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

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.

Some three years after Lambert Simnel had taken up his post as Henry VII’s kitchen boy, another claimant to Henry VII’s crown appeared in Ireland. He was initially identified as Edward, earl of Warwick, son of the duke of Clarence, and subsequently as a bastard son of Richard III. Perkin Warbeck denied that he was either. By the end of 1491, he had decided to claim the identity of Richard of Shrewsbury, Edward IV’s younger son. 

For a period, this new pretender moved from European court to court: initially, to that of Charles VIII in France, then to that of his purported aunt, Margaret of Burgundy, at Malines in Flanders. At the English court itself, the supposed ‘Edward VI’ attracted a degree of support, and yet, in spite of suspicions and rumours, no invasion or uprising materialised in the spring of 1493.

‘As for the matier beyond See, be ye sure ye may slepe in rest for any trouble that shall be this yere or the next’, as the Norfolk gentleman William Paston reported to a correspondent.

In the first instance, this was indeed so, for Warbeck, attached to the entourage of the Archduke Maximilian, meandered around northwestern Europe, variously recognised as Richard of Shrewsbury by all but the English crown. Even in England, the pretender found support from a substantial number of former servants of the Yorkist royal family.

At the end of June 1495 Warbeck was ready to sail for England. His first intention may have been to land in East Anglia, but in the event his flotilla made landfall at Deal in Kent in the first days of July. It proved a disaster. The pretender was left to watch helpless from his ship as his vanguard of about 300 men was slaughtered by a far superior force brought up from Sandwich. Warbeck sailed for Ireland, but was eventually driven off by the Lord Deputy, Sir Edward Poynings. Whomsoever of his adherents Henry VII could get hold of, were condemned as pirates and unceremoniously hanged. Warbeck himself went into hiding. For two months, his whereabouts are unknown to us, although one man who clearly knew was King James IV of Scotland: on 20 November Warbeck rode into Stirling castle.   

James IV seems, if anything, to have been even more completely taken in by Warbeck than his counterparts on the continent. Less than two months after his arrival, the pretender was married to Katherine, daughter of George, earl of Huntly. The importance of this match has been somewhat overstated. Far from being a direct member of the royal family, Katherine was at best a distant relative of the King and more properly only a connexion by several remarriages. Nevertheless, the cogs of European diplomacy continued to turn.

In parallel, English and Scots continued preparations for open war. These dragged on for much of the summer before James IV finally crossed the English border on 21 September 1496. It was at best an inglorious expedition. Over a period of two days James IV’s troops pulled down a number of towers in the border region. Then, within a matter of hours, they pulled back to the safety of Scottish territory.

Henry VII was not to be rushed. Only after the Scots’ withdrawal did he convene a great council which made the financial grant required. In the first place. Money was to be raised in the form of a loan, pending a formal grant to taxation by Parliament, which followed in early 1497. Preparations for the war continued throughout the spring of 1497, but although Henry’s vanguard eventually advanced north, their effort was overtaken by events further south.

Even in February Henry VII’s forced loan of £40,000 was collected in the English shires. This was followed later in the spring by the taxation granted by Parliament – some £120,000. As far as it is possible to tell, it was an excessive tax rating imposed by John Oby, the provost of Glasney college, and tax collector at Penryn in Cornwall, that lit the touch paper. Before too long, Cornwall was in revolt, and the rebels marched east, led by a local blacksmith, Michael Joseph, ‘an Gof’, and a lawyer from a long-established local gentry family, Thomas Flamank. In Devon, they garnered little support. When they reached Exeter the citizens agreed to admit the rebel leaders, but in spite of threats of violence against the mayor, the rebels left the city untouched and instead marched on into Somerset.

Here, they found extensive support, restricted not merely to the county and its towns, but also into Wiltshire and Hampshire. Here, also, they acquired a noble leader in James Tuchet, lord Audley. Audley’s motives in joining the rebels are hard to fathom, but it has been suggested that a resentment of the royal preferment of John, Lord Cheyne, was to blame.  From the cathedral city of Wells, the rebels wrote to Warbeck in Scotland, inviting him to join, and indeed lead their cause. Then, the rebels split their army in two: one, lead by an Gof marched via Winchester towards Guildford, while the other, under Lord Audey, took a more northerly route via Wallingford to London.

At Ewelme, the King’s messengers located Edmund de la Pole, earl of Suffolk.  In fact, they found him in bed. Or to be precise, sharing a bed with Lord Abergavenny, who hid from the messengers under the covers. De la Pole responded to the King’s orders to protect Staines Bridge with alacrity, and rode to join the army, but not before he had immobilised Abergavenny by taking his shoes.

The rebellion was brought to an end at Blackheath where the rebels were crushed by the King’s army. Many of the rebels nevertheless got away, and this – if indeed he had heard news of Blackheath – may have motivated Warbeck, who set sail on 6 July. Whether intentionally or as a result of stormy weather, he was initially driven to Ireland, but found a Spanish ship to take him to Cornwall. This, however, was intercepted by an English vessel. Informed by the English captain of Prince Arthur’s recent betrothal to Catherine of Aragon, the Spanish sailors were charged on their loyalty to give up Perkin Warbeck if they had him on board. The Spanish master kept a straight face and swore that he had never even heard of such a person: Warbeck, for his part, lay huddled up in an empty wine barrel in the ship’s prow. On 7 September, the ship landed at Whitesand Bay near Land’s End.

