Glendower’s revolt appears to have marked the beginning of a long-term decline in Shrewsbury’s economy. Calculations from the subsidy assessments of 1334 suggest that, measured in terms of taxable wealth, the town was then the 13th wealthiest in England; the same calculation for the subsidy of 1524-5 shows that its position had declined to 31st.
If, however, the period under review here was not one of prosperity, it was one of important institutional development. The borough was not incorporated until 1586, but it developed a sophisticated constitution between 1380, when a dispute among the townsmen over the election of bailiffs revealed defects in the town’s government, and 1445, when a detailed composition regulating its administration received the sanction of Crown and Parliament. The first composition, agreed in 1389, established the rules of election for the bailiffs and other borough officers: at an assembly of the borough community the outgoing bailiffs were to choose 25 resident burgesses, who, in turn, were to elect two new bailiffs, two coroners and six assessors. Property qualifications were also laid down for bailiffs – they were to have £10 p.a. in land or rent or goods to the value of £100, so excluding from that office all but the wealthiest burgesses – and regulations were established for the proper collection and expenditure of the borough revenues. The six assessors were joined with the bailiffs as supervisors of these revenues, and they were together to render account annually before six auditors chosen by the commons. Further difficulties led to an addition to this composition in 1400: two elected chamberlains were made responsible for borough expenditure, and they and the bailiffs were to keep two of the eight keys to a common chest, in which were deposited the borough seal and other common property of the town, the other six keys being entrusted to the assessors.
Both these amendments to the borough’s constitution owed something to the intervention of external powers. The composition of 1389 emerged from a meeting of the townsmen held in Shrewsbury abbey in the presence of the abbot, Richard Fitzalan, earl of Arundel, and others; the amendment of 1400 was agreed at an assembly held in the town’s common hall before a distinguished body headed by Thomas Arundel, archbishop of Canterbury, and Edmund, duke of York.
The content of the schedule, however, makes it clear that the issue of restraint upon the bailiffs was merely a pretext to secure a remedy for the limitations usage had revealed in the composition of 1389. The specific penalties imposed for breaches of each article of the new composition fell not only on the bailiffs but on all contraveners, and there were many detailed additions and amendments to the old composition. The town clerk was given responsibility for supervising elections; a property qualification was laid down for the assessors (namely, two marks p.a. in land or £20 in goods); the annual remuneration of the bailiffs was increased from £2 to £5; and the keys of the common chest were committed to four ‘worthy men’ of the town, chosen by the commons, rather than to the borough officers. In these and other respects the new composition was a refinement of that of 1389, but in another regard it represented novelty, adding a new body to the borough’s administration. The bailiffs and commons were to elect 12 of the most ‘sufficient and discrete’ burgesses to give the bailiffs ‘good Counseill’ and to hold office for life unless discharged for ‘cause notable’.
Shrewsbury’s constitution was further elaborated in 1445, again in response to a petition to the Commons. This third composition was more innovative than that of 1433. It re-modelled the council of 12, giving its members the title of aldermen and specifying who were to be its first members (presumably those who composed the council of 12 at the time of the petition), and established a further body of 24 who were to be of counsel to the bailiffs and aldermen.
Another of the innovations in this composition suggests that, as in other towns, the giving of liveries was raising problems of order. It was laid down that no resident of the town or franchise was to take or wear any livery contrary to statute on pain (for burgesses) of losing the freedom. This measure was justified in terms of the keeping of the peace, for, if the bailiffs had need of assistance ‘at eny assemble of Lordes, Assises or Sessions, when eny affray or trouble fall in the seid Toun’, those wearing livery ‘wolde drawe to his maister, or to his felawe, and not to the Baillifs whech have the peas to kepe’.
Royal assent was duly given to the petition, but this was not the only important change in the borough’s government during 1445. On 7 June, two days after the second prorogation of Parliament and some months before the presentation of the petition, the Crown had conceded important new privileges to the bailiffs and community. The scope for the intervention of external powers in the borough’s affairs was reduced: the bailiffs were given the role of the county escheator within the town and suburbs, and, more importantly still, they were named as j.p.s there to the exclusion of all other royal justices (save in respect of the determination of felonies).
