Charters and Inter-Urban Networks: England, 1439–1449*

Abstract

Royal charters to towns—once the bedrock of medieval urban history—have received little attention in recent years from historians of urban politics in late medieval England. This paper seeks to rehabilitate the role of the royal charter in urban history by proposing that it represents not merely the relationship between individual civic governments and the Crown, but also the less formal and often otherwise unrecoverable interpersonal networks between politically important townspeople. Periods when a large number of towns requested the same types of liberties from the Crown were not usually the result of royal policy or local circumstance, but instead of frequent communication between elite merchants of different towns that took place in parliament or through trans-regional mercantile organisations. In studying patterns of charter acquisition by towns, therefore, it becomes possible to identify an inter-urban network in medieval English politics, to chart its membership, and to observe the fluctuating nature of its influence over time. By recognising that charters—documents frequently seen as pillars of urban autonomy and political isolationism—actually stem from a world of inter-urban networks with a high level of engagement in national politics, we can also begin to appreciate that politics in fifteenth-century England was not the sole preserve of magnate affinities but was also responsive to the interests and activities of an interconnected urban political lobby.

Royal charters to later medieval English towns can, on first reading, appear to offer little that is new or exciting to social and political historians.¹ The preambles justifying any given town’s receipt of extended privileges were highly formulaic, with almost all charters highlighting that particular town’s poverty, loss of inhabitants and long-standing service to the king.² The newly granted powers and liberties were often set out in a vague or confusing manner; indeed, it was not uncommon for towns to request further charters from the king to clarify ambiguities in previous grants.³ Some of the privileges obtained were significant, but, more often than not, royal charters simply validated existing practices and jurisdictions.⁴ Moreover, although charters possessed a veneer of permanence, the terms they contained were always subject to royal pleasure.⁵ Towns whose citizens angered the Crown or promoted widespread disorder could have their charters temporarily revoked, and their elected civic officers replaced with royal wardens; in addition, the king could cancel rights which he had granted to a town if they reduced the powers exercised by others—as the town of Beverley found out to its cost in 1416, when the archbishop of York forced the king to renege on his charter allowing Beverley’s municipal officials to serve as Justices of the Peace.⁶ It is little wonder, then, that modern scholars of the political history of English towns have turned their attention away from the charters that dominated urban historiography in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, choosing instead to focus on financial accounts, custumals, assembly rolls, minute books and official correspondence.⁷

Modern indifference to the medieval urban charter, however, is greatly at odds with the attitude of contemporary townspeople. These documents were highly prized and considered to be well worth the considerable investment of money and time required to obtain them. In 1463 it cost Exeter’s civic government 116s 11d to cover the expenses of two representatives sent to London to secure a charter confirming previous royal grants to the city.⁸ Charters that were not merely confirmatory but which granted significant new privileges could be considerably more expensive. A 1461 charter that turned Canterbury into a freestanding county cost the corporation £35 19s 2d.⁹ In 1440, Hull received two charters, one incorporating the town as a county in and of itself, and another allowing for a sword to be carried before the mayor. Richard Scoles and Richard Anson spent twenty-eight days in London lobbying for the new charters, and, when all was said and done, Hull’s government tallied an extraordinary £238 7s 4d in expenses for securing the grants.¹⁰

Once obtained, urban charters became deeply ingrained in the civic imagination. Urban governments sometimes paid for their new charters to be illustrated with decorative insignia or images of the king, and always preserved them for succeeding generations in a municipal archive.¹¹ The text of the charters was often copied into books or rolls listing the town’s customs; civic governments sometimes took the opportunity to illustrate or rubricate these custumal copies.¹² Nor, once copied and decorated, did charters lose their political significance. In 1469, for example, two citizens of Hull interrupted the annual mayoral election to demand ‘that the Charters and the ordinauncez of the Toun myght be sene and Redd’ by the commons of the town.¹³ To these residents of Hull, these charters were not dead documents, but important reminders of their shared history and of the rights belonging to the town’s citizens. Perhaps most tellingly, the annalistic civic chronicles produced in Coventry, with surviving examples dating from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries, all begin their narratives in the year 1345–6—the date of the town’s famous charter of incorporation.¹⁴ Charters were signposts of urban public memory, which townspeople used to plot the history of their urban corporation.

It is apparent, then, that English civic governments and the people they ruled attached great significance to urban charters. It is less clear why they did so. Historians have offered several explanations for the attachment of later medieval citizens to their town’s charters. Most of these, as we shall see, depend on viewing each town as a discrete unit, concerned principally with its own relationship to the Crown and with its own internal politics. Here, it will be proposed instead that charters signified that a particular town and its residents had joined other towns endowed with similar liberties in a powerful network capable of exercising influence on the national stage. Royal charters, or at least particular types of charters granted in particular circumstances, may thus have served as reminders to later generations of townspeople of their borough’s past political glories and of its role in a politically important inter-urban network. To substantiate this argument I use a multi-stranded approach, comprising: a discussion of the ways in which social-network analysis can advance our understanding of the nature and purpose of urban charters; a delineation of striking patterns in urban charter acquisition during the fifteenth century; a forensic examination of one particular period characterised by a glut of urban charters—1439–49—and the political relationships which tied the recipients of such charters together; and finally some suggestions about the ways in which the study of inter-urban networks can reshape our analysis of later medieval English politics and of England’s place within wider European narratives.

I

To the casual observer, it may well appear that urban charters have been discussed and debated ad nauseam, and need not be the subject of a historiographical renaissance. For historians and antiquaries working before the Second World War, charters were the bedrock of urban history.¹⁵ The work of these early historians is exemplified in the two-volume Town Life in the Fifteenth Century written by Alice Stopford Green in 1894. Green presented the urban history of later medieval England as a progressive, and only occasionally stunted, accumulation of civic autonomy through chartered liberties. Urban charters ensured freedom from the surrounding feudal landscape and therefore, far from being simply status symbols, were important historical milestones in the march towards modernity. Charters removed towns and townspeople from the environment around them: as Green wrote, ‘clinging to privileges won by common effort that separated it from the rest of the world—the town remained isolated and self-dependent’.¹⁶

Subsequent research on urban charters took a less Whiggish tone, but still viewed them as vehicles through which civic governments and townspeople sought to achieve a desirable distance from royal government. Historians such as Caroline Barron and A.P.M. Wright have regarded urban charters as the product of a largely antagonistic relationship between the Crown and its towns. During periods of royal weakness, towns were able to gain extensions of their privileges of autonomous governance, but these were not available from more competent kings who did not wish to see their power eroded through the creation of independent jurisdictions.¹⁷ Although this viewpoint still underpins a great deal of work on urban history, it was contested in the mid-2000s by Christian Liddy, who has argued that charters to towns did not represent urban independence and royal weakness, but were instead the culmination of a political partnership between the king and his urban subjects.¹⁸ The charters studied by Liddy, those granted to Bristol in 1373 and to York in 1393 and 1396, did not divorce the civic governments concerned from the exercise of royal power, but integrated them more firmly within it, as municipal officers began to operate as royal sheriffs and Justices of the Peace.¹⁹ This perspective, while dramatically altering the way in which historians view urban charters, has nevertheless kept the study of urban politics firmly focused on the town–Crown relationship.