Warbeck’s own following had shrunk from its original size to barely 300 men, but his English sponsors were able to raise fresh troops, so it was at the head of some 3,000 armed followers that the pretender marched on Exeter. Initial developments seemed promising: when the sheriff of Cornwall raised the posse comitatus and attacked the rebel camp at Castle Kynnock near Bodmin the majority of his men deserted and joined the pretender. Similarly, the earl of Devon who had arrayed his retinue was forced to retreat into the walled city of Exeter before the approaching rebels.

Warbeck’s army, purportedly swollen to some 8,000 men, now marched on Exeter and laid siege to the city. On 17 September, attacked on the east and north gates were beaten back. The rebels renewed their attack on the following day. The earl of Devon and his son were caught asleep, and the assailants managed to batter their way into the city. But the earl of Devon and the citizens rallied, and the steep incline of the high street from the Exe bridge probably playing its part in driving back the attackers. Neither side could claim a victory, but a truce was agreed, under the terms of which the rebels would continue on their march east, if the earl of Devon would promise not to pursue them.

So the rebels marched on, and on 19 September 1497 reached Taunton. Here, they remained for two days executing a variety of military manoeuvres, but it was clear that the game was up. A royal army was approaching from the east, and behind them the earl of Devon, whatever he had previously promised, was bringing up his men in their rear. In the face of this, Warbeck and a small group of confidants fled from Taunton in the middle of the night.

For a day and a half Warbeck and his last few followers galloped through the English countryside until they reached the sanctuary of Beaulieu abbey. Here, Henry VII’s men caught up with them, and in return for their lives, they agreed to surrender to the King. In the first instance, Henry VII showed himself gracious. He kept the pretender in his entourage, and subsequently at his court, although he periodically exposed him to the scorn of the Londoners. Yet, within a year Warbeck attempted to escape. This, Henry could not allow.  Warbeck was consequently confined in the Tower in chains: his public exposure – in the stocks on a scaffold of empty wine barrels – became more taxing. And yet, he also became a target for fresh treason against Henry VII’s rule.

This time, the King had had enough. On 16 November 1499 Warbeck was put on trial in the palace of Westminster’s White Hall. The predictable sentence was that he should suffer the customary penalties of treason. Yet, apparently public opinion had preserved some affection for the pretender and opposed this gruesome punishment. So, on 23 November, Warbeck was led through the streets of London, a halter around his neck, and hanged on a small scaffold erected for this purpose at Tyburn. The Warbeck conspiracy was at an end.

H.W.K.

Further Reading:

Ian Arthurson, The Perkin Warbeck Conspiracy (Stroud, 1994)

For much of the middle ages, and even into the modern period, many parliamentary elections were ‘arranged’. This meant that rather than conducting a formal poll, the election meeting would simply rubber stamp a pair of candidates agreed upon by the leading men (and sometimes women) of the counties. The process by which the candidates in question were chosen is by and large obscure, but it is worth noting that their confirmation nevertheless followed a formal process.

The parliamentary elections in the English counties were held in shire courts, and forty days thus had to elapse from the issue of the parliamentary writs to the electoral meeting. This period of grace was necessary not merely because of the time it would take for the writs ordering the elections to be delivered to the English counties, but also because in a select number of northern counties (Lancashire, Lincolnshire, Northumberland and Yorkshire) the county court only met every six, rather than every four weeks. Even so, many electoral writs arrived so late as to make it impossible for the sheriffs to hold their elections within the normal cycle of meetings of the county court. Thus, elections in Lancashire had to be held at specially convened electoral meetings in 1423, 1427, 1429 and 1433; while on other occasions special meetings were also held in Cumberland, Westmorland, Bristol and Nottinghamshire.   

In 1459, special circumstances prevailed, not merely on account of the political crisis which followed the Yorkist rout at Ludford Bridge, and which saw the King’s cousin and principal opponent, Richard, duke of York, his two eldest sons Edward, earl of March, and Edmund, earl of Rutland, and their Neville allies, the earls of Salisbury and Warwick flee into exile. On 9 October the government summoned a Parliament, allowing 41 days before the opening on 20 November. Yet, by the end of October it had become apparent that many sheriffs had not yet identified any candidates, and were due to hand over their offices just a few days later. The administration thus took the extraordinary step of sending letters under the privy seal to all serving sheriffs instructing them to hold their parliamentary elections even if their relevant county court fell after the date of their discharge. This proved to little avail: no elections were ever held in Sussex and Hertfordshire, and the Members for Berkshire, the city of York and Shropshire were confirmed only after Parliament had assembled, in the case of Shropshire as late as 29 November, nine days into the session.

On a few rare occasions it is clear that no agreement could be found among the county elites, and that the choice of MPs therefore had to go to a ballot. One such occasion was the Nottinghamshire election of 1460, when the names of four candidates, Sir Robert Strelley, John Stanhope, Richard Sutton and William Babington, were placed before the electorate. In the ensuing contest Strelley and Stanhope each secured over 150 votes, while Sutton and Babington were left far behind with just 56 and 44 votes respectively.