The year 1445 was thus an extremely important one in Shrewsbury’s history, and the borough records provide a suggestion of the lobbying necessary to secure the intervention of the Commons in securing royal confirmation of the composition. The Speaker in this Parliament was Shrewsbury’s long-serving steward, William Burley I*, and on the assembly’s conclusion a grateful borough made him a present of cloth worth £4 ‘pro labore suo in parliamento pro negociis ville’. John Hampton II*, MP for Staffordshire in this assembly and an influential esquire for the King’s body, was also rewarded, receiving five marks ‘pro suo bono auxilio’, almost certainly in connexion with the composition’s confirmation.
As national politics became increasingly disturbed in the 1450s, the main focus of the Shrewsbury’s authorities turned from institutional reform to the maintenance of the town’s security. Geographically the town was poorly placed to avoid involvement in the approaching conflict. Richard, duke of York, the leader of the opposition to Henry VI’s failing regime, was a major landholder in its environs, and it was inevitable that he should establish a relationship with the borough as a body, even if he was slow to develop links with individual townsmen. When he returned from Ireland in the autumn of 1450 to claim what he saw as his rightful place in Henry VI’s government, he visited Shrewsbury and received a pipe of red wine from the town’s authorities, and he was again there in the following summer, bringing with him several leading members of his retinue, including William Burley I.
Later in the decade, the pull that the duke exercised upon Shrewsbury’s political loyalties was counteracted. According to a chronicle of the town written in the reign of Elizabeth I, in 1455-6 Queen Margaret ‘gave bages’ there and John Trentham, as one of the bailiffs, and the town’s powerful neighbour, John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, ‘varyed and had either of them a man slayne’, a juxtaposition perhaps intended to suggest that the two events were linked.
Three other later incidents can also be interpreted as expressions of support on the town’s part for the Lancastrian cause. First, the bailiffs’ account for 1459-60 show that, early in the accounting period, a delegation from the town, headed by Trentham, then again bailiff, and one of the borough’s legal advisers, Thomas Horde*, travelled to Nottingham on unspecified town business. Judging by the large sum of £10 paid to the delegates in expenses, that business was important, and, since Henry VI was at Nottingham shortly before he confronted the Yorkist lords at Ludford Bridge, it is a fair speculation that their purpose was to see the King. Second, in the aftermath of the Yorkist defeat at Ludford, the borough returned Edward Esthope, a minor member of the royal household, to the Parliament that attainted the defeated lords. He had been admitted to the freedom only on the day before the summons of this assembly, no doubt simply to qualify him for election. Third, and most strikingly, in the following summer the borough sent 61 men to fight for Henry VI at the battle of Northampton.
None the less, there can be no doubt that, by the late 1450s, the town’s sympathies were with the duke of York. These apparent indications to the contrary are open to more than one interpretation: the surprising payment of £60 to the earl of Shrewsbury as treasurer may have been a forced gift, intended not for the earl himself but rather for the cash-strapped government he represented; Esthope’s introduction into the town for the purpose of election to Parliament implies a lack of home-grown Lancastrian sympathisers; and the men sent to fight at Northampton may have been raised under the compulsion of a commission of array.
This factional interest is also apparent in Shrewsbury’s response to the Yorkist victory at the battle of Northampton. Messengers were sent to the duke’s son, Edward, earl of March and future King, at Hereford, Gloucester and Worcester, and there is every reason to suppose that the duke himself came to the town, as he had done ten years before, on his way from Ireland to Westminster. Most significantly of all, as the young earl made ready for a campaign in the marches of Wales, he spent Christmas 1460 at Shrewsbury, receiving a payment of 40 marks from the town’s authorities for his ‘good lordship’. Nor was this the extent of the townsmen’s support: they spent £30 on dispatching 40 soldiers to fight for the duke in the campaign that ended so disastrously for him on the field of Wakefield, a markedly greater sum than the £8 13s. 4d. spent on the troops they sent to fight for Lancaster at the battle of Northampton. Later, not surprisingly, a contingent from Shrewsbury was in Edward IV’s army at the decisive battle of Towton, and the town continued to provide him with occasional military aid during the uncertain early years of his reign.
