At the end of 1425, just three years into the reign of the infant Henry VI, the English polity, such as it was, was in turmoil. Although arrangements for the conduct of government during the King’s minority had been agreed shortly after Henry V’s death in 1422, these were now called into question by an acrimonious quarrel between the protector of England, the boy-king’s uncle, Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, and the chancellor of England, Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester.

Each man had his own ideas of how the king’s affairs should be managed in his name, although, it is fair to say with the benefit of hindsight, Duke Humphrey perhaps emerges from the affair with less credit. The decision of assembling Parliament at Leicester (very much in the heartland of Lancastrian power in England) was taken in view of the armed might that the two squabbling magnates brought to bear: Bishop Beaufort in his manor at Southwark, and Humphrey in the streets of London itself. In the autumn of 1425, their enmity had found an outlet in an actual armed fight on London bridge, and it was thus deemed necessary for Humphrey’s elder brother, John, duke of Bedford, to return from France, where he otherwise served as regent, and to preside over Parliament.

The Parliament was convened in something of a hurry: just 42 days were to elapse between its summons and assembly (the fourteenth-century tract, the Modus Tenendi Parliamentum stipulated a minimum of 40 days to allow the northern counties whose shire courts met in six-week intervals to conduct their elections). Conversely, the Commons rather dragged their feet in choosing their Speaker, at nine days taking rather longer than the two days this process normally demanded.

But what (according to a chronicler) gave the Parliament its name, were the armed retinues that the various lords brought to the assembly. The administration thus harked back to the fourteenth century, when it had been common practice for a proclamation to be made in Westminster Hall at the beginning of each Parliament, prohibiting the wearing of swords and other weapons. Also prohibited was the playing of silly games, as it had apparently become common practice to pull men’s hoods off their shoulders. Now, in 1426, the prohibition of bearing arms was reiterated. According to a London chronicler, ‘every man was warned and it was cried throughout the town that they should leave their weapons in their inns, that is to say their swords and shields, bows and arrows’.

Yet, the lords’ men were not cowed: ‘And then the people took great bats on their shoulders, and so they went. And the next day they were charged that they should leave their bats at their inns, and then they took great stones in their bosoms and their sleeves, and so went to the parliament with their lords.’ And so, the chronicler concluded, ‘some men called this Parliament the “Parliament of bats”.

In the event, it seems, it proved possible to get the session under way, and for Humphrey and Beaufort to plead their respective cases. The pleadings have come down to us in the form in which the clerk of the Parliament recorded them. There has to be some suspicion that he was a partisan of Beaufort’s, for much of what Duke Humphrey put forward sounds little short of petty to the modern observer. Among the stories he dredged up was one dating back to Henry V’s lifetime, when he had been accommodated in the palace of Westminster’s Green Chamber, and by virtue of the barking of a spaniel a man had been discovered hiding behind a wall hanging. This man had allegedly been induced by Bishop Beaufort to murder him, and for his pains was drowned in the Thames.

Beaufort for his part kept his statements dignified, and above all pointed to his ecclesiastical dignity in his defence. In the event, Bishop Beaufort was dismissed as chancellor, but at long last granted permission to accept the papal offer of a cardinal’s hat. He and duke Humphrey were made to seal their reconciliation with a formal handshake.

With that, the first session of a parliament was drawn to a close and the Lords and Commons were dispatched to their homes for Easter. The bulk of the assembly’s business was probably transacted in the month that followed their return on 29 April, a period during which the young king (still only four years old) was knighted by his uncle, the duke of Bedford.  

H.W.K.  

Further Reading:

R.A. Griffiths, The Reign of King Henry VI (London: Benn, 1981), 73-81

The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England (16 Vols., Woodbridge: Boydell, 2010), x. 276-317

Peter starts with the received wisdom that, in the late 1450s, Coventry was militantly Lancastrian. Such a view had the endorsement of the greatest authority on the reign of Henry VI, Ralph Griffiths (who, incidentally, supervised Peter’s thesis on the Kentish gentry), who described its citizens as ‘fiercely loyal to the Lancastrians’ (R.A. Griffiths, The Reign of Henry VI, pp. 777-8). This conclusion has a persuasive context, which Peter sets out.  The city had close and historic ties with the Crown. The royal earldom of Chester, part of the endowment of the heir to the throne, was overlord of its southern half; and, when Crown and duchy of Lancaster were united on Henry IV’s accession in 1399, its proximity to the great duchy castle of Kenilworth brought it closer to the centre of the political nation.  In the late 1450s the increasing power of Queen Margaret, who held Kenilworth as part of her dower, brought these connexions into the most intense political focus. The court spent extended periods there, and the notorious Parliament of November 1459, which confiscated the lands of the Yorkist lords, was convened in the city’s Benedictine priory.  

This was the well-established picture Peter set out to re-examine. A small doubt had already been raised by Michael Hicks, who, in 2010, pointed out that the court’s residence in the city in the late 1450s was more intermittent than is generally supposed (M. Hicks, The Wars of the Roses, 126).  Peter took this doubt very much further.  Indeed, he entirely subverted the argument.  In his formulation the court’s periodic sojourns there, even if less prolonged than was once thought, eroded rather than strengthened the city’s ties with the house of Lancaster. He describes the tensions evident from the outset.  On 11 October 1456, during a great council in the city, there was ‘a gret affray’ between the followers of Henry Beaufort, duke of Somerset, and the city’s watchmen in which two or three of the citizens were killed. By 1460 there are clear signs that the court had become an unwelcome visitor. Royal signet letters to the city authorities on 8 February of that year, cited reports that ‘diuers of thinhabitantes of oure Cite of Couentre haue …. vsed and had right vnfittyng langage ayenst oure estate and personne’ and in favour of the recently-attainted Yorkist lords, a curious circumstance in a city of unquestioned loyalty.  