Before such a poll could be taken, the sheriff (or his deputy) was faced with the onerous task to ensuring that the electors who turned up in the county court were qualified to vote. This meant establishing that they met the statutory income qualification, that is that they each held freehold lands worth 40s. per annum, but also that they actually resided within the relevant county, and not within any separate constituencies within its boundaries. This, for instance, became one of the principal grounds on which the Warwickshire elections of 1427 were challenged, for some of the electors present, ‘pompous men’, were said to have hailed from the town of Warwick, and they or others were moreover said to have shouted unreasonably in making their nomination.

Perhaps the most curious election of the period (as far as the records allow us to tell) was that held in Berkshire in early 1453. The election that year was not held (as was normal) at Abingdon, but instead at Chipping Lambourn, which, while not a county town, had the advantage of being the residence of the sheriff, John Roger. The return names just eleven further voters, and it is perhaps no surprise that one of the men elected was Roger’s son and heir, Thomas. Alongside him, the sheriff returned the county’s veteran representative, the courtier John Norris, who nevertheless seems to have been sufficiently concerned by the odd proceedings to secure for himself an alternative seat in distant Truro.

H.W.K.

Further reading:

H. Kleineke, ‘Parliamentary Elections’, in The History of Parliament: The Commons 1422-61 ed. L.S. Clark (Cambridge, 2020), 219-73. 

J.G. Edwards, ‘The Emergence of Majority Rule’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5^th ser. Xiv (1964).

On 9 August 1485 Henry Tudor, titular earl of Richmond, landed on the Welsh coast near Milford Haven with a small flotilla equipped with the aid of the French king, Charles VIII. In the days that followed, Henry’s small force gradually made its way inland, and on 15 August reached the English border near Shrewsbury. The invasion was not unexpected. Earlier in the summer King Richard III had established his headquarters at Nottingham, and at the end of July he had instructed the Chancellor, John Russell, bishop of Lincoln, who remained at Westminster, to send him the great seal of England, one of the principal tools of government which alone gave a written instrument the full authority of the Crown. Richard received the seal on 1 August, and entrusted it to the keeping of the master of the rolls, Thomas Barowe, a senior administrator whom he kept by his side throughout the dramatic days of that summer.

Confirmed news of Henry Tudor’s landing reached the King at Nottingham within two days of the event, on 11 August. Richard at once sprang into action and in the following days sent urgent messages summoning his supporters. Little of what else occupied the King in the final ten days of his reign is known: the final letter under the great seal was recorded on the patent roll on 9 August and concerned the confirmation to the priory of Lenton of a grant of Edward IV. And then, on 16 August, with Henry Tudor’s army already on English soil, Richard issued an elaborate pardon to an old adversary, John Morton, bishop of Ely.

Morton was a die-hard Lancastrian loyalist, who served as chancellor to the young prince of Wales, Edward of Lancaster in the second half of the 1450s, and subsequently followed first Henry VI and later his queen, Margaret of Anjou, into their respective exiles. Following the extermination of the male line of the house of Lancaster after the battle of Tewkesbury, Morton accepted a pardon from Edward IV, who recognised his administrative skills, and in 1472 appointed him master of the rolls. Frequently employed on diplomatic missions, Morton was among the envoys who in 1475 negotiated the profitable treaty of Picquigny with the French, and he received his reward four years later, when he was elevated to the bishopric of Ely. 

By the end of Edward IV’s reign, he was perceived to be among the most influential of the King’s councillors, and as a consequence on 13 June 1483 he was arrested during a dramatic council meeting (immortalised by Shakespeare) alongside William, Lord Hastings, and Archbishop Thomas Rotherham of York. Hastings was summarily executed without delay, but the two prelates were placed in the Tower. Handed over into the custody of Henry Stafford, duke of Buckingham, Morton regained his freedom and played his part in the duke’s rebellion in the autumn of 1483, and on the failure of that rising made good his escape into exile in Flanders. As might be expected, Morton was attainted in Richard III’s delayed Parliament in early 1484, but remained at liberty on the continent. Unable to lay hands on his eloquent and well-connected opponent, Richard III tried in vain to bring him to submission with the offer of a general pardon in December 1484. This, Morton rejected.

In the spring of 1485, Morton was at the papal curia in Rome, and he may still have been there when the events that would lead up to Richard’s death at Bosworth began to unfold. It may, however, be a measure of how far from a foregone conclusion Henry Tudor’s victory was, that Morton was apparently in contact with the nuclear court at Nottingham. While it is possible that the pardon of 16 August represented a final attempt by the King to drive a wedge between the earl of Richmond and his supporters, it is also possible that it had been prepared for some time. As C.S.L. Davies has pointed out, on 2 August, in one of the first acts after taking direct control of the great seal, Richard had issued pardons to a group of known associates of Morton’s, at least one of whom had acted as a go-between at the time of the earlier, abortive, offer of a pardon the previous December. Then, Morton had rejected the King’s offer. In July 1485, he may have accepted it. Certainly, he seems to have taken delivery of the letters of pardon, and would a few years later plead them in court.

