Appleby

In a petition to the Parliament of January 1380 the burgesses of Appleby painted a bleak picture of decline brought about by the visitations of plague and the economic competition of unchartered markets. At the end of that decade this picture was made bleaker by the devastation wreaked by the Scots in the aftermath of their victory at the battle of Otterburn in August 1388. The Commons 1386-1421, i. 678-9. The process of recovery from such brutal setbacks was a slow one, hampered by the general poverty of the borough’s hinterland. On visiting Westmorland in 1539 John Leland, the Tudor antiquary, drew an unfavourable comparison between Kendal, the ‘one good market town’ in the county, and Appleby, which, although the ‘Shire towne’, was ‘but a poore village’ with a ruined castle. J. Leland, Itin. ed. Toulmin Smith, v. 46-47. In these circumstances it is not surprising that the burgesses should have had difficulty in raising the annual fee farm due to the Crown, fixed in better times at 20 marks. Indeed, in an earlier period – from 1312 to 1331 – the borough had been taken into royal hands because the fee farm was seriously in arrears, and the petition of 1380 had argued, probably truthfully, that the farm was insupportable. It was not, however, until 1432 that it was reduced to only two marks, presumably after irrecoverable arrears had built up. CChR, iv. 224; SC8/90/4470; CIMisc. iv. 125; CFR, xvi. 88.

The loss of nearly all the borough’s medieval archives – only its charters and a few deeds relating to chantry property survive – means little is known of either the form or personnel of the borough’s government. Cumbria RO, Kendal, Appleby bor. mss, WSMB/A/1, 2/12. From at least the mid-thirteenth century it was governed by a mayor and two bailiffs. The confirmation of its charters in 1286 contained the additional privilege that the fee farm should be paid into the Exchequer by these bailiffs rather than the sheriff of Westmorland as hitherto. J. Nicolson and R. Burn, Westmld. and Cumb. i. 311. Unfortunately, the identity of the three borough officials is rarely known for the fifteenth century. Even so, it is clear that the officers were not rotated annually, suggesting that there was little competition for election. Between 1414 and 1461 the names of only four of Appleby’s mayors are known: John Mauchell (c.1414-16, c. 1420-5); William Thornburgh (1419); Robert Warcop (1444); and John Wharton (1450): C219/11/5-7; 12/3-6; 13/1, 3; Later Recs. N. Westmld. ed. Curwen, 53, 58. Given the lack of resident burgesses among the borough’s MPs, it is significant that all four of these mayors came from neighbouring gentry families with interests in the borough. This lack of competition is equally, if not more, apparent in respect of the borough’s parliamentary elections.

No account of the representation of Appleby can be entirely satisfactory due to both the gaps in the returns and the difficulties in identifying several of its MPs. The returns are more incomplete than they are for most constituencies: the MPs are known for only 16 of the 22 Parliaments of Henry VI’s reign. The losses are particularly marked from 1439: of the 11 Parliaments that met from then until 1460 the Appleby MPs are unknown for five. These lacunae notwithstanding, it is clear that men were rarely elected to represent the borough more than once. The 32 known seats were filled by as many as 30 different individuals. The following statistics are based on the assumptions that the same man (Thomas Chamber II) represented the borough in the Parls. of 1426 and 1455; that John Helton was MP for both Appleby and Carlisle in 1397 (Jan.), for Carlisle in 1399 and 1427, and for Appleby in 1411 and 1425; and that Cerf did not accept election in 1435 (and can therefore be discounted). Thus within the period under review here only two men – Robert Lambton and Thomas Chamber II, and the second is a slightly doubtful case – represented the borough twice, and none more often. Considering parliamentary careers as a whole, this picture of the rarity of MPs returned more than once is only slightly modified. Nicholas Stanshawe served the borough in four Parliaments, the last of which was that of 1422; John Helton was returned for the borough to three Parliaments (and even he, like Chamber, is a slightly doubtful case); and Thomas Pety to two.

Strangely, given the prominence of outsiders among the borough’s MPs, only four of the 30 sat for other constituencies, that is, Helton and Pety for Carlisle and John Musgrave and John Burgh for Westmorland. This is a marked departure from the pattern prevailing in the period 1386-1421. Then, while most of the 29 MPs represented the borough only once, there was a significant overlap between the representation of county and borough. Six of the 29 represented Westmorland, one of them, Robert Crackenthorpe*, doing so on at least four occasions. This suggests that, as a group, the MPs of Henry VI’s reign were either of lesser status or less closely connected with Westmorland than those of the earlier period.