Another school of historical argument regarding urban charters, represented in the work of Stephen Rigby, implies that charters were usually sought by civic governments for the purpose of bolstering their position vis-à-vis lesser urban citizens, and as such they were related primarily to the rhythms of internal urban politics.²⁰ Charters granted new legal and financial powers to civic governments, increasing the control that elite merchants holding civic office could exercise over those they ruled. It was royal letters patent giving JP jurisdiction to the mayor, aldermen and recorder of London in 1443–4 that prompted a famous rebellion among the artisans of the capital, who felt that their opportunities to contest civic government policies had been circumscribed.²¹ Civic governments also sought royal charters in order to change procedures through which municipal officers were elected, to redefine eligibility requirements for civic office-holding, and to alter the configuration of councils governing the town.²² In some instances, these charters could broaden the participation of the citizenry in civic political life, as occurred, for example, at York in 1464 and 1473.²³ More often, however, they limited the number of citizens who were involved in municipal decision-making—as became particularly apparent in charters from the later fifteenth century.²⁴

Each of these approaches has contributed much to our understanding of the role played by royal grants in later medieval urban society, but all have emphasised particular aspects of urban political life while ignoring others. Urban charters have been depicted either as indicative of the relationship between individual towns and the Crown, or as pertaining to the town as an isolated unit occupied with its own internal civic politics. But these do not constitute the totality of urban political experiences. In addition to interactions with the king and with the lesser citizens of their own town, urban elites were frequently in contact with wealthy merchants and civic officers from other towns. Such horizontal links between towns were fostered through shared participation in a vibrant national political community, manifested most visibly in parliament.²⁵ Royal charters to civic governments were products of this communication between towns, and can be used to trace the influence in national politics of a shifting group of urban actors who shared common experiences of commerce and municipal government—an entity we shall call an ‘inter-urban network’.

To view late medieval English towns as part of an inter-urban network is to re-evaluate the motivations behind the political actions taken by townspeople. The historians cited above have taken an individualistic approach to municipal decision-making, in which those acting on behalf of the town rationally calculate the advantages to be accrued by that particular locality (or a group of individuals within it) and act accordingly. A network approach, however, posits that the decisions made by individuals or particular groups are affected significantly by the actions taken by other people and entities with whom they are in contact (either directly or indirectly); as such, social interactions replace rationality as the most important framework guiding the choices made by people or groups.²⁶ Civic governments forming part of an inter-urban network, therefore, sought charters not (just) because of the material or political benefits that could be gained from the documents themselves, which were often far from commensurate with the effort and money spent to obtain them, but because other civic governments in their network had received similar charters and they wished both to follow a co-ordinated policy and to demonstrate their continued membership of the network by gaining a new charter of their own.

More broadly speaking, by viewing fifteenth-century English towns as part of a network and not as individual actors, it becomes possible to gain a greater appreciation of urban influence on English politics. In Friends of Friends, the anthropologist Jeremy Boissevain argued that individuals and groups hold power less through their formal positions in political organisations and more through their ability to maintain a wide-ranging set of friends, allies and acquaintances; political goals can then be achieved by mobilising this network of contacts into action.²⁷ Even before Boissevain, however, historians of later medieval England had long accepted that the exercise of power was, fundamentally, a matter of assembling political networks. Scholars following in the footsteps of K.B. McFarlane have demonstrated that the influence exerted by individual nobles on the national political stage was, in part, the result of carefully cultivated affinities of well-wishers in the localities.²⁸ But of equal importance to these vertical ties between noble and gentleman were the horizontal networks that the gentry constructed among themselves. In marrying one another’s kin, acting as each other’s witnesses and feoffees at law, and serving together in county administration, gentry from a particular locality built up a sense of solidarity and a strong collective power base, allowing them, on many occasions, to dictate the course of local politics and even to play a considerable role in determining the success or failure of aspirants to the throne during the Wars of the Roses.²⁹

Towns and townspeople, though, fit rather awkwardly into these networks of noble and gentry power that were so fundamental to English political life. Although the world of noble patronage was certainly not alien to townspeople, their participation in aristocratic networks was discouraged by civic governments.³⁰ A 1442–3 ordinance in Hull, for example, ordered that no citizen who accepted fees or clothing from gentlemen should hold office in the town or counsel the mayor, and this directive was reiterated in a letter patent received by the town in the same year.³¹ Moreover, while some urban office-holders held significant rural estates, many members of urban elites lacked substantial lands in the countryside, meaning that they were not a particularly strong presence in the world of enfeoffment and land law that helped to knit together the gentry networks that held such sway in local and national politics.³² In these circumstances, it is no wonder that Lorraine Attreed and others who have attempted to situate townspeople within networks of provincial patronage and noble affinities have concluded that civic governments and those they ruled were minor and comparatively powerless actors in an English political society based on landholding.³³

As only occasional participants in the noble and gentry networks through which historians argue that real power was exercised, civic governments are easily cast as politically isolated entities that pursued the extension of their own liberties but had little means of exercising greater influence on the running of English government. If we see towns, instead, as forming their own network of political actors, this picture changes considerably. When townspeople pooled their resources they made for a formidable political force. Wool merchants and cloth merchants from different towns, organised as the Company of the Staple at Calais and the Merchant Adventurers respectively, lent substantial sums of money to the Crown and played a significant role in the formation of royal foreign policy.³⁴ G.L. Harriss and J.L. Bolton have shown, moreover, that the Calais Staplers were pivotal in securing the throne for Edward IV, since the liquid cash at their command and their ability to pay (and thus gain the allegiance of) the permanent garrison at Calais made them crucial contributors to the Yorkist military victory over Henry VI’s supporters.³⁵ As we shall see, the merchants who were active in powerful commercial lobbies also acted as mayors, sheriffs, aldermen and bailiffs for civic governments and represented their towns in parliament, so creating an urban network committed to both the extension of municipal government and the advancement of particular trading interests. The individual interests of participants in this sector sometimes clashed; nevertheless, the experiences of commerce and civic governance shared by these urban/mercantile elites created a framework within which prominent townspeople participated in English political life. This network of urban actors was capable of exerting collective influence on national politics; it interacted with the aristocratic political networks discussed earlier, but involved different participants and cemented the ties between them through different means. For townspeople, parliament and mercantile organisations, rather than the county court, served as the chief venues for interaction, and personal links were made through joint commercial or shipping ventures rather than through receipt of livery.³⁶

