Situated at the head of the Orwell estuary in east Suffolk, Ipswich was one of the oldest ports and parliamentary boroughs in England. Its population appears to have remained stable in the fifteenth century, at perhaps just under 3,000, although it remained considerably smaller than nearby Colchester. Among the most prosperous East Anglian boroughs in this period, Ipswich had a close connexion with the Low Countries, from where a number of its residents originated. The bulk of its overseas trade was with northern Europe although wine, predominantly claret shipped from Bordeaux, was easily its most valuable import. It was also a centre for cloth production and a natural point of export for cloth produced in south-west Suffolk and north-east Essex.
Ipswich owed its liberties to a series of royal charters, beginning with that of 1199. Having obtained a confirmation of all previous charters in 1427, the burgesses acquired a new one awarding them additional privileges in 1446. By the early 1450s, however, they were seeking a further charter, although they were not to receive one until 1463.
A distinct minority of fifteenth-century Ipswich’s inhabitants were burgesses, with a third or less of its adult males enjoying the freedom of the borough, a privilege acquired through purchase (the standard entry fine was 40s.), patrimony or apprenticeship. ‘Foreign’ burgess status was available to non-resident subjects of the Crown, although to retain it they had to purchase freehold property at Ipswich within a year and a day of their admission to the freedom. Within the body of burgesses was a smaller minority, the oligarchs who governed the borough. In theory, they were accountable to their fellow freemen; in practice they were a self-perpetuating elite. At the apex of this elite was an inner council of 12 portmen who every year elected the borough’s bailiffs, coroners and serjeants. In turn, the two bailiffs and four coroners nominated the body that elected the portmen. Later in the century, and certainly by 1470, there was also an outer council of 24. Portmen retained their status for life (vacancies were filled by election held among the existing portmen), but the other office-holders were normally elected on the feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary (8 Sept.) each year. In 1439, however, the borough farmed out the position of one of its two chamberlains, whose role it was to collect and account for municipal income, to John Felawe for 12 years at 20 marks p.a.
Also prominent in Ipswich’s affairs were its legal advisers, among them Reynold Rous* and Thomas Denys, to whom it paid annual retainers of 20s. in the mid 1440s. Denys, who served as Ipswich’s ‘attorney at common law’, resided in the town, sat for it in at least four Parliaments and helped to secure its charter of 1446. By 1460 the burgesses were employing John Pollard to act for them in the Exchequer and in the same year they retained James Hobart† to provide them with legal advice and represent them in the King’s courts at Westminster.
One of these ordinances, made in 1429, laid down that none should be re-elected bailiff within two years of last serving in that post. Another, of 1433-4, ordered that the burgesses should in future elect all of the four serjeants, the men who acted as the bailiffs’ executive officers and helped the chamberlains collect the borough’s revenues. The reason given for the latter directive was that the bailiffs, who had come to acquire the right to choose two of these officers, had fallen into the habit of favouring their own nominees to the detriment of the other serjeants, elected by the community. Notwithstanding the ordinance, the election of serjeants remained contentious, and it was necessary to refer the matter to the arbitration of John Mowbray, 3rd duke of Norfolk, in 1436 or 1437. The charter of 1446 marked the formal incorporation of the borough and introduced further changes to its governance. It excluded royal officials from Ipswich’s liberties and vested the office of King’s escheator in one of the bailiffs, but the chief innovation concerned the appointment of the town’s j.p.s. Previously the Crown had chosen these officers, but the charter handed control of their appointment to the borough. From September 1448, when this change first came into effect, the town had six justices, comprising the two bailiffs and four portmen whom the bailiffs had nominated to serve alongside them.
At least 25 men represented Ipswich in the Parliaments of Henry VI’s reign. The returns for the elections of 1426, 1439, 1445 and 1460 have not survived, but the borough’s own records show that Richard Felawe and William Baldry sat in 1460 and it is possible that two of the 25, John Smith and William Weathereld, were also Members of the Commons of 1445.