The next evidence Peter cites is yet starker. On 17 February 1461, in signet letters in the name of the young prince of Wales and dated at St. Albans, where the Lancastrians had just defeated the  leading Yorkist lord, Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, the mayor and aldermen were peremptorily ordered to be ‘assystent, helping and faverable’ to three local Lancastrian loyalists, the King’s carver, Sir Edmund Mountfort, Sir Henry Everingham of Withybrook, only a few miles from the city, and William Elton, MP for the city in 1453. This reads, Peter suggests, as a desperate attempt to recall the city to its earlier Lancastrian allegiance. If so, it failed. When it was read before the ‘Comyns’ in St. Mary’s Hall, they were so ‘meved’ against its bearer, a priest in Everingham’s service, that they would, but for the mayor’s intervention, ‘A smytt of the prestes hed’.  Soon after, according to one chronicle, its erstwhile resident, Queen Margaret, singled out the city for punishment.  In this context, it is not surprising that the city authorities soon came to share the Yorkist sympathies of the ‘Comyns’. They provided £100 for soldiers to accompany Edward, earl of March, to London in the wake of Neville’s defeat at St. Albans, and a further £80 for 100 men to go with him to what proved to be the decisive battle of Towton.

To explain this support for the Yorkist cause in a city with long-standing Lancastrian connexions, Peter pointed not only to the tensions inherent in the court’s presence but also to influence of the earl of Warwick, whose castle of Warwick lay only ten miles away. It is instructive here that, in the crisis of 1469-71, the city appears to have sided, albeit rather equivocally, with the earl when he rose against Edward IV. Peter shows that, in the campaign of the spring of 1471 during which the earl met his death at the battle of Barnet, Coventry provided him with at least 40 soldiers and was fined by the restored Edward IV for its temerity in doing so. He might also have cited other evidence for the city’s support for the earl. Two of its leading citizens, Richard Braytoft, a former MP, and Robert Onley, were accused of complicity in the execution at Gosford Green, just outside the city, of the King’s father-in-law Earl Rivers, one of the principal victims of Warwick’s rising against Edward IV (TNA, KB27/836, rot. 61d). The reception accorded to Everingham’s priest may, therefore, have been an expression of the city’s support not for the Yorkist cause in general but for the earl of Warwick in particular. Even so, one thing is clear: Peter has shown that Coventry was not a Lancastrian stronghold, even in the late 1450s when its ties with the Lancastrian ruling house were, at least to outward appearances, at their closest.

S.J.P.

Further reading

P. Fleming, Coventry and the Wars of the Roses (Dugdale Society Occasional Papers, 2011)

and Late-Medieval Bristol: Time, Space and Power (2024).

The Commons,1422-61, ed. L. Clark, iii. 497-9 (for Braytoft), iv. 235-8 (for Elton), 281-3 (for Everingham), v. 547-56 (for Mountfort).

All long-lived institutions have their antecedents, and the antecedents of Parliament (or, perhaps more accurately put, the origins of the House of Lords) are to be found in the Anglo-Saxon witan which brought the leading men of the realm periodically together with the King for ceremonial, legislative and deliberative purposes.  In its earliest history ‘Parliament’, first used as a technical term in 1236, was a gathering of the same type, an assembly of prominent men, summoned at the will of the King once or twice a year, to deal with matters of state and law. It remained largely in that form for much of the thirteenth century. Occasionally, however, these assemblies were afforced by the summons of a wider grouping.  At first these extended assemblies – the first known dates from 1212 – served as a means by which the King could communicate with men who, although below the ranks of his leading tenants, were of standing in their localities and well-informed about local grievances. 

Had the Crown been able to subsist financially upon its landed and feudal revenues alone, these representatives of the localities, the precursors of the Commons, might have remained, from its point of view, no more than conduits of information and recipients of instruction. The decline in the real value of its traditional revenues and the financial demands of war, however, transformed these local representatives from an occasional to a defining component of Parliament.  Above all else, this was because the levy of taxation came to be understood as depending on their consent. The theoretical principle of consent had been stated in Magna Carta, but that consent was conceived, on the feudal principle, as residing exclusively in the King’s leading subjects, his tenants-in-chief.  But as the thirteenth century progressed this principle gave way to another, namely that consent must also be sought from the lesser tenants as the representatives of the localities.  There was both a theoretical and practical reason for this: on the one hand, there was the influence of the Roman law doctrine, ‘what touches all shall be approved  by all’, cited in the writs that summoned the 1295 Parliament; and, on the other, there was the practical consideration that the efficient collection of a levy on moveable property, the form that tax assumed, depended on some mechanism of local consent.  Hence, from the 1260s, no general tax was levied without the consent of the representatives of local communities specifically summoned for the purpose of giving their consent, and only Parliaments in which the Crown sought no grant of taxation met without these representatives.  The Crown’s increasing need for money meant it was a short step to the Commons becoming an indispensable part of Parliament.  After 1325 no Parliament met without their presence.

None the less, although this right of consent gave the Commons their place in Parliament, it did not give them any meaningful part in the formulation of royal policy.  In so far as that policy was determined in Parliament, it was determined between the King and the Lords, who came to Parliament not through local election, as was the case with the Commons, but by personal writ of summons from the monarch.  Further, the Commons’ right of consent was as much an obligation as it was a privilege.  Since subjects had a duty to support the Crown in the defence of the realm, the Commons had few grounds, even had they sought them, on which to deny royal requests for taxation.  What did, however, remain to them was some scope for negotiation.  To make demands on his subjects’ goods, the Crown had to demonstrate an exceptional need, a need generally arising from the costs of war; and, in making a judgment on the level of taxation warranted by this need, the Commons were drawn into a dialogue with the Crown over matters of policy, at least in so far as those matters  concerned expenditure.  Hence the Crown had to measure its demands to avoid exciting criticism of its government.  The consequences of its failure to do so are exemplified most clearly by the ‘Good Parliament’ of 1376, when the Commons, in seeking to legitimate the extreme step of refusing to grant direct taxation, alleged misgovernance, accusing certain courtiers of misappropriating royal revenue.