Tracing this English inter-urban political network is not an easy endeavour. Towns in continental Europe have left much richer records of their networked political activities because they took place within formal associations, such as the Lombard League, the Hanseatic League and the Four Members of Flanders, that held their own regular assemblies and possessed their own administrative apparatuses.³⁷ With the exception of the Cinque Ports—which held a Brodhull, or assembly, in which participating towns and their affiliated ‘members’ created their own ordinances and constructed collective policy—England did not possess formally constituted urban associative groups; interaction between residents of different towns tended to occur more informally and was thus less likely to produce extensive documentation.³⁸ That English inter-urban networks were rarely formally recorded, and were often based on private friendships between individuals rather than on public relationships between institutions, did not necessarily make them less influential or less worthy of analysis; indeed, the power exercised by a political network often stems from the very fact that it is a ‘members-only’ club whose activities are impenetrable to outsiders.³⁹ That said, there are tools that historians can use to trace the membership of late medieval England’s informal inter-urban networks—correspondence between civic governments, records of visits by urban representatives to other towns or to places where political contacts were likely to be made (such as the royal court or parliament), documentation relating to business partnerships between merchants from different towns, or wills that shed light on personal relationships between citizens from different communities.⁴⁰ Such sources, however, while demonstrating contact and communication between towns, do not necessarily show that such communication engendered political action.⁴¹ Moreover, not all towns are blessed with a surviving municipal archive that provides these types of evidence. Historians of late medieval England are also hampered by the fact that the Company of the Staple at Calais, the most prominent mercantile conglomerate in late medieval England and undoubtedly a significant hub for interactions within the inter-urban network, left virtually no records of its internal organisation.

It is at this point that the urban charter becomes significant, not only as a product of inter-urban communication, but as a way of tracing the extent and operation of the inter-urban political network in late medieval England. One of the key means by which social scientists explore the operation of a social system is to follow the diffusion of a selected ‘innovation’.⁴² Through this process, analysts are able not only to observe the social interactions through which information travels, but also to gauge the ways in which influence is exerted in a particular social milieu—for example, who are the actors most likely to convince others to adopt something new, unfamiliar and perhaps strange? Socio-economic historians have used this technique to chart the parameters and dynamics of urban systems at particular points in time; most notably, Bernard Lepetit used the spread of savings banks to determine which towns were integrated into networks of communication and exchange in nineteenth-century France.⁴³ Here, I will take charters granting new types of privileges, or reviving forgotten ones, as an ‘innovation’, and by tracing which towns asked for these charters at which particular times, will reconstruct the inter-urban political network in fifteenth-century England and identify fluctuations within it.

In charting the spread of an innovation through an urban network, it also becomes possible to deduce connections between different towns that cannot be traced through other forms of written evidence. As Lepetit has pointed out, an urban network analysis based purely on documented links will usually serve to confirm what we already know about transport systems and economic relationships between towns; in contrast, by examining the diffusion of an innovation we can identify the less tangible means by which information circulated around the network and thus uncover new kinds of relationships between the network’s members.⁴⁴ Studying the diffusion of an innovation also hints at indirect or weak links between participants in the network. The decisions taken by political actors can be affected by the behaviour of others with whom they have no direct connections; if both parties are members of the same network, however, it is probable that they will receive news of one another’s actions through a third party. Moreover, as the sociologist Mark S. Granovetter has shown, it is often indirect links or very occasional contact between parties (the kind least likely to appear in written sources) that lead to the circulation of new information within a network and facilitate collective political action—members of ‘dense’ networks, in contrast, who have frequent (and probably the best documented) contact with one another, will not be exposed to new ideas and will not have the same ability to reach out to peripheral acquaintances to create a powerful political action group.⁴⁵ By looking at the diffusion of ‘innovative’ charters among towns in fifteenth-century England, we can attempt to identify these indirect or weak linkages between residents of different towns that might enable them to form a powerful and well-informed urban political lobby and affect the content of national policy.

A degree of speculation is, of course, inherent in a ‘diffusion of innovations’ approach to inter-urban networks. There is, above all, an in-built assumption that the spread of the given innovation, in this case the ‘innovative’ royal charter, indicates a relationship (whether direct or indirect) between the recipients of charters, even when there is minimal evidence to suggest contact between the towns concerned. Without this assumption, however, it is not possible to gain a nuanced and complete view of the operation of the inter-urban political network in late medieval England; instead we are able to see only isolated clusters of relationships, rather than the full extent of a functioning network capable of influencing politics at the highest levels. Though charters are not evidence for direct links between different towns, the receipt of similar charters by a group of towns suggests that they had some sort of relationship or, at the very least, existed within the same political milieu and had access to the same types of information; in turn, then, patterns in the receipt of charters can alert historians to relationships between towns that might not be obvious from other types of evidence.

But, it should be stressed, I have not chosen the charter at random as an indicator to trace; there is every reason to believe that its diffusion does, indeed, coincide with real relationships. As will be shown below, evidence from municipal financial accounts, parliament rolls and central government administrative documents demonstrates that, in many cases, residents from towns receiving similar types of chartered liberties also traded with one another, acted together politically, and knew the same people. Moreover, a consideration of the mechanics through which civic governments obtained charters fortifies the argument that they were documents produced through horizontal forms of communication and social interactions between townspeople, and are thus an appropriate vehicle for analysing a social system. The terms of charters were not the product of royal policy, but of petitions submitted by civic governments.⁴⁶ Urban elites, therefore, wrote the content of their own charters—typically, the king merely ratified or refused them. To craft a petition that was likely to receive royal approbation, representatives of civic governments not only needed to know when the king would be in a mood to grant further liberties to towns, but also which liberties other towns had successfully requested. A civic government’s intimate knowledge both of recent charters obtained by other towns and of the goings-on at London, Westminster and the royal court was fostered by the involvement of its members in an inter-urban network, through which information about both urban and national politics was communicated. In addition, to get a petition for liberties ratified, civic governments sent representatives to lobby parliament, nobles, royal ministers and important lawyers. The effectiveness of this lobbying often depended upon relationships that leading citizens of the town concerned had already formed with men in power; while some of these links were tied to patterns of lordship in the localities, many other important relationships with political power-players evolved from citizens’ involvement in large-scale mercantile and naval initiatives characterised by inter-urban co-operation. Thus, the process of obtaining a charter was rooted in the participation of townspeople in an interconnected urban political network. Civic governments also regarded charters as documents that tied them as institutions to other towns. In charters, a town was often granted explicitly the liberties of another town in full—London, Oxford, Winchester and Lincoln were frequent exemplars. This created a lasting bond between the town concerned and its ‘mother-city’. The civic governments of Lynn and Norwich consulted their respective ‘mother-cities’ of Oxford and London during disputes over mayoral elections in the fifteenth century, and London’s internal ordinances were copied into the custumals of other towns, such as Bristol, York and Northampton.⁴⁷ Charters, then, both reflected urban networks and helped to fortify them.

