Unique among the shires of England, Sussex was distinguished by its division into rapes. This split the county into six units: from west to east the rapes of Chichester, Arundel, Bramber, Lewes, Pevensey and Hastings, with their borders running from north to south. Each rape possessed distinct seigneurial characteristics and a castle as its seat of governance. Although the castle at Chichester had been demolished in the thirteenth century, by the period under review the city was well established as the focus of both county and diocesan administration. Tenure of the lordships of Arundel and Lewes had made the Fitzalan earls of Arundel the wealthiest landowners in the region in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Thomas, earl of Arundel, possessed estates in Sussex valued at some £550 p.a.,
While the dower lands of Countess Eleanor passed after her death to her son the earl of Arundel, those of Countess Beatrice devolved on the descendants of Earl Thomas’s three sisters and coheirs: John Mowbray, duke of Norfolk, Elizabeth Neville, Lady Abergavenny, and Edmund Lenthall, and when Lentall died childless in 1447 the Mowbrays and Nevilles took half shares.
By contrast, the lordship of the rape of Pevensey further to the east of the county belonged to the dukes of Lancaster. John Pelham, constable of Pevensey castle by appointment of John of Gaunt, defended it for Henry of Bolingbroke in 1399, and reaped outstanding rewards for his loyalty when Henry seized the throne. Continuing as constable on Henry IV’s behalf he took into his custody at Pevensey several important political prisoners, held office as steward of the duchy honour of the Eagle, and in 1409 received from the grateful King a grant for life of both castle and honour. Pelham thus gained possession of all the duchy estates in Sussex for the next 20 years.
The bishops of Chichester, whose diocese was coterminous with the county of Sussex, possessed substantial estates there, as did other members of the nobility besides the lords of the six rapes. Centred on the manor of Petworth in the west of the county, one such estate provided net revenues of up to £194 p.a. for Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland (d.1455). By marrying his son and heir to Eleanor, the grand-daughter and heiress of another important landowner Robert, 4th Lord Poynings (d.1446), the earl further increased the Percys’ territorial stake in the south of England, albeit at the cost of provoking serious unrest in Sussex and Kent when she and her husband prevented her uncle Robert Poynings from taking possession of the peroperties left to him by his father.
In the last decade of the period Sussex was riven by violent disturbances following the collapse of English rule in Normandy and the emergence of political factions on a national level. Adam Moleyns, the bishop of Chichester and keeper of the privy seal, sent to Portsmouth in January 1450 to settle the unpaid wages of mutinous soldiers and sailors, was murdered by them for his role in ‘selling’ Normandy to the French; in the summer Lord Hoo and Hastings was threatened with death by other soldiers returning from France; and Cade’s rebels found willing recruits for their cause in Sussex: a large contingent from the county joined them in their march on London, and in the aftermath of the rebellion over 400 Sussex men and a number of local communities saw fit to secure royal pardons.
Electoral returns for Sussex survive for 18 of the 22 Parliaments summoned between 1422 and 1460, and the names of the MPs for 1439 and 1445, for which returns are lacking, are recorded in the fine rolls. Thomas Hoo is known to have sat for Sussex in the Parliament of 1455 on the evidence of a writ of privilege issued to one of his servants. Thus, the names of 28 MPs are recorded, with gaps remaining only for one of the seats in 1455 and both those of the Parliament at Coventry in 1459 when no election was held. Of the 28 individuals, nearly two thirds (17) are recorded representing this shire only on a single occasion and a further six sat in just two Parliaments for Sussex in the course of their careers. The most experienced of the remaining five all began their parliamentary service before Henry VI came to the throne: Pelham represented the county in as many as eight Parliaments between 1399 and 1427; his former ward Sir Roger Fiennes was returned to five spread between 1416 and 1445; and William Ryman was elected to five assembled between 1420 and 1432. In addition, no fewer than seven of the 28 also represented other constituencies. In some cases these were situated in Sussex: 20 years before his single election for the shire in 1426, Vincent Fynch had sat for Winchelsea, one of the Cinque Ports; Walter Urry had represented Horsham in two Parliaments and Reigate in Surrey in another two before he was elected for Sussex in 1435; and John Wood III’s earliest experience of the Commons had been as an MP for Midhurst in three Parliaments. By contrast, both Hoo and his half-brother John Lewknor sat for a borough (Horsham) only after they had first represented the county. Three of the shire knights for Sussex were also returned by neighbouring counties where they had significant landed interests: Surrey in the case of William Sydney and Wood, and Hampshire in that of Thomas Uvedale. Uvedale’s service for Hampshire preceded that for Sussex.