Another point of difference between the two groups lies in the matter of parliamentary experience. The 29 MPs of 1386-1421 sat in an average of two Parliaments each for Appleby and slightly more if returns for other constituencies are included; the 30 MPs of Henry VI’s reign averaged, even with the inclusion of other constituencies, less than two Parliaments each. In other words, continuity of representation, although hardly marked in the earlier period, became even less so under Henry VI. On only once occasion – Stanshawe in 1422 – did the borough return one of those who had represented it in the immediately preceding assembly, and, even more strikingly, of the 32 known seats as few as six were filled by men who already had parliamentary experience. Thus, in as many as ten of these 16 Parliaments, Appleby was represented by two novices, compared with seven out of 20 in the earlier period; and on no occasion was it represented by two experienced MPs when, in the earlier period, two such MPs were elected to six.

One reason for this discontinuity was the near-total failure of the leading men of the borough, admittedly a small group in view of Appleby’s poverty, to shoulder the burden of parliamentary representation. Only one of those known to have held office in the borough in Henry VI’s reign represented it in Parliament, namely Robert Roche, who was the borough’s bailiff when elected in 1425. It is unlikely that this stark statistic is simply a function of the considerable gaps in the list of officers. The 12 lists of attestors to Appleby’s parliamentary elections between 1414 and 1442 name a total of 52 participants, all presumably burgesses. Several of these 52 appear repeatedly, implying the existence of a small elite that might have been expected to take a significant share of the borough’s seats; yet, of the 52, only two – Robert Overdo† (MP in 1402), and Roche – are recorded among its MPs. Appleby’s leading residents had clearly abandoned their representative responsibilities.

In the early history of the borough’s representation this had not been the case. Between 1295 and 1379 Appleby was represented on at least 12 occasions by members of the Goldington family; and the Overdos, who appear to have inherited the Goldington property, filled 16 seats from 1368 to 1402. In 1450 William Overdo held ‘Goldyngton Hall’: Later Recs. N. Westmld. 58. None the less, local gentry are found among the borough’s MPs even in the early 14th century. To cite the most notable example, the gentry family of Sandford took 14 of Appleby’s seats in the brief period between 1332 and 1351: The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 298-300; S.J.P. Howarth, ‘King, Government and Community in Cumb. and Westmld. c.1200-c.1400’ (Liverpool Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1988), 298-301. Interestingly, the latter family survived into the period under review here. Four members of it appear among the attestors and one, Richard Overdo, was bailiff in the early 1420s, yet they abandoned their tradition of representation in 1402.

The near total retreat of the borough elite from representation left vacancies to be filled, and many of these were taken by lawyers with varying degrees of connexion with Appleby. This was not a new trend: at least ten of the 29 MPs of 1386-1421 were men of law compared with ten of the 30 from 1422 to 1460. Anderby, Burgh, Carlisle, Helton, Ingleton, Lambton, Leybourne, Pety, Stafford, Stanshawe. The figure is 11 of 30 if Cerf is included as the MP of 1435. I have assumed here that Forster was the local gentleman of Drybeck near Appleby rather than his namesake of L. Inn. Between the elections of two of these lawyers, Robert Crackenthorpe to the Parliament of 1414 (Nov.) and John Stafford to that of 1432, an interesting phenomenon, more typical of a later period of representative history, is observable, namely a close (albeit passing) connexion between the membership of a particular inn of Court and the representation of a borough. In Appleby’s case the inn was Lincoln’s Inn. Men of that inn took, in the persons of William Anderby, Robert Crackenthorpe, Thomas Manningham†, Thomas Pety, John Stafford and Nicholas Stanshawe, ten of the borough’s 30 known seats from 1414 to 1432, and two of them were elected together to the 1427 Parliament. This was not the result of the admittance to that inn of a group of Westmorland men, for only Crackenthorpe and Pety were local to the county. It must, therefore, be assumed that these two were responsible for recommending their colleagues at the inn to the electors of Appleby. The influential Crackenthorpe was probably the driving force. Stanshawe, from distant Gloucestershire, was returned by Appleby four times between 1420 and 1422, and, at the time of his last three elections, Crackenthorpe, as deputy sheriff of Westmorland, was well placed to secure the election of his friends. Crackenthorpe’s influence supports the identification of Forster, returned with Stanshawe in 1422, as the L. Inn man, but, on balance, he is more likely to have been a gentleman local to Appleby. It is also worth observing that Crackenthorpe was elected for Westmorland when Manningham and Anderby were returned for Appleby (respectively in 1416 and 1427). His murder in 1438 is the probable reason for the breaking of the representative link between Lincoln’s Inn and the borough.