Aside from the granting of taxation, the other principal function of the medieval Parliament was legislative.  Even before the early Parliaments lawmaking was theoretically established as consensual between King and subjects, yet, in the reign of Edward I, legislation arose solely out of royal initiative and was drafted by royal counsellors and judges.  As the medieval period progressed, however, the assent of Parliament, first of the Lords and then of the Commons, became an indispensable part of the legislative process.  Here, however, the question was not, as in the case of taxation, simply one of parliamentary assent, it was also one of initiative.  New law came to be initiated not only by the Crown but also by the Commons.  In the early fourteenth century, in what was a natural elaboration of Parliament’s role as the forum for the presentation of petitions of individuals and communities, the Commons began to present petitions in their own name, seeking remedies, not to individual wrongs, but to general administrative, economic and legal problems.  The King’s answers to these petitions became the basis of new law. Even so, it should not be concluded from this important procedural change that Crown conceded its legislative freedom.  Not only could it deny the Commons’ petitions, but, by the simple means of introducing its own bills among the common petitions, it could steer its own legislative program through the Commons.  

By the end of the medieval period, Parliament was, in both structure and function, the same assembly that opposed the Stuarts in the seventeenth century. It bargained with the Crown over taxation, formulated local grievances in such a way as to invite legislative remedy, and, on occasion, most notably in 1376, opposed the royal will. Yet this is not to say that Parliament had yet achieved, or even sought, an independent part in the polity.  The power of the Lords resided not in their place in Parliament, but in the landed wealth of the great nobility.  For the Commons, a favourable answer to their petitions remained a matter of royal grace, yet they were under an obligation to grant taxation as necessity demanded (a necessity largely interpreted by the Crown); and their right of assent to new law was a theoretical rather than a practical restraint on the King’s freedom of legislative action.  Indeed, Parliament amplified, rather than curtailed, royal power, at least when that power was exercised competently.  Not only were the Crown’s financial resources expanded by the system of parliamentary taxation, so too was its legislative force and reach extended by the Commons’ endorsement of the initiatives of a strong monarch, a fact strikingly demonstrated by the legislative break with Rome during the Reformation Parliament of 1529-36. 

S.J.P.

This is a revised version of the article ‘Parliament and politics before 1509’ by Dr Simon Payling, originally posted on historyofparliamentonline.org.

In 1760 Thomas Worsley of Hovingham, a close friend of George III’s favourite, the earl of Bute, penned a letter to his friend and patron insisting on his family’s antiquity. In their possession, he claimed, were ‘authentic documents of coming over with William the Conquerer’. Worsley’s concern to prove that he was no johnny-come-lately had originally been seen when he was appointed to the privy chamber back in the 1730s, but he was still clearly concerned to emphasise his suitability at the time of his appointment as surveyor general of the king’s works (thanks to Bute).

He had nothing to worry about. The Worsleys were an old family, who could trace their ownership of estates in Lancashire to at least the 14th century. Another branch of the family, ultimately settled in Hampshire (and on the Isle of Wight), produced a parliamentary dynasty of their own.

Supporting Thomas Worsley’s assertion of descent from a companion of William the Conqueror were accounts in ‘ancient chronicles’ recording the family’s progenitor as the giant Sir Elias de Workesley, who had followed Robert Curthose, duke of Normandy, on ‘crusade’. The 1533 Visitation of Lancashire referred to this character as Elias, surnamed Gigas on account of his massive proportions, and suggested he was a contemporary of William I.

It took some time for the northern Worsleys to establish themselves but by the 15th century a number of distinguished figures had already emerged. The marriage of Seth Worsley to Margaret Booth linked the family to two archbishops of York, Margaret’s uncles, William Booth (archbishop 1452-64) and Lawrence Booth (1476-80). Their son, William, later became dean of St Paul’s Cathedral and towards the end of his life became caught up in the Perkin Warbeck conspiracy, for which he was sent to the Tower.

William Worsley may have conspired against Henry VII, but by the 16th century other members of the family had managed to establish themselves on the fringes of the Tudor court in the retinue of the earl of Derby and it seems to have been thanks to the 3rd earl (Edward Stanley) that Sir Robert Worsley was returned to Parliament in 1553 as knight of the shire for Lancashire. Nine years earlier, he had been knighted at Leith in recognition of his services in the English army. Worsley’s return in 1553 seems to have been somewhat accidental, only occurring as a result of a by-election after one of the other recently elected members had declared himself too ill to serve. By becoming one of the Lancashire knights of the shire, Worsley was following in the footsteps of his father-in-law, Thurstan Tyldesley, who had been elected to the same seat in 1547.

Sir Robert’s son, another Robert, continued the family tradition of following the Derbys by attaching himself to the retinue of the 4th earl (Henry Stanley). A passionate Protestant, as keeper of the gaol at Salford he had numerous recusant (Catholic) prisoners in his care, whom he tried to persuade away from their faith by organising time dedicated to reading from the Bible. How successful that policy was is uncertain, but he found the burden of his role intolerable and by the end of his life he had lost all of his principal estates in Lancashire. Like his father, he seems to have owed his election to Parliament to his patron, Derby, though in his case he was returned for the Cornish borough of Callington.

The best part of a century passed before another Worsley was returned to the Commons. In the interim, having lost their original estates, the family had relocated to Hovingham, near Malton in North Yorkshire. The manor had been acquired by Sir Robert Worsley in 1563 from Sir Thomas Gerard, and the connection was reinforced by the subsequent marriage of the younger Robert to Gerard’s daughter, Elizabeth. In 1685, it was one of the Hovingham Worsleys, Thomas (great-great-grandson of Robert and Elizabeth), who succeeded in being returned for Parliament, where he proved to be ‘totally inactive’.

Inactive he may have been, but this did not prevent him from making his views clear to the lord lieutenant when he was faced with the ‘Three Questions’, framed to tease out opposition to James II’s policies. In response to them he insisted that he would ‘go free into the House, and give my vote as my judgment and reason shall direct when I hear the debates’. This was not at all the response required by the king’s officials, and he was removed from his local offices. He regained them shortly after at the Revolution but it was not until 1698 that he was re-elected to Parliament, again for Malton. In 1712 he was removed from local office again, this time probably on account of his Whiggery.

The older Thomas lived to see the Hanoverian accession, which he doubtless welcomed. Three years before that his son (another Thomas) had been returned to Parliament as one of the Members for Thirsk, after failed attempts in 1708 and 1710. This Thomas Worsley also seems to have played little or no role in the Commons. This was perhaps ironic, given that his marriage to Mary Frankland linked him directly to Oliver Cromwell. Efforts by his father to secure him a government post through the patronage of the earl of Carlisle came to nothing.