It is nevertheless surprising to find that in only three of the 20 Parliaments for which the names of both the Sussex MPs are recorded (1425, 1427 and 1442) were both men elected already experienced in the workings of the Commons, while perhaps in as many as four (1423, 1437, 1447 and 1460), both appear to have been newcomers to the House.
Of the county’s most important and wealthiest gentry families, a handful stand out for never, so far as we know, providing MPs in the fifteenth century, although they had done in earlier times: the Bohuns, seated at Midhurst in the west, the Halshams of West Grinstead in the centre and the Etchinghams from the east. Nor were all of the 28 MPs natives of Sussex, for at least six of them came from other parts of the country. The family of John Audley alias Tuchet, the son and heir of James, Lord Audley, had virtually no territorial stake in the county; indeed, how he came to reside at Brambletye near East Grinstead remains unclear, for the estates he held jure uxoris at the time of his election in 1453 were primarily situated in Dorset and Hampshire.
Yet whatever their origins these six, like the other 22 shire knights, all had a place of residence in Sussex at the time of their elections. At least 15 of the 28 had inherited land in the county from their parents, and numbered among them the heirs of old county families such as Fiennes, Hussey, Lewknor, Poynings, Michelgrove, Rademylde, St. John and Tauk. For some, service in Parliament for Sussex continued a tradition begun by earlier generations of their kin: the fathers of Fynch, Hussey, Rademylde and Roger and John Lewknor had all represented the county in the Commons. Together, Sir Thomas Lewknor his sons and stepson Hoo filled at least eight of the Sussex seats in Henry VI’s reign (as well as three more for boroughs in the county). By contrast, ten of the shire knights owed their acquisition of lands in the locality to their opportune marriages to widows or heiresses. The most lucrative matches were those contracted by Pelham, to a wealthy widow, Hoo, to the daughter and heiress of the shire knight Urry, Roger Lewknor to the Camoys coheiress (enabling him to be returned during his father’s lifetime and when he had barely come of age), and the latter’s brother John to the Halsham heiress; while, as already noted, Sir Richard Poynings, the heir apparent of Lord Poynings, married the widow of Lord Mautravers, the de jure earl of Arundel. Those of the shire knights who were lawyers by profession for the most part acquired some or all of their landed possessions in the county by purchase: such was the case with Iwode, Mille, Ryman, Sydney and Urry.
While ten of the MPs held estates which were primarily or exclusively located in Sussex, many others possessed land elsewhere, often concentrated in south-east England (in the neighbouring counties of Hampshire, Surrey and Kent), but sometimes much further away, for example in Dorset (Poynings), Oxfordshire (Fiennes and Rademylde), Gloucestershire (Hussey and Lisle), and Cambridgeshire (Pelham). The Lewknors’ holdings were spread over nine other shires, in the Midlands and East Anglia as well as closer to home. The lack of returns for Sussex for the tax imposed in 1436 makes it difficult to place the shire knights in categories in terms of their relative wealth. There can be no doubt, however, that the wealthiest among them was Pelham, to whom Henry IV had granted all of the duchy of Lancaster estates in Sussex (valued at £270 p.a.), to add to the lands brought to him by marriage (worth another £121), and by the time of his final Parliament in 1427 his annual income had risen to £870 owing to the royal grant of the lordship and rape of Hastings. Next to Pelham in wealth were Sir Thomas Lewknor with at least £242 a year, Uvedale with £173 or more, Fiennes with at least £165, even before his military service in the French wars reputedly made him £3,800 to spend on his castle at Herstmonceaux, and Hussey with £112 before the onset of the financial difficulties which soured his later years. Roger Lewknor enjoyed an income from his wife’s estates of at least £53 p.a. when he was first returned to Parliament in 1439, and of more than £220 at the time of his second election in 1453 after he had inherited his patrimony; and his half-brother John received £86 a year from his wife’s inheritance. Rademylde’s wife brought him at least £55 p.a. and four other shire knights enjoyed similar revenues. Comparatively less well-off were Fynch, with an annual income of about £30, Michelgrove about £20, and Mille even less, although these figures reflect a lack of evidence about their earnings from fees and commercial activities.