None the less, Crackenthorpe’s patronage of the men of his inn only partly explains the particular prominence of lawyers among the borough’s MPs in the 1420s and 1430s. Other lawyers, with no known connexion with Lincoln’s Inn, were also returned, recruited by the borough because of their local associations. The two lawyers elected together in 1425 – Roche, then serving as one of the borough’s bailiffs, and Helton – lived in the immediate neighbourhood of Appleby; Robert Leybourne, elected in 1429, was a younger son from a Westmorland knightly family; and the MP of 1431, Burgh, who was probably from Kendal, was the filacer responsible for cases from the county in the court of common pleas. More intriguing are the elections of Robert Lambton, from a prominent gentry family in County Durham, in 1432 and 1435.These can be explained neither by neighbourhood nor membership of Lincoln’s Inn (he was of Furnival’s Inn, an inn of Chancery), and it is most likely that he was elected as a servant of Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland. Later elections certainly suggest that that great family exerted some influence over the borough’s representation.

Lambton’s election in 1432 came at a time of particular significance for the borough. On 28 May, 16 days after the opening of Parliament, by a royal grant to Thomas Pety and William Vincent, Appleby’s annual fee farm was effectively reduced from 20 marks to two marks on the grounds that the town was ‘laid waste and destroyed’. CFR, xvi. 88. There is no record of any petition presented by the burgesses to this Parliament and, in any event, no such petition would have elicited so swift a response. Yet it is possible that the two MPs – Lambton, son of the sitting MP for Northumberland as well as an associate of the Percys, and Stafford, a former governor of Lincoln’s Inn – had lobbied for the concession at the start of the assembly. It may, therefore, be that the electors of Appleby had exerted themselves to find effective representation more actively than they were wont to do.

Between 1422 and 1437 lawyers like Lambton and Stafford filled as many as ten of the borough’s 20 seats. This figure rises to 12 if Forster was the L. Inn man and Cerf rather than Gower was the MP in 1435. In this period they shared representation with local gentry. Three of these – Leybourne (who was also a lawyer), Musgrave and Threlkeld – were younger sons of the leading gentry families of Westmorland; four others (Thornburgh, Osmundlaw and the two Whartons) came from families of the second rank of the county’s gentry; and three more (Chamber, Forster and Roche) from the parish gentry. Why these particular men came to be elected can only be a matter of speculation. In two elections, however, the influence of one of the county’s leading gentry can be discerned. When Sir Richard Musgrave*, who lived at Hartley, some ten miles to the south-east of Appleby, was elected for the county to the Parliament of 1433, his brother-in-law, Thornburgh, and putative nephew, Roland Wharton, were returned for the borough. Four years later Appleby elected his younger brother, John, and another probable nephew, Thomas Wharton.

In the 1440s a new type of MP emerged largely to replace lawyers, who took only two of 12 seats between 1442 and 1455, and local gentry, who similarly took only two seats. The lawyers were Ingleton and Carlisle; the local gentry, Chamber and Watyr. These new MPs are difficult to categorize. They, some of them very obscure, appear to have been elected because of a connexion with one of the great baronial families of Neville, in both its senior and junior branches, and Percy. It is hard to be dogmatic about this because those returned were by no means prominent members of those great retinues. For some, however, the connexion is quite clear. Robert Kelsy, elected in 1447, was a servant of Robert Neville, bishop of Durham, and was later to serve as steward of the bishop’s household; and William Overton, elected to the Parliament of 1449 (Nov.), was employed by Ralph Neville, earl of Westmorland, for whom he later acted as receiver-general. For others, the connexion has to be inferred, but the inference is given strength by the absence of any other possible explanations for their elections. Robert Halley, a Yorkshireman elected to the Parliament that met in the wake of the victory of the duke of York and the Nevilles at the first battle of St. Albans, was, a few years later, a mainpernor for Thomas Haryngton I*, a leading servant of Richard Neville, earl of Salisbury. Robert Manston, MP in 1450, was from a Yorkshire family very closely connected with the Gascoignes of Harewood, who, in turn, were close to the Percys. Similar indirect connexions can be made between John Blackburn, MP in the Parliament of 1449 (Nov.), and the Percys and between Thomas Motte, MP in 1453, and the Nevilles. The apparent influence of the Percys and Nevilles in the Appleby elections in the 1440s and 1450s corresponds with what happened in the nearby city of Carlisle, with the difference that men of greater substance were elected there. It is difficult to know what to deduce from this, although it is curious that these great families should have intervened in elections simply to secure men of little account who, in some cases, appear to have been connected with them only at a tangent.