Although by no means an outsider, given his family’s ties with the borough, John Andrew was a member of the gentry involved in the affairs of the wider region of East Anglia. The Gilbert Debenhams and John Timperley were likewise county gentry who were far from complete strangers to Ipswich. Like Andrew, the two Debenhams possessed strong family links with the borough, were sometimes known as ‘of Ipswich’ and owned property there. Both Gilberts became freemen of Ipswich, the younger just days before his election in 1455, and Gilbert I chose its Carmelite friary for his burial place. Several months before his son’s election in 1455, the borough called upon the elder Gilbert Debenham to act as an arbitrator in a quarrel between them and the men of Bury St. Edmunds. He was not always a positive influence, for he was a maverick figure capable of acts of blatant lawlessness. Timperley’s association with Ipswich was nothing like as deep rooted as Andrew’s or those of the Gilbert Debenhams but he possessed estates near the town. He also became a freeman; in his case a year before his election alongside Gilbert II. Curiously, Andrew did not gain admission to the freedom (as a ‘foreign’ or non-resident burgess) until late in life, well after his parliamentary career was over and more than two decades after representing Ipswich in his second known Parliament. Like his father before him, he was lawyer and the burgesses may have hoped that he would prove a potentially useful advocate for their borough in the Commons. While they were not typical carpet-baggers, it is worth noting that all of the gentry MPs sat in the second half of Henry VI’s reign, a period of steadily deepening political divisions within the realm, and there is no doubt that external politics played an important part in the return of Timperley and the younger Gilbert Debenham in 1455.
John Andrew was not the only lawyer among the MPs, since Denys, Robert Wood, Worsop and, perhaps, John French were also members of the legal profession. Lawyers represented Ipswich in at least eight of the 22 Parliaments of Henry VI’s reign (those of 1422, 1429, 1431, 1435, 1442, February 1449, 1450 and 1459), and in three of those assemblies (the Parliaments of 1431, 1435 and 1442) both its MPs were men of law. No obvious pattern is apparent here, given the relatively even spread through the reign of the Parliaments in question, but lawyers featured more prominently than they did in the 1386-1421 period, since just two of the known MPs of those years, Robert Hethe† and the already mentioned James Andrew, were definitely men of law.
The evidently prosperous Wynter undertook to meet his own costs while attending the Parliament of 1453, the only known occasion in Henry VI’s reign when an MP for the borough who was a resident burgess rather than a lawyer or semi-outsider agreed to forgo his wages. For want of evidence, it is impossible to calculate the incomes of Wynter and nearly all the other MPs but there is no doubt that the great majority were wealthy in local terms at least. Baldry and Felawe, for example, were among the leading Ipswich merchants of their day, and John Andrew’s success as a lawyer gave him the means to lend the Crown no less than £100 just a year after sitting for the borough in his first known Parliament. The semi-outsider gentry among the 25 were the most significant landowners but reliable evidence for their landed incomes is almost non-existent. While the inquisitions post mortem held for Gilbert Debenham I in Norfolk and Suffolk following his death in 1481 have survived, their valuations of his estates in those counties, totalling some £60 p.a., are almost certainly underestimates.
Few, if any, of the 25 gained election at a particularly young age, since the electors of Ipswich normally returned men of at least some administrative experience to the Commons. A comfortable majority of those MPs who were resident burgesses held municipal office at some stage during their careers, with as many as 16 of them having already taken up one or more of these positions before entering the Commons for the first or only time. Of those who were borough office-holders, only William Walworth and Worsop appear not to have served as such until after they had left Parliament for the last time. Fourteen of the MPs were bailiffs, of whom only Baldry served a single term as such. Both John Caldwell and John Deken held the office for ten terms, while Denys was bailiff for nine and William Debenham for seven. Following the ordinance of 1429, however, none of those who became bailiff served consecutive terms in the office. After the borough had obtained the right to appoint its own commissioners of the peace, nine of the MPs held the position while not serving as one of the bailiffs, the ex officio justices, although in some cases not until long after their time in Parliament had ended. In the years 1386-1421 Ipswich regularly returned one (and, on at least two occasions, both) of its bailiffs and other serving municipal officers to the Commons, meaning that the borough nearly always had a current member of its governing body in Parliament.
