A HISTORY OF SURREY 



national government was quite as much of an obligation as a right. 

 Indeed the burden usually outweighed the privilege. 



The elections were held in the next regularly recurring County 

 Court after the receipt of the writ, and the statute of Marlborough, 1 267, 

 had released nearly all important people from the duty of attendance at 

 the ordinary meetings of the County Court. Of the practice of the 

 thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries we can say little, but in 1406 

 the sheriffs were ordered by Parliament to make proclamation in all the 

 market towns of their counties of the day and place of election fifteen 

 days beforehand. The order was not always observed nor enforced, and 

 the sheriff might in practice give notice to whom he chose or none at 

 all. At all events in 1406 it was enacted that the election should be 

 made by ' all that be there present, as well suitors duly summoned for the 

 same cause as others.' l This might include persons attending as suitors 

 in small actions for debt with no other qualification. 



In fact people were not often keen to be represented at all. County 

 members had to be paid four shillings a day and their expenses. The 

 tenants-in-chief of the Crown and ecclesiastics were represented in the 

 House of Lords and in Convocation. It was only by degrees that the 

 smaller landed gentry who furnished the knights of the shire attained a 

 position of sufficient independence of the Crown and great men to make 

 their position in Parliament very valuable. In the same County Court, 

 irregularly attended and often casually composed, took place the formal 

 return of the names of the borough members. Persons from Southwark, 

 Reigate, Blechingley, Kingston and Farnham would give the sheriff the 

 names selected by their town's meeting or in fact nominated by their 

 overlord. How easily the wrong name might be substituted, or how 

 difficult it must have been to prevent the p/enus comitatus, the rabble of 

 the county, from having a voice in naming the Guildford borough 

 members, we can easily conceive. Irregularities in returns are so 

 common that the practice of indentures was introduced in 1406, whereby 

 the persons electing affixed their names and seals to an indenture con- 

 taining the names of the persons chosen which was returned with the 

 writ. Plures alii, cum multis a/iis, in plena comitatu are expressions which 

 are added to the actual names on the indentures, but those named and 

 sealing are probably the real electors speaking for or assuming the con- 

 sent of the rest. Nineteen persons so elected for Surrey in 1414, thirty 

 in 1447.* Yet an Act of Parliament in 1430 regulated the elections 

 owing to the disorderly crowd which attended the County Court and 

 established the forty shilling freeholder as the county elector. It is 

 really possible that it may have been in practice an extension of the 

 franchise, not a restriction ; that the forty shilling freeholders would really 

 vote themselves, while the previously existing irregular crowd had been 

 obliged to delegate their powers. 



i 7 Hen. IV. c. 15. 



a See Prynne's Registers of Parliamentary Writs, \\. 128-32 for lists of the electors sealing the 

 indentures. In 1447 John Basket and Robert Wynteshull and twenty-eight others named on the 

 indentures but unnamed by Prynne returned the Surrey knights of the shire. 



352 