In terms of social standing the MPs ranged from the ranks of the lesser baronage to those of relatively lowly esquires and lawyers. Audley, as the eldest son of a baron, was to be summoned to the Lords in 1460; and included among his equals were the brothers Sir Richard and Robert Poynings, respectively the heir apparent and younger son of Lord Poynings. In all, ten of the shire knights were knighted in the course of their careers, but only six achieved this distinction before they first sat in the Commons. Pelham was knighted on the eve of Henry IV’s coronation, Fiennes probably while campaigning with the duke of Clarence in 1412, and Hussey in the same year or the next. Thomas Lewknor, who served under the command of the earl of Arundel in Henry V’s first expedition to France in 1415 won his spurs on that campaign, probably at Agincourt, where Fiennes and Hussey also fought (indeed Hussey commanded in the field a contingent over a hundred strong). Both Hussey and Fiennes followed this triumph with further expeditions and captaincies of French castles, and the latter was later nominated (albeit unsuccessfully) to be a Knight of the Garter. Sir Richard Poynings engaged in military service before his election to Parliament in 1423, and died fighting near Orléans six years later. While these five owed their knighthoods to their soldierly exploits, others were elevated for political reasons. Roger Lewknor, who is not known to have ever fought in France, was ceremonially knighted in 1453 in the company of the King’s half-brothers; Audley, whose early career (strangely for the heir to a barony) had been that of a professional administrator and estates-steward, was to be knighted only after he had succeeded his father as Lord Audley and had lent valuable support to Edward IV; and similarly, despite his high social standing, Uvedale declined the honour of knighthood until the coronation of Elizabeth Wydeville. John Lewknor was to be knighted just prior to the battle of Tewkesbury in 1471, where he met his death fighting for Queen Margaret and the Lancastrian prince of Wales, while Wood’s knighthood was awarded at the dissolution of the Parliament of 1483 in which he had presided over the Commons as Speaker, and during the final stages of a career which culminated with appointment as treasurer of England. Participation in the French wars did not necessarily lead to advancement at home: certain of the Sussex esquires who crossed the Channel to fight in Normandy (such as Bartelot, Ledes and Devenish) never attained knighthood, and four other MPs were fined for failing to take up the honour when required to do so.
During the reigns of Richard II and Henry IV knights by rank had far out-numbered those of lesser status when it came to election to Parliament for Sussex, for belted knights had taken 47 of the 72 recorded seats. By contrast, in Henry V’s reign it only ever happened once that a knight was elected (Fiennes in 1416), and 19 out of 20 seats were filled by those of lower social rank.
Whereas in the period 1386-1421 lawyers had taken just five of the 56 documented seats,
As yet, the geographically-extended county of Sussex was not formally divided for the purposes of royal administration and shire courts were held in the west, at Chichester – although for pragmatic reasons the two collectors of customs and subsidies at Chichester divided the long Sussex coastline between them, with one collector basing himself at Winchelsea. In the sixteenth century there seems to have been a convention that one of the shire knights would come from the west of the county and the other from the east. It is uncertain whether this arrangement consistently applied in earlier times, and although there are signs that the electors may have tried to balance the representation between west and east – for in 15 of the 28 Parliaments of the period 1386-1421 for which returns survive such a balance had been maintained – in eight others both shire knights came from the eastern part of the county, which weighted the representation in its favour. In the period under review, the western part of the shire was more to the fore. Seventeen of the shire knights lived in west Sussex and only 11 in the east, and although the two MPs of 1422 both came from the east, in five later Parliaments (1432, 1433, 1435, 1447 and February 1449) both were from the west. That the distribution of the seats was evenly balanced in 14 Parliaments raises the question as to whether this was an intentional outcome and the result of negotiation between the gentry families of the county at or before the meeting of the shire court, or merely coincidental.
