Central and local government under Henry VII: a prosopographical approach to the commissions of the peace

I

1This paper is based on a research project which began in 1987, before J. R Lander’s book English Justices of the Peace 1461-1509 had appeared1 A database was created for the period 1470 to 1509 on the basis of the commissions of the peace published in the Calendar of Patent Rolls which give the names and ranks of the justices and the places and dates where the commissions were issued. The database was then enlarged by adding prosopographical information in the lists of sheriffs. After the publication of Lander’s book it became necessary to enlarge the database still further as many of the questions originally raised had been answered by him while new ones were raised and others continued to be unsolved. The first step was to look at the personell of the other types of commissions which the crown made use of such as commission of goal delivery or commissions of oyer and terminer as well as commissions to inquire into concealed lands or other less formal commissions which have also been published in the Calendar of Patent Rolls The idea was to throw prosopographical light on the interaction between these commissions in order to find out more about the active core and the hierachy of the local governing elite which no analysis of the comissions of the peace would disclose given their symbolic function in the representation of the local world of power and influence and given the lack of information on actual attendance at quarter sessions. This work is still in progress not because the sources are so intractable or so voluminous but because financial support for the original data collection team ran out and has forced the king in late medieval parlance "to live on his own". Although, to continue in this way, transfer to a richer see has made things easier in terms of resources, additional responsibilities made it more difficult to concentrate on an enterprise so time-consuming as the enlargement of a data base. The greater part of this paper will therefore be a comment on J. R. Lander’s findings pointing out where future research might be directed to.

II

2First of all, I wish to underline the importance of the prosopographical approach for the comprehension of societies with low institutional density. In modem societies institutions make men; in the late medieval world men made institutions. Prosopography is therefore a key technique to discover the textures of power and the significance of institutional developments in this context provided that adequate source material in available. This is often missing for the local level. But in the case of late medieval England so many commissions of the peace have survived that a large scale and nationwide prosopographical approach becomes possible. The commissions are even published as an appendix to the Calendar of Patent Rolls up to the end of the reign of Henry VII. From then onwards no such collection is available. The numbers of commissions issued for each country and the time intervals in between commissions vary to such an extent that we must draw two conclusions: Frist, there was no uniform policy of issuing commissions to all counties. Instead each county was dealt with individually. Secondly, many commissions have simply been lost, so that we have to be careful with statistical evaluations.

3Moreover, I hold a systematic analysis of the membership of the commissions of the peace to be an important contribution to English constitutional and administrative history. English constitutional history has largely been written in terms of power relations at the centre. This is, to be sure, quite appopriate Unlike the feudal kingdoms on the continent England did not experience a vertical fragmentation of power of lasting significance even though central control tended to be rather weak on the periphery as in the marches of Wales or in Northern England2. It was for central power instead that the king and his great barons and later the king and parliament contended Yet in this struggle the source and the organization of the power of each party mattered greatly. The king was above all the source of legitimacy while the power of the barons and later of parliament was based on socioeconomic might in the localities. The king could and did only rarely exercise his power through servants dependent solely on him and deriving their right to govern only from him. He chose instead to rule through local men powerful in their own right upon whom he conferred legitimacy by creating them barons or by making them his agents in keeping the peace or solving all sorts of problems.

4From the 14th century onwards the commission of the peace empowering all those named to act either alone or in conjunction with others as justices of the peace grew slowly into a key instrument of government3. While the commission of the peace played its role at first alongside other commissions for other matters of government it had become by the end of the 16th century the pivotal institution of English local government. Membership in the commission of the peace soon became an indicator of rank and of consequence in the affairs of a county. The personell of the commissions of the peace can thus be taken as a directory of the power elite of late medieval and early modem England. Changes in the composition of the commission of the peace indicate redistributions of power or tell in how far the power elite at county level was affected at all by what resulted from the power games at the centre.