By tracing which towns gained charters at which times and how widespread particular types of new privileges were among urban communities, we can begin to identify when it was that changes occurred both in the composition of inter-urban networks and in the role these networks played in national politics. When a number of towns received the same types of liberties at the same time, we can assume a high degree of communication between urban elites across the country and the existence of an inter-urban network in which leading members of civic governments followed each other’s cues. Furthermore, when there was an increase both in the number of towns receiving particular types of charters and in the status of the individual towns receiving them, it is plausible to conclude that the inter-urban network was, in that period, one capable of pooling a vast range of resources and exercising a particularly strong influence on national politics.

II

In order to demonstrate the close relationship between charters and urban political networks I shall compare the period 1439–49—when the Crown granted a wealth of new privileges to towns, principal among them the appointment of civic officers as Justices of the Peace or escheators, incorporation, and exemption from Admiralty jurisdiction—with periods featuring fewer new urban charters. This comparative process draws on formal charters and letters patent granting urban privileges, which, for the sake of convenience, are both categorised here as ‘charters’; it excludes confirmations of existing charters, which tended to occur at fixed periods, such as the accession of a new monarch. Over the course of 1439–49, the Crown issued forty-two charters and letters patent to towns beyond those of a purely confirmatory nature—this compares to six in the years 1428–38 and sixteen in 1450–60. Furthermore, across the years 1395 to 1504, the only ten-year periods when the figures reached anywhere near those for 1439–49 were 1395–1405 and 1461–71, during each of which kings issued twenty-six non-confirmatory charters to towns.⁴⁸

When we view towns as individual political agents in a one-to-one relationship with the Crown, these patterns are difficult to explain. The concentration of royal grants to towns during the 1440s belies the idea, advocated by Wright and others, that the English Crown granted away privileges to towns during periods of its own weakness.⁴⁹ In the 1450s, the loss of England’s possessions in France (apart from Calais), Jack Cade’s rebellion, economic recession and the duke of York’s claims to exert power in the name of the ‘commonweal’ left the authority of Henry VI’s government in tatters—and yet this was a period in which very few royal grants of liberties were made. In fact, the Crown was in a far stronger position in the 1440s—when many charters were issued to towns—since the duke of Suffolk had managed to craft a household-based royal regime that commanded support from the vast majority of the political community.⁵⁰ The patterns observed in urban charters indicate, instead, that towns were hesitant to seek grants from royal governments they believed to be incapable of upholding them. In this context, it makes perfect sense that no towns should receive new royal grants in 1450 (a year featuring the fall of the duke of Suffolk, the loss of Lancastrian Normandy and Cade’s rebellion), 1454 (the year in which the duke of York assumed control of royal government during Henry VI’s bout of madness) and 1456 (the year in which Margaret of Anjou set up a clearly partisan government at Coventry)—these were not years in which civic governments could trust that the Crown could guarantee the security of any new privileges obtained.⁵¹ By the same token, civic governments would have been eager to petition for new grants in the years after 1439, by which point Henry VI, who had begun his reign as an infant in 1422, was approaching adulthood. It was natural that more of his subjects, who may have believed that grants made by a minority council might not be confirmed once the king reached his majority, should seek charters now that the king could issue grants of his own grace.⁵² It is not sufficient, however, simply to reverse conventional wisdom, and to state that urban charters were most prevalent during periods of strong royal rule; by such logic, the reign of Henry V (1413–22) and the second half of Edward IV’s reign (1471–83)—often touted as periods of powerful kingly leadership and domestic peace—should have featured far more requests for urban charters than the 1440s, when royal government, though still functional, was not headed by a decisive or active king.⁵³ Another factor must be in play.

One explanation offered by historians for the profusion of urban charters in the mid-fifteenth century is the onset of urban decline. According to this interpretation, as urban populations dwindled after the Black Death and the business activities of provincial towns were usurped by London, civic governments could no longer rely on traditional taxation or tolls to fund their activities. By obtaining new privileges, urban governments gained the right to acquire lands in perpetuity, and thus extract rents from them, as well as to collect the fines associated with new jurisdictional offices.⁵⁴ Richard Britnell and others have also contended that the attachment of new dignities to civic office by charter—such as the wearing of special liveries, the carrying of swords before office-holders and the vesting of more power in the hands of aldermen—was intended to make urban office-holding more attractive to a town’s wealthier residents, who in difficult economic times may have sought to avoid the personal costs associated with service to the town.⁵⁵ These arguments are fortified by the preambles of urban charters, which frequently cited poverty and the desertion of inhabitants as the reasons why new privileges were necessary.⁵⁶

For 1439–49, however, these explanations for the growth in urban chartered liberties fall short. Firstly, many town governments that did obtain new privileges in this period were perfectly capable of meeting their costs through existing resources. Indeed, the great budgetary deficits of the civic governments of Hull and York, frequently cited by historians of urban decline, did not occur until the 1450s or 1460s—a period in which grants of chartered liberties were less numerous—and thus cannot explain why these towns were so eager to expand their privileges in the 1440s.⁵⁷ Indeed, another of the towns receiving extensive chartered liberties in this period, Colchester, experienced a commercial renaissance as a result of peace between England and the Hanseatic League, whose cloth merchants were active in Suffolk and Essex.⁵⁸ Thus, while some towns, such as Rye, were suffering from long-term economic malaise which they hoped royal grace might alleviate, many of the larger towns were not—or at least not yet.⁵⁹

Furthermore, even if royal weakness and economic necessity are thought to be sufficient reasons for towns to have sought new liberties during some time periods rather than others, they cannot explain why a large number of different towns requested exactly the same types of new privileges. The urban charters of 1439–49 were remarkable not just for their number, but also for their standardised character. Towns did not pursue particular liberties according to their own independent schedules, but rather at the same time that other large towns were seeking the same liberties. This suggests that the political ‘needs’ of a town were formulated as much through interaction with fellow members of an elite inter-urban political network as they were in response to local conditions. That towns pursued charters in some sort of co-ordinated fashion can be seen from the fact that the liberties granted in 1439–49 fall into four major categories: commissions of the peace, escheatorship, incorporation and exemption from Admiralty jurisdiction. These four types of liberties were either entirely new or reintroduced in 1439–49—meaning that, in order to ask for these liberties, a particular town needed to be aware that other towns had successfully petitioned for similar privileges. Charters conveying commissions of the peace, escheatorship, incorporation and exemption from Admiralty jurisdiction to municipalities can thus be interpreted as ‘innovations’, the diffusion of which we can study in order to gain a better understanding of the ways in which inter-urban political networks operated in the mid-fifteenth century.