The trio of Thomas Worsleys in Parliament was completed by the election for Orford of the second Thomas’s son in 1761. It was this Thomas Worsley, the friend of Bute, who had been so concerned to prove his family’s antiquity. Although he was to sit first for Orford and then (like his forebear, Robert) for Callington, Parliament was not Thomas’s passion. Rather, his interests lay in equestrianism, collecting and architecture. His true claim to fame was rebuilding the family seat at Hovingham, creating the elegant Georgian house that endures to this day, but his dedication to horseflesh was equally strong and he seems to have looked out for suitable mounts for his contacts, the king among them. Writing to Sir James Lowther, 5th bt. (future earl of Lonsdale) in 1763, he mentioned trying out one of Lowther’s horses in front of the king and queen. They liked the animal, but concluded it was not ‘strong enough to carry [the king’s] weight’. [HMC Lonsdale, 132]

Thomas Worsley died in December 1778 at his London residence in Scotland Yard. [Morning Chronicle, 15 Dec. 1778] Just a few months before, he had been contacted by the duke of Ancaster, the lord great chamberlain, requiring him to see to the repair of the House of Lords, which was reported to be ‘in bad condition’. [PA, LGC/5/1, f. 279] By then, he was probably in no fit state to oversee the work.

This Thomas seems to have been the last member of his family to show much interest in national politics until the 20th century. His eldest son, another Thomas, had died four years before him, leaving the inheritance to a younger son, Edward. In 1838 Edward’s nephew, Sir William Worsley, was created a baronet but his interests appear to have been largely confined to his immediate surroundings in North Yorkshire. The 4th baronet was a talented cricketer, serving as captain of Yorkshire, as well as president of the MCC. It was his son, Sir Marcus Worsley, 5th bt., who finally broke the family duck and returned to Parliament, first as MP for Keighley and latterly for Chelsea. In November 1969 he presented a bill to encourage the preservation of collections of manuscripts by controlling and regulating their export. His other chief preoccupation was as one of the church commissioners.

The late duchess of Kent was Sir Marcus’s younger sister. She continued the family’s long tradition of interest in sport (in her case tennis) and quiet dedication to their locality.

RDEE

Further reading
Estate and Household Accounts of William Worsley, Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral 1479-1497 (Richard III & Yorkist Trust and London Record Society, 2004), ed. H. Kleineke and S. Hovland
VCH Yorkshire North Riding, volume one
Visitation of Lancashire and a part of Cheshire, 1533, ed. William Langton (Chetham Soc. 1876)

In defeating the rebellion of the Percys at the battle of Shrewsbury, Henry IV overcame an existential threat to the infant Lancastrian regime. It was a threat that came upon him suddenly and undeservedly. The rebellion had but one cause, the overweening ambition of the Percys, and no justification, or at least no meaningful one. The best the Percys could offer was Henry’s alleged duplicity in the deposition of Richard II in 1399: they claimed that they had supported him because he had sworn to claim only his great Lancastrian patrimony and not the Crown.  Given their readiness to accept the rewards the new King bestowed upon them (and their belief that even these were not enough), this justification must have been widely perceived as hollow as it was. 

It was these rewards that made the rising so dangerous to Henry IV. Not only did they give the Percys a virtual monopoly of the local exercise of royal authority in their northern heartland, the east march towards Scotland, but also in north Wales, where the earl of Northumberland’s son, Henry Hotspur, was made justiciar.  Hotspur, a renowned soldier with a military career extending back to the late 1370s, repaid the King’s trust by fighting against Glyn Dŵr in the early stages of the Welsh rebellion, and, much more significantly, by defeating an invading Scottish force at Homildon Hill on 14 September 1402.  This victory, however, was to drive a wedge between the Percys and the King, or, perhaps to put it more accurately, to give the aggressively acquisitive Percys expectations of reward beyond anything a prudent monarch could give. The Scottish commander, Archibald Douglas, earl of Douglas, was among those captured, and the King exercised his legitimate right to deny the Percys permission to ransom a soldier whose reputation was almost as elevated as Hotspur’s.  This rebuff was added to another unjustified grievance over a ransom. At the battle of Pilleth on the previous 22 June Hotspur’s brother-in-law, Sir Edmund Mortimer, had been captured by Glyn Dŵr, and the King refused to assent to his ransom, taking the view, correctly as it transpired, that Mortimer (who subsequently married one of the Welsh rebel’s daughters) was a traitor. 

This was the immediate background of a rising that took the King entirely by surprise.  On 9 July Hotspur raised rebellion in Cheshire, as the King, with a small force, was advancing north from London, ironically with the aim of supporting the Percys against the Scots on the northern border, ‘to the last unaware of the yawning danger that was opening at his very feet’ (as the great Victorian scholar, James Hamilton Wylie, elegantly put it).  He was at Nottingham when, on 12 July, he heard that Hotspur had rebelled. Perhaps acting on the advice of the experienced Scottish soldier, George Dunbar, earl of Dunbar, whose feud with the earl of Douglas had brought him into Henry’s ranks, he determined to risk the hazard of an immediate battle rather than return to London.  Here he had one advantage. The great Lancastrian retinue was particularly strong in the Midlands, and many of its leading gentry rallied to his cause, as they had done in 1399.

The King was also aided by what appears to have been a miscalculation of the rebel side.  No one could dispute Hotspur’s choice of Cheshire as the locus of rebellion, for not only had it been a Ricardian stronghold but its geographical position offered the prospect of joining the Welsh rising with his own.  If, however, the location of the rising was logical, its timing was not.  Hotspur’s plan appears to have been to seize Shrewsbury, the headquarters of the heir to the throne, Henry, prince of Wales, who, despite his youth, had been appointed royal lieutenant in Wales in the previous March, and there to await reinforcements from his father in the north and from the Welsh rebel leader.  This plan, however, was thwarted by the King’s swift and decisive action.  Had Hotspur delayed making plain his intentions until the King had reached the north, he would have had time to seize Shrewsbury and the prince. The King would then have been faced a long march back to intercept Hotspur, who would probably have made for London. The timing of the rebellion was also unfortunate in another sense, although one that was not apparent at its beginning. On 12 July Glyn Dŵr was defeated near Carmarthen by the Pembrokeshire levies, headed by Sir Thomas Carew, constable of Narberth, so diminishing any aid he might have been able to offer Hotspur in a future campaign. Carew, something of an unsung hero of the campaign, was later fittingly rewarded by a grant of Sir Edmund Mortimer’s forfeited estates.