5My focus in this paper will be on the question what the composition of the commissions of the peace tells us about how the crown controlled them. It is only in conclusion that I will point out some further questions which may be asked using the database. It might be argued that an analysis of the membership of the commissions is scarcely worth while as long as we do not know more about actual attendance at quarter sessions. Attendance is, indeed, a big problem4. But I hope to show that the commissions reveal some valuable information about the relationship between central and local government pending a definite answer to the question of attendance and that there might be other ways of determining who was active in local government. As to the period under consideration I concentrate on the reign of Henry VII when the process of the reconsolidation of royal power made rapidly headway even though the traditional picture of Henry VII as the founder of the ’New Monarchy¹ has been modified5.

III

6In a society where the centre enjoyed a virtual monopoly of legitimacy, but where the actual exercise of power was highly localized the crown had basically two options to use its undoubted right to appoint the justices of the peace. It could try to bring its monopoly of legitimacy into play. And it could introduce agents of the centre into the local power networks.

7Let us consider the legitimacy option first. Henry VII was well aware of the symbolic function of the selection of J. P.s. The composition of the commissions of the peace from 1485 onwards reveals how the victor of the battle of Bosworth grew quickly into the role of the founder of the Tudor dynasty. In the early years of the reign the chief dignitary of the realm heading a majority of commissions troughout the country had been John Morton, a man high in the king’s confidence who had succeeded Thomas Bourchier as archbishop of Canterbury in October 1486. By the 1490s, the primate of England though now on all commissions throughout the country including those in the archbishopric of York was only second in the order of precedence. The chief dignitary of the realm was now the prince of Wales as heir apparent of the throne. The first commission we find Henry’s first son Arthur, bom in 1486, on is that for Northumberland issued 10 June, 1489 in Nottingham where he is listed immediately after his creation during the parliament of 1489 in very ceremonious style with all his titles as "Arthur prince of Wales, duke of Cornwall, earl of Chester and Flint, warden-general in the parts of the Eastmarch and Middlemarch for the parts of Scotland and in the king’s lordship of Scotland"6.

8As duke of Cornwall, the title belonging to the king’s eldest son from his birth, Arthur does not appear on any commission. It is true that in many cases the last commission issued before the one first listing Arthur goes back to 1486/87. But there are 11 commissions for the year 1489 on which Arthur does not appear and even one for 1490. As Arthur had been bom before Henry’s coronation and as there had been a second parliament in 1487 during which he could have been created prince of Wales we may conclude that Henry waited for his rule to be reasonably well established before he began to think openly in dynastic terms. Once he felt safe enough the commissions of the peace became an instrument to propagate dynastic presence throughout the country. When Arthur died, Henry’s second son Henry, the later Henry VIII, succeeded his brother not only as prince of Wales but also as cumulative chief magistrate of England under the king in the country’s commissions of the peace as soon as this was possible.

9A somewhat similar position to that of Arthur, prince of Wales, came to be held by the king’s uncle, Jasper, duke of Bedford, who can be found on few commissions in the early years of the reign but was not missing on many from 1490 onwards to his death in 1494. In many cases Jasper Tudor appears for the first time with the prince of Wales. The king’s stepfather Thomas, earl of Derby, however, was treated like any other great and loyal magnate appearing as a permanent member on six commissions in the centre of England only7.

10This would confirm the observation that Henry VII began to use the commissions of the peace from the 1490s onwards to express a new dynastic self-consciousness. Interestingly, however, this strategy did not include Henry’s second son, Henry, bom in 1491, whose dynastic right was obviously too strong to be allowed a similar presence in the country’s chief executive agencies at the local level before the death of his elder brother. The earliest commission on which we find Henry, still with the title of Duke of York, was that for Devonshire issued in June 15028. His nomination as prince of Wales started a few months later in November and December, curiously enough before his official succession to the title on 18 February 1503. It was obviously not deemed necessary to issue new commissions in order to include the new heir to the throne. For Henry continued his way onto the commissions throughout 1503 and 1504. The latest nominations occur in Lincolnshire (Lindsey) in March and in Wiltshire in June 15079.

11There can be no doubt that the crown used the commissions to demonstrate and augment its political capital of legitimacy. But in how far did it succeed in converting this symbolic capital into actual power? The commission, we have to remind ourselves, was not an institution of its own staffed and financed by the central government. The J. P. system operated instead on the principle that private power was transformed into public power by an act of the king. The crown used the social power of the landowners in a given region to exercise a (growing) number of governmental functions. This was a cheap and practical solution, but made the central government dependent on the cooperation of the local power elites.