In the first of these privileges, royal charters allowed members of civic governments to serve ex officio as Justices of the Peace for the town over which they ruled, giving them broad summary powers to seize, imprison and punish non-felonious offenders.⁶⁰ This privilege was granted to towns for the first time in the late fourteenth century, and eleven towns received it over the period 1373–1414.⁶¹ There was then a twenty-five-year hiatus in such grants, with no towns seeking or obtaining this privilege between 1414 and 1439. Over the single decade of 1439–49, however, another twelve towns gained the right to have their elected officers serve as JPs—Windsor, Plymouth, Hull, Winchester, London, Shrewsbury, Derby, Bridgnorth, Ipswich, Colchester, Bath and Canterbury.⁶² A similar pattern emerges in grants allowing mayors to serve as royal escheators, the officers responsible for investigating and reporting which lands under their jurisdiction should be heritable by the Crown. This privilege had been granted to Bristol in 1373, York in 1396, Norwich in 1404 and Lincoln in 1409, but to no town in the succeeding thirty years.⁶³ In 1439–49, six towns (Hull, Southampton, Northampton, Shrewsbury, Ipswich, Bridgnorth and Nottingham) were granted the right for their mayors to act as royal escheators, bypassing the machinery of county administration.⁶⁴

While charters granting civic officers JP and escheator duties underwent a revival in 1439–49, incorporation charters and exemptions from Admiralty jurisdiction were either redefined or invented over the same years, strengthening the argument that towns receiving these types of privileges must have been in communication with one another (or at the very least with important officers in central government) in order to be aware of these newly moulded liberties and to petition for them. Incorporation—the creation of a group of men as an entity capable of legal action—was exercised de facto by many civic governments throughout the Middle Ages, as Susan Reynolds has shown, and was granted by royal charter to Bury St Edmunds, Coventry and Hedon (Yorks.) during the early fourteenth century in a primitive form, and, with varying degrees of formality, to Bristol, York, Basingstoke, Norwich and Lincoln between 1373 and 1409.⁶⁵ After another thirty-year interval in the granting of incorporation, eight towns (Plymouth, Hull, Southampton, Canterbury, Rochester, Tenterden, Nottingham and Ipswich) received the privilege.⁶⁶ In earlier years the features of incorporation had remained imprecisely defined, but in charters of the 1440s the classic ‘five points’ of incorporation identified by Blackstone began to emerge: perpetual succession for the governments and burgesses of the town; the ability to sue or be sued as a collective entity; entitlement to hold lands in mortmain; permission to adopt a common seal; and the authority to issue by-laws.⁶⁷ The standardisation of the incorporation principle in urban charters between 1439 and 1449 suggests that towns were particularly conscious in these years of the liberties being granted to other towns, and were anxious to remodel their own constitutions accordingly. Indeed, the spate of standardised incorporation charters probably led towns to fear that the liberties they already exercised by custom might be rescinded ‘for lack of any express statement of them’, and thus spurred them to request new charters.⁶⁸

The last of the four types of privileges that we are discussing, exemption from Admiralty jurisdiction, was an entirely new type of urban liberty introduced in the 1440s. The Lord High Admiral had the authority to exercise summary justice and administrative oversight for anything occurring on the sea, in the Channel, and in rivers, creeks and inland ports. This included summoning juries to judge legal cases concerning piracy, foreign contracts, distribution of captured goods, naval discipline and mariners’ wages.⁶⁹ Henry VI’s government exempted York, Newcastle upon Tyne, Southampton, Bristol, Ipswich, Rochester and Hull from the Admiral’s jurisdiction in charters issued in 1442–7, and in several of these cases vested the Admiral’s authority over local waterways in the hands of members of the civic government.⁷⁰ To know that exemption from Admiralty jurisdiction was a privilege at the Crown’s disposal, civic governments needed to possess keen awareness of the activities of their fellow towns.

An unusual profusion of urban charters is most likely, therefore, to be a product of heightened inter-urban communication. Another curious feature of the grants of 1439–49 is that they tended to be awarded to larger towns that had parliamentary representation and could be relied upon to choose local men as their MPs. It was from these cities and towns—Bath, Bedford, Bridgnorth, Bristol, Canterbury, Colchester, Coventry, Derby, Dover, Faversham, Gloucester, Hull, Ipswich, Kingston-upon-Thames, Lincoln, London, Newcastle upon Tyne, Northampton, Nottingham, Plymouth, Retford East, Rochester, Shrewsbury, Southampton, Sudbury, Tenterden (incorporated as part of Rye), Thetford, Winchester, Windsor and York—that people came who could be counted as political power-players with sufficient political knowledge to seek charters at the most propitious times.⁷¹ Some of these towns, such as Retford East, were minor centres at best, but most were at the heart of political affairs, because of their positions as centres of trade and industry (London, York, Coventry, Bristol, Newcastle upon Tyne, Colchester, Ipswich, Southampton), as county towns (Derby, Gloucester, Lincoln, Northampton, Nottingham, Shrewsbury), as members of the historically influential Cinque Ports (Dover, Faversham, Tenterden/Rye), or as locations for the royal court, government and administration (London, Windsor, Canterbury). In contrast, the towns receiving grants in 1428–38 and 1450–60 tended to be rather smaller—such as the fast-declining Melcombe Regis in Dorset, Woodstock in Oxfordshire, Chipping Sodbury in Gloucestershire and Wainfleet in Lincolnshire.⁷² The civic governments that obtained charters in the 1450s did so less through their own influence and more through that of powerful political patrons—for example, it was Bishop William Waynflete of Winchester, born in Wainfleet, who secured an incorporation charter for that town while he was serving as Lord Chancellor.⁷³ It is also worth noting that Woodstock used its incorporation charter of 1453 to remove itself from further engagement in national politics by securing a provision that the town should be exempt from sending representatives to parliament.⁷⁴ This contrasts starkly with the civic governments that received charters in the 1440s, which were highly active in parliament and other venues for public political discussion, as we shall see.

It may well be that larger towns possessed enough political awareness to know that a charter issued by what was still, in effect, a minority council in the 1430s or by the highly questionable authority of those acting in the name of Henry VI during the 1450s could be more easily disputed, particularly considering parliamentary pressure for the resumption of royal grants during the latter decade.⁷⁵ The civic government of Ipswich, for example, made some initial steps to obtain a new charter in 1451–3, but then decided that it would be more prudent to wait and took up the project again only in 1463, when Edward IV was on the throne and central government was operating more effectively.⁷⁶ They were also more likely to possess the wider range of connections that would enable them to keep abreast of new developments in urban liberties occurring across the realm, and thus to petition for new charters according to the same schedule as a greater number of other towns. Therefore, in examining, identifying and analysing particular spates of urban charters, we can also delineate more clearly the distinction between towns that were members of an inter-urban political network with the up-to-date knowledge of national politics that came with those connections, and those that were not. Moreover, spikes in the granting of urban charters can be taken to indicate the existence of an unusually powerful and co-ordinated inter-urban network, which had at its disposal the means of achieving the aims both of the group as a whole and of its individual members.