Political circumstances inevitably played a part in the electoral process, and the fluctuating fortunes of the members of the nobility who held estates in Sussex seem also to have been a factor in the county’s parliamentary representation. During Henry IV’s reign that representation had been dominated by Pelham and Sir John Dallingridge†, his fellow knight of the King’s chamber, but on the day he acceded to the thone Henry V replaced Pelham as treasurer of England with his own friend Thomas, earl of Arundel, and five of the six Sussex seats in the Parliaments assembled before the earl’s death in 1415 were taken by men of the earl’s affiliation, who were comparatively obscure. Thereafter, the interests of the widowed Countess Beatrice and the new earls of Arundel were regularly safeguarded in the Commons by at least four of the shire knights: Ryman, returned five times after the death of Earl Thomas, whom he served as an executor, was appointed joint custodian of the estates of the earldom during the minority of Earl John; Sydney, steward and feoffee of the latter’s estates was probably one of the lawyers who supported him when he made his claim to the earldom in the Parliament of 1433; Urry (1435), was retained by the dowager countess with a fee of £10 p.a.; and Bartelot (also 1435) who, employed by three successive earls as a councillor, received a smaller annuity of £5. The MPs of 1435, returned soon after the death of Earl John in France, had probably sought election to facilitate the business at Westminster arising from the minority of the young heir to the earldom. The affinity of William, earl of Arundel, is poorly documented, but it seems likely that John Knottesford (1447) was one of his retainers, for Knottesford’s grandfather and father had both been closely linked to previous earls and he himself had received an annuity from Countess Beatrice.
The territorial influence of the Mowbrays was less well reflected in the parliamentary representation of the county, although Ledes, a Mowbray retainer of over 20 years’ standing, was constable of Bramber castle, master forester and steward of estates in the region by appointment of John, 2nd duke of Norfolk, when returned in 1432. Hoo, employed for many years from the early 1450s as steward, household-treasurer and ‘chief’ councillor to the 3rd and 4th dukes cannot be dismissed as a mere servant of either peer, and not only because he also acted as councillor and principal agent in the south of England for the Percy earls of Northumberland; in the three Parliaments to which he was returned as a shire knight the interests of himself and his kinsfolk assumed paramount importance. Sydney, who as we have seen was linked with the earls of Arundel, also served the Percys, notably as long-term steward of their Sussex estates, while his companion in the Parliament of 1433, William St. John, was one of the earl of Northumberland’s most important tenants in the county, and Bolney (1460) was a trustee of the Poynings inheritance which fell to the next earl by virtue of his marriage.
Other MPs were closely associated with different members of the House of Lords. Sir Thomas Lewknor was a cousin of John Kemp, who when Lewknor sat in Parliament in 1422 was bishop of London and a member of the all-important Council of the minority; Sir Richard Poynings, returned in 1423, was the eldest son of another member of this Council, Lord Poynings; while a third councillor, Bishop Henry Beaufort of Winchester, may well have looked for support in the same Parliament to Hussey, who had very recently travelled with him to the General Council of the Church. Hussey was re-elected to the succeeding Parliament, in 1425, when Beaufort was chancellor. Devenish (1437) acted as steward of the household and then treasurer for Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, from whom he received an annuity of £10. Other shire knights established links with the archbishops of Canterbury. Robert Poynings, a member of the household of Archbishop Stafford, could ask his lord to be a feoffee of his disputed inheritance; another of Stafford’s esquires, Audley, was actively engaged as administrator of his goods and steward of the estates of the archbishopric under his successor John Kemp at the time of his return in 1453; and Bolney served Archbishop Bourgchier as his steward in Sussex.
While all such links between members of the Commons and Lords are of interest, in no single case is it possible to be certain that those of the Upper House played a decisive role in the choice of the representatives for Sussex. More importance, however, should be attached to the personal connexions between certain of the shire knights and the Lancastrian monarchs. Pelham, the sword-bearer, councillor, friend and executor to Henry IV, served as a member of Henry V’s council in England in the last five years of his reign, and the council of the minority of Henry VI entrusted him with negotiations with envoys from Scotland. Pelham’s former ward Sir Roger Fiennes had received an annuity of £40 from Henry V, and by that King’s appointment held office for life as keeper of the strategically-important castle at Portchester. Of greater significance, when returned to the Parliaments of 1439, 1442 and 1445 he was firmly ensconced in Henry VI’s household, as its treasurer. Undoubtedly some weight should be attached to the influence over the representation of the county exercised by Sir Roger and his brother James Fiennes*, who having joined him in the Household and become one of the King’s favourites was elevated to the post of chamberlain, to the peerage as Lord Saye and Sele, and eventually to high office as treasurer of England. The brothers’ political circle included several of the men returned to Parliament for Sussex before Sir Roger’s death at the end of 1449, most notably their kinsmen Fynch, Hoo and the Lewknors. The lawyer Iwode was attached to the Fiennes brothers throughout his life and married a kinswoman of theirs, and Iwode’s fellow legal practitioners Sydney and Mille both acted as feoffees of the Fiennes estates. More importantly, the youthful Robert Rademylde, an esquire of the King’s chamber elected to the first Parliament of 1449, had been James Fiennes’s ward and was by then married to one of his daughters. Altogether, relations and associates of the two brothers secured 17 of the Sussex seats between 1422 and November 1449. A hint of how elections might have been manipulated in their favour is provided by an examination of the return of Iwode to the Parliament of 1431, for the sheriff, Iwode’s brother-in-law William Fynch*, also belonged to the Fiennes circle. Then, in 1439, the sheriff who made the returns of Sir Roger Fiennes and his kinsman Roger Lewknor was none other than James Fiennes himself.