12The crown could, of course, refuse to appoint to or exclude from the commissions persons suspected of disloyalty or deemed unworthy for whatever reason. In theory, at least, this power could have gave been developed into something akin to a power of recognition or even confirmation of local power hierarchies. Social power declared unfit to become entrusted with public duties would have been devaluated in the esteem rate mechanism which governed county society. Inclusion into the roll would then have been regarded as the recognition of a power status inherited or recently acquired, while exclusion would have become an instrument of public censure and social disciplin which could possibly have been used short of more drastic methods such as acts of attainder.

13As regards the admission of new men the commissions are extremely difficult to handle as a source for upward social mobility into the gentry. For the identities and a fortiori the power status of the persons within this category are naturally difficult to establish. Omissions from the list of J. P.s, on the other hand, are easier to deal with especially when they concern the higher echelons of the local or national power elite. We have to be careful, however, that we do not misread omissions of names on account of the death of the person in question, possibly without an heir or with one under age, as omissions through exclusion.

14In the first five to ten years of his reign while the main objective was the consolidation of his rule Henry’s policy of exclusion is reasonably clear. It is not surprising that he should have wished to get nd of his chief opponents after the battle of Bosworth and that the resulting changes in the power elite would be reflected in the membership of the commissions. Henry’s treatment of the defeated party proved nonetheless highly circumspect. Neither did he attempt a general purge. Nor did he treat the leading Yorkists indiscriminately.

15It is true that some of them were never readmitted into English political life. The earl of Warwick, for instance, the duke of Clarence’s only son, whom Richard III had proclaimed heir apparent to the throne, had to be excluded permanently for obvious reasons and remained imprisoned in the Tower until he was finally convicted of high treason and beheaded in 1499. Viscount Lovel who fled after Bosworth and fought at the battle of Stoke for Lambert Simnel disappeared after 1487. Others had fared better like the Earl of Westmoreland, Lord Audley or Lord Zouche who were pardoned and even summoned to parliament as their status commanded. But they did not make their way back onto the commissions of the peace. Their exclusion from the commissions signalled that even if they were now given back their former rank and a part of their former wealth, their status would henceforth be one of reduced legitimacy.

16A third group of leading Yorkists was integrated into the new regime. Lord Grey of Codnor, for instance, was not summoned to Henry’s first parliament for which the writs were issued 15 September 1485 but was placed on the commissions for Derbyshire and Kent issued only five days later and stayed there till he died in 1496. In the following year he was placed upon the commission for Rutlandshire and served again without interruption until his death. It is only in Nottinghamshire that Lord Grey seems to have met with some difficulties. There were four commissions in 1485/86. He was placed on the first one, excluded from the second one issued 22 June 1486, placed again on the third one issued 12 November 1486 and then left off the forth one dated 15 November 1486 which remained unchanged for the next seven years. He was eventually again included in the commissions of February and May 1493 and remained on the latter one up to his death in 1496. The reasons remain obscure. A more spectacular case of rehabilitation and integration was that of Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, who was held a prisoner in the Tower until 1489 when he was directly sent to the North to replace the Earl of Northumberland murdered in the course of a tax not. In June 1489 he already appeared on the commissions for Northhumberland and Cumberland. From 1493 onwards we find him also on the Yorkshire commissions. Surrey proved a loyal and reliable servant in the difficult North and was eventually rewarded with the restitution of his estates in East Anglia. The shift is reflected in his presence on the commissions of the peace. In 1501-1502 he was left off the Yorkshire commissions, in 1503-1504 off the commissions for Cumberland and Northumberland. From 1501 onwards he was instead included in the commissions for Surrey and Sussex, in 1504 followed those for Suffolk and Norfolk.