Strikingly, the pardon offered to Morton in July 1485 went further than other general pardons. While, like them, it covered a broad range of offences, it placed particular emphasis on Morton’s legal rehabilitation and restoration following his attainder in the Parliament of January 1484. This restitution technically required a fresh act of Parliament, but in the absence of such an act, the King’s pardon simply set aside the provisions of the attainder. This, in turn, may hint at a degree of desperation on King Richard’s part: Morton was a problem that needed to be solved. It could not wait for a future Parliament.   

H.W.K.

Further reading:

C.S.L. Davies, ‘Bishop John Morton, the Holy See, and the Accession of Henry VII’, English Historical Review, cii (1987), 2-30.

Richard’s pardon to Morton is printed in Pardon Rolls of Richard III, 1484-85 ed. by Hannes Kleineke (List and Index Society 365, 2023)

No series of blogs to mark the coronation of TM King Charles III and Queen Camilla would be complete without some comment on the weather – it is, after all, an English, as well as a British, coronation. Indeed, the weather is often the first thing anyone recalls when asked about their memories of a particular royal occasion – the downpours during the Diamond Jubilee river pageant were a case in point, as, indeed, were the rains that marred the coronation of Her late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in June 1953, conditions that have been described as ‘an atrocious day in the middle of a lengthy spell of atrocious weather’.

One coronation that has gone down in history for its appalling weather conditions is that of King Henry V in 1413. The circumstances, were arguably, less than promising. Where in the modern day coronations and other royal celebrations are generally scheduled for the early summer months of May and June, when there is an expectation of favourable weather (albeit with mixed results, as in 1953 and 2012), King Henry IV had died in the third week of March, and in view of the as yet shaky claim of the Lancastrian dynasty, it was decided to hold the coronation sooner, rather than later, on 9 April.

What this foreshadowed, should have been clear to anyone familiar with Geoffrey Chaucer’s near contemporary Canterbury Tales, which of course open with a reference to April showers. Yet, before too long after the event, a narrative emerged that suggested that the weather on the day in question had in fact seen completely unseasonal snowfall.    

This story seems to have originated with the St. Albans chronicler Thomas Walsingham, notable for his colourful account of events. In his account of Henry’s coronation he noted that

‘there was a great fall of snow on this day. Everybody was surprised by the severity of the weather. Some people connected the climatic harshness with the fate that awaited them at the hands of the new king, suggesting that he too would be a man of cold deeds and severe in his management of the kingdom, while others who knew of a gentler side to the king took the unseasonable weather as the best of omens, suggesting that he would cause to fall upon the land snowstorms which would freeze vice and allow the fair fruits of virtue to spring up, so that his subjects would truthfully be able to say of him “Winter is now past, the rains are over and gone”.’

(Chronica Maiora ed. Preest)

By the reign of Elizabeth I this version of events, which so conveniently matched the verse from the Song of Songs quoted by Walsingham at the end of his passage, had become canonical. Probably copying Walsingham, Robert Redman, the author of the late 16^th-century Vita Henrici Quinti likewise noted the different interpretations placed on the weather conditions, but refused to give details. He was, however, clear that ‘There is nobody, who does not know what powerful storms and tempests arose on that day when the king was consecrated and his head encircled with the crown.’ (Memorials of Henry the Fifth, ed. Cole)   

To the present day, the attractive story of the snowstorm of April 1413 finds its place in the literature. Even Henry V’s principal modern biographer regarded Walsingham’s narrative as ‘more than a literary device’, although he was more concerned with the popular sentiments that the chronicler conveyed than the actual weather on the day (C. Allmand, Henry V, 63-4).

In London, however, where men were perhaps best placed to know what the weather had been like on coronation day, they told a different story. An English chronicle of the first half of the fifteenth century recorded that it had been ‘a ful trobly wet day’. This chronicler knew what he was about: his next observation following his terse one-sentence notice of the king’s coronation ‘with michel ryalte’ was that on 1 September in the same year it had hailed strongly.

It seems that the author of this chronicle was familiar with one of London’s principal tourist attractions, a tablet displayed in St. Paul’s cathedral above the tomb of Bishop Roger Niger which recorded, among other historical events, the dates and places of the coronations of the kings of England.

This tablet was also known to another Londoner, John Cok, a former goldsmith who in the later part of his life became a brother of St. Bartholomew’s hospital in Smithfield. Cok copied some of the information on the tablet, including the dates of the coronations, into the hospital’s cartulary. But he also added extra information, and in the case of Henry V’s coronation he was keen to record his own part in this historic occasion.

‘In the year 1413 on the 9^th day of April, which day was Passion Sunday and an extremely rainy day,’ Cok wrote, ‘was the coronation of Henry V at Westminster, at which coronation I, Brother John Cok, who have written up this summary of the Kings for the refreshing of [their] memory, was present and saw it.’

(E.C. Roger, ‘Blakber’d Treasure’)

This version of the coronation day weather of 1413 was passed down through other London chronicles, and in the latter part of the 15^th century the draper Robert Fabyan was also clear that Passion Sunday 1413 had been ‘a day of excedyng rayne’ (New Chronicles of England and France ed. Ellis).