The names of the Shrewsbury MPs are known for 21 of the 22 Parliaments that met during the reign of Henry VI. Twenty different men were returned, only two of whom sat for other constituencies, namely the esquire, Roger Corbet I, who was returned for Shropshire, and the prominent lawyer, Thomas Luyt, who was elected for Middlesex and possibly also for the Wiltshire borough of Heytesbury.
Between them the 20 MPs were elected for Shrewsbury on 60 occasions (and on either two or three occasions for other constituencies).
There was a significant level of representative continuity with as many as 13 cases of re-election between 1422 and 1460 (one more than in the period 1386-1421), eight of them involving the re-election of both the borough’s MPs from one Parliament to the next (1432, 1433, 1439 and 1453). Two novices were elected (as far as one may judge) on only three occasions – in 1435, 1445 and 1459 – compared with ten occasions when both of the MPs had previous experience of the Commons. In total, just 14 of the 42 known seats were taken by apparent novices, a lower proportion than the 23 out of 54 in the earlier period.
Given the fragility of male lines in medieval boroughs, it is striking how many of Shrewsbury’s MPs were the descendants of those of earlier generations. Colle, Gamel and Stury were all descended in the male line from men who had sat for Shrewsbury in the first half of the fourteenth century, and Perle and the two Thornes from MPs of the second half. Few other boroughs could match such continuity, and the pattern continued beyond the fifteenth century. The families of Colle, Corbet, Thornes and Trentham provided the borough with MPs in the sixteenth century.
The dominance of the leading townsmen over representation is also reflected in the considerable overlap between those who served it as MPs and those who did so as aldermen and bailiffs. Six of the MPs were named on the body of 12 alderman established under the composition of 1445, namely Bastard, Burley, Eyton, Gamel, Stury and Thomas Thornes (of these, all but Eyton had already sat for the borough in Parliament), and four other MPs (Bentley, Esthope, Trentham and John Horde), were added as the original members died.
Often the elections as MP and bailiff came very close together: Burley, Forster, Gamel, Perle, Stury and Whitcombe were all returned to Parliament for the first time during their first terms as bailiff. To these examples of the return of serving bailiffs are to be added others. In the reign of Henry VI one of the serving bailiffs was returned on 13 (of 21) occasions, compared with 13 of 27 between 1386 and 1421, an occurrence far too frequent in both periods to have arisen out of mere accident. It seems that one of the bailiffs was expected to accept election to any Parliament summoned during their term of office, an indication, perhaps, that parliamentary service was often seen as a burden rather than a privilege by the leaders of Shrewsbury society.
There was a lower level of overlap between the body of MPs and the personnel of the lesser offices of borough administration, those of assessor and coroner. Only seven of the 20 served as assessor, all of them doing so before their first election to Parliament, and only 14 of the 42 seats were filled by former assessors. Significantly, all six of the MPs who served as both assessor and bailiff held the former office first, and there can be no doubt that the assessors were generally inferior in rank and experience to the MPs and bailiffs. The office of coroner, however, presents a different picture. As many as 12 of the 20 MPs served at least one year as coroner, but only four of these did so for the first time before their first election to Parliament and thus only ten of the 42 seats were taken by former coroners. Further, of the 11 men who served as both coroner and bailiff, eight took the latter office first. This strongly suggests that the office of coroner was the most senior, although not, in executive terms, the most important of the borough offices. The explanation may lie in its comparative desirability, for the responsibilities of the office, namely the supervision of the common works of the town and (from 1445) the arraying of certain jury panels, were meagre and carried a remuneration of 12d. per week (to be divided between the two coroners).
Although Shrewsbury’s MPs were exclusively drawn from a borough elite intimately involved in its administration, their office-holding was not confined to the borough. Indeed, there was a greater degree of overlap between the personnel of the town’s representation and that of the county’s administration than there was in respect of most other county towns. Four of the MPs served as coroner of Shropshire (Bastard, Bentley, Colle and St. Pierre), and it is noteworthy that three of them were in office when they represented the borough in a total of five Parliaments.
