Commons 1422-1461

One of the most important cities in late medieval England, Norwich was a centre for regional commerce, the seat of an episcopal see, an administrative base for the sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk and the venue for elections to Parliament of Norfolk’s knights of the shire. Its walls enclosed nearly a square mile in area, making it topographically nearly as large as London, although its population was about a quarter of that of the capital. There were some 6,000 people living there in 1400 – about 25 per cent of the pre-Black Death figure – but this number grew during the fifteenth century.

Comprising just a single parish and established as a parliamentary borough before the end of the thirteenth century, Great Yarmouth lay 20 miles east of Norwich at the mouth of the river Yare. An important fortified town and fishing port since the early Middle Ages, its history after the mid fourteenth century is one of decline, even if it remained a major centre for herring fishing. By contrast, it was a flourishing port and one of the wealthiest towns in the kingdom in the early 1300s, and it may have had a population of over 4,500 on the eve of the Black Death.

Founded by the bishop of Norwich at the end of the eleventh century, Bishop’s Lynn became a borough in the reign of King John. By the late fourteenth century, when it may have had more than 4,500 inhabitants, it was significantly larger than Great Yarmouth, Southampton and Kingston-upon-Hull, although its population could have dropped sharply in the following decades. An important medieval port, Lynn served as an entry point for imported goods destined for its hinterland of Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire and the Midlands.

Represented by at least 23 men in the Parliaments of Henry VI’s reign, Norfolk was one of the most populated and developed counties of late medieval England. Arable farming was the pre-eminent agricultural activity in its eastern and most heavily settled part, while in the west sheep rearing was at least as important as grain production. Landownership in west Norfolk was less widely based than in the east, where the existence of large areas of heavily divided lordship and a substantial population of free and semi-free men made seigneurial control harder to exercise. B.M.S.

Among the English shires the county of Middlesex was something of an oddity. Tied in administrative terms to the city of London, it possessed few other urban communities of any significance, and there were no parliamentary boroughs within its boundaries. The greatest resident magnate in the county was the King himself, whose government was by the fifteenth century permanently settled at Westminster. The county’s leading landowners were in their majority ecclesiastical dignitaries and institutions. Apart from the shire’s own religious houses (the great Benedictine abbey of St.

As a direct consequence of its growing political and financial prestige and the prominence of its citizens and institutions, fifteenth-century London frequently found itself at the centre of national events. The reign of Henry VI saw London drawn into the increasingly polarized dispute between Lancaster and York, and was the scene of some of the key events of the period, including Cade’s revolt and the anti-alien violence of the mid 1450s.

The late-medieval history of Lincoln, once a great centre of the cloth trade, is one of decline. In the records of central government the city, ‘appears with depressing regularity as one of the most necessitous of all the urban communities of England’. A.R. Bridbury, ‘English Provincial Towns’, Econ. HR, n.s., xxxiv. 8. The archaeological evidence does not entirely support a picture of decay, but there are indications enough that the desperate plight, outlined in the petitions presented by the city to the Crown for financial relief, was exaggeration not fabrication.

The late medieval period was one of decline for the once-thriving port of Grimsby, which, in the fifteenth century, was ‘a small town growing poorer’. E. Gillett, Grimsby, 66. The population appears to have fallen from about 2,000 in the late thirteenth century to less than half that figure 200 years later. S.H. Rigby, Med. Grimsby, 126-31. By the 1450s, if not before, the burgesses were finding difficulty in raising the fee farm of £50 p.a.

Lincolnshire, at nearly 1,700,000 acres, is the second largest of England’s ancient counties, ranking between its much larger neighbour Yorkshire and the slightly smaller Devon. Despite its size, it has a certain geographical integrity. To the east and north it is bounded by the North Sea and the river Humber; to the west by the river Trent (with the inhospitable Isle of Axholme, in the county’s north-west, the only part of it lying to the west of that river); and to the south by the river Welland and a large area of fenland.

By the fifteenth century Leicester had passed beyond the peak of its medieval prosperity. Rated as the eighth richest borough in England in the tax assessments of 1269, it had declined to 17th by the time of the poll tax of 1377. The Commons 1386-1421, i. 474. None the less, economically and administratively, it remained an important place. Its castle was the administrative centre of the duchy of Lancaster honour of Leicester, and this connexion with the duchy explains why, twice in the period under review here, Parliament met in the town.