The city of Salisbury, or New Sarum, sprang up around the cathedral transferred in 1219 from Old Sarum, some three miles distant. The new settlement received a charter from the bishop of Salisbury in 1225 and one from the crown two years later. A centre of the cloth industry, by 1520 Salisbury with a population of some 8,000 ranked among the kingdom’s ten largest cities, but until its incorporation in 1612 it remained under the increasingly irksome lordship of the bishop. The citizens had none the less early won the right to elect their own mayor and other officials, and by the mid 15th century there had emerged an inner council of Twenty-Four and an outer group of Forty-Eight, which together constituted the assembly.23

Relations between city and bishop seem to have been peaceful under Bishop Audley and his absentee successor Cardinal Campeggio, although a draft bill (corrected by Cromwell) designed to limit the powers of the under bailiff and to ensure that he was sufficiently learned in the law may date from Campeggio’s time. The situation rapidly worsened after the consecration in February 1535 of the imperious and Protestant Nicholas Shaxton. Led by the elder Thomas Chaffyn, the citizens denounced the episcopal claims to Cromwell as a usurpation of royal rights; in particular they argued that the Act of 1536 limiting franchises (27 Hen. VIII, c.24) had extinguished the bishop’s authority to appoint justices of the peace, and they rejected the oath taken by the mayor as an innovation by the under bailiff Thomas Chamber in November 1536. Cromwell may have hoped to ease the tension by having Chamber replaced by his own servant John Goodale, but Goodale was to outdo even Shaxton as a champion of episcopal rights and his Protestantism was no less offensive to the conservative citizenry. Although Goodale’s dismissal and Shaxton’s resignation in 1539 left the question of jurisdiction unresolved, the next bishop, John Capon alias Salcot, proved more pliable both in his religious professions and in his dealings with the city.24

The names of all the Members for Salisbury during the period are known, their elections having been recorded in the extant general entry book of the corporation. Elections were held in the guildhall following the delivery of a precept from the sheriff of Wiltshire. The sheriff was informed of the outcome at the next meeting of the county court at Wilton, and although the indenture then made included the date of the election, the compilers of the Official Return sometimes chose the date of the indenture itself. Indentures survive for all the Parliaments between 1545 and 1555 except that of 1547; they are uniformly in Latin and several are in poor condition. They originally bore the common seal of Salisbury and the personal seals of the Members. The contracting parties are the sheriff and the mayor and community of Salisbury, with no mention of the bishop’s bailiff or under bailiff.25

Sixteen of the Members were citizens, among whom nine had served as mayor before their first election within the period and four did so later. During his Membership of the Parliament of 1529 the elder Thomas Chaffyn was twice excused the mayoralty on ground of ill-health, and in October 1536 he was allowed to take precedence ‘as though he had been mayor next unto Mr. Webbe’. The seven who were not citizens included Charles Bulkeley, a lawyer active in county administration and a resident in the city; his partner Edward Chaffyn, who presumably belonged to the merchant family; and the civilian John Story, son of a Salisbury merchant. Three more—(Sir) John Thynne, Henry Clifford and George Penruddockmwere Penruddock—were Wiltshire gentlemen. Only the lawyer Thomas Gawdy was a stranger to the city and to the county.

In 1512 Salisbury seems originally to have chosen a local gentleman, Henry Pauncefoot, with Richard Bartholomew, but in the record of the election in the corporation ledger Pauncefoot’s name is crossed out and that of Thomas Coke written above the deletion. Three years later the city complied with Henry VIII’s request for the re-election of the Members of the Parliament of 1512 but replaced them before the second session: both were elderly men who may have felt that their attendance at the first session should satisfy the King. Chaffyn’s incapacity, through illness not age, may likewise explain the city’s failure to comply fully with the similar recommendation of 1536. Illness was at least the ostensible reason for the replacement of one of the two men originally chosen in 1545, Robert Keilway, legal adviser to the Earl of Hertford and probably a son of the Member in 1523, and Edmund Gawen, a former mayor. Elected on 23 Jan. 1545, they were replaced by Gawdy and Story on 19 Nov., four days before the Parliament finally assembled after two postponements. In the interval Keilway had accepted election for Bristol, but Gawen was said to be ‘so diseased that he cannot labour without peril of his body’. For the succeeding Parliament William Webbe and Robert Griffith, elected on 26 Sept. 1547, were brushed aside without any such reason or excuse. The names of their replacements, Thynne and Clifford, are known only from the Crown Office list prepared for the last session, but both had almost certainly been Members from the outset, since Webbe and Griffith outlived this Parliament and there is no trace of a by-election.

The patronage behind Gawdy and Story is uncertain, but Gawdy could have been recommended to Hertford by his fellow Inner Templar Keilway, and Story supported by Bishop Salcot. There was evidently some resentment at their intrusion, for the record of their election is followed by a restatement of an earlier resolution that ‘henceforth no strangers shall be chosen for the city but such as be inhabiting within the same city’. Thynne was clearly the nomineee of Hertford, then Duke of Somerset and Protector, and Clifford, if not also of Somerset, probably of (Sir) William Herbert I. On 3 Feb. 1553 the assembly agreed to allow Herbert, then Earl of Pembroke, to nominate both Members: Penruddock was his servant but John Beckingham was a citizen of Salisbury. This breach of the resolution of 1545 was connived at, if not arranged, by Webbe, then mayor, who agreed to discharge the city of the Members’ wages if Pembroke failed to provide for them. It is thus likely that Webbe had approved his own supersession in 1547, and there is evidence that he had also approved the choice of Bulkeley in 1542.

The city’s ledger book shows that Salisbury usually paid its Members at this time, raising its rate from 1s. or 1s.8d. a day to the statutory figure of 2s. Payment was often in arrear and was sometimes remitted in return for favours.