This overlap between the holders of county and town office reflects that between the county gentry and the leading borough families, a reflection, in turn, of the poverty of Shropshire which consequently supported relatively few gentry. As a result, the county town, despite its economic problems, was proportionately more important in its county than many other county towns were in theirs. It was probably for this reason that two younger sons of leading Shropshire families – Eyton and Corbet – made their careers in the borough, as did several men from less important gentry families, such as Esthope and St. Pierre (and perhaps also Bentley, Luyt and Whitcombe, whose origins are unknown).
There was also a process of emigration: many leading townsmen acquired estates in the county, and, without abandoning their interests in the town, established themselves among the gentry. Indeed, nearly all of Shrewsbury’s MPs had some property outside the borough, either by purchase, inheritance, marriage or lease. These holdings are, for the most part, poorly documented, but it is clear that they extended beyond the vills in the near-neighbourhood of the town. Colle, for example, had land at Child’s Ercall near the Staffordshire border, and Horde acquired, in right of his second wife, property at Acton Scott and elsewhere in the south-west of the shire. In all the 20 MPs held, as a group, land beyond the borough in at least 19 Shropshire towns and villages. Three or four of them even had property outside the shire: Thomas Thornes inherited land near Lichfield in Staffordshire; Luyt, whose busy legal career gave him need of a base near Westminster, purchased property in Middlesex; Whitcombe had interests at Newark in Nottinghamshire; and Bastard acquired land in Hertfordshire by marriage, although not until after his parliamentary career was over.
The income derived by the MPs from these lands and their holdings in Shrewsbury itself is largely a matter for speculation. If the 16 MPs who served as bailiff met the wealth qualification for that office laid down in the composition of 1389, they each had either £10 p.a. in land or £100 in merchandise, but there is no other evidence against which to measure this surmise satisfactorily. The loss of the Shropshire return to the subsidy of 1436 and damage to the surviving return, that of 1450, mean that direct estimates of the MPs’ incomes are scarce. At least seven of the MPs – Burley, Colle, Gamel, John Horde, Luyt, Robert Thornes and Stury – were assessed in 1450, but only two of their assessments are legible: Burley had £10 p.a. and Horde only £3. The only other available figures come from the aborted tax on knights’ fees in 1431, an unsatisfactory source as its assessments of income are more than usually notional. Then nine townsmen and two widows were said to have lands in the liberty of the borough worth £5 p.a. or more: two of these were MPs during Henry VI’s reign, William Horde (£5) and Stury (£5 0s. 6d.), another, Roger Thornes† (£6 0s. 3d.), had earlier been an MP and was the father of Thomas and Robert Thornes, and another, William Tour (£5 6s. 6d.) was the father-in-law of Burley.
With regard to the occupations of the MPs, the evidence is incomplete, but it is clear that representation was, as in the period 1386-1421, dominated by lawyers and those involved in the cloth trade. Three MPs – Bastard, Bentley and Luyt – were certainly lawyers, and two others – Gamel and William Horde – appear to have shared the same profession. Between them, these five filled 15 of the borough’s 42 known seats during Henry VI’s reign, and provided at least one of the MPs in 13 of these 21 Parliaments. Three MPs – Esthope, Forster and Trentham – were drapers, although Esthope appears not to have adopted the trade until after his parliamentary service, and another, Thomas Beget, was a shearman. Better evidence would no doubt add to this number. Eyton, for example, is known to have supplemented his landed income by trading in cloth.
Although there can be no doubt that Shrewsbury’s MPs represented its elite, they were only part of that elite, and it is striking how many of the leading townsmen are not found among its parliamentary representatives. Six of the original body of 12 aldermen do not figure among the town’s MPs, nor do others of prominence in the borough’s administration, such as Richard Burley and Robert Scriven, both of whom served as many as three terms as bailiff between the 1430s and 1450s. This raises the possibility that enthusiasm for parliamentary service was far from general among Shrewsbury’s governors, a consideration that might explain why Bastard and Luyt, filacers in the court of King’s bench whose normal duties took them to Westminster, filled as many as eight of the 14 seats between 1442 and 1453 inclusive. It might also, as suggested earlier, be the reason why one of the serving bailiffs was so frequently returned.