A curious feature of Appleby’s representation in the Lancastrian period, both before and after 1422, is the comparative absence of MPs who can be unequivocally described as servants of the borough’s natural patrons, the Cliffords, lords of the castle and manor of Appleby. In Henry VI’s reign, only Malett and the two Whartons can be even tentatively described as members of their affinity. There are two possible reasons for this apparent under-representation. The first is only a partial one, namely that it reflects the minority of Thomas, Lord Clifford, who was only about seven when his father was killed at the siege of Meaux in 1421, and the loss of returns for three of the Parliaments that met in the period of his majority. The second is that the loss of the Clifford archives has concealed associations between the family and other of the borough’s MPs. It may be significant here that Thomas Wharton was elected to the first Parliament to which Clifford was summoned as a peer, and there is certainly an argument for the view that the lack of Clifford influence over the borough’s representation is more apparent than real. On the other hand, it is clear that, if Lord Thomas did influence the borough’s elections between 1437 and his death at the battle of St. Albans in 1455, his influence did not exclude that of the Percys and Nevilles.

As already remarked, only one of the Appleby MPs is known to have held office in the borough, yet although, as a group, the borough’s MPs were fairly insignificant, particularly in the second part of Henry VI’s reign, the high proportion of lawyers among them ensured that several held offices elsewhere. As many as eight were j.p.s at some point in their careers, although only three (Helton, Thornburgh and Leybourne) were nominated in Westmorland. In addition, Leybourne was appointed in Cumb., Anderby in Lincs. (Lindsey), Kelsy in the bpric. of Durham, Stafford in Yorks. (W. Riding), Carlisle in Lancs. and Ingleton in both Northants. and Bucks. The figure is nine if Cerf, a j.p., like Anderby, in Lindsey, was the MP of 1435. Significantly, however, all were named to the bench after they had represented Appleby, although Helton was a serving j.p. on his third and final election. Three of the MPs were escheators – Ingleton in the joint bailiwick of Northamptonshire and Rutland, Kelsy in Northumberland and Thornburgh in Westmorland – but again all officiated only after they had represented the borough. Cerf, escheator in Northumb., held the office before his possible election. Lambton, Overton and Ingleton held office in customs administration, the first two in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and Ingleton in London and Kingston-upon-Hull, but, once more, they were all appointed after they had represented Appleby. This shows that the lawyers elected for the borough were generally at the beginning of their careers.

The only surviving evidence of the electoral process is the indentures of return, and these are difficult to interpret. Least revealing of that process are the five returns –1447, 1449 (Nov.), 1450, 1453 and 1455 – that name Appleby’s MPs only in the endorsement of the electoral writ, and only slightly more so are those which name both the county and borough MPs but make no distinction between the county and borough attestors. These imply not only that the borough election was made at the same time and in the same forum, namely the county court, as the shire election, but that the same group of electors was responsible for both elections. The earliest indenture, for example, that for the Parliament of 1407, had named 24 ‘electores militum et burgensium’. C219/10/4. There can, however, be no doubt that two bodies of electors were involved, for other indentures make an explicit distinction between those responsible for attesting the county election and the quite different group that elected the borough MPs. In these a list of the county attestors is followed by a new list, generally headed by the mayor and two bailiffs of Appleby, and it is made clear that two separate elections had been held. This practice of returning what was in effect a separate indenture for the borough drafted on to that for the county was employed in all the surviving Westmorland returns from the Parliament of 1414 (Nov.) to that of 1425 inclusive and from 1435 to 1442 inclusive. Of these 12 lists of borough attestors, the longest, that of 1415, includes 21 names and the shortest, that of 1425, has only the three names of the mayor and bailiffs.