Eye-witnesses to Henry V’s coronation, or those who probably got their information from such, then knew only of rain, and not of snow. It is of course possible that on 9 April 1413 there was indeed a snow storm at St. Albans, but on balance it seems more likely that it was the verse from the song of songs quoted by Walsingham that had suggested these weather conditions to the learned chronicler. What seems clear is that the experience of those watching the outdoor processions in an age without umbrellas was less than pleasant. Let us hope that those attending the coronation of 2023 fare better!

H.W.K.

News has reached us of the death at the age of 76 of Professor Robert C. Palmer of the university of Houston, Texas. A specialist in medieval English legal history, Palmer held the Cullen Chair of History and Law at Houston until his retirement. Born in California, Palmer studied at the universities of Oregon and Iowa, and held a number of posts at American and Canadian universities, before being appointed to his chair at Houston in 1987. Palmer’s published work was often ground-breaking, being based on his detailed work on the medieval English legal records, the extent of which particularly at the start of his career both astonished and impressed his contemporaries. His monographs The County Courts of Medieval England (1982) and English Law in the Age of the Black Death (1993) in particular remain essential reading for any student of later medieval England and its governance. 

While he never had any direct personal association with the History of Parliament, there can have been few scholars who made such an impact on the work of its medieval sections. In the last 25 years of his life, Palmer developed a project website, the Anglo-American Legal Tradition, which seeks to make the manuscript records of the English law courts accessible to scholars around the world in the form of high-quality digital images.

This website quickly became an invaluable resource for the staff working on the History’s volumes for 1422-61, allowing them to trawl plea rolls and related documents in far greater numbers than would have been possible had this invariably entailed trips to the National Archives. But it is fair to say that without the site work on the current 1461-1504 volumes would have largely ground to a halt during the recent pandemic, when archival repositories around the world closed their doors to researchers. Even with the archives once again open, the site continues to be extensively used by the History’s staff, and greatly facilitates the medieval section’s work; it has, in fact, become hard to imagine life without it.

Dr Simon Payling, Senior Research Fellow on the 1461-1504 section recalls:

‘I remember, in the early 1990s, flicking through a CP40 [plea roll of the court of common pleas] in the upstairs room in Chancery Lane, overhearing a discussion between Robert and one of the PRO staff about the cost of photocopying a roll. How far we have come since then.’

At the present day, the period covered by the website extends far into the 17^th century, and incorporates literally tens of millions of images, as well as indices and other finding aids. Scholars everywhere owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Professor Palmer for his vision, and the enormous amount of time and energy he continued to dedicate to it right up to the end of his life. He will be sorely missed.

H.K.

The deans and canons of Windsor who took their places among the clerical staff of Parliament do not represent the total presence of the men of Windsor in Parliament. There was within the Windsor community another group of royal servants some of whom also had a track record of parliamentary service. These were the Poor Knights, the precursors of today’s military knights. In the same way as the modern military knights join the community of St. George’s at the end of long and distinguished careers in His Majesty’s armed forces, so their medieval antecedents also came to Windsor after many years in the service of the Crown, and of this, membership of Parliament sometimes formed a part. Examples of MPs who came to secure one of the coveted retirement spots of the Poor Knights in Windsor castle during the second half of the 15^th century include Lawrence Leventhorpe and Christopher Furneys.

Leventhorpe spent much of his career in the service of two successive earls marshal of England, the third and fourth Mowbray dukes of Norfolk, serving as treasurer of their respective households. Perhaps through their patronage, he secured return to Parliament for the Sussex boroughs of Midhurst and Bramber in 1450 and 1472 respectively. When the fourth duke died in 1476, his only daughter and heiress married Edward IV’s second surviving son, Richard. This royal connexion may explain how Leventhorpe, who is not otherwise known to have been in royal service, and who, as far as we know, never attained a knighthood, came to be appointed a Poor Knight of Windsor in March 1482.

Like Leventhorpe, Furneys had strong connexions with the county of Sussex, where he served as controller of the customs in the Chichester district from June 1455. He entered Edward IV’s household in the early years of that King’s reign as a yeoman of the bottles in the royal buttery, and in 1467 was further rewarded with the post of porter of the outer gate of Windsor castle. Furneys was returned to the Parliaments of 1472 and 1478 for the Sussex boroughs of Lewes and Bramber. On the second of these occasions at least he may have enjoyed the King’s own patronage. The Commons of 1478 were notable for the large number of royal household servants in their ranks, many of them probably the King’s placemen. These had been sent to Parliament for the sole purpose of bringing about the condemnation of King Edward’s wayward brother, George, duke of Clarence, whose trial formed the principal business of that assembly. The Commons did what was required of them, and the King showed his gratitude: in the summer of 1481, Furneys was granted the place of one of the Poor Knights of Windsor.   

The remarkable medieval records of the College of St George allow us to construct a detailed picture of the activities in Parliament of both the canons and the Poor Knights during a brief period from 1483 to 1486, when the two groups suffered a major disagreement. At the heart of this quarrel was, as so often, money. Under the terms of the College’s first statutes of 1352 there was to be a body of 26 impoverished knights, who would be housed in the castle and receive wages of 12d. per day, as well as an annual stipend of 40s. Modest as the sums involved might appear, they could in total have amounted to almost £20 per knight in any one year. Had there ever been 26 of them, the funding of the knights would have been far beyond the College’s means, and throughout the middle ages the dean and canons were thus at pains never to have more than three poor knights resident in the castle at any given time, and often even just one or two.

