Midhurst

This very small town in west Sussex had a taxable population said to number just 15 in 1340 and only about 100 in 1523. VCH Suss. iv. 76. In the early fifteenth century lordship of the manor and borough, vested in the Bohun family, fell to the long-lived Sir John Bohun, who in 1432, the year before he died, finally reached an agreement with the townsmen to settle the disputes between them which had festered for many years. These conflicts had led at the beginning of the century to the violent death of William Baggele†, a former MP for Midhurst. The Commons 1386-1421, i. 660-2; ii. 96. Now, on 7 Apr. 1432, thanks to the mediation of two landowners from Hampshire, Sir Stephen Popham* and Walter Veer*, it was agreed between Sir John and his feoffees on the one hand and eight named burgesses of Midhurst on the other that in the coming year Sir John might keep all the profits of the court called the ‘Lawday’, held twice annually, and of the market tolls levied in the town, but thereafter the burgesses were to receive these dues, in return for making a fixed payment to Bohun and his heirs of just £2 p.a. W. Suss. RO, Add mss, 20801; Cowdray mss 4734/5. Sir John’s successor, his son Sir Humphrey Bohun (1418-68), appears to have resided mainly in Essex and to have paid little attention to his estates in southern England, save perhaps for playing a part in the return of William Pestell† to the Parliament of 1467. CP, ii. 201. In his will Sir Humphrey asked to be buried in Coggeshall abbey, although requested that if he happened to die while in Sussex he should be buried in Easbourne priory next to his parents. The curate of Midhurst parish church was to have 6s. 8d. Pestell was named among his executors: PCC 27 Godyn (PROB11/5, ff. 214v-215). No evidence has been found of any links between him and Midhurst’s MPs during Henry VI’s reign. Besides the Bohuns certain magnates had interests in Midhurst and its environs. Notable among them had been Thomas Fitzalan, earl of Arundel (d.1415), whose widow, Countess Beatrice, possessed dower lands there, and Eleanor (d.1455), widow of John, Lord Mautravers and de jure earl of Arundel (d.1421) – and wife successively of Sir Richard Poynings* (d.1429) and Walter, Lord Hungerford† (d.1449) – who held some of the former Fitzalan estates. CPR, 1422-9, p. 282; 1452-61, p. 203; CP40/699, rot. 128d.

Returns for Midhurst survive for 18 out of the 22 Parliaments summoned between 1422 and 1460, supplying the names of as many as 28 MPs. The majority of them (20) only sat for Midhurst in one Parliament in the course of their careers. The most experienced of the group were William Brereton, returned to four Parliaments between 1406 and 1422, John Sewall, four between 1415 and 1426, and William Chyngford, five from 1417 to 1429; while three others were each elected three times for this constituency. It should be noted, however, that in the cases of 11 of the 28 their representation of Midhurst formed only a small part of their total parliamentary service, for they also secured election for different constituencies. These other constituencies were mostly boroughs elsewhere in Sussex or in Surrey, with which this county shared its sheriff. Thus, besides representing Midhurst Thomas Bellingham sat twice for Arundel, Brereton and John Fust once each for nearby Chichester, William Fenningham three times for East Grinstead and once for Arundel, Thomas Gynnour for New Shoreham and Bletchingley, Hugh Huls for East Grinstead and Gatton, Laurence Leventhorpe for Bramber and John Stokes II for East Grinstead. Much more unusual were Thomas Bartelot, who had previously been returned for Ludgershall in Wiltshire, Thomas Urswyk II, who went on to represent London four times after he took up office as the city’s recorder, and John Wood III, who served as a shire-knight for either Sussex or Surrey in five Parliaments and ended his distinguished career, in Edward IV’s last Parliament in 1483, as the Commons’ Speaker.

As five of this group of 11 had served other constituencies before their first or only elections for Midhurst, during Henry VI’s reign the borough was generally represented by at least one man with previous experience of the workings of the Commons, and in six of the 18 Parliaments for which returns are extant both MPs were already versed in parliamentary procedure. In only five Parliaments (1423, 1433, 1447, 1450 and 1460) is it possible that both representatives were novices, and the gaps in the returns make this unlikely in all five cases. Continuity in the borough’s representation was provided by Brereton, who sat in three Parliaments in a row in 1421 and 1422, and four other instances of re-election are known, although it never happened that both MPs of one Parliament were re-elected to the next.