Although even these indentures imply that the Appleby election was made with the Westmorland one in the county court, there can be no doubt, on an analogy with the better documented electoral practice of other boroughs, that this was not the case. This raises the question of how the borough attestors were identified to the compiler of the joint return. If it is assumed that the borough elections always took place either before or on the same day as the county election then it would feasible to characterize the borough attestors named in the indenture as a deputation to the county court formally to convey the result of the borough election to the deputy sheriff, the officer responsible for conducting the county election. Yet there can have been no ready assumption that borough election would never be made after the day of the county election, and it is much more likely that the names of the borough attestors have been abstracted by the compiler of the indenture from the document by which the result of the borough election had been notified to the deputy sheriff. This document, the sort of separate indenture that survives for other boroughs, was then discarded and a combined return made to Chancery. Such a hypothesis is impossible to prove, but one indenture presents features that can be cited in its support. In the indenture of 4 Sept. 1415 the names of the 21 borough attestors, headed by the mayor and bailiffs, appear to have been added in a lengthy blank left after the indenture was originally drafted. C219/11/6. The amendments to the return for the previous Parl. are not so easy to interpret. In the original draft of the indenture of 16 Oct. 1414 blanks have been left for the names of the borough’s bailiffs and its MPs with the mayor and the other borough attestors as part of the original draft: C219/11/5. This suggests that the compiler committed himself to a list of borough attestors when the result of the borough election was not yet known. When he received that information, in a form which also included the names of the bailiffs, he amended his draft accordingly. As one of the bailiffs was William Dent, he interlineated ‘junior’ by the name of another William Dent who is named towards the end of the list of attestors.

Those returns in which the names of Appleby’s MPs have been added in a gap originally left in the county indenture provide further support for the notion that they were sometimes not known until after the indenture had been drafted. In the indenture for the Parliament of 1414 (Nov.), for example, the names of the burgesses were added in such a gap with not enough room left for the surname of the second MP, ‘Birkrig’, which had to be added as an interlineation; and in the indenture for the Parliament of 1421 (Dec.) the names of the MPs – Stanshawe and John Booth† – were added in a space that was too wide. C219/11/5; 12/6. In other indentures it is less obvious that the names of the borough’s MPs are later additions, but contrasts in ink and hand suggest that they were in those for the assemblies of 1421 (May), 1427, 1431 and 1442.

None the less, the attribution of amendments in the returns to a delay in holding the borough election, does not explain all the features of and irregularities in the indentures. In the indenture of 1425 the name of one of the MPs, Robert Roche, who is also named in the indenture as one of the bailiffs, has been written over an erasure in a different hand and ink from the rest of the document; ‘Geoffrey Threlkeld’ has been added over the erasure of a slightly shorter name in the 1429 indenture; and in that of 1432 the Christian name of John Stafford has been added over erasures on both indenture and dorse of writ. C219/13/3; 14/1, 3.

Later the electoral pressures that brought about the setting aside of an earlier election, as appears to have happened in 1425 and 1429, intensified, as clearly exemplified in the indentures for the period immediately after that under review here. In the 1467 return the gap left in the original draft of the indenture for the names of Appleby’s MPs was never filled in. The names of the MPs were added only to the dorse of the writ. This raises the possibility that the addition was made not in the office of the deputy sheriff but only after the return had been sent into Chancery. C219/17/1. The identity of the MPs elected to the next Parliament for which returns survive, that of 1472, also suggests a nomination made centrally rather than locally, for the two MPs were Sir John Scott† of Brabourne (Kent), who had recently surrendered office as controller of the royal household but remained high in the King’s favour, and Peter Curteys† of Leicester, clerk of the great wardrobe and Appleby’s MP in 1467. The next surviving indenture, that for the 1478 Parliament, reveals another curiosity, in that it names two sets of Appleby MPs. The dorse of the writ identifies them as two yeoman of the Crown, Charles Nowell† and Peter Wrayton†, whose names have been written over an erasure. Yet, later in the same endorsement, the MPs are named as Roland Thornburgh† and Alexander Radcliffe†. It is probable that the original election of the latter two, both of whom had local connections, had been set aside in favour of two royal servants, and it is not unlikely that the return was amended after it had arrived in Chancery. C219/17/3. It is hard to resist the conclusion that in the 1460s all pretence of a meaningful process of local election in Appleby had been set aside, and that the amendments in the returns for Henry VI’s reign are early intimations of this later abandonment.

There can be no doubt that during the fifteenth century Appleby progressively surrendered an ever greater degree of its electoral independence, first to a coterie of Lincoln’s Inn lawyers and local gentry, then, after the end of the period under review here, to royal servants with no connexions with either the borough or county. The pattern changed again in the early sixteenth century. If Clifford influence was less apparent than might have been expected in the fifteenth century, this was not the case later. In the early Tudor period the borough’s MPs were predominantly their nominees. The Commons 1509-58, i. 216.