These considerations aside, the rapid approach of the royal army forced Hotspur to abandon his plan of taking Shrewsbury, and draw up in battle array on its outskirts.  None the less, although much had run in the King’s favour in the lead up to the battle, when that battle was joined, it was still a close-run thing.  Although it appears to have lasted no more than two hours, it was, in the words of the later Gregory’s Chronicle, ‘one of the wyrste bataylys that ever came to Inglonde,, and unkyndyst’.  The casualty rate was very high, a product of the intense exchange of longbow fire with which it began, with, according to the St. Albans chronicler, Thomas Walsingham, men falling ‘as fast as leaves … in autumn’.  These casualties were heaviest on the royalist side, certainly in respect of the leading men (the most notable casualty on his side was the young Edmund, earl of Stafford), and it is probably fair to say that, if Hotspur had not fallen on the field, the result of the battle, if not that of the rebellion, might have been different. Indeed, if the accidents of battle had brought death to the King rather than to Hotspur, the civil war, the ‘Lancastrian’ title against the ‘Yorkist’, (represented in 1403 by the young Edmund Mortimer, earl of March, nephew of Hotspur’s wife) would have begun in 1403 rather than 1459.

SJP

Further reading

J.M.W. Bean, ‘Henry IV and the Percies’, History xliv (1959), pp. 212-27.

P. McNiven, ‘The Scottish Policy of the Percies and the Strategy of the Rebellion of 1403’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library lxii (1979-80), pp. 498-530.  

For biographies of some of the casualties on the royalist side: The Commons, 1386-1421, ed. Clark, Rawcliffe and Roskell, ii. 262-5 (Sir Walter Blount of Barton Blount, Derbyshire), 467-9 (Sir John Calverley of Stapleford, Leicestershire), 593-4 (Sir John Clifton of Clifton, Nottinghamshire); iv. 364-6  (Sir Hugh Shirley of Shirley, Derbyshire), 607-9 (Sir Thomas Wensley of Wensley, Derbyshire). For a probable casualty on the rebel side see ii. 384-6 (Sir Hugh Browe).

The tomb was probably commissioned by her husband, Sir William Lichfield, a veteran of Agincourt, whose friendship with her father had enabled him to marry above his birth rank. Although, however, one of the couple’s children died with her, Elizabeth, aged in her early thirties on her death in about 1422, left two young daughters as her coheiresses. Her inheritance was thus destined to pass through the female line for a second successive generation.

That descent, however, for reasons that are unclear, did not follow predictable lines.  One of her daughters survived to have a daughter of her own, and the Cornwall inheritance should eventually have passed to this daughter, Margaret, the wife of Humphrey Stafford of Halmond’s Frome (Herefordshire), but it did not. Instead, it came to Humphrey Blount, to whose memory, and that of his wife, Elizabeth Winnington, the second tomb was erected. He was a descendant of the Cornwalls in the female line, the great-nephew of Sir John, and was quickly and unexpectedly able to establish title after the death, in 1446, of Lichfield, who had lived at Kinlet, as tenant by the courtesy (a husband’s life interest in the lands of his deceased wife), since Elizabeth’s death. Blount, from the least wealthy of the two surviving branches of an ancient family, now found himself a man of account. He moved to Kinlet from his ancestral manor of Balterley in Staffordshire, and with this move came, both geographically and tenurially, significant new connexions. Kinlet was held of Richard, duke of York’s lordship of Cleobury Mortimer, and, in the civil war of 1459-61, Humphrey put his new gains at hazard by committing himself to the duke’s cause. He was in his ranks at the rout at Ludford Bridge, and his Yorkist credentials were further confirmed in the following autumn, when he was named as sheriff of Shropshire after Yorkist victory at the battle of Northampton. This support explains his election for the Shropshire borough of Bridgnorth, about nine miles north of his home at Kinlet, to the first Parliament of the new reign. He no doubt sought the seat because he was excluded as sheriff from representing the county.

Blount’s active loyalty to the house of York was to be made further manifest in the crisis of 1470-1.  He fought for Edward IV at the battles of Barnet and Tewkesbury, where he was knighted.  This, however marked the highpoint of his career.  At his death a few years later, he was only in his mid-fifties. By 6 September 1477, when he made his will, he had moved, perhaps due to ill-health, from Kinlet to Worcester. It was, however, at Kinlet that he was interred, and he bequeathed to the church there a velvet gown for the making of a cope and a gold chain to be sold for the support of a chaplain. 

Blount was survived by his wife, Elizabeth Winnington.  She had played an important part in his elevation, and her career is as interesting as his own. Her early marital life had been troubled.  In 1426, at the age of only four, she had been contracted in marriage to Richard, the ten-year-old son and heir-apparent of Sir John Delves, a match that represented an alliance between two leading Cheshire families. Sir John, however, died in 1429, and his friend, Ralph Egerton, saw this as a means of advancing one of his own daughters at the expense of the young Elizabeth.  He persuaded Richard to disavow his intended bride. Years of uncertainty followed before, in July 1439, William Heyworth, bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, confirmed the validity of Richard’s marriage to Elizabeth.  The match, however, proved childless, with Richard dying in 1446. Lichfield died in the same month, enhancing Blount’s prospects and hence his qualifications as her suitor. For her part, Elizabeth had, as a result of her troubled marriage, a life interest in the caput honoris of the Delves family, the manor of Doddington. Her marriage to Blount, contracted soon afterwards, had obvious advantages for both bride and groom. 