This background of association with the Fiennes brothers fed into the political polarization of the Sussex gentry when, in the late 1440s, violent disputes over the Poynings inheritance flared up. Robert Poynings’ grievances against his stepbrother William Cromer*, the detested sheriff of Kent who was another of Lord Saye’s sons-in-law, fuelled the excesses of Cade’s rebellion in 1450, during which both Cromer and Saye were murdered. Robert’s movements that summer prompted the later allegations that he himself joined the rebels as their leader’s sword-bearer. Whether these were true or false, when electors met on 8 Oct. at the shire court in Chichester, at the other end of the county, to choose representatives in the forthcoming Parliament, Poynings was one of the candidates selected. His fellow shire knight, Thomas Uvedale (himself an unusual choice, as his interests focused on Hampshire), stood by him to the extent of offering substantial financial guarantees a month later when Poynings was required to appear before the assembled King and Lords to answer for his behaviour. No shire elections were held in Sussex for the Parliament of 1459 so it is impossible to discover how the renewal of the civil war might have affected the choice of representatives, although to that of 1460 which met after the Yorkist victory at Northampton the shire returned as one of its MPs the newcomer Thomas Tauk, whose subsequent career reveals his alignment with the victors’ cause.
As might be expected, the majority of the 28 were appointed to royal commissions and offices for the administration of the locality, but, unusually, Fynch, Ledes and Sir Richard Poynings were never employed in this way. Although appointments to the joint shrievalty of Surrey and Sussex were shared more or less equally between the gentry of both shires, scarcely more than a third (ten) of the MPs for Sussex served in that office,
Elections were invariably held at the county court at Chichester, and nearly always on a Thursday. The numbers of those named as attesting the surviving electoral indentures from 1413 to 1477 ranged from a minimum of eight (in 1420) to a maximum of 29 (in 1422), although on six occasions there were a round dozen. This seems to have been a matter of convenience: the indenture for the Parliament of 1437 named a dozen attestors, while stating that there were 50 other 40s. free-holders present at the shire court. Their names were not supplied.
Lawyers and managers of large estates figured prominently on the indentures. Thus, 14 ‘esquires’ and three ‘gentlemen’ were listed on that for the Parliament of February 1449, nine ‘esquires’ figured on those for both those of November 1449 and 1453, and there were eight such recorded in 1450. Of the 28 shire knights of the period, 15 attested Sussex elections at some point in their careers; indeed, a few of them put in a regular appearance (for example, Bartelot was recorded on ten indentures, and Lisle, Michelgrove and Urry on six each). Four days after his return for Sussex on 8 Oct. 1450, Uvedale was present at the Hampshire elections held at Winchester, in breach of the statutes which required both electors and elected Members to be resident in the relevant shire on the date of the writ of summons.
The nine boroughs of Sussex which elected MPs in this period were concentrated in the westerly and central rapes: only East Grinstead belonged to east Sussex. (The Cinque Ports of Hastings, Rye and Winchelsea there were not subject to the shire administration). The boroughs’ representation often reflected the interests of their different lords. For the most part the names of those elected by the boroughs are recorded only on schedules sent to Chancery with the shire indentures, although a few borough indentures do survive. Those that are extant for the Parliament of 1460 point to irregularities in the sheriff’s return. All save that for the city of Chichester bear the same date as the shire indenture, 28 Aug., and are stated to have been drawn up in the county court at Chichester. This, the only occasion in the fifteenth century when indentures for the boroughs were not attested in the boroughs themselves, prompts the suspicion that rather than being finalized at the shire court the returns of 1460 were in fact compiled in the Chancery after the Sussex indenture had been handed in. Such a suspicion is given added weight when it is noted that at least 12 of the 16 men returned for the Sussex boroughs to this particular Parliament were strangers to the communities they were supposedly representing.