of the mayor’s livery forfeited their wages): from November 1449 until 1460 former mayors filled only three out of eight seats.

The explanation for this apparent negation of the ordinance probably lies in the institution of a body of aldermen by the charter granted between the two Parliaments of 1449. To have maintained the ordinance would have meant that those aldermen who had not yet served as mayor would have been disqualified from serving in Parliament with proper remuneration. In the circumstances, it made sense to convey the intended monopoly of representation from the former mayors to the aldermen, and this is what appears to have happened, with the important continuing exemption of the recorder, who, from 1447, was regularly returned. In the 30 years after the charter the identity of the town’s MPs is known for nine Parliaments: on as many as five occasions the recorder was returned with an alderman; on two others both MPs were aldermen; and on another an alderman was elected with one who was soon to be elected to the same rank.

The exception to this clear pattern was the election to the Coventry Parliament of 1459. One of those elected, Robert Stable, was an alderman by 1464 and may already have been in 1459, but the other, John Sergeant, was never received into the inner circle of the town’s administration. As in other constituencies it is likely that the obvious candidates were reluctant to serve in what, as could be easily anticipated, was to be a profoundly controversial assembly.

The ordinance of 1436-7, together with the near monopoly enjoyed by aldermen and recorder after 1449, clearly show that the leading townsmen were successful in their determination to exclude the wider body of their fellows from representation. Indeed, comparing those returned in the period under review with those elected in that immediately preceding, there is a clear trend towards increasing exclusivity. Between 1386 and 1421 only nine of the 21 MPs held office as mayor, and it is impossible to imagine such a man as Robert German†, returned ten times between 1377 and 1397 but whose only borough office was that of bailiff, figuring so prominently among the MPs in the later period.

Before the charter of June 1449 the result of the borough election was communicated to Chancery in one of two forms. Commonly, the sheriff of Nottinghamshire merely appended the names of a few townsmen to the list of attestors to the county election and incorporated the names of both county and borough MPs into the same indenture. Such returns are unrevealing, falsely implying that there was only one election. On other occasions, the sheriff returned two indentures: one between himself and the county electors, the other between himself and the borough attestors. Although in 1427 these elections were held on the same day, they were generally held on different dates. In 1429, for example, the borough election was held on 29 Aug. and the shire one not until 19 Sept. As there can be no doubt that there were two separate elections, it is probable that a borough indenture was drawn up at every election, and that, when it was not returned into Chancery, it was the source (although possibly not the only one) from which the sheriff drew the names of the townsmen he added to the list of county attestors in the single return he made to Chancery. Uniquely, in 1426 the sheriff, although returning one indenture, did not simply add a few townsmen to his list of county attestors, but specifically referred to the separate indenture he had made with the townsmen he named: C219/13/4.

The new dispensation after Nottingham became a shire incorporate in June 1449 naturally brought a change in the diplomatic of the returns. The county sheriff no longer had any responsibility for the borough election. Instead a separate writ was directed to the sheriffs of the town, to whom the responsibility had been transferred. The election was no longer to be held ‘in plena curia burgi’ but in the monthly county court established by the charter. The Nottingham election was usually held before that for Nottinghamshire. The ‘county court’ of both counties met on a Monday, but the cycle for the shire was one week behind that for the former borough. Thus, for example, in 1450 the Nottingham election was held on 12 Oct. and the shire election a week later. This pattern was broken only in 1459. Then the Nottingham election should have been held on 29 Oct., 20 days after the issue of the summons, but, presumably because the delivery of the writ was delayed, no election was held until the next county court on 26 Nov., three weeks after the shire election and six days after Parliament had assembled. Before the charter the borough election had not invariably been held on a Monday: in 1425 it was held on Thursday and in Jan. 1449 on a Tuesday.

Evidence defining the formal franchise is scarce. The inquiry into the disputed mayoral and parliamentary elections of 1412 and 1413 respectively not only documents a tension between the leading men of the town and their lesser fellows but also shows that the established franchise was wider for parliamentary elections than it was for those of mayor and bailiffs. For the latter it was restricted to those who had previously held these two offices; for the former it included all burgesses (as it later, formally at least, did for the election of aldermen). CIMisc. vii. 469. Thereafter, however, the parliamentary franchise, to match the growing exclusivity of its body of MPs, became increasingly narrow. It seems that by the second half of the sixteenth century at the latest the right of election was confined to the common council (the mayor, his fellow aldermen and the six common councilmen) together perhaps with those then serving in borough office. The Commons 1558-1603, i. 225.

There is no direct evidence to show how far this restriction of the franchise had progressed during the period under review here. The indentures, however, provide some indirect evidence, particularly those made after the charter of June 1449. The number of attestors named in indentures varied between six in the indenture of February 1426 and 16 in November 1459, with a slightly higher average for the period after the charter. There can be no doubt that those named as attestors, whether in the separate or joint indentures, were only a proportion of those who participated in the election. This is implied not only by the inquiry of 1413, which stated that as many as 120 burgesses took part in the election of that year, but also by the occasional addition of the words ‘and other burgesses’ to the list of attestors. References to unnamed burgesses among the electors is found in the returns of 1425, 1426 and 1427 and, although such references do not appear again in the period under review here, the elections of 1467, 1472 and 1477 are said to have been made by the named ‘electores’ and ‘multi alii Burgenses’. None the less, an analysis of the named attestors reveals a pattern which is unlikely to have been fortuitous and suggests that references to other participating burgesses gives a false impression of the democracy of the elections. In the 16 surviving indentures between 1422 and 1459 a total of 66 attestors are named and only 14 of these are not recorded as holding office as mayor, bailiff, sheriff or chamberlain before first appearing as attestor. Given the omissions in the list of bailiffs and chamberlains, it may be that all those named had qualified for inclusion among the attestors by the holding of borough office, and thus that this group of former officers, slightly more broadly defined than in respect of the franchise for the election of mayor and bailiffs in that it included former chamberlains, served as the effective franchise in parliamentary elections from the beginning of the period under review here.

Within this group the former mayors appear to have possessed a special place. The lists of attestors are almost invariably headed by the serving mayor and a small group of former mayors (as many as five in those of 1447 and 1450, but more usually three). No firm conclusions can be drawn from these findings, but it is a reasonable speculation that the elections were dominated by the small group of former mayors later supplemented by the aldermen. Indeed, after the charter, it became the standard practice to name the mayor and those aldermen present at the election (although the aldermen were not styled as such) at the head of the list of attestors. For example, six aldermen attended the election of 12 Oct. 1450 and the seventh, the mayor Thurland, was returned. C219/16/1. The aldermen of that date are identified in Nottingham Recs. iii. 408.

In a few instances, it is possible to adduce a reason for the return of a certain individual to a particular assembly. The anxiety of the leading townsmen to forward the case for incorporation may explain why the two greatest among them, Thurland and Alestre, were elected to the Parliament of February 1449. Their immediate re-election to the second assembly of that year is probably to be explained by their personal concern, as merchants of the Calais staple, to secure repayment of the loans the staplers had made to the Crown. Other of the MPs were able to employ their time in Parliament to personal advantage. While an MP in 1427, Manchester secured a royal grant of the office of clerk of the statute merchant in Nottingham, and in 1431 he was an MP when granted, in company with his friend Robert Rasyn, the custody of 60 acres of local land to hold during a minority.

The administration and representation was dominated by an elite of merchants and lawyers, whose dominance of both appears to have grown as the period progressed. By its end the body of seven aldermen, instituted by the charter of 1449, and the recorder had a virtual monopoly of representation, and the franchise which elected them appears to have excluded all save former office-holders.