A majority of the 25 also held office at Ipswich by direct appointment of the Crown. Nine of them were j.p.s for the borough before it acquired the right to appoint its own justices, and most of this group sat in at least one Parliament while on royal commissions of the peace. During the period under review, the Crown also appointed at least nine of the MPs to ad hoc commissions for Ipswich but only Caldwell and the elder Gilbert Debenham appear to have served on such bodies before sitting for the borough. Four of the 25 held offices related to the tronage and customs of Ipswich, either before or while representing the town in Parliament. Like John Andrew, the two Gilbert Debenhams and Timperley, several others among the 25 also served the King as office-holders in Suffolk, by virtue of their professional qualifications or interests beyond Ipswich. Worsop entered Parliament while a coroner for the county and Wood was clerk of the peace there before and throughout his time in Parliament. Three others, Denys, Felawe and French, received appointments to ad hoc commissions for Suffolk during the period under review although only French did so before first entering the Commons. French subsequently came to serve Henry IV’s widow, Joan of Navarre, as bailiff of her liberty in Norfolk and Suffolk, an office he was perhaps already exercising when returned to his second Parliament. At least one of the gentry MPs, Gilbert Debenham I, possessed a more significant link with the Crown when elected for Ipswich, since he was then an esquire of the King’s household, making him a potentially useful conduit to the centre of power. It is also possible that Timperley was the John Timperley who had become a Household esquire by the second half of the 1440s.
The Debenhams and Timperleys were followers of John Mowbray, 3rd duke of Norfolk, even if they sometimes fell out with that frequently inept lord. It was surely no coincidence that John Timperley and Gilbert Debenham II gained election to the Parliament of 1455, an assembly summoned when the duke enjoyed greater influence in East Anglian politics than hitherto, thanks to his alliance of convenience with the duke of York, recently victorious at the first battle of St. Albans. Yet the borough valued its political independence, and it is unlikely to have viewed the return of Timperley and Debenham – notwithstanding the close ties with Ipswich of the latter in particular – with complete equanimity. In September 1455, during the recess following the first session of the very same Parliament, its authorities ordered that, in future, anybody seeking a position in the borough (whether a burgess or ‘foreigner’) who secured letters from a lord or lady in support of his application, should be permanently excluded from office.
It is much harder to ascertain if external pressures played a part in the earlier elections of Debenham’s father, Gilbert I, and John Andrew, a follower of William de la Pole, earl of Suffolk, or of any of the others of the 25. Worsop was however another Mowbray servant and, as already noted, Dunton a servant of the duke of York. Yet it is unlikely that the burgesses elected Andrew unwillingly, given his close ties with Ipswich, and they may have hoped to use his professional qualifications as a lawyer and his connexion with the earl of Suffolk, a magnate particularly close to the King, to their own advantage. The putative lawyer, French, also had a connexion with that peer, since by the latter part of Henry V’s reign he had become bailiff of Hartismere, a Suffolk hundred under the earl’s lordship, although at that date de la Pole was a young man with far less power and influence at a national level than he later enjoyed. Less certainly, it is possible that Smith was an employee of another earl, since a John Smith of Ipswich was the secretary of John de Vere, 12th earl of Oxford, in the mid 1450s.
Several of the MPs had links with other important landowners in East Anglia although it is impossible to say whether these ties had any significance for their election to Parliament. French and Wood served the prior of Ely as bailiffs but it is unclear if French’s tenure as such overlapped with his time as an MP, while Wood had certainly relinquished his bailiwick by the time of his election to his first known Parliament in 1429. For a while at least, Wood also had a connexion with a leading Suffolk knight, Sir Robert Wingfield*, another Member of the Commons of 1429. Following Wingfield’s return to that assembly as a knight of the shire for the county, Wood stood surety for him at the shire-house in Ipswich. Wood and Wingfield were also among the parties to a conveyance of property in London a few months before the return of the former to the Parliament of 1435. In the following decade, however, Wood was among the Ipswich j.p.s who complained to the Crown about the knight’s recent lawless activities in their town.
