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The Shropshire Muster-Master's Fee
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 July 2014
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In the Elizabethan re-organization of the English militia the muster-master was given the responsibility of supervising the training and inspecting the equipment of the trained bands in each county. As an ex-professional captain, he supposedly provided the experience in military matters lacking among those who served in the county lieutenancy and commanded the militia.
In The Muster-Master, a pamphlet written probably by Gervase Markham around 1630, unstinting tribute is paid the Elizabethan muster-masters. Confronted with an unprecedented threat from abroad as well as occasional domestic rebellion, “the state elected so many old and experienced captains and approved officers in the wars, as might furnish every county in the kingdom with one able and sufficient commander” who would instruct the bands, inspect their armor and equipment and certify all defects to the commissioners of muster. These tasks were “faithfully and skillfully performed, not by inferiors, or petty officers, which knew no more but the bare A.B.C. of war: but by such as had run through every grammar rule thereof; such as had borne the office of captain by desert and not from private letters, gaudy clothes, or lustful employments; such as have their wounds in their faces, chasing the enemy, not such as have whole skins by running away, which they now call a violent retiring.”
Not for long, however, did this situation last. By the time of the Armada the Council unwisely shifted the burden of paying the muster-masters on to the counties while the office itself became part of the lord-lieutenant's patronage. Commenting on the rising opposition to paying the muster-master's fee in the early Jacobean period, Boynton writes that the “main complaint was apparently that, subject to the Council's formal approval, the office was venal. Not that there was anything unusual in that; but the lord-lieutenants often retained this piece of patronage for their own clients, so that the county paid but had no say in the matter.” The author of The Muster-Master was deeply troubled by the results attendant on the lord-lieutenant's monopoly of military patronage in the county.
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- Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1970
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NOTES
1 Boynton, Lindsay. The Elizabethan Militia, 1558-1638 (London, 1957), 105–7.Google Scholar
2 H(untington) M(anuscript) 27514, fol. 4r-4v. Quotations from this mauscript are reproduced by kind permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California as are other references to the Ellesmere Collection.
3 Ibid., fol. 5r.
4 Boynton, op. cit., 226; Barnes, Thomas G., Somerset 1625-1640 (Oxford, 1961), 263, n.52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
5 Fol. 7v.
6 Fol. 9v.
7 Fol. 10r-10v.
8 Boynton, op. cit., 288; Barnes, op. cit., 118-19.
9 Boynton, op. cit., 255, 271-2, 290; Barnes, op. cit., 263. The author of The Muster-Master complained (10r) of some counties “finding wusses and starting holes in the laws, by which they refuse to pay any muster-master's fee, at all ….”
10 HM Ellesmere 7631. Each of the 15 hundreds in Shropshire was assessed at ten shillings an allotment. According to Edward Burton, the muster-master, there were 100 allotments “which makes up the sum of £50 being the small sum formerly paid to the muster-master.” El. 7637. The fee, so Burton complained, was already two years in arrears; El. 7625.
11 El. 7694; 7633. Sir Richard Newport also criticized the jury's presentment Sir Richard, an official in the Council of Wales and a Royalist in the Civil War, was father of Francis Newport, a Royalist MP in the Long Parliament. See Keeler, Mary Freer, The Long Parliament, 1640-41 (Philadelphia, 1954), 284–85.Google Scholar
12 E1. 7647. Bridgewater was Lord President of the Council of the Marches of Wales — a fact which will help to explain Sir Richard Newport's reaction to the jury's presentment (see n. 11) — and Lord-Lieutenant or other English border counties as well as those in north and south Wales.
13 Later Turner was to minimze his dispute with Sir John. Before a Commons Committee in 1641 he stated that “for Sir John Corbet he had not spleen unto him; he married his cousin german and for what passes at the Sessions if there was any more than his opinion to diverse question in debate he referred and submitted it and himself to the grave judgment of the assembly.” El. 7694. In 1642 Turner was Recorder of Shrewesbury and particpated in negotiations with Corbet and two other MPs concerning keeping Shrewesbury loyal to Parliament! Beaumont, H., ‘Events in Shropshire at the Commencement of the Great Civil War,’ Transactions of the Shropshire Archaeological and Natural History Society, 4th Series. Vol. XVIII, 1941–1943, 20–21.Google Scholar
14 El. 7644.
15 El. 7646. The JPs noted that the muster-master himself was a member of the grand jury.
16 El. 7656. The jury foreman was to present the letter to Bridgewater. He would, according to Sir Andrew, confirm the latter's views to the Earl. Richard Harris, Clerk of the Peace for Shropshire, also warned Bridgewater concerning the muster-master fee: ‘Your truest friends … disgust it utterly …” El. 7649.
17 El. 7657.
18 El. 7634. The jury was now in the custody of messengers from the Privy Council; the jurymen informed Bridgewater of their willingness to submit themselves to him and to perform whatever duties he demanded of them.
19 El. 7660.
20 El. 7668. One High Constable confessed that he and some of his colleagues did have a conference with the grand jury and desired “them to take order that the bench might be moved that such moneys as were unpaid for the muster-master's wages might be levied before any further collections were made” but denied having any other contact with the grand jury. The High Constables were placed in custody as a result of the grand jury's testimony; Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, 1635, 304.
21 El. 7651; for Sir John's complaints concerning his imprisonment, see El. 7701. Corbet's petition to the King for his release is in C.S.P., Dom. 1635, 455.
22 El. 7676; C.S.P., Dom., 1535, 507.
23 El. 7677.
24 El. 7673; 7671.
25 Historical Manuscripts Commission, IVth Report, 99b. El. 7682a is a complete copy of Corbet's petition with marginal notes by Bridgewater.
26 El. 7694.
27 Marginal note, El. 7682a.
28 El. 7697 is a complete copy of the declaration of Commons which ends with a formal declaration of impeachment against Bridgewater and the others who signed the warrant committing Corbet to prison. Commons' Journal, 1640–1642, Vol. II, p. 167Google Scholar, gives only a record of the House's action on Corbet's petition.
29 In the Commons' Journal the fee is listed as £30.
30 Marginal note, El. 7697. In his formal answer to the Commons' declaration, Bridgewater admitted only to appointing Burton and requesting that he be paid the traditional muster-master fee. These were not, he argued, illegal acts; El. 7706.
31 Lords' Journal, 1644–1645, Vol. VII, p. 470.Google Scholar
32 El. 7710.
33 El. 7770; 7774.
34 Or so appears from El. 7702; there is no record of the impeachment trial in the Lords' Journal.
35 Op. cit., p. 291. According to Barnes (op. cit., 119) “In Somerset as elsewhere the constitutional struggle raging in the Commons, when translated into county ferment, effectively sapped his [i.e. the muster-master's] authority and ultimately destroyed his usefulness.”
36 El. 7710.
37 Keeler, op. cit., p. 143.
38 Of course, Bridgewater may not have informed the Council of the opposition in Shropshire, although this does not seem likely. A comment he made in a letter to Turner written in June 1635 implies that he had passed on to the Council what he knew of the affair: he “wishes with all his heart there had not been cause to have written so much of our countrymen's business.” El. 7661; see also El. 7667.
39 Beaumont, op. cit., 13; they were Francis Newport and Sir Richard Lee, Bart., of Langley and Acton Burnell, who was the other member from the county.
40 On Newport, see n. 11 and 12.
41 Ives, E. W., ed., The English Revolution 1600-1660 (London, 1968), 86.Google Scholar
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