This apparent reluctance may have arisen from the relatively low wages paid by the borough to its Members, itself perhaps a further sign of difficulties in borough finance. These generally fell well short of the daily rate of 2s. which was the notional remuneration accorded to parliamentary burgesses. The occasional references to the payment of wages in the surviving borough accounts show that Shrewsbury’s MPs generally received much less, scarcely half this rate. In 1437 Thomas Thornes was paid 81s. and Burley 80s. for service in a Parliament which lasted 65 days (or 73 if allowance was made for travelling time), in other words, both received a little over half the accepted rate. For their service in the next Parliament they received precisely 1s. a day each, although, interestingly, Burley was paid for five fewer days in respect of the Parliament’s second session. In 1442 the MPs fared even worse: Whitcombe received 40s. and Bastard 26s. 8d. for a Parliament lasting 62 days. Bastard was, presumably, minded to accept this greatly reduced rate because, as an officer in King’s bench, he was bound to be at Westminster when the Parliament met, for its first three weeks overlapped with the Hilary law term; Whitcombe, however, had no such compensation for payment that, allowing for travelling time, amounted to only about 7d. a day.
It seems that only when Parliament was unusually short did Shrewbury’s MPs receive something near their notional entitlement: for the controversial assembly which met for 22 days at Bury St. Edmunds in 1447 both MPs, Bastard and the obscure Beget, received 40s. each. Conversely, those elected to what proved lengthy assemblies might have to accept very inadequate payment. No Parliament in Henry VI’s reign was longer than that of 1445-6, which met for 191 days over four sessions. Horde received 20s. ‘ex convencione’ together with a further 46s. 8d. as a reward, suggesting that for him the normal equation between length of service and payment had been abandoned. Making allowance for travelling time to each session, he received less than 4d. a day. His fellow MP, Stury, fared better: he was paid at the daily rate of 1s. for 225 days. The different treatment accorded to the two men suggests that Horde may have absented himself from one or more of the sessions, despite the important matters the borough was pursuing in this assembly.
This system by which the borough MPs generally accepted payment at a greatly reduced rate was challenged after the long Parliament of 1453-4 (the second longest of the reign) when the MPs, Luyt and Bastard, sued the bailiffs for payment in full, no doubt after failing to negotiate what they considered acceptable wages. Significantly, neither man was returned for the borough again, presumably because they were no longer, as perhaps they had once been, ready to serve at severely reduced wages.
The diminished wages generally offered to the town’s MPs may have meant that a particular incentive was required to overcome a reluctance to serve on the part of qualified candidates. William Horde, for example, may have taken advantage of election to introduce a petition into the Commons. An undated and damaged petition in his name complained that he had met with resistance from 500 armed men when, as escheator under Henry V, he had attempted to levy sums due to the Crown from the lordship of Powis, and offered to inform the Commons more fully on the matter ‘by word of mouth’, suggesting that he might have been a serving MP. If so the petition is probably to be dated to the Parliament of 1427.
The compositions of 1389, 1433 and 1445 devoted much ingenuity to defining the process by which the borough officers were to be chosen; by contrast they said very little about parliamentary elections. At the end of a long paragraph concerning the election and activities of the borough auditors, there is appended to the composition of 1445, seemingly as an afterthought, the clause ‘the Burgeysz that shall be chosen to Parlement from this tyme forth, [shall] be chosen bi the .. Co[mmon]es in fourme as the .. Auditours shall be’.
The obscurity lifts only after the end of the period under review here, namely in regard to the election of 1478. Here the official return is routinely uninformative, taking the form of an indenture between the sheriff and 13 attestors witnessing the election for the county and its three boroughs, and no more would have been known had it not been for a dispute over the Shrewsbury election. This resulted in the return of two further documents into Chancery. One of these was an indenture drawn up between the two bailiffs, John Horde and Roger Knight, and no fewer than 106 townsmen as attestors witnessing the election, on 7 Jan., of Robert Beyneon† and John Gyttons†, the two MPs named in the sheriff’s joint return.