Elizabeth was probably responsible for commissioning their fine tomb, for she survived her husband by some 25 years.  It is a commemoration not only of herself and her late husband, but also of their many children. The long side of the tomb appears to commemorate the three sons of the marriage, all of whom are mentioned in Sir Humphrey’s will, and the short side, at the effigies’ feet, their three daughters (the other two sides are blank).  This was a fitting to memorial to one who had elevated his family into the front rank of the Shropshire gentry, acquiring, seemingly against the odds, an inheritance to which his claim was far from unchallenged; and, early in the civil war of 1459-61, committing himself to what proved the winning side. He was unfortunate not to receive greater recognition from Edward IV.  He established a dynasty that survived at Kinlet in the male line until the death of a prominent parliamentarian, his great-grandson, Sir George, in 1581.  The most notable of the family, however, was George’s sister, Elizabeth, mistress of Henry VIII and mother of Henry Fitzroy, duke of Richmond.

Further reading

E. Norton, ‘The Depiction of Children on the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Century Tombs in Kinlet Church’, Transactions of the Shropshire Archaeological and Historical Society 87 (2012), 35-46.

A biography of Sir Humphrey Blount will appear in The Commons, 1461-1504 and those of Sir John Cornwall, Sir William Lichfield and Sir George Blount are in The Commons, 1386-1421, ii. 661-3; 1422-61, v. 275-8 and 1509-58, i. 445-7 respectively.

Political geography ensured that the town of Ludlow would, for good or ill, play some part in the great civil conflict that began when its lord, Richard, duke of York, moved into active opposition to the government of his cousin, Henry VI. The town was part of the great inheritance that came to the duke on the death of the last Mortimer earl of March in 1425, and, throughout his career, its castle was a favoured residence and a place of refuge in troubled times.  But his interest extended beyond the castle, for he showed a benevolent concern for the town beyond its walls. In the late 1430s he and his wife, Cecily Neville, were admitted to the Palmers’ guild, by far the largest and most prestigious of the town’s fraternities, and the period of his lordship coincided with the major rebuilding, begun in the early 1430s (although not completed until the early 1470s), of the town’s church, of St. Lawrence.  More significantly, in terms of the town’s institutional development, he acknowledged the right of the townsmen to a certain amount of administrative freedom.  In 1449 he allowed that the town councils of 12 and 25 had the right to govern the town in all matters, save those that belonged to his steward ‘in the holding of our courts’.

The escalating political tensions of the following decade, however, revealed a less welcome side to the town’s position as a centre of benevolent lordship. In early 1452, as the duke launched a campaign (the so-called ‘Dartford rising’) to remove the King’s chief minister, Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset, he rallied forces at Ludlow before marching to London, only to submit tamely in face of the King’s superior forces. This humiliation was followed by another in the summer when royal commissioners toured the duke’s estates to investigate the local disturbances that had attended the rising.  Coming to Ludlow in August, they took an indictment that implies that some radical and dangerous political ideas were circulating in the town. Two of its tradesmen were among those indicted for claiming that Henry VI had neither the ability nor the right to rule (‘non est habilis nec de potestate gubernare regnum .. nec illud regnum de recto regere debuisset’), and that he could be deposed by ‘a Parliament of the whole community of the realm (‘parliamenti tocius communitatis regni’) and another elected in his place (TNA, KB9/103/1, m. 15).  The rebels then gave active expression to their treasonable designs by participating in the murder of a yeoman of the Crown who had come to the town with a message for the duke.  There is no reason to suppose that the duke himself approved this conspiracy nor that it had the support of any of the leading townsmen, but it provides an indication of the strength of Yorkist feeling there.

The strength of that feeling was to be tested seven years later when the duke and his Nevilles allies, feeling themselves endangered by the militant regime of Henry VI’s queen, Margaret of Anjou, brought national conflict to its very gates.  On 12 October 1459 the Lancastrian army, nominally led by the King, confronted an inferior Yorkist force at the bridge over the River Teme on its southern edge. To avoid defeat, the Yorkist lords fled into exile under cover of darkness, the duke leaving his town to face the unhappy consequences. ‘Gregory’s Chronicle’, in its typically vivid style, describes them: ‘The mysrewle of the kyngys galentys at Ludlowe, whenn they hadde drokyn i-nowe of wyne that was in tavernys … robbyd the towne, and bare a-waye beddynge, clothe, and othyr stuffe, and defoulyd many wymmen’.

 These sufferings did not deflect the town from support for the house of York. According to the Burgundian chronicler, Jean de Wavrin, when the duke came there on his return from exile in September 1460, the townsmen were among the Shropshire men who went further than the duke himself had yet publicly gone by acclaiming him King. This loyalty was to bring the town considerable rewards when York’s son, Edward, took the Crown in the following March.  Its castle had been his childhood home, and he spent a week there in the autumn after his accession. The burgesses took the opportunity to lobby for the grant of a comprehensive new charter. That charter was granted on the following 7 December (while Parliament was in session), and the townsmen were given extensive powers of self-government under two bailiffs elected annually from among their ranks. With administrative privileges went financial ones. The townsmen were to hold at a favourable annual farm of 37 marks all the royal property in the town, save for the castle; to regulate the town’s trade through a guild merchant; and to levy a sales tax to maintain its bridges, gates and walls. Most important of all, however, at least from the aspect of parliamentary history, was the grant of representation: the burgesses were given the right to elect two MPs ‘of themselves or others’. This enfranchisement was an important mark of the town’s enhanced status.

The town’s importance was further enhanced in the second half of Edward’s reign.

In July 1471, to improve peace-keeping in the Welsh marches, the newly-restored King established a council there for his infant son, Edward, not yet a year old. Some 18 months later, in February 1473, this council was formalised and enlarged, and soon after the infant prince took up residence in the town, which remained his principal home for the rest of his father’s reign. The council came to exercise wide-ranging functions, supervising the administration of the principality of Wales and the marches. The town later became home to Henry VII’s eldest son, Arthur, who lived there from the spring of 1493 until his death in April 1502. This, in the words of Ralph Griffiths, gave the town a ‘unique profile among England’s provincial centres’, and an importance far beyond its population of about 2,000.

S.J.P.

Further reading

R.A. Griffiths, ‘Ludlow During the Wars of the Roses’, in Ron Shoesmith and Andy Johnson (eds.), Ludlow Castle: Its History and Buildings (Hereford: Longstone Press, 2000), 57-68.

