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

The long reign of Henry VI was not short of high political drama, and so it is perhaps not surprising that is has also given us two of the most dramatically named Parliaments of the middle ages, the Parliament of Bats of 1426 and the Parliament of Devils of 1459. By their names, the two assemblies would seem an apt subject for a blog in the Halloween season, yet, in the first instance at least, the nomenclature is not everything it seems.

The Parliament of Bats assembled at Leicester on 18 February 1426, and continued to sit there over two sessions from 18 February to 20 March, and 29 April to 1 June of that year. The political atmosphere in the country was highly charged, owing above all to an acrimonious quarrel between two of the young King’s closest relatives and counsellors, Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester, and Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, in which other lords took sides. It was this dispute which, above all, accounted for the unusual choice of venue: while the Bishop of Winchester could rally armed support in Southwark, where he controlled a sizeable liberty, the ever unruly London mob could be expected to back the duke of Gloucester, and the council was thus justified in fearing that a Parliament at Westminster might lead to open violence between the two sides.

Even in Leicester, a stronghold of the ruling house of Lancaster, there were concerns about outbreaks of violence among the retainers of the various lords. Therefore, as a London chronicler recorded, ‘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’. This, however, did not deter those intent on a fight: ‘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”.

Some 23 years after the events at Leicester, Parliament again met in the midlands. For much of the late summer and early autumn of 1459, Henry VI’s close relative Richard, duke of York, and the Neville earls of Salisbury and Warwick, who were implacably opposed to the court party surrounding Henry VI and his formidable French queen, Margaret of Anjou, had been preparing themselves for an armed confrontation with the court’s forces. Matters came to a head in late September and early October, and following the desertion of part of their army from an encampment at Ludford bridge, York and the Nevilles had fled into exile. Already, a Parliament had been summoned to meet at Coventry, where the King and his court had based themselves, and in the Yorkist lords’ absence this now turned into an outright reckoning with the ruling party’s opponents, who were attainted and stripped of their property.

The measures of the Coventry Parliament were promptly overturned a year later, when the Yorkists had returned from exile to overcome their opponents. Much opprobrium was heaped by contemporaries on the Coventry assembly and those who had dominated its business, but it was left to later historians to coin the now well-established usage. It may have drawn upon the existence of a mystery play of the ‘Parliament of Devils’ in the play cycle performed at Coventry, but seems to have become associated with the Parliament of 1459 only in modern historiography.

H.W.K.

Further reading:

Andrew Broertjes, ‘The Lancastrian Retreat from Populist Discourse? Propaganda Conflicts in the Wars of the Roses’, Limina, 20:3 (2015), 1-21

For many decades, historians haven’t really thought about sound. It’s easy to see why, since unlike text, visual images or material objects, past sounds have, quite simply, passed out of existence. Of course, the situation is different for scholars working on periods since the invention of sound recording, but for those of us who study earlier epochs, contemplating sound can seem an impossible task. And yet, for most human beings our thoughts, feelings and actions are as much influenced by information that arrives through our ears as through our eyes. Understanding all of the dynamics of past societies must surely, then, involve some way of accounting for sonic experience.

In recent years, historians have begun to address this problem. Influenced by sound studies and historical musicology, their efforts have formed part of a broader focus on bodily and sensory experience within historical studies. My Leverhulme postdoctoral project represents another contribution to this endeavour. It explores the role of sound and music within the Chartist movement and, more generally, sonic aspects of political culture in mid-nineteenth-century Britain.

In my ‘work-in-progress’ paper for the Parliament, Politics and People seminar, I introduced my project through a case study of Leicester, exploring in microcosm some of the wider themes that I’m pursuing on a national level. Leicester was ideal in this regard, as the town’s Chartists, especially under the leadership of Thomas Cooper in the early 1840s, engaged in a remarkable flurry of cultural activity, including poetry, music and theatre alongside their political agitation.

My paper presented four major lines of inquiry, while a fifth came up in the subsequent questions. The first addressed the changing soundscape of the mid-nineteenth-century urban environment and Chartist listening experiences. Soundscapes are far from neutral entities and listening practices—in contrast to the biological process of hearing—are shaped by culture. Consequently, exploring Chartist responses to the sounds around them can tell us much about the identity and ideology of the movement. In dialogue with the debate sparked decades ago by Gareth Stedman Jones’s ‘Rethinking Chartism’, the response of Chartists to steam-powered machinery or workhouse bells, for instance, can offer new insights into their relationship to class, the economy and the state.

The second theme explored the role of sound and noise within political and especially electoral culture in the mid-nineteenth century. The increasing quietness of Victorian politics, and its association with reason, seriousness and sincerity, has been debated by James Vernon, Jon Lawrence and others, as part of a wider discussion about the emergence of a liberal political culture. My aim is to dig more deeply into the role of Chartism in this process. Examining the changing politics of ‘noisiness’ within Chartism offers another means of assessing how far, and with what consequences, the Chartists accommodated themselves within the liberal modes of behaviour that were coming to dominate the practice of politics in Victorian Britain.

Drawing on recent work by Mark Philp, my third approach examines Chartist musical culture as a response to the role of music at religious, civic and social events—and the pleasurable bodily and emotional states it could generate—as a way of subtly, and perhaps subconsciously, bolstering support for the existing social and political order. As recent Chartist scholarship has shown, the movement was notable as much for its cultural as its political output, and this might profitably be seen as an attempt to disrupt these connections between music, positive bodily and emotional sensations, and a conservative outlook. Through their inversions of religious and civic ceremonial and their attempts to foster working-class poetic and musical activity, the Chartists were seeking to generate an all-encompassing radical counter-culture that might insulate its adherents from the conservative tendencies of much existing musical culture, and use music’s emotive potential instead in the cause of the Charter. Herein may lie an important reason for the movement’s success in persuading so many of the need for radical change.

The fourth aim of my project is to explore the dynamics of Chartist musical culture and its relationship to, and differentiation from, other facets of Chartist cultural activity. I am particularly interested, for instance, in the ways in which figures like Cooper drew distinctions between the political and cultural functions of poetry and song and the kinds of events and moods that they associated with music. Furthermore, a recent discovery of a Chartist manuscript musical composition has opened up the possibility that the movement fostered the development of working-class composers, alongside the better-known poets, permitting a deeper understanding of Chartist musical aesthetics.

These are four of the major lines of investigation I’m pursuing. A fifth—regional and national variations within Chartist musical and sonic culture—came up in the seminar discussion. My intention is to compare my case study of Leicester with Chartist localities in places like Scotland, South Wales, the northern textile towns or London, with an ear towards understanding to what extent Chartism acted to foster an emerging nationwide working-class musical culture, or whether it provided an umbrella under which many distinctive regional musical traditions continued. As with my other themes, these thoughts are very much provisional and much work still remains to be done, as I continue to work towards a sonic history of Chartism.

DK

Our next seminar takes place at the IHR on 5 March at 17:15 in N202, when Professor Alan Marshall, Bath Spa University, will be speaking on Henry Bennet Earl of Arlington, A Restoration Politician and Parliament