There is every reason to suppose that such an indenture, that is, between the bailiffs and the borough attestors, was drawn up for every election, but that the sheriff, on receiving it from the bailiffs, generally contented himself simply with adding the names of the borough’s MPs to a joint return and disposing of the borough indenture.
These documents leave no doubt that, in contrast to the election of most of the other borough officers, all the burgesses voted in parliamentary elections, and thus the number of voters could exceed 150. The contrast suggests that, notwithstanding the example of 1478, contention and dispute was far less likely to arise in the case of a parliamentary election than it was in the annual election of the bailiffs, coroners and assessors. Regulation was not seen as necessary, perhaps because the electoral difficulty generally lay not in choosing between candidates but rather in finding them.
With respect to the influence exercised by Crown and local nobility over Shrewsbury’s elections, it is surprising that only two of the 20 MPs had connexions with the Lancastrian royal household. St. Pierre was a ‘King’s esquire’ by 1413 and he long served as constable of the royal castle in the town, and Esthope was serjeant of the royal buttery. In Esthope’s case his election to the Lancastrian Parliament of 1459 was determined by that connexion, but there is no reason to suppose that the same can be said of St. Pierre’s two elections at the beginning of the period under review here. Baronial influence over Shrewsbury’s’s representation was similarly in abeyance for the bulk of the period. The influence of the Fitzalans in the town, so pronounced in earlier periods in its history, declined greatly after 1415, when the family’s estates fell into division between heir male and heirs general, and was not replaced by that of any other noble family until the duke of York began to look to the townsmen for political support in the 1450s.
Local support for York is manifest in one of the parliamentary elections in that decade. Although the duke was in Shrewsbury shortly before the elections to the Parliament of 1450, there is no reason to suppose that he influenced the election of the two lawyers, Luyt and Bastard; but there can be no doubt that his influence, albeit probably only indirectly exercised, explains the election of the leaders of the Yorkist faction in the town, Eyton and John Horde, to the Parliament of 1455, which met in the wake of the Yorkist victory at the first battle of St. Albans. It is unfortunate that the identity of Shrewsbury’s MPs in the Parliament of 1460 – another that met after a Yorkist victory – are unknown, but it is likely that the same two men were elected.
In respect of the previous Parliament, however, the town’s election was subject to very different influences. This was summoned on 9 Oct. 1459 as the King was at Leominster on his way to confront the Yorkist lords at Ludford Bridge, where three days later they were routed. Significantly, on the day before the summons was issued, Esthope, then a minor official in the royal household, was admitted to the Shrewsbury guild merchant. Although he was a Shropshire man by birth and was later to play a significant part in Shrewsbury’s’s affairs, he had had no recorded association with the town before that date, and there can be little doubt that he sought the freedom as a preliminary to securing a seat in Parliament. This he duly did. When the electors gathered in the guildhall on the following 17 Nov., he was returned in company with one of the bailiffs, Trentham. Unusually, a separate indenture survives for this election, although there is nothing suspicious about it: eight attestors are named, headed by two of the leading burgesses, Nicholas Stafford and John Knight, whose widow Esthope was later to marry. None the less, there can be no doubt that Esthope’s election was determined by the prevailing circumstances in national politics.
Notwithstanding the election of Esthope in the unusual circumstances of 1459, Shrewsbury’s representation was dominated by its leading residents, many from families long-established there. There was no infiltration of outsiders despite the town’s apparent economic decline and the diminished wages its authorities offered to MPs. This, however, is not to say that the leading townsmen were enthusiastic parliamentarians. The frequency with which the borough elected one of its bailiffs or a lawyer with a Westminster practice, together with the absence of many leading townsmen from the list of its MPs, could be interpreted (although the point is an arguable one) as manifestations of a lack of enthusiasm. Even so the borough maintained its electoral independence into the late sixteenth century.