17After the period of consolidation Henry’s policies of exclusion became more complicated and less straightforward. There is, for instance, no correlation between Henry’s policy of suspended attainders, bonds and recognizances described by Lander and his practice regarding the appointment of I. P.s10. Most of the peers involved in this system of probation stayed on their commissions, at least for some time. Thomas Grey, Marquess of Dorset had to give the king so many guarantees for his good behaviour that one wonders how the king could have entrusted him with public duties at all. Nonetheless, he was placed on a total of nine commissions of the peace11. But Dorset’s son and heir Thomas, the second marquess of Dorset, found himself confined to the commissions of Leicestershire, Northhamptonshire and Warwickshire. From 1504 onwards Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland had had to enter into various recognizances for various reasons, one of them being a condemnation for having infringed the royal right of wardship. He was nonetheless kept on the commissions for the three ridings of Yorkshire till the end of reign12.

18This is not to say that Henry VII left the weapon of exclusion unused. On 20 May 1493 Edmund de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, started an impressive career as a justice of the peace. He was placed on fourteen commissions, all issued on the same day, but was dropped from all of them at the first possible renewal which occurred sometimes as early as 1494. Eventually he sat only on the commissions for Norfolk and Suffolk from which he was also dropped in 1502-1503. In 1504 he was attainted.

19Another remarkable case is that of George Neville, Lord Burgavenny who in 1507 was fined £ 70,650 for retaining 471 men below the rank of knight or squire. In the course of the ensuing negotiations he gave "a recognizance for 5,000 marks not to enter the shires of Kent, Surrey, Sussex and Hampshire at any time during his life without the king’s licence"13. Burgavenny had been on the commissions for Essex and Kent from the beginning of the reign and on those for Gloucester, Surrey, Sussex and Worcester from 1493-1494 onwards. From 10 December 1506 and from 11 November 1508 to the end of the reign he was dropped from the commissions for Gloucestershire and Essex respectively. But his recognizance was obviously not reason enough to renew the commissions for Kent and Surrey in order to exclude him. On the contrary, Burgavenny was kept on the commission for Sussex issued on 24 February 150814.

20 How do these cases fit together? Henry’s policy of blackmailing his barons into political obedience must be seen as an after-effect of the political experience of the past age of instability and conflict. It was based not so much on concrete suspicions as on a structural mistrust of the power elite which Henry conceived of and accordingly treated as a temporarily subdued hostile faction. Henry reacted to potential disobedience by potential sanctions which had moreover the interesting side-effect of being fiscally exploitable. Real disciplinary measures had only to be taken in case that there was real opposition or a real danger of opposition.

21Henry’s policies can also be seen as a result of his awareness that he depended on a power elite which he had few means to discipline. Like attainders or indictments for high treasons exclusion from the commissions of the peace could only be directed against individuals. Wholesale purges of the commission were practically impossible and hat not even been practiced during the Wars of the Roses because the very logic of government by commission did simply not permit to staff a commission against the local power hierarchy. The only English king ever to attempt this was James II, and he paid for his lack of understanding of the system with his throne. The membership of the commissions shows thus a remarkable continuity which makes one wonder why it was felt necessary to renew the commissions if no or only minor changes occurred. The sequence of commissions will have to be studied on a much larger scale and in a comparative manner before we will know more about the motives which lay behind renewals. One general aspect certainly was that the crown used renewals to remind the local power elite that they exercised public power not in their own right but as trustees for the king who conferred legitimacy upon them.

IV

22Let us next consider the option of direct control. The crown seems to have followed a double strategy. On the one hand, it appointed key figures of the central government who then sat on several, sometimes up to eight commissions in different parts of the country for a considerable number of years being included in one commission after the other. They might be regarded as representatives of a national political elite although their presence on the commissions was far from nationwide with the exception, as we have seen, of the prince of Wales, the king’s uncle Jasper, duke of Bedford, and the archbishop of Canterbury. On the other hand, the crown assigned trusted servants to commissions for limited periods of time only, perhaps in order to solve particular problems

23 We can distinguish three groups among the "national political elite" on the commissions of the peace: men from the immediate entourage of the king, the leading law officers of the crown and the bishops. The following remarks will focus on the second part of Henry VII’s reign when the political practice of the regime was no longer dominated by the experience of violent dynastic change

24The first group mentioned consisted of leading loyal peers like the earl of Oxford and leading officeholders and councillors like Sir Reynold Bray and Sir Thomas Lovell, manager of the king’s finances, or Sir William Uvedale, a less prominent household official. The name of Sir Richard Guildford, the master of the ordnance, might be added.