III

The glut of urban charters of 1439–49 must be examined more closely to establish how townspeople gained knowledge of other activities within the inter-urban network, and what the particular circumstances were that encouraged the formation of channels through which information about chartered liberties could be disseminated. As we shall see, there were a number of different ‘clusters’—or sub-networks featuring unusually dense linkages between members—within the inter-urban network of the mid-fifteenth century, generated (for instance) through geographic proximity or through the activities of individual brokers.⁷⁷ What gave great political clout to the inter-urban network of 1439–49, however, was the emergence of one particular ‘cluster’: a mercantile/naval lobby, including many men active in civic governments, which had been essential in supplying ships and money to the Crown for the defence of Calais against Burgundian attack in 1435–6. During the 1430s and 1440s, these men secured the passage of extensive commercial legislation in parliament, especially statutes designed to benefit the wealthier merchants of the Calais Staple.⁷⁸ Through their activities as members of this lobby, mayors and aldermen formed links with their counterparts in other towns which enabled them to communicate information about the types of liberties that could be sought from the king, while also pooling their resources to achieve particular policy initiatives.

An examination of the activities of Hamo Sutton, mayor of the Calais Staple, hints at some of the ways in which this mercantile lobby may have helped to generate inter-urban communication and a culture of urban charter-seeking. Sutton had been one of the leading lenders to the Crown throughout the 1430s, and had undoubtedly been instrumental in securing a number of exemptions from parliamentary subsidies for his hometown of Lincoln.⁷⁹ He represented Lincolnshire at the parliament of 1439–40, where he was part of a mercantile lobby responsible for ensuring the passage of several statutes favourable to their interests, including the Alien Hosting Ordinances, the relaxation of anti-piracy laws and the stricter enforcement of the Calais wool monopoly.⁸⁰ The same parliament also saw the beginning of the run on urban charters, with Plymouth gaining formal recognition of its independence from local ecclesiastical houses through a parliamentary petition and with the MPs of Hull using the parliament’s sessions to lobby for an important new charter of their own.⁸¹ Both towns gained incorporation through the charters negotiated at the 1439–40 parliament, as well as the right to appoint their own civic officers as JPs, and, for Hull, to have its mayor serve as royal escheator. It may be no coincidence that the last town to receive an incorporation charter before Plymouth in 1439 was Sutton’s home borough of Lincoln in 1409—and this was also the most recent charter to appoint a mayor as escheator and one of the most recent to allow a town to choose its own JPs from among its elected officials.⁸² Although Sutton was exempted from holding civic office in Lincoln from 1429 onwards, he had been involved in the town’s civic government in the early 1420s, before his commercial activities and his appointments to royal office in the county intervened.⁸³ When we take into account Sutton’s influence at the parliament of 1439–40 and his political experience in Lincoln, it appears plausible that Sutton, while lobbying for mercantile legislation in parliament, might also have counselled borough MPs to seek these privileges for their own towns.

This possibility is strengthened by the fact that Sutton had strong connections with Hull. Hull is just across the Humber from Lincolnshire, and Sutton not only exported wool from the port but had served as deputy for Ralph Botiller, the king’s butler in the town, from 1435.⁸⁴ Later, in 1451, he would be given a commission to seize ships in the town for royal use.⁸⁵ Moreover, a sizeable number of Hull’s aldermen, including prominent citizens Hugh Cliderhowe, Edmund Coppendale and Richard Auncell, were members of the Calais Staple, of which Sutton was the head.⁸⁶ It seems feasible that, through their interactions with Sutton either in parliament or in Calais, members of the Hull civic elite became aware of the terms of Lincoln’s 1409 charter, and sought to secure them for their own town.

Unlike Hull, Plymouth had no recorded links to Sutton. Nevertheless, Plymouth’s prominence in the naval activities of Henry VI’s reign made it part of the same powerful mercantile lobby to which Sutton and Hull were connected. Plymouth, like Hull, was small in population, with only around 1,500 taxpayers in 1377, but had a disproportionate importance when it came to the keeping of the seas and the provision of ships for royal armies.⁸⁷ Ships from Plymouth were to join those of London, Bristol, Hull, Newcastle upon Tyne, Weymouth, Winchelsea, Falmouth, Fowey, Dover, Sandwich and Hastings in the fleet set up by parliament in 1442 for the keeping of the seas, which was designed to protect English interests in the Channel and defend Calais from further attacks.⁸⁸ These naval activities would have brought Plymouth into contact with merchants and townspeople organising the defence of Calais and royal naval preparations. The connection between Plymouth’s 1439 charter and the town’s naval contributions was made explicit in the preamble, which argued that the ‘mooring of fleets, ships and vessels’ there and the destruction wrought by the king’s enemies made it necessary for the town to seek incorporation so that the civic government might attend to the construction of new walls and other defensive fortifications.⁸⁹ Through its connections to wider naval preparations and defence, Plymouth, too, was drawn into a political network of powerful towns.

As the 1440s progressed, there continued to be a correlation between the towns obtaining new chartered liberties and membership of an active mercantile lobby at parliament, even if at times the interests of particular groups within this lobby splintered. One of the other towns to gain incorporation in this period was Nottingham, which received its new charter in June 1449. By this same charter, Nottingham’s mayor was made royal escheator and the mayor and aldermen were allowed to wear liveries similar to those worn by the mayor and aldermen of London (a privilege that had already been won for Hull by its second of two charters in 1440).⁹⁰ Nottingham’s charter was probably negotiated during the first parliament of 1449, which held sessions in February–April, May and June–July. This parliament featured a long petition from the merchants of the Calais Staple, requesting the confirmation of the Staple’s liberties, the invalidation of any licences issued by the king allowing men to avoid the Staple, and the deposit of broad summary powers of enforcement in the hands of the mayor and merchants of the Staple.⁹¹ Nottingham’s MPs at this parliament, Thomas Thurland and Thomas Alestre, were both active members of the Calais Staple (with Thurland holding office in its administration), and would almost certainly have been involved in the formulation and passage of this petition.⁹² Other Staplers, such as Sutton and some of his fellow Lincoln merchants, as well as Hugh Cliderhowe, a prominent Calais Stapler and alderman for Hull, probably joined them in this endeavour.⁹³ Nottingham’s charter could well have been the product of communication stemming from the co-operative efforts of a Stapler lobby in parliament, but the impetus for Nottingham’s 1449 incorporation charter may have also lain in mercantile rivalries within the Calais Staple. In 1435, Sutton and several of his trading associates, in return for a loan to the Crown, had received a licence allowing them to sell wool without reference to the ordinances of the Staple.⁹⁴ Thurland was Mayor of the Staple at the time, and vehemently opposed the licence, even imprisoning the servant of one of Sutton’s trading partners when he attempted to sell a sarpler of wool to an alien merchant without observing Staple protocol.⁹⁵ In achieving for his own home town of Nottingham very similar chartered liberties to those possessed by Sutton’s Lincoln, Thurland may have hoped to cement his position within the Calais Staple, demonstrating to his fellow wool merchants that he, too, had enough power at court to secure important grants from the Crown. Thus, Susan Reynolds is probably right in stressing that keeping up with the ‘municipal Joneses’ was one of the crucial motives for towns to seek new charters.⁹⁶