Simon Payling, ‘Making the most of a parhelion: the earl of March and the battle of Mortimer’s Cross’, History of Parliament, 3 February 2020.

Simon Payling, ‘The battle of Ludford Bridge’, History of Parliament, 10 October 2019.

To the parliamentary historian, the assembly summoned in the late spring of 1483 in the name of the young Edward V presents a problem. Unquestionably, it was a Parliament, summoned by letters under the new King’s seal, and in the best traditions of such assemblies, summoned, e.g., in May 1413 in the name of Henry V and in October 1422 in that of Henry VI. As was the case particularly in the latter instance, it was understood that the community of the realm should come together to make arrangements for the nominal rule of the monarch who for the foreseeable future would be a minor.  And yet, the circumstances of Edward V’s accession had perhaps more in common with those of Richard II in 1377, than with those of the infant Henry VI. Richard II had been ten years old when the deaths in quick succession of his father (Edward, the Black Price) and grandfather (King Edward III) had propelled him to the throne. Edward V, for his part, was twelve when his father died, and thus even close to achieving his majority than Richard had been.

As now became customary for royal children, in 1473 the young Edward had been established at his family home of Ludlow castle, there to be prepared for his future as heir to his father’s throne. It was also there, that on 14 April he received news of his father’s death, five days earlier, and it took a further ten days for him to set out to London, ostensibly to await his coronation. On the way, he met with his uncle, Richard, duke of Gloucester, who under the terms of Edward IV’s will had been appointed protector during his nephew’s minority. Gloucester for his part lost little time in separating the young King from his entourage, and it was surrounded by Gloucester and his servants that he was conducted to the Tower of London, the ancient royal palace to the east of the city.

The coronation had originally been planned for 4 May, the day of Edward’s arrival in London, but was now pushed back to 22 June. Parliament, for which writs of summons were issued on 13 May, was to assemble three days later, on 25 June. Edward V took up residence in the Tower on 19 May, and here he was joined, almost a month later, on 16 June, by his younger brother, Richard of Shrewsbury, duke of York and Norfolk. In the mean time, elections were held up and down the country, in the normal fashion, usually in one or other of the four- or six-weekly county courts. By and large, we may assume, the local communities were unaware of the intense politicking at the centre that paved the way, on the very day when parliament should have opened, for Edward’s deposition and replacement by his uncle Richard. No formal letters of supersedeas were, it seems, issued and some of the representatives of counties and towns consequently made their way to Westminster, where they were to witness a very different spectacle from what they might have expected.

H.W.K.

While, during the Wars of the Roses, the political allegiances of individual noblemen are relatively easy to determine, those of individual towns are generally obscured. This is not surprising, for the notion of the corporate allegiance of a town is a difficult one.  While sometimes a few leading townsmen can be identified as active partisans of either York or Lancaster, that does not mean that they carried their fellow townsmen with them. Town authorities generally saw the safest course in giving their allegiance, outwardly at least, to whichever faction happened to be in charge. None the less, if commitment was not actively sought, it could not always be avoided. Towns in areas of strong Yorkist or Lancastrian lordship, or else on the route of campaigning armies, could find themselves drawn into conflict. Shrewsbury provides an instructive example.  Already the location of a major battle – when Henry IV defeated the Percys in 1403 – it was, geographically and politically, poorly placed to avoid involvement in the Wars of the Roses. Not only was it one of the major towns on the Welsh March (and, in the townsmen’s own characterization, ‘on off the keyes for the good ordre off the marches’) and a crossing point on the River Severn, it was also in the political orbit of Henry VI’s leading opponent, Richard, duke of York, whose great castle of Ludlow lay only 30 miles away. 

What this meant for the town was clearly illustrated in the early 1450s.  When York returned from Ireland in the autumn of 1450 to claim what he saw as his rightful place in Henry VI’s government, he passed through the town on his way to Westminster and was elaborately entertained by the borough authorities, who provided a pipe (about 100 gallons) of red wine.  Although so relatively modest a gift can hardly be interpreted as an endorsement of his opposition to the Lancastrian regime, the duke himself clearly believed that the town was a promising source of support.  On 3 February 1452 he wrote, from his castle of Ludlow, to his ‘right worshipful friends, the bailiffs, burgesses and commons of the good town of Shrewsbury’, outlining his grievances against the King’s chief minister, Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset and asking the townsmen ‘to come to me with all diligence … with as many goodly and likely men as ye may’.  The townsmen responded: some 60 of them, headed by an alderman, Roger Eyton, were later indicted for armed insurrection against the King at Ludlow. If, however, is an early mark of the town’s Yorkist sympathies and its readiness to support rebellion, that readiness, perhaps diminished by the ignominious failure of the 1452 rising, was much less apparent when York again raised rebellion in the Marches in 1459.  The bailiffs’ accounts reveal a state of some confusion amongst the town’s leaders, as they dispatched emissaries to detect the movement of rival armies, but that confusion was resolved in favour of Lancaster  In the aftermath of the Yorkist defeat at nearby Ludford Bridge, the victorious Henry VI wrote to them thanking them for resisting the passage of the Yorkist Edward Bourgchier, younger son of Viscount Bourgchier, Clearly, at least a faction among the townsmen saw the value of maintaining allegiance to the ruling house, and that faction was still in the ascendant at the time of the battle of Northampton in the following July when the town sent 61 men to fight for Henry VI.

Yet, although the borough authorities were ready to support the ruling house in the first part of the civil war of 1459-61, some senior townsmen had a very different inclination. Chief among them was Eyton, who was in the duke’s ranks at Ludford Bridge, and then fled with him to Ireland, but there were others. An action sued in the court of King’s bench in the Hilary term 1460 implies the existence of a strong Yorkist faction: Edward, prince of Wales, and other Lancastrian lords sued an action of trespass against Eyton, John Horde, head of the town’s principal family, and three other prominent burgesses.  The subject of the action is unknown – it disappears from the plea rolls with the change of regime – but there can be little doubt that it arose from some event in the Ludford campaign.