25The peers were in general chosen on a territorial principle. In accordance with the idea to transform private power into public power by an act of the king they were placed on the commissions of those counties where they held land and exercised social power as magnates. Even if we find some of the greater barons on a considerable number of commissions there never was a group of peers which gamed preeminence on a national scale for any length of time. The closest we come to this is in 1493-95 when a group of bishops and peers consisting of the bishops of Bath and Wells, of Rochester and Exeter and of the earls of Derby, Devon, Essex and Suffolk appears on 12 commissions out of a total of 36 at the same time. Only two years later this constellation had vanished.

26The territorial principle did obviously not apply in the case of central government and household officials like Sir Reynold Bray. In the beginning of the reign his name appears on the commissions for Sussex and Surrey only. From 1493 onwards we then find him, often together with Sir Thomas Lovell, on 14 commissions. He sat on the commissions for Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Derbyshire, Oxfordshire and Shropshire for the whole period from 1493/6 to the end of the reign and had short term assignments in Hertfordshire, Lincolnshire, Middlesex, Warwickshire and in the three ndings of Yorkshire. A comparable range was covered by Sir Thomas Lovell who was placed on the commissions for Berkshire, Hertfordshire, Middlesex, Norfolk, Nottinghamshire and Oxfordshire again for the whole period from 1493/5 to the end of the reign. Like Bray he also had a number of short-term assignments in various other counties. While the short-term assignments suggest that Bray and Lovell were used as special agents or troubleshooters, the long-term assignments create the impression of service appointments like that of the Earl of Surrey in the North. The area covered and geographical distribution of the counties raises, however, the question how they could have fulfilled their duties? And if they did not attend the quarter sessions regularly, why were they appointed on a long-term basis at all instead of being sent on special missions?

27Another intriguing question with regard to central government and household officials is the contrafactual one why a number of trusted and prominent figures do not appear on the commissions. Edmund Dudley, for instance, figured more prominently on the commissions than Richard Empson although both were highly unpopular. William Berkeley, earl of Nottingham, the earl marshal of England, whom Henry VII elevated to the rank of marquess in 1490, sat only on the commission for Gloucestershire. Lord Dynham, the lord treasurer, appears only for a very brief period on the commission for Surrey. Why did someone like Edward Belknap so intimately acquainted with English county society as to be made surveyor of the king ’ s prerogative in 1508 with a commission to enquire into concealed lands of felons, wardships and marriages sit only and only intermittently on the commission for Warwickshire15? Was there a division of labour regarding the relations between the centre and the localities?

28The second group among the representatives of the central government on the commissions is a little easier to deal with. It consisted of the leading law officers of the crown such as Sir William Huse and Sir John Fyneux, both chief justices of the king’s bench, Sir John Vavasour, a chief justice of the common pleas, Sir William Hody, a chief baron of the exechequer, Sir John Boteler, another chief justice of the common pleas, or Sir Thomas Frowyk, a serjeant-at-law. Others names like that of John Fyssher, a judge of the assize, might be added. Our list need not be complete. The comparatively high proportion of law officers as representatives of the centre suggests that in appointing them the crown was perhaps more concerned with legal and judicial standards in the adimimstrati on of justice than with the distribution of power even though the king’s judges would not have overlooked this aspect. What also points into this direction is the fact that the geographical distribution of the commissions to which these law officers were added corresponded to a considerable degree albeit not fully to the circuit of the judges of the assize. John Fyneux, for instance, sat on the commissions of all counties in the Norfolk circuit. To these were added Kent where Fyneux was a large landowner and from 1501 onwards Dorset. John Vavasour was on the commissions of all counties in the Midland circuit. Sir William Hody was a J. P. in all counties of the Oxford circuit. This suggests a much more formal and at the same time closer functional relationsship between the commission of the peace and the assizes than Lander assumes16. If this assumption proved correct, it would also explain why the assize judges were not "particularly prominent" in quarter sessions where they were not concerned as local land-and powerholders17.