Nottingham’s (and Thurland’s) connections with Hull and Lincoln manifested themselves outside the Calais Staple, as well. Hull was the port through which many Nottingham Staplers chose to export their wool.⁹⁷ Thurland actually owned property in Hull in conjunction with the Bedford family, whose members served in civic office there. Thurland would later release his property to the civic government of Hull in order to endow a chaplain to pray for John Bedford’s soul.⁹⁸ Considering Thurland’s connections with Hull, it is not unreasonable to see Hull’s charters of 1440 as the direct antecedents of Nottingham’s 1449 charter. Thurland may also have been well acquainted with Lincoln’s 1409 charter through his friendship with Ralph, Lord Cromwell, Lord Treasurer of England. In 1447 Cromwell and Thurland jointly refounded the Holy Trinity guild at St Mary’s church in Nottingham— and, tellingly, they secured an incorporation charter for the guild at this time.⁹⁹ Cromwell, a prominent landowner in both Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire, was also informal patron to the city of Lincoln.¹⁰⁰ He had endorsed a licence in 1426 allowing Lincoln to acquire lands in mortmain, and may well have been influential in helping the city to secure its parliamentary tax exemptions in the 1430s—the city’s first such award being granted in 1433, the year Cromwell became Treasurer.¹⁰¹ Cromwell was, moreover, an associate of Sutton, acting as surety for a loan he made to the Crown in 1435 and serving with him on a number of Lincolnshire commissions in the 1430s and 1440s.¹⁰² He was also one of the royal councillors to whom the Libelle of Englyshe Polycye (the poem of the 1430s that argued vociferously for the defence of the English Channel and the protection of English mercantile interests in Calais) was addressed.¹⁰³ Sutton, Thurland, Cromwell, and the towns of Hull, Nottingham and Lincoln were thus connected through a web of contacts— mercantile, political and personal—through which ideas about incorporation and other urban chartered liberties could well have been disseminated.

Local politics, of course, played a great role in the relationship proposed above between Hull, Nottingham and Lincoln, creating an East Midlands cluster within the wider inter-urban network. Lincoln is only about fifty miles from both Hull and Nottingham, and the leading merchants of these towns were historically involved in the wool trade. Cromwell held extensive lands in this region, and was thus an excellent candidate to foster interpersonal links between the elites of these towns. But the 1440s was not simply a period in which existing associations were strengthened; instead these years witnessed contact between townspeople from different regions, opening up new conduits along which knowledge of developments in chartered liberties could travel. We know that during the 1442 parliament the MPs for Hull, Richard Anson and Nicholas Elys, paid £3 to Thomas Yong, recorder and MP for Bristol, to assist them in attempting to discourage the assembly from making another grant of poundage to the Crown. Although Yong was a lawyer by trade, and thus often consulted by private individuals as well as urban corporations, in this case he was clearly being sought out in his urban capacity—Hull’s payment was made to ‘Thomas Yonge de Bristollia’.¹⁰⁴ Bristol and Hull were also linked in this period by their commitments to naval defence; during the 1442 parliament, a sea-keeping force—the same one to which Plymouth contributed—was instituted to patrol the English Channel, for which Bristol and Hull were each to provide two ships.¹⁰⁵ When Hull obtained exemption from Admiralty jurisdiction in 1447, it may have been inspired by the similar grant made to Bristol in the previous year. After all, one of the two men who lobbied on Hull’s behalf for the new privilege was Richard Anson, who had been among those who met with Yong in 1442.¹⁰⁶

Indeed, it is possible that Yong served as a broker within the inter-urban network, enabling a wide variety of towns to keep themselves informed of the activities pursued by other members of the network. In networks, a broker, in Boissevain’s terminology, is a person with an extensive set of social contacts who links otherwise unconnected entities in exchange for some sort of profit.¹⁰⁷ In Yong’s case, many civic governments were willing to pay him a fee for the expertise and knowledge he had gained through advising other municipalities on the acquisition of new charters. In 1449 the Cinque Port of Rye paid ‘Younge of Bristowe’ to assist it in its efforts to receive an incorporation charter for the small town of Tenterden, so that it could be more easily declared a ‘member’ town attached to Rye.¹⁰⁸ Rye itself, albeit on a lesser level, contributed ships to the naval expeditions of the mid-1430s in which Bristol and Hull had been involved, and the town’s vulnerability to French attack made it particularly concerned with the naval and defensive policies in which merchants from larger towns played a significant part.¹⁰⁹ The men of Rye may thus have had some contact with urban shipping interests in parliament, but were very much on the periphery of the inter-urban network in which men such as Sutton and Thurland were central players. In obtaining an incorporation charter—a device which had never before been used by any of the Cinque Ports—Rye demonstrated that it had access to up-to-date information on municipal liberties that passed through this inter-urban political network.¹¹⁰ Yong was very probably the bridge connecting Rye to the network formed by other, more important, English towns, and Rye may have chosen Yong as its legal adviser for the information he could provide about other towns within the network. Yong not only had established connections to Hull, which was incorporated in 1440, but also had links to one of the key political allies of the mercantile lobby, Ralph, Lord Cromwell—who had chosen Yong as one of his feoffees for his manors of Ampthill in 1444 and Tattershall in 1454.¹¹¹ In soliciting Yong’s advice, Rye was seeking to reinforce its links to a wider inter-urban network, and the town’s resulting decision to obtain incorporation for Tenterden signalled that Rye belonged to an elite group of connected towns, brought together through joint contributions to royal commercial and defensive initiatives, that formatted their constitutions in the same way and employed a defined set of signifiers—even if Rye had few other claims to membership of such a group.