Successive kings nevertheless continued to appoint additional knights who often remained in limbo for a number of years before eventually (if ever) gaining admission to a place at Windsor. In spite of repeated attempts at a settlement, none was achieved, and in the early weeks of 1483, finally, the matter came before Parliament. It seems that some of the unusually large number of royal servants who had been abortively granted places as Poor Knights of Windsor had used their preferential access to their royal master, to whom they were said to have ‘made gret instaunce and labour’, seeking the knights’ incorporation and endowment separate from the dean and canons.

In the event, however, the act of Parliament that passed was everything the dean and canons could have hoped for. Not only was the college of St. George formally incorporated, but in a final clause the dean and canons were exempted once and for all from any payments to the poor knights, for whom the King promised to provide in other ways.

This should have been the end of the matter, but within two months of the dissolution of the Parliament, Edward IV was dead. On his deathbed he was said to have added a codicil to his will, assigning the Lincolnshire manor of Long Bennington for the poor knights’ support, but if this was so, his successors never fulfilled this promise. The canons, for their part, took this as read and immediately stopped their payments to the knights, who were thus at a stroke deprived of any income at all. This remained the state of affairs during the short reign of Richard III.

Yet, when Henry VII came to the throne and in November 1485 opened his first Parliament, the Poor Knights were ready, and presented a petition to the assembly. Although King Henry’s newly appointed Dean of Windsor, John Morgan, was the clerk of the Parliaments, the knights’ bill caught the canons by surprise, and Canon-steward John Seymour had to pay 2s. for a copy of ‘a certain schedule placed into Parliament by the knights’.

Now, however, the canons swung into action, and within weeks the influence of most of the prominent members of the chapter and of its full retinue of legal advisers was thrown behind their case. On account of his office of clerk of the Parliaments, the Dean of Windsor, John Morgan, was present at Westminster throughout the two sessions, and although undoubtedly heavily preoccupied with his official duties, he nevertheless found time to devote himself to the pursuit of his college’s interests.

Both sides promoted their cases energetically. In the first instance, the officials who controlled physical access to the Lords and Commons needed to be won over. Canon Seymour paid the porter of the Parliament house (that is, the Commons’ Chamber), John Flygh, 2d. ‘for his favour’, and, probably out of similar considerations, on 1 February the Speaker’s serjeant-at-arms, John Harper, received 20d. Within the chambers, procedure was the main barrier, and the favour of the officials of both houses, as well as the support of professional men from among their membership needed to be ensured. The clerk of the Commons, Thomas Bayon, could be counted upon, as he had long been employed by the College of St George in a private capacity, but prudently he was treated to a sumptuous breakfast in addition to being paid his expenses. On 24 January, the Speaker of the Commons, Thomas Lovell, whose support could have a serious impact on the passage or rejection of a bill, was paid the substantial sum of 66s. 8d., and in subsequent days other sums of money were distributed to those expected to promote the college’s interests in debate.

The Poor Knights based their case on the argument that through the machinations of the canons the act of 1483 had been made without their knowledge and agreement, and that King Edward IV himself had on his deathbed expressed remorse at having allowed it to pass. The canons by contrast claimed that the act had had the knights’ full agreement, and had indeed in part resulted from the almsmen’s own lobbying of the monarch.

Yet, whatever was said in the Lords’ and Commons’ chambers, the king’s attitude was clearly of central importance. Consequently, Dean Morgan and Canons John Arundell and David Hopton joined Canon Oliver Kyng, a former private secretary to King Edward IV, in the royal presence, when the latter presented Henry VII with a gift of £100 in cash for his good will, and in February and March Kyng was at various times able to further promote the canons’ case while riding out with the sovereign.

In the event, the canons prevailed once again. Not only was the Poor Knights’ call for the repeal of the act of 1483 rejected, but the college’s privileges and endowment, including all of Edward IV’s generous settlements, were confirmed in full. In one important respect, however, the canons’ victory proved hollow. From 11 March 1486, just a week after the dissolution of Parliament, the canon-treasurer once more had to pay the wages of three Poor Knights, amounting to more than £54 p.a., as he recorded tersely, ‘on the king’s orders until they should be provided for by the king himself’.  The Poor Knights had survived to fight another day.

H.W.K.

You can watch Dr Hannes Kleineke deliver his talk at the ‘Maurice and Shelagh Bond Memorial Lecture’, here.

Further Reading:

Hannes Kleineke, ‘Lobbying and Access: The Canons of Windsor and the Matter of the Poor Knights in the Parliament of 1485’, Parliamentary History, xxv (2007), 145-59.

Amid news of the discovery of part of the medieval river wall of the Palace of Westminster, it is worth remembering that for many centuries the river was, for MPs and peers, the preferred route of access to the meeting place of Parliament. There were multiple landing places near the palace, the sites of which were submerged when additional land was reclaimed from the River Thames at the time of the construction of the new palace after the fire of 1834.

