With the publication of The House of Commons 1422–1461 a major milestone in scholarship on late medieval England has been reached. Edited by Linda Clark (with co-editors), this latest set of volumes (seven in total) in Cambridge University Press's The History of Parliament series has been a work in progress since the publication of the only other publication covering a medieval period, The House of Commons 1386–1421, edited by J. S. Roskell and colleagues, in 1993. With almost thirty years separating the two publications, it would be no exaggeration to say that these are once-in-a-generation events, and historians are most fortunate to see the realization of almost three decades of research at this moment. They may be slow burners, but the results are definitely worth the wait. The original plan was to take the survey up to 1509, but this would clearly have pushed the project beyond the realms of a reasonable timeframe (even by this series’ standards). Under the capable leadership of Clark—a veteran of the History of Commons 1386–1421 volumes—a team of nine researchers has produced a publication of truly epic proportions focusing exclusively on the reign of Henry VI. It includes a wide-ranging general introduction (volume 1), a survey of the 144 constituencies that returned MPs to parliament in the period (volume 2), and five volumes containing the biographies of all known MPs (2,844 individuals altogether). Even allowing for the generous font size of volume 1, the notable expansion of the number of volumes over that of History of Commons 1386–1421 (which provided biographies of 3,173 men in just three volumes) suggests a significant expansion in the source material available to the researchers of the later period and, consequently, a much richer set of biographical studies.
The decision to publish History of Commons 1422–1461 as a group of volumes in its own right also makes good sense historically. In multiple ways, medieval parliaments were shaped by the particular circumstances of the king who happened to be sitting on the throne. Under Henry VI, England—and especially the individuals who were returned to parliament—faced a set of challenges quite different from those that came about under his successors. Henry VI was never able to rule effectively: because of his youth in the early part of his reign; because of his lack of resolve and inherent weakness in the middle years; and because of incapacitation in the 1450s, when he suffered bouts of severe psychotic illness. This, then, was a forty-year period during which there was an almost total absence of royal authority. Increasingly, the stresses on the polity caused by the king's inanity, chronic royal insolvency, and a downward spiral of military defeat created deep-running political fissures. Consensus gave way to conflict, leading eventually to civil war. So much of the drama of these years was played out in parliament. Learning about who attended parliament at this time thus not only carries intrinsic interest but also sheds invaluable light on the English polity in the years leading up to the outbreak of the Wars of the Roses.
Only twenty-two parliaments met in this period, but it was a particular feature of this reign that, when the assembly did meet, its sessions lasted much longer than they did in earlier periods: on average, in the 1420s and 1430s for eleven to twelve weeks, rising to an astonishing five months (average) between 1445 and 1454. Because of the length of the sessions, prorogations became the norm, happening in fourteen of the twenty-two parliaments. Parliaments may still have been occasional, ad hoc meetings of the political nation, but when called upon to attend, MPs were frequently committing themselves to substantial investments of time, and their constituencies to a considerable outlay of money on wages. Even novice attendees might have considered themselves seasoned parliamentarians by the end of some of these more protracted sessions. Such lengthy periods of attendance point to the difficult and sometimes intensely controversial issues with which MPs were confronted.
This set of volumes will, like others in the History of Parliament series, be mined for the extraordinary detail they provide on the individual lives and careers of MPs. The vast majority of these men have until now occupied the shadows, the periphery of historical knowledge; many, indeed, were previously known only by the appearance of their names on the lists of returnees. Through the industry and scholarship of Clark and her co-editors, who have trawled through vast amounts of published and unpublished sources (the extensive bibliography of manuscript sources in volume 1 indicates how thorough these searches have been), a window has been thrown open onto a whole class of men—the middling sort—who formed the backbone of the political community in Henry VI's reign. Inevitably the length of each biography is determined by the individual's engagement in activities that left a mark on surviving records, but it is in general a testimony to the highly bureaucratized nature of governance in late medieval England (both at the center and locally) and of the burgeoning writing culture of the fifteenth century that in many instances the editors have been able to write exceptionally full accounts of the lives of their subjects. The biographies allow insights into an extraordinary range of fifteenth-century societal and cultural concerns, and they provide the footing for detailed investigations into local conditions, regional networks, and structures of power. However, it is the light shed by this underpinning research on the MPs as a class that really advances understanding of the institutional history of parliament in these years. Taking their cue from Roskell's brilliant analysis of the data gathered for the volumes in House of Commons 1386–1421, Clark and her co-editors present in the first two volumes a synthesis of the vast compendium of raw data collected in the individual biographies of the MPs. Volume 2 provides what is akin to constituency biographies, highlighting key features such as origins (especially applicable to the boroughs), magnate influence (of particular relevance to the shire constituencies), profiles of the MPs (such as their wealth, connections, experience, and officeholding), and discussion of the conduct of elections. A useful innovation is the itemization of all the known constituency petitions. Volume 1 offers a more general survey on virtually every conceivable aspect of the collective profile of the men returned as MPs. With numerous tables and appendices supporting the analysis, this volume is the one most likely to be used by readers wishing to step back from the individual trees to survey the wood in its entirety.
