Introduction

Summary

An housholdere, and that a greet, was he;

Seint Julian he was in his countree

. . . . . . .

At sessiouns ther was he lord and sire;

Ful ofte tyme he was knight of the shire,

. . . . . . .

A shirreve hadde he been, and a countour.

Was no-wher such a worthy vavasour.

In his description of the franklin who journeyed with the other pilgrims to Canterbury, Chaucer has aptly summarised the main characteristics of the majority of the men who represented Bedfordshire in parliament during the middle ages. They were essentially local men : substantial landowners whose property was often scattered through several shires, and whose co-operation was necessary to keep the machinery of local government running. In the wider field of national affairs they played little part except to fight the king’s battles and occasionally attend at court on ceremonial occasions. Such a group of men have naturally left little record behind them except as representatives of the royal authority in the county, and it is almost impossible to find out the things we would most like to know about them—their reactions to political developments, their attitude to social and economic problems, and their religious impulses. Their biographies have a monotonous similarity; and an analysis of their activities, as far as we can piece them together, serves only to emphasise the meagreness of our knowledge.

The first question which naturally arises with regard to the knights of the shire is that of determining how many of them were actually knights. Was the king’s order to return “duos milites” always carried out? It is a difficult question to answer because their titles are not always given in the records, and it is possible that there was often some doubt as to who had been formally admitted to the degree of knighthood. Of the 124 known Bedfordshire representatives, 75 seem to have been knights either on their first return to parliament or soon after. The other representatives are sometimes described as “esquire” or occasionally in the fifteenth century “gentleman” or “franklin”. The term “duos milites” seems gradually to have become a formality.