In the absence of extant borough records it is difficult to determine which of the MPs lived in Midhurst itself, but certainly ten of the 28 came from the immediate locality, and to these may perhaps be added four more whose identity remains obscure. Brereton, Rodenale, Stubbe and the improbably named Docatus Playnesburgh. For the most part, these local men were of little account, and apart from their service in Parliament they failed to make a mark beyond the confines of their small community. They included a husbandman, a yeoman, a tanner and a soldier. Yet they achieved some prominence in Midhurst itself: three of them and the father of another were among the eight burgesses who reached agreement with their lord Sir John Bohun in 1432. Lucas, Maunser and Thomas Westlond; with John Wood the father of John Wood III. The eight also included a former MP, Michael Baggele†. Undoubtedly, the most outstanding figure in this group, and far from typical of it, was John Wood III, whose mother came from a Midhurst family. As a young man Wood sat in three Parliaments for the borough at the start of a career at the Exchequer that eventually led to promotion as under treasurer in the reigns of Henry VI and Edward IV and ultimately as treasurer of England by appointment of Richard III. Apart from Wood (who was to serve on the quorum of the benches of Sussex and Surrey as well as on numerous ad hoc royal commissions), only two other local men were ever named on commissions by the Crown, and they were allotted the relatively unimportant and unpopular roles of collectors of taxes.

Local men dominated the representation of Midhurst until the 1430s. Thereafter, an increasing number of outsiders were elected. Initially, these outsiders were drawn from elsewhere in the county: Fenningham (1432) from East Grinstead, Fust (1433) from nearby Chichester and Gynnour (1447) from West Firle. The most marked change in the borough’s representation occurred in the late 1440s. Although one of the MPs of February 1449, Bartelot, lived in west Sussex, as did Hiberden, who sat in 1460, many of the others elected before the end of the reign originated from much further away. They included Bellingham from Westmorland, Molyneux and his friend Urswyk from Lancashire, Huls from Cheshire, Leventhorpe from Yorkshire, Baldwyn from Buckinghamshire, and Beauley from London. In fact, in the five Parliaments from 1449 to 1460 for which returns survive, only three of the MPs identified were of Sussex origin.

Just two of Midhurst’s MPs in Henry V’s reign have been identified as attorneys, and they took only two of the available seats. The Commons 1386-1421, i. 661-2. By contrast under his successor the borough returned several men trained in the law. Fenningham, an attorney in the court of common pleas, served many clients drawn from the clergy, gentry and townspeople of Sussex, and Gynnour, a member of Middle Temple, was similarly engaged in the King’s bench. The latter, employed as under sheriff of Sussex at the time that his superior conducted elections in 1447, may well have certified his own return. Significantly, Gynnour was accompanied to the Parliament at Bury St. Edmunds by another member of the legal fraternity, Molyneux of Gray’s Inn. It cannot have been purely coincidental that two of the other MPs, Urswyk (February 1449) and Baldwyn (1453), also belonged to that same inn of court. Elected for Midhurst near the start of their careers, Baldwyn and Urswyk rose to prominence in their profession: the former as an apprentice-at-law for the duchy of Lancaster and common serjeant of London, the latter as King’s attorney in the county palatine of Lancaster, recorder of London and ultimately chief baron of the Exchequer. Naturally, they were appointed j.p.s in the years following their parliamentary service for Midhurst. As members of the quorum in Bucks. (Baldwyn), and Essex and several other counties (Urswyk). The more obscure Beauley, later described as legis peritus, bequeathed his law-books to a son who joined New Inn. The only one of the group of outsiders to make a mark before his election to Parliament for this borough was Huls, who had earlier been sheriff in Caernarvon, and a royal commissioner in North Wales; the fact that in the course of his Parliament of 1453-4, in which he was technically representing a Sussex borough, he was appointed to administrative duties in Wales says a good deal about how far he was divorced from the constituency which returned him.

How each of these strangers came to be elected for Midhurst requires explanation. In some cases the patronage of magnates may be credibly suspected to have lain behind their successful candidacy. For instance, members of Bartelot’s family were household retainers of William, earl of Arundel, seated not far away at Arundel, and Bellingham is known to have been an esquire in that earl’s service; and although Leventhorpe perhaps first came to the notice of the burgesses of Midhurst through his connexion with Sir John Bohun’s widow, he was also closely linked to the Mowbray dukes of Norfolk, who made him one of the officials on their widespread estates in the county.

If indeed external influence was brought to bear on the elections for Midhurst, the surviving returns provide no proof of it. For the most part the names of those elected were merely listed with the MPs for the other Sussex boroughs on a schedule accompanying the shire indenture to Chancery; only three electoral indentures specifically for Midhurst survive from the fifteenth century. One, in 1453, was drawn up between the sheriff of Surrey and Sussex on the one part and the two constables of Midhurst on the other, simply testifying that the constables, together with the ‘community of the borough’, had elected Baldwyn and Huls. The next, an indenture made between the sheriff and four named burgesses ‘and many other men of Midhurst’, was curiously dated at Chichester in the full county court meeting on 28 Aug. 1460. Uniquely, indentures for all the other Sussex boroughs (with the exception of the city of Chichester) bore the same date and purported to record elections held at the same venue, and since at least 12 of the 16 men returned in this way were strangers to the constituencies they represented it may be strongly suspected that external influences had been brought into play in the disrupted political circumstances following the Yorkist victory at Northampton seven weeks earlier. The third indenture for Midhurst to survive related to the Parliament of 1472 and was drawn up in a more conventional fashion, between the sheriff and 12 named burgesses. C219/16/2, 6; 17/2.