Thus, the reader learns that at least 50 percent of MPs served on more than one occasion, and that no fewer than 350 individuals (12 percent of the total) were elected to five or more parliaments. Twenty-five individuals might be considered to have made a career out of parliamentary attendance, having served in a remarkable twelve or more assemblies (though not all necessarily under Henry VI). One of the more interesting observations is that constituencies tended to elect novices when parliament was sitting away from Westminster, probably because these assemblies offered fewer opportunities for the more senior and experienced candidates to advance their private interests in nearby London, when parliament met at Westminster. The reader learns, too, that fewer and fewer MPs with military experience attended parliament as England increasingly disengaged from the Hundred Years War (in 1449 only 11 of 273 MPs had seen military service), raising the troubling prospect that as the kingdom's military fortunes went into decline, those who attended parliament became increasingly ill-equipped to provide the robust and informed counsel needed to help reverse that decline. On the other hand, parliament was becoming much more clearly the habitat of men of law: across the reign, at least 20 percent of MPs made a living from the legal profession, a statistic suggesting that the Commons could bring high levels of legal expertise to the assembly's proceedings, no doubt assisting their role in scrutinizing the public and private bills to be forwarded for royal assent.
If the Commons were becoming more erudite and less militaristic in their outlook, it was a shift no doubt fueled by increased opportunities for learning, as more of them attended school and university, and levels of literacy increased across the board, thereby elevating the educational quality of parliament's membership. Yet there were still rogues and victims. Among the more unusual statistics is that twenty-three MPs were murdered (though not, it should be noted, during their time in parliament). These numbers included the hapless Walter Rich, MP for Bath, murdered by a real-life wife of Bath in what is speculated to have been “a sexual encounter gone wrong” (I:575) (he was suffocated with a linen towel, strangled with a leather belt, and sat on for good measure). Among the notorious rogues elected to parliament was the Lincolnshire MP William Tailboys. He was described by the Commons themselves a few years after his attendance in 1445 as a “common murderer . . . [and a] continual breaker of the king's peace” (1:577). His example proves the point that being a law-abiding citizen was not necessarily the overriding quality looked for by constituencies when choosing men to represent their interests in parliament.
The detailed analysis of the collective data on MPs sheds important light on other key aspects of parliamentary history. It was under Henry VI that the phenomenon of the nonresident MP really took off. There were two distinct categories: (1) boroughs (for it was principally borough rather than shire constituencies affected) turned to lawyers and other gentry who, although not strictly resident, nevertheless came from the surrounding area and who could therefore claim a loose affiliation to the place they sought to represent; and (2) boroughs increasingly returned men from well beyond their political catchment area, men with no meaningful connection to the constituency, chosen because of their political connections and influence. These were the real carpetbaggers of the period, and their number increased dramatically from the 1440s as the factional struggles at court began to place increasing premium on the political sympathies of those who sat in the Commons.
Some MPs appear to have made it something of a career of offering their services to different boroughs: between 1442 and 1460, as many as sixty-six men represented boroughs in more than one county (whereas there we just twenty-three who did so in the whole of the period 1386–1421). These constituencies should not be thought to have been rotten boroughs, in the modern sense of the term, for it was an arrangement suiting all parties concerned: it was especially welcomed by poorer boroughs whose inhabitants might agree to the election of an outsider in return for the reduction or cancellation of his wages. If the politically fraught circumstances of the 1440s and 1450s were key in driving the dramatic increase in nonresident MPs, it was also the principal factor behind the increase in the number of parliamentary boroughs, taking the total number of representatives in 1439 from 264 to 288 in 1453. Controversial parliaments seem to have been a fillip rather than a dampener to representative politics.