Urban charters proclaimed a town’s membership of a powerful inter-urban political network at a particular point in time; they proved that the town concerned was well connected with other important mercantile centres and that its inhabitants were capable of exercising influence in national politics. After all, information about which towns were gaining which chartered liberties at which times—information that was necessary for crafting a successful petition—was gained at venues for inter-urban contact to which not all towns had access, such as parliament and the Calais Staple. When we view charters not just as mechanisms for augmenting the powers of civic governments but also as membership cards for an inter-urban political network, we can begin to understand why citizens were willing to spend a great deal of effort and money to secure royal documents that often did no more than formalise long-standing customs—and why, once obtained, charters held such a revered place in civic history.

IV

While this article has focused on charters and inter-urban networks in England over a relatively confined period of time, the approach outlined above has important implications for wider narratives of English and European political history in the later Middle Ages. Firstly, changes in the nature and extent of the English inter-urban network—changes visible, at least in part, through the examination of charter evidence—had the potential to alter the course of national politics. By examining two periods of particularly frequent grants of charters to English towns, 1399–1413 and 1439–49, we can observe that increases in the privileges of urban corporations corresponded to the high profile of inter-urban mercantile organisations on the national political scene. Neither was a period of particularly intense military activity, but in each the Crown was struggling to fund the royal household and, especially, its permanent garrison in Calais.¹¹² Such peacetime costs were less likely to be bankrolled through tenths and fifteenths granted by parliament than were full-scale military campaigns such as the Agincourt campaign of 1415. A lull in parliamentary taxation also made it difficult for the king to seek loans from monasteries, civic governments and other public institutions, which often required assurances that they would be repaid through the proceeds of taxation. The Crown’s financial troubles in both periods were alleviated by loans made by individual merchants and mercantile organisations, who were more adept at securing repayment through the grant of wool subsidies, assignments on customs and a variety of commercial exemptions and privileges, and therefore were willing to advance money to the king even without the guarantee of repayment from direct taxation.¹¹³ Taking advantage of their financial leverage with the Crown, mercantile interest groups were very successful in both 1399–1413 and 1439–49 in shepherding legislation through parliament that benefited the Calais Staple, mariners and other townspeople.¹¹⁴ Both of these activities—supplying the Crown with cash and parliamentary lobbying—involved frequent communication between residents of different towns who participated in large-scale mercantile organisations such as the Calais Staple or Merchant Adventurers. These men were also often officials in civic government, and contact with other urban officers created an atmosphere in which talk of new varieties of urban liberties would spread rapidly, and in which towns would be eager to secure privileges demonstrating that they were fully-fledged members of this elite inter-urban network. The resulting town charters, therefore, imply that urban power was most forcefully expressed on the national political stage during periods of peacetime financial crisis for the Crown, when it was channelled through a mercantile ‘cluster’ within a strengthened inter-urban political network.

The years between 1450 and 1460, on the other hand, featured a very different pattern in charter acquisition: a reduction in the frequency with which such documents were issued to the more prominent towns of the kingdom, and an increase in privileges granted to smaller, less politically active towns. These changes in the patterns of charter acquisition reflect a collapse of the influential inter-urban political network of the 1440s. Crucially, parliament—one of the primary venues through which urban representatives exchanged information and pursued collective political goals—became dominated first by concerns with Henry VI’s misgovernment, and later also by the public disputes of the duke of York and his opponents. This made parliament less a place where townspeople could meet with one another to advance a shared mercantile agenda or discuss urban governance, and more a stage for the political battles between Lancaster and York. As Simon Payling has shown, some towns were anxious to avoid these politically volatile assemblies, and allowed members of aristocratic affinities to be elected to seats usually reserved for officers of the civic government.¹¹⁵ The decline in the number of charters issued to towns in the 1450s was both symptomatic of and contributory towards this temporary decrease in the urban presence in parliament. Parliament had previously provided a venue for civic representatives to discover developments in chartered liberties which they could then pursue on behalf of their own towns, and, once they had decided to obtain a charter, to lobby figures in central government.¹¹⁶ It is interesting in this regard to note that several of the towns that received charters in the 1450s were among those that did not send MPs to parliament, and would have been unaffected by these developments—in contrast to the 1440s, when a greater proportion of towns receiving charters were represented in parliament.¹¹⁷ A decrease in the number of charters granted to important towns, therefore, may indicate urban disengagement from the conduct of national politics, as well as the severing of inter-urban links. Indeed, the lack of an inter-urban political network in the 1450s, demonstrated in part by the paucity of charters granted to important towns, may help to explain why towns, whose residents had played such an important role in the national political conflicts of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, were less involved in the rebellions and dynastic wars of the early stages of the Wars of the Roses.¹¹⁸

The fluctuating strength of inter-urban networks, then, could influence the course of national politics as profoundly as could shifting alliances of aristocrats and gentry. Thus, in tracing the activities of these changing inter-urban political networks—networks which occasionally involved aristocrats and gentry but also had interests and dynamics of their own—we can begin to question the historiographical assumption that politics in late medieval England was the preserve of landholders. To obtain a voice in fifteenth-century English politics, one did not need to belong to a magnate’s affinity. Those whose livelihood came from commerce rather than agriculture and who resided in towns rather than on country estates could make use of the collective political might of towns—whether mobilised through royal institutions such as parliament, independent mercantile organisations such as the Calais Staple, or through informal meetings stemming from the sense of ‘brotherhood’ existing among civic governments—to gain leverage on the national political stage.

Moreover, by adopting a network approach, it becomes possible to see greater similarities between late medieval English towns and those on the continent. While English towns, unlike those in Italy, the Low Countries or Germany, rarely formed institutionalised inter-urban associations, they were not defined purely by their relationship with the monarchy. The political activities of townspeople in England, as elsewhere, often manifested themselves through inter-urban networks, and the actions taken by any individual civic government or town-dweller were influenced by those adopted by others within the network. In this regard, England fits into a wider European narrative of associative politics, beginning with the communal movement of the eleventh century, that existed alongside and participated in monarchical power structures.¹¹⁹ England may not have had a direct equivalent of the Lombard League, but networked urban political activity was crucial to the operation of the polity. Medieval English towns did not exist in isolation, solely concerned with increasing their own self-government at the Crown’s expense; nor did their political strength derive primarily from partnerships, however reciprocal and respectful, between the Crown and individual towns. Towns and townspeople in fifteenth-century England used their interactions with one another to gather information and resources that would make them a collective entity capable of influencing political affairs at the highest level. Urban charters were the products of these English inter-urban political networks, and were crucial status symbols within them; as such, they comprise the best means at our disposal for tracing the elusive, informal and often unrecorded relationships on which these networks were built. As such, charters can be used to reconstruct the changing dynamics of an inter-urban network in fifteenth-century political society—to determine its membership, assess the intensity of relations between its members, gauge its integration within a wider world of national politics, and illustrate how its cohesion and importance altered over time.