In these circumstances, it is not surprising that this Yorkist faction took control of the town after the Lancastrian defeat at Northampton. The duke of York, as he again made his way back from Ireland in the aftermath of that victory, was welcomed as he had been ten years earlier; and the town then spent £30 on dispatching 40 soldiers to fight for him in the campaign that led to his death on the field of Wakefield, a markedly greater sum than the £8 13s. 4d. spent on the troops it sent to fight for Lancaster at Northampton. Further, as the duke travelled north to his death, his son, Edward, earl of March, making ready for a campaign in the Marches, spent Christmas in Shrewsbury, receiving a payment of 40 marks from the town’s authorities for his ‘good lordship’. Although evidence is lacking, there can be little doubt that there was a Shrewsbury contingent at the earl’s victory at the battle of Mortimer’s Cross, fought about 35 miles south of the town, in the following February, as there certainly was at the battle of Towton some eight weeks later. It is not known how much was spent on sending soldiers to that decisive battle, beyond 16s. 8d. spent on a banner, but £20 was expended on sending 40 soldiers to the new King when he was at Bristol in early September 1461. The bailiffs’ account for 1462-3 records larger payments, with as much as £68 5s. laid out on the wages of soldiers sent to the King in the north and 10s. on another banner, presumably displaying the town’s arms, to be borne before its contingent.

Thus Shrewsbury, in the civil war of 1459-61, conformed to a common pattern amongst towns, namely giving outward allegiance to the ruling house, but there can be little doubt that the sympathies of the townsmen lay with the house of York. In the aftermath of the Yorkist seizure of government in the summer of 1460, they supported York with much greater enthusiasm than they had supported Lancaster in the immediately preceding period.  Further, although the town as a corporation was to gain little from Edward IV’s accession (beyond the routine confirmation of its charters), the leaders of the Yorkist faction in the town were rewarded, most notably Eyton, who found a place in the new King’s household and was granted the constableship of the town’s royal castle.

SJP

Further reading:

For a discussion of the misattributed statue: D.R. Walker, ‘An Urban Community in the Welsh Borderland: Shrewsbury in the Fifteenth Century’, University of Wales, Swansea, Ph.D. thesis, 1981, pp. 412-17.

For biographies of Roger Eyton and John Horde with a general discussion of the town in Henry VI’s reign, see L. Clark (ed.), The House of Commons, 1422-61 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

Hugh Oldham (c.1450-1519), bishop of Exeter from 1505, has had a good press from historians. Described by the Exeter MP and chronicler, John Hooker alias Vowell (d. 1601), ‘as a great favourer and a friend both to learning and to learned men’, he was a major benefactor of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, the foundation of his friend, Richard Foxe, bishop of Winchester. Although Hooker was no advocate of Oldham’s own academic attainments, rather patronisingly remarking that he had ‘more zeal than knowledge and more devotion than learning’, he praised him for his friendliness. A curious action in the court of King’s bench in 1512 gives a rather contrasting picture of the bishop, albeit one, as an ex parte statement, on which little reliance is to be placed.  When the bishop’s servant, William Knot, came to Crediton to summon one of the clerks of the diocese, Edward Grigson, to appear in the consistory court, Grigson responded uncharitably, claiming that ‘the Bysshoppe  of exet[er] is the most extorcyoner and poller that is in Englond for he hath extorcyoner and polled both me and my Tenauntez and that he hath more poison in that grete fowle bely of hys then all the Bysshoppes in Englond’. A jury found for the bishop, and he was awarded the relatively modest sum of £8 in costs and damages.

The action was an innovative one.  Medieval statutes of scandalum magnatum, the first dating from 1275 and reenacted in almost the same terms in 1378 and 1389, had given peers and the King’s great officers protection against the circulation of defamatory rumours about them. The purpose was political: as the 1378 enactment put it, such rumours created ‘Debates and Discords’ whereby, in the hyperbolic language of such statutes, the realm might be brought to ‘quick Subversion and Destruction’.  Despite this alarming danger, the statutes were rarely used until the first years of the sixteenth century, when lawyers began to wonder whether their peerage clients might use the offence of scandalum magnatum as a civil plea to win damages against those who could be accused of speaking ill of them. Their first recorded effort proved a failure. In 1495 Sir Richard Croft sought to forward a land dispute with Richard, Lord Beauchamp, by bringing an action under a statute which penalised the fabricating of false deeds. Beauchamp’s response was to counter-sue for damages of £1,000 on the eccentric claim that the allegation he had fabricated false deeds was itself an offence under the scandalum magnatum statute of 1378. This claim, which, if successful, would have given peers extensive protection against litigation, was quickly dismissed by the chief justice of the common pleas, Sir Thomas Bryan, who succinctly observed that the statutes of scandalum magnatum were ‘not made to oust men of their legitimate actions’.  Yet Bryan’s ruling did not preclude the use of the statutes to sue for scandalous words.  There were a series of such actions in the common-law courts in early years of the sixteenth century.  The most famous of these was brought by Edward Stafford, duke of Buckingham, in the same year as Odiham’s, against his former servant, Thomas Lucas of Inner Temple, former solicitor-general to Henry VII, for allegedly saying that ‘he sett nott be the Duke two pens’ and that the duke ‘hath no more conseyens than a Dogg’.

It would, however, be mistaken to see these actions solely in terms of the exploitation of aristocratic privilege under arcane medieval statutes, for they can also be seem as part of a more general development. Church courts had enjoyed a monopoly over cases of defamation, and, as in those courts the plaintiff could gain no damages beyond the imposition of penance upon the defendant, this was unsatisfactory. These actions of scandalum magnatum were only one attempt to redress this deficiency, for, at about the same time as they emerged, the common-law began to provide a general remedy with plaintiffs able to sue for damages for reputational damage caused by defamatory words.  Scandalum magnatum certainly gave peers a legislative advantage, one that was later to be ruthlessly exploited by the future James II in the early 1680s, but lesser men also had a common-law remedy for slander.

Further reading

Article on Hugh Oldham, bishop of Exeter, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

J.H. Baker, The Oxford History of the Laws of England, 1483-1558 (2003), pp. 781-2, 797-8.

J.C. Lassiter, ‘Defamation of Peers: the Rise and Decline of the Action of Scandalum Magnatum’, American Journal of Legal History, xxii (1978), pp. 216-36.