Boatmen were available for hire both on the South Bank, at the archbishop of Canterbury’s manor at Lambeth, and in and near Southwark where many of the inns that accommodated Members of the Commons were situated. They also plied their trade at the various quays of the city of London. Travelling to Westminster by boat spared the traveller the arduous journey through the crowded streets of London, where he would be repeatedly accosted not only by a flock of apprentices hawking their masters’ wares, but also less savoury elements, such as pickpockets and cutpurses.

In the most extreme circumstances, the traveller could even fall victim to their enemies, or their hired hitmen and assassins, from whom a journey by water offered some limited protection – provided the traveller could reach his boat in the first place. Thus, in March 1446 Sir Thomas Parr, one of the knights of the shire for Cumberland in the Parliament then in session, was making his way from his lodgings in the city of London to the river when in a place called ‘Cornewalesse grounde, besyde the Crane in the Warde of the Vyntrye’ he was attacked by the two brothers of his longstanding enemy, Henry Bellingham.

Parr managed to escape, and successfully petitioned the King to place his assailants outside the normal process of the law: a proclamation was to be made in the city of London, ordering them to appear in court. If they did so, they were to be clapped in prison and remain there without the possibility of bail until the normal (and protracted) process of the common law had taken its course. If they failed to appear, they were to be deemed convicted of felony without the possibility of suing out a royal pardon. The Commons, horrified by the attack of one of their Members, put forward a bill under the terms of which the same draconian measures should become the rule in the case of any attack on a member of either house of Parliament, but this proved a step too far for Henry VI and his ministers, who instead directed that the existing statutes covering such matters should be observed and enforced.

Of course, not all watermen who plied their trade on the river were themselves honest. At some point in the final years of the 15^th century one John Tadgas, the parish clerk of Lambeth, complained to the chancellor, cardinal Morton, of having been attacked at the landing place known as the King’s Bridge at Westminster by John Borell, a local waterman, as he came from his work at Lambeth. By Tadgas’s account, the waterman beat him unconscious and disoriented. There was evidently more to the matter, for according to the parish clerk’s tale, the waterman subsequently sought out his wife and struck her several times with a drawn sword (perhaps the flat of it, since the unfortunate woman survived her ordeal), before having his victim clapped in the abbot of Westminster’s gaol.

H.W.K.

Biographies of Sir Thomas Parr and his assailant Thomas Bellingham by Dr. S.J. Payling have appeared in The History of Parliament: The Commons 1422-61, published by Cambridge University Press in 2020.

Annually in October, a lecture is given at St George’s Chapel in Windsor castle to celebrate the memory of Maurice Bond, for many years the official custodian of the records of the dean and canons, and his wife Shelagh, who served alongside him as honorary archivist. Maurice Bond is, however, also remembered at Westminster, where he served as clerk of the records to the House of Lords from 1946 until his retirement in 1981.

When the then 30-year-old Maurice Bond took up the clerkship of the records at the House of Lords, it was still a relatively new post, having been created only in February of the same year, when Francis Needham, formerly an assistant librarian in the Bodleian, had been appointed to it. The Palace of Westminster at this time still bore the scars of German bombing. The parliamentary records had during the war been evacuated to Laverstock House in Wiltshire, where they had been stored in less than ideal conditions. Needham’s first task was thus to return them to their proper home at Westminster. To re-organise the dark and dirty interior of the Victoria Tower where the records were traditionally kept, proved too much for him, and Needham consequently tendered his resignation after just a few months in post. As a final task before leaving, he was charged by the Clerk of the Parliaments of the day, Sir Henry Badeley, to find a successor. Needham approached the distinguished medievalist, Alexander Hamilton Thompson, formerly professor of medieval history at the university of Leeds, and it was he who recommended the young Mr Bond.

The creation of a dedicated parliamentary record office had been recommended by an official report in 1937, little had been done, and Bond set about his task with enthusiasm and, in the words of one observer, a ‘flair [that] had the characteristic of an entrepreneur’. Over a period of fifteen years, seven new floors, equipped with modern air conditioning units were constructed in the Victoria Tower, while Maurice Bond and his staff not only carried out vital listing and conservation work, but also kept the enthusiasm of parliamentarians in both houses alive with a programme of exhibitions and lectures. In 1963, finally, the new record office was opened to great acclaim. 

Bond’s appointment at Westminster renewed a connexion between Parliament and the College of St George that had first come into being in the mid 15^th century. This connexion was first established as a direct result of the appointment in 1447 of a Chancery clerk called John Faukes as clerk of the Parliaments.

John Faukes is thought to have come from Worcestershire, and had found employment in the royal Chancery by the later years of the reign of Henry IV. His ecclesiastical career, by contrast, was in the first instance centred in Sussex, which may have provided easy access to Westminster. He had become involved in parliamentary affairs in the 1430s, when he was repeatedly named among the clerks assigned at the beginning of each assembly to receive petitions from all comers. In 1439 he was appointed chancellor of Chichester cathedral, and two years later he became dean of the collegiate church of St Mary in the Castle at Hastings.

