The story of Coventry

by Mary Dormer Harris

The Coventry men were, most likely, implicated in the obscure rising under Jack Sharpe in 1431; at least arrests were made in their neighbourhood.[225] These offenders, whose scheme for the disendowment of the Church was both behind and in advance of those times, were shown no mercy, but suffered the penalty of treason. The bishops of Coventry, at a later date, made the city the theatre of their persecutions, whereat many recanted, but others endured to the end.

Echoes, first of the great doings of Englishmen in the French wars, and then of the reverses which befell them, reach us from time to time, chiefly in the form of requests to relieve the royal poverty. And the chief folk of the town frequently travelled to London in order to procure sureties for repayment of money lent to the King or other members of the royal house. Thus when the Earl of Warwick, in 1423, wrote to beg the citizens to relieve the necessities of the child-king Henry, "now in his tender age and his greatest need," informing them, as an incentive to their liberality, that the townsmen of Bristol had "notably and kindly acquit them" in these matters, the citizens lent £100 willingly enough. But with the prudence which distinguished their everyday doings, they sent John Leder, late mayor, to London to negotiate for pledges for future repayment,[226] which sureties, we are told, "might not be gotten without great labour."[227] Richard Joy and Laurence Cook[228] undertook a like errand the same year, for the protector Gloucester, the husband of Jacoba of Hainault, who proposed—so he informed the citizens—"to pass over the sea with God's might ... to receive ... his lands and lordships," begged the good folk of Coventry to ease him in his undertaking with £200 "upon sufficient surety." Whether the good folk believed that the expedition to Flanders would turn to "right great ease of the people, and especially of these merchants of this realm," as the duke boasted, we cannot tell; but they sent him 100 marks, insisting nevertheless upon obtaining the security he had been so ready to offer. They gave, however, "with all their good hearts" to those more worthy of respect than Gloucester; and when Talbot was a prisoner in the hands of the French, they sent 23 marks towards his ransom.[229] To the King's later applications for a loan, they usually gave a favourable answer. In 1431 Laurence Cook bore to London £100, lent for the prosecution of the war, "and many lords, spiritual and temporal," the Leet Book says, "that is to say, the worthy cardinal, then bishop of Winchester, the bishop of Bath, the bishop of Ely, and the bishop of Rochester, lords spiritual, the duke of York, the duke of Norfolk, the earl of Warwick, the earl of Stafford ... with other reverent barons and bachelors ... took the water at Dover, and riveden (arrived) thro' God's grace at Calais, and so comen to the city of Roan (Rouen) by the land of Picardy."[230]

Four years later the government was forced yet again to have recourse to borrowing, and on the occasion of the congress at Arras the same sum was collected to relieve the King's necessities "by way of loan" throughout the wards of the city.[231]

There were other charges besides direct loans that the citizens were forced to support that they might pleasure the members of the royal house. The Dukes of Gloucester and Bedford came frequently to the royal castle of Fullbrook, which lay some four miles beyond Warwick, and the good folk of the town felt called upon to furnish them with appropriate gifts. Thus, in 1434, a sum of 50 marks, with a silver cup, was presented to the Duchess of Bedford, and an offering to the Duke, of 24 pike, 12 bream, 12 tench, and a ton of red wine.[232] These presents were often not without some political significance. Thus, in 1431, the year wherein the protector Gloucester made a progress through England on the track of the Lollards, the Coventry men, who were, it seems, not free from the suspicion of holding unorthodox tenets, sent to the duke and duchess at Fullbrook a silver cup, 40 marks, and a plentiful supply of fish and wine.[233]

FOOTNOTES:

[197] This castle, afterwards rebuilt, fell into decay, and was let out into tenements. Cheylesmore, where the De Mohaut's lived, had originally been a nursery for the Earl of Chester's children (Stowe in Harl. MS. 539, No. 4: see also Corp. MS. C. 61).

[198] The borough sent two members to the 1295 parliament, but remained unrepresented from 1315 to 1452.

[199] Stubb's Const. Hist., ii. 49.

[200] Sharp, op. cit., 179.