29The third and last group of representatives of the central government on the commissions were the bishops. Their appointments resembled those of the high judges in that they too sat quasi ex officio on the commissions of the counties in their dioceses. There are, however, a few notable exeptions to the rule. The most prominent one was the archbishop of York who in the first decade of the reign was only placed on the commissions for a part of Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, and the three ridings of Yorkshire while the presence expected of him in the North was supplied by the bishop of Durham. After the death of Thomas Rotherham in 1501 the archbishop was even omitted from the Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire commissions. Other cases could be added. Thus, the bishop of Rochester was on no commission after 1494, and the bishop of London made it onto the commission of Middlesex only during the first six years of the reign and was missing for the rest of the reign. He was never a justice of the peace in Surrey or Kent between 1485 and 1509 and disappeared from the commission for Essex after 1494. From 1502 onwards the bishop of Hereford was missing on the commissions for Herefordshire although another four were issued before the end of the reign Neither can the bishop of Coventry and Lichfield be found on the commission for Derbyshire nor the bishop of Lincoln on the one for Leicestershire which is surprising enough since the latter sat on six commissions in his own diocese and was a nearly permanent J. P. in Staffordshire in the adjacent bishopric of Coventry and Lichfield18. It was obviously not deemed necessary to renew a commission expressly in order to include a newly appointed bishop In Cumberland no new commission was issued after 1503 although there was now no more ecclesiastic among the J. P.s

30It follows that the ex officio nexus between diocese and commissions was not a very formal one as it seems to have been the case with the judges We should rather regard the bishops as persons of authority in their dioceses who would not normally be passed over in a representation of the local distribution of power unless the king denied them his confidence When employed outside their dioceses we find the bishops on short-term as well as on long-term assignments. The former could be easily explained in personal terms. The bishop en mission might be a particularly gifted mediator or particularly well connected in the county to which he was sent. Or else his own interests might be at stake. Long-term service on the commissions of counties beyond the diocesan boundaries is more difficult to explain before the complex interplay between personal and institutional, secular and ecclestiastical factors in the selection of bishops and their employment as J P.s has not been unravelled.

31Two examples may suffice to illustrate the point. A change of persons might bring well-established structures of cooperation to an abrupt end As bishop of Durham Richard Fox, since 1487 Henry’s keeper of the privy seal, had demonstrated a presence on the commissions in the northern church province which one would rather have expected from the archbishop of York William Sever, former bishop of Carlisle, who succeeded him on his translation to Winchester, did not replace Fox as a key figure in the local government of Northern England He just made it onto the commissions of Northumberland and Westmoreland, but not onto those of Cumberland or the ridings of Yorkshire although he had sat there before as bishop of Carlisle For Richard Fox himself the world must have changed as well. The see of Winchester, the wealthiest in the country, was a rich reward for loyal service But it played practically no role in local government. The bishop of Winchester sat on the commission for Surrey and Hamsphire only.

32My second example is that of John Alcock who as bishop of Ely had sat on the commissions for the neighbouring counties of Essex, Hertfordshire and Suffolk from the beginning of the reign until his translation to the primatial see of Canterbury in 1500. His successor, Richard Redman, formely bishop of Exeter, for whom the translation to the wealthier diocese of Ely meant a promotion in ecclesiastical and financial terms, did not even sit on the commission for Cambridgeshire.

V

33Let me in conclusion direct your attention to two questions which it might become possible to answer with the help of the database mentioned in the beginning. First of all, a systematic comparison between the membership of the commissions of the peace and that of other commissions may enable us to identify the class of persons who were really active in local government and may even give us some idea of the hierarchy among them For unlike the commissions of the peace the commissions for other purposes had no symbolic functions and list therefore only those who were really concerned with the matter in question. The information gained in this way does not make up for the lack of sources on attendance. But for the questions raised above it is better than nothing.

34Secondly, an analysis of all J. P.s below the national level described above who served on more than one commission may disclose information about how the counties cooperated and give us an idea of the political geography of England at the local level. For a close reading of the commissions creates the impression that the relations between some counties were closer than between others A county by county comparison of adjacent counties could therefore reveal the existence of power regions above the county level which would then have to be checked against what we know about the patterns of landownership.