Yet, in their assessment of the implications of the connections that existed between MPs and members of the nobility, the editors are rightly cautious: though such connections existed (in the period 1426–1433, MPs who held a substantive link to a lord comprised 13 percent of those returned; in 1447–1441 it was 15 percent; and in 1450–1467 it was 25 percent), they warn readers not to assume either that these figures indicate that magnates unduly manipulated elections to have their own men returned, or that MPs who belonged to magnate affinities were necessarily the political creatures of their lords. One of the more surprising facts to emerge from analysis of MPs’ connections is the discovery that for the most part those with household connections made up only a relatively small presence in parliament throughout Henry VI's majority (insofar as meaningful data can be collected from sometimes incomplete lists of MPs’ names). In some assemblies, when the court was under attack or the interests of the duke of York were served (such as in November 1450, when just 23 of 269 MPs were household men, or in 1455 when they constituted just 11 of 199 MPs), this is not surprising, but even in less overtly partisan assemblies the figures suggest that the king could never expect a significant base of support within the Lower House (such as 26 of 269 in 1442). This suggests that overt packing of parliament, even at times of heightened political tension, was avoided. It also suggests, however, that the crown placed particular reliance on the abilities and loyalties of the Commons’ Speaker to push through favorable policies, for a member of the household was chosen as Speaker in seven out of the ten parliaments to meet between 1437 and 1459.
The History of Parliament Trust's publications on the House of Commons have long struggled conceptually from their implied synonymy with the history of the institution in its entirety. That the volumes contain biographies of only the members of the Lower House, rather than all those who attended parliament, has presented successive generations of editors with a conceptual headache, for the approach hints at a Whiggist visualization of parliament in which the representatives are accorded the highest priority. Roskell's solution to this difficulty in House of Commons 1386–1421 was to make his introductory survey a broad-ranging account of all aspects of the institution. This approach is also taken in volume 1 of House of Commons 1422–1461. It certainly has merits, serving in some ways as a form of compensation for the absence of biographies of members of the Lords; but one cannot help wonder whether by offering in volume 1 an overall history of parliament under the auspices of a publication on the Commons this approach actually accentuates rather than resolves the apparent disparity in the treatment of the two houses. For volumes titled The House of Commons, perhaps the most straightforward approach would have been—and would be—to focus straightforwardly on the activities and profile of the Commons. Nonetheless, in its extension to other aspects of the history of parliament under Henry VI, besides those areas directly connected to the activities of the MPs, the general survey has much to offer. There is useful discussion of the idea of parliamentary privilege—the first half of the fifteenth century was crucial in the formulation and recognition of the notion that service in parliament afforded an individual protection at law. There is also a good summary of the increasingly elaborate procedures shaping the passage of private and public bills. And there is an excellent account of the changing size of the Upper House, which increased its membership (measured in terms of writs of summons) from 74 in 1423 to a high of 117 in 1453 and 1455, figures that reflected the significant increase in the creation of new parliamentary baronies by letters patent. Intriguingly, at least twelve of these new peers had previously attended parliament as representatives in the Lower House. Under Henry VI, the reward of peerages for political service—a phenomenon very much redolent of the modern UK parliament—became a routine constitutional mechanism.
The general survey thus provides a huge amount of useful context and explanation for the reader. Unlike the introduction to House of Commons 1386–1421, which was written solely by Roskell, the various sections in House of Common 1422–1461 are written individually by the central core of the editorial team. This has obvious advantages: the research and synthesis are presented at a level of detail that a single author would have struggled to achieve on their own. However, it also has some drawbacks. The survey does not hold together as a single, coherent account of parliament in the way that Roskell's analysis does. Whether intended or not, it is set out in such a way that it is most likely to be dipped into, rather than read in the whole. An overall conclusion would have helped tie the many and disparate strands together. The coverage of subject matter also seems at times a little haphazard: Why, for example, give private petitions a section of their own, but not common petitions? Why provide a section on the “The Diplomatic of Parliament” (I:110–14) (in reality, the diplomatic relating specifically to bill process) but no general consideration of the records of parliament? Furthermore, a minimalist approach to referencing is perfectly understandable in a publication of this length, but occasionally it is at the expense of full acknowledgment of the scholarly foundations on which much of the analysis in volume 1 rests. The close analysis of the collated data and the conclusions reached about its wider significance are generally sound, but occasional slips of judgment creep in. It is not accurate, for example, to characterize Henry VI's parliaments as the first to be accorded a part in “constitutional and dynastic affairs” (1:506). These are, of course, minor quibbles and are not meant in any way to detract from a publication that transforms understanding of political society in one of the most pivotal of medieval English reigns. Clark and her co-editors should rightly be proud of this magnificent achievement and the part they have played in producing a set of volumes that will form a mainstay of research into the medieval parliament, the English state, and its localities for generations to come.
