Today’s blog is the second installment from our ‘Medieval MP of the Month’ series. In this post we hear from Senior Research Fellow Dr Hannes Kleineke about landed gentleman Robert Hill…
THE HISTORY OF PARLIAMENT: THE HOUSE OF COMMONS 1422-1461, edited by Linda Clark, is out now. For further details about the volumes, including purchasing information, visit the Cambridge University Press website, here.
While clashes over fishing stocks in the Seine estuary have of late made the news, this month’s sneak preview of the History’s forthcoming fifteenth-century volumes serves as a reminder that fish has always formed an important part of our diet, all the more so in the period before the Reformation when the Church forbade the consumption of meat during substantial parts of the year.
Robert Hill came from a family of important men-of-law of Devon origins. Both his father, Sir Robert (d.1425), and his maternal grandfather, Sir John Wadham (d.1412) were justices of the court of common pleas, in the middle ages one of the two principal royal law courts based in Westminster Hall. Robert himself did not actively practise the law, but was instead able to use the wealth he had inherited from his father to live the life of a landed gentleman. He cut his military teeth in the French wars in 1423, serving under Thomas Beaufort, duke of Exeter, and went on to hold office as sheriff of his county for a term of 15 months in 1428-30, before representing Devon in the Commons in 1442.
Not long before taking his seat, Hill had become embroiled in an acrimonious quarrel over fishing rights in the river Erme between Ugborough and Ermington. Another legal acquaintance, the future Chief Justice John Fortescue, had acquired a 20-year-lease of these rights, and had sub-let them to Hill. Their monopoly was not, however, recognised by one of the most powerful landowners in the vicinity, Sir William Bonville. By custom, the proprietors (or lessees) of the fishery were entitled to access it across the landholdings of the tenants of the manors on either side of the river, but on 23 November 1440 Hill found his access blocked by a party of Bonville men, headed by Walter Raleigh, (an ancestor of the better-known Elizabethan seafarer) who claimed to be protecting their master’s property, and had helped themselves to Hill’s fish, said to have included 100 salmon, 200 bass, 200 trout and 200 other fish. Their exchange grew heated, but Hill and his men retained the upper hand, succeeded in disarming Raleigh and his followers, and – to add insult to injury – unceremoniously pitched Raleigh head-first into the river. The dispute exercised the royal law courts for a number of years, but it is likely that Hill sought election to his only Parliament precisely with the intention of seeking an outcome there.
Eventually, the matter was put to arbitration, but it is possible that from prior experience Hill had mixed feelings about this way forward. A few years earlier, in 1435, he himself had been asked to arbitrate in a dispute between two of his neighbours, but on this occasion the agreement of the parties to submit to his verdict had carried the curious stipulation that should no other evidence be forthcoming, the arbiter should examine a certain soothsayer over the matter. This soothsayer would be brought to Shilston for this purpose, and in such a way as to prevent the parties from influencing him beforehand. If there had ever been any notion of involving similar practitioners over the question of the Ermington fishery, it came to nothing, since Hill died apparently suddenly in the spring of 1444, and aged not much over 50.
H.W.K.
Full biographies of Hill and Raleigh appear our Commons 1422-61 volumes. All information can be found here.