Having become clerk of the Parliaments in the reign of Henry VI, Faukes might have been dismissed on Edward IV’s accession, as some of his successors were during subsequent changes of dynasty. But Edward recognised his ability and not only confirmed him in post, but also promoted him from the deanery of Hastings to the more prestigious one of Windsor, which Faukes would retain until his death nearly ten years later.

But Faukes’s longevity alone does not account for his importance in the history of the medieval Parliament. Faukes was an administrative innovator, whose work has shaped the process of parliamentary record keeping to the present day. The parliament rolls of the middle ages were little more than a record of the acts that had passed, along with some procedural notes of matters like prorogations or the appointment of the Commons’ speaker. Faukes faithfully continued this practice, and oversaw the creation of a total of ten parliament rolls.

But he went further. From early on in Faukes’s clerkship, we begin for the first time to have a record of attendances in the House of Lords, with some terse notes on the discussions that took place: these are direct precursors of the modern journals of the houses of commons and lords, which contained similar material, albeit over the centuries in an increasingly detailed form. Sadly, none of Faukes’s originals survive, but we do have early modern copies of several fragments, dating from the 1450s to 1461. These compilations were in the first instance Faukes’s private records of proceedings which would only acquire an official character in a later period, and they may tell us a little about the man’s own orderly mindset and penchant for record keeping. 

There is also a second body of parliamentary records from Faukes’s day, which is interesting for a different reason. The documents in question are a collection of exemptions from the provisions of one or other of the repeated acts of resumption passed by Parliament in the course of the 15^th century. These were acts based on the view that the King should be able to live comfortably off the revenues of the Crown estates, provided that he did not grant away too many of them by way of reward. The acts thus cancelled all royal grants before a given date and took the property or annuity back into the King’s hands. The King was, however, accorded the power to exempt individual grantees from the resumption of all or some of their grants, and suitors in their droves routinely petitioned for such exemptions, which are generally known as ‘provisos’.

To gain such a proviso (or bill of exemption), an individual or corporate body would have it written out, and needed to present the document for personal approval to the King, which, assuming that it was forthcoming, was usually indicated by the monarch’s hand-written initials, or on other occasions a token, such as a ring. The successful suitor would then take this slip of parchment to the clerk of the Parliaments for enrolment on the Parliament roll in an appendix to the act of resumption.

What makes these relatively mundane documents, which survive in their hundreds, interesting are the notes that Faukes scribbled on them, indicating where he had received them. It is not entirely clear why he would have wanted to record this information, although we may speculate that it perhaps formed part of his personal filing system. Along with, perhaps, another insight into his mindset, it also offers us a glimpse, however limited, of the busy and peripatetic life that the clerk of the parliaments led during the sessions. His normal place of work during this time was the Parliament chamber in the palace of Westminster, and here he took delivery of the majority of the documents filed by him, while others were delivered to his own house. On a number of days, he visited the King’s own chamber, and even the more private spaces of the monarch’s closet and oratory. At other times he was found in St Stephen’s chapel and the meeting place of the House of Commons in the refectory of nearby Westminster abbey, on his way between these various locations being accosted by further supplicants in the abbey cloisters and Westminster Hall.

Nor, for that matter, did the deanery at Windsor afford Faukes much privacy: his movements during the Parliament of 1467 are less well documented than those of two years earlier, but the journey to St George’s was clearly insufficiently onerous to deter all suitors. Faukes had by then ceased to keep a detailed record of where every individual bill of proviso was delivered to him, but he did note that a number of them had come to his hands at Windsor.

The towering figure of John Faukes, the expert administrator, easily dwarfs many of the men who succeeded him, but his death did not represent a sharp break of the ties between St George’s and Windsor. He was probably instrumental in recommending as his successor as clerk of the Parliaments a fellow canon, Baldwin Hyde, who duly assumed the office, but was forced to retire following the upheaval of Henry VI’s brief restoration. Richard III’s clerk of the Parliaments, Thomas Hutton, was likewise rewarded with a prebend at Windsor, but Richard’s defeat at Bosworth saw Hutton dismissed from office, and two years later he also resigned his place at St. George’s and retired to Lincoln. In the autumn of 1485, finally, the clerkship of the Parliaments and the deanery of Windsor were once more reunited in the hands of John Morgan, a Welsh-born second cousin of King Henry VII, and future bishop of St David’s.

H.W.K.

You can watch Dr Hannes Kleineke deliver his talk at the ‘Maurice and Shelagh Bond Memorial Lecture’, here.

Further reading:

G.R. Elton, ‘The early Journals of the House of Lords’, English Historical Review, lxxxix (1974).

Hannes Kleineke, ‘Parliaments and Procedures’, in The History of Parliament: The Commons 1422-61 ed. Linda Clark (7 vols., Cambridge, 2021).

Michael Hicks, ‘King in Lords and Commons: three insights into late-fifteenth-century parliaments 1461-85’, in People, Places and Perspectives ed. Keith Dockray and Peter Fleming (Stroud 2005).

Roger Virgoe, ‘A new fragment of the Lords’ Journal of 1461’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, xxxii (1959).

R.A. Griffiths, ‘The Winchester session of the 1449 Parliament: a further comment’, Huntingdon Library Quarterly, xlii (1979).

The Fane Fragment of the 1461 Lords’ Journal ed. W.H. Dunham (New Haven, 1935).