The Parliamentary Representation of the English Boroughs by May McKisack

Author:May McKisack [McKisack, May]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, History
ISBN: 9780429632495
Google: RmpVQwAACAAJ
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2019-10-10T04:00:00+00:00

The records of Salisbury seem to echo a conflict, more persistent here than elsewhere, between the elected representatives and the governing body of the town on the matter of payment of wages. The representatives sued fairly regularly for expenses writs, and these writs were often sewn to the folio of the ledger on which the payment was recorded. It appears that the representatives looked upon the writ as a safeguard against attempts to reduce their wages, and that they were even prepared to resort to legal measures to obtain their just reward. In 1470, the Assembly promised John Aport and Thomas Pyrie, who were still unpaid for their services in the parliament of 1467, that they should receive their wages absque ullo breue inde prosequendo seu alia quacumque secta pro eisdem facienda.3 The promise was not kept. In 1474 an expenses writ had to be issued in favour of Aport and Pyrie ordering the payment to them of £12 12s. od.,4 but even this proved unavailing. In 1476, the two representatives began an action against the mayor, who resisted their claim and secured their expulsion from the Assembly. Eventually, however, they won their case, payment was made, and the town was obliged to indemnify the mayor for the costs of the suit, amounting to £6 17s. 8d.5 This experience, so far from teaching them wisdom, led the mayor and his brethren to try a new means of curtailing wages. At the time of the election of citizens for the parliament of January 1478, John Hampton and Roger Holes appeared on behalf of Edward Hardgyll, one of the representatives elected, and undertook that he would not ask more than forty shillings in wages, no matter how long the parliament should last.1 If this promise was made with Hardgyll’s knowledge, he found it convenient to forget it. At the conclusion of the parliament he and his fellow representative appeared in the Assembly and presented a writ enjoining that they be paid the sum of £9 8s. for forty-seven days’ service. The writ was not disputed, and arrangements were at once made for the collection of the money by the usual method of a tax on movables, for which assessors and collectors were named in the Assembly.2

At Winchester, the two-shilling rate was normally paid, at least from the beginning of Richard II’s reign.3 Earlier in the century the representatives were often asked to accept a lower wage, and on the few occasions when parliament met at Winchester nothing was paid. On the other hand, wages were frequently supplemented when the representatives undertook special duties for the town.4 At Plymouth, in 1495, two representatives received only forty shillings between them.5 The corporation of Cambridge, in 1427, ordained ‘that for the future the burgesses elected to parliament shall have only twelve pence a day during the parliament’, and though two shillings had been paid in 1424, there is no instance of a subsequent departure from the one-shilling rule.6 Two shillings a day was paid at Hull in 1453, the expenditure on parliamentary wages for that year amounting to £21 8s.

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