Eleven of the 25 certainly sat for the borough more than once, but the gaps in the evidence for its parliamentary representation during the later Middle Ages makes it impossible to gauge how frequently it returned newcomers to the Commons during the period under review. Even so, it must have valued continuity of representation. In at least 19 of the 32 Parliaments of the years 1386-1421 one or both of its Members had sat previously,
Ipswich was among a group of boroughs that held their parliamentary elections locally and informed the sheriff subsequently. While those for Suffolk’s knights of the shire also took place in the town, the selection of the parliamentary burgesses occurred separately from these meetings of the county court. There survive indentures of return with legible dates for both county and borough to a dozen of Henry VI’s Parliaments. None of those for Ipswich bears the same date as the corresponding one for Suffolk, and ten of these returns for the borough post-date those for the county, sometimes by weeks. Save for that of 1425, the parties to the extant indentures for Ipswich from the first half of the reign were the bailiffs and coroners of the town on the one hand and the ‘community’ on the other. In the indenture of 1425, however, at least 13 named burgesses took the place of the ‘community’. The listing of attestors by name reappears in the extant indentures from 1442 onwards. These later returns declare that the bailiffs had held an election in the presence of a number of named burgesses (ranging from as few as 14 in the election to the Parliament of November 1449 to as many as 34 to that of 1459) and ‘many other burgesses and residents’. In two of them, those for 1450 and 1459, the sheriff of Suffolk was one of the parties. Whatever the reasons for the changes of wording and form in the indentures, it is likely that a select few controlled elections throughout the period under review. If anything, the franchise appears to have narrowed during the course of the fifteenth century: presumably, it was in reaction to protests from those who felt excluded that the great court issued an ordinance in 1474 upholding the right of every resident burgess to a free vote in the elections of municipal officials and MPs.
In spite of Ipswich’s relative prosperity, the evidence suggests that the borough did not allow its MPs particularly generous wages, that the payment of these sums was by no means always immediate and that there was no fixed rate of pay. The chamberlains’ account for 1446-7, for example, records that the borough awarded Smith and Rydout, its MPs in the Parliament of 1447, 26s. 8d. each. The Parliament lasted for 22 days and they are likely to have spent at least two days travelling to and from Bury St. Edmunds where it sat, meaning that they each received no more than just over a shilling a day. These expenses were, however, supplemented in kind, since the account also shows that the borough spent another 6s. 8d. in sending victuals to the Parliament, presumably for their use. It was common for wages to fall into arrears. In April 1448, for example, the borough agreed that Weathereld should recoup the £5 still owed to him from the rent of a local mill. In the following December the great court awarded 20 marks to Smith, who by this date had sat in at least three Parliaments, for his service in the Commons. While it is possible that this sum was a special reward, it is more likely that it represented arrears of wages.
On at least one occasion, wages were a matter of some controversy between the borough and its MPs. Following the Parliament of 1449 (Feb.), John Andrew and Richard Felawe claimed daily wages of 2s. each (the old traditional rate for parliamentary burgesses) for the entirety of that assembly. The authorities at Ipswich disputed the claim, asserting that the two men had agreed to receive no more than 12d. per day for as long as the Parliament sat at Westminster, meaning that they were only entitled to the higher rate for its final session, held at Winchester. It would appear that this dispute concluded in some sort of compromise, since an entry in the borough records suggests that Felawe, at least, ended up receiving less than he claimed but more than the municipal authorities had asserted was his due. Whatever the case, some of his wages were still outstanding in the spring of 1452 when the borough resorted to using the issues of the ‘Marsh farm’ to settle up with him. As this dispute demonstrates, by the latter part of Henry VI’s reign wage rates varied according to where Parliament met. Later, in the autumn of 1459, the great court assigned Worsop and Rever, the men who were to sit in the forthcoming Parliament, 18d. each per day if the assembly took place at Coventry (the venue finally decided upon) or York, or 12d. if it was held at less distant London or Canterbury.