Brecon Boroughs

Borough

Published in The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1558-1603, ed. P.W. Hasler, 1981
Available from Boydell and Brewer

Elections

DateCandidate
4 Jan. 1559ROWLAND VAUGHAN
23 Dec. 1562SIR ROGER VAUGHAN
1571RICHARD PRICE I
1 May 1572WALTER GAMES
7 Nov. 1584DAVID WILLIAMS
5 Oct. 1586DAVID WILLIAMS
1588/9DAVID WILLIAMS
1593SIR MATTHEW MORGAN
28 Sept. 1597DAVID WILLIAMS
21 Oct. 1601HENRY WILLIAMS

Main Article

Brecon, shire town of a new county created by the Act of Union, received a charter of incorporation in 1556. A common council of 15 capital burgesses was created, from which a bailiff and two aldermen were to be chosen annually. The councilmen were authorized to meet in the guildhall at Brecon, and to elect a recorder and a common clerk. The first councilmen, chosen from the ‘better and honester burgesses’, are named in the charter. The other boroughs in Breconshire were Builth, which was given a charter by Edward I and belonged to the Herberts in the Elizabethan period; Crickhowell, also a Herbert possession, and governed by a bailiff; Hay—‘wonderfully decayed’ in Leland’s time—which had a bailiff appointed by the lords Stafford; and Talgarth.1

The elections for the borough MPs took place at Brecon and were presided over by the bailiff. There is very little evidence, at least until 1597, to suggest that the other ‘ancient boroughs’ in the county, as defined in the Act of Union, sent burgesses to take part. Before that date the indentures are made out between the sheriff of Breconshire and the bailiff and a handful of Brecon burgesses, presumably common councilmen. The 1597 return, however, states that the Member was chosen with the assent of the burgesses of Brecon and ‘of all the other boroughs within the county of Brecon’, and in 1601 about 15 named burgesses of Brecon ‘and others’ were party to the indenture.2

All the Members save Sir Matthew Morgan belonged to a close-knit group of families in the county. Rowland Vaughan, who sat in 1559, owed his election to the influence of his father, Sir Roger Vaughan of Porthaml, returned as knight of the shire at the same time. In 1563 Sir Roger himself retired to the borough seat, presumably to give his son the opportunity to sit for the county, which he did. Richard Price (1571) was the son of Sir John Price, one of the leading supporters of the Reformation in South Wales. Richard inherited the priory and much other former monastic property in Brecon and was bailiff of the town at the time of his election. Edward Games had been the most prominent burgess of Brecon in the 1540s and 1550s, occupying the borough seat on several occasions, and Walter, a relative, was elected in 1572, when the family supplied the knight of the shire also. In 1584, and three times thereafter, the Brecon burgesses chose their recorder, David Williams, a local man, and brother-in-law to Walter Games. Williams was no doubt responsible for the choice of his son Henry in 1601. The influence of the Earl of Essex and his Welsh steward, Gelly Meyrick, was sufficient to interrupt Williams’s occupation of the seat in 1593, when Sir Matthew Morgan, one of the Earl’s companions-in-arms, was returned.

Author: M.R.P.

Notes

  • 1. T. Jones, Hist. Brecon. i. 114 seq.; ii. 58-59; iii. 4-5, 100, 119, 127-8; iv. 230-2; CPR, 1555-7, pp. 76-81; Bull. Bd. of Celtic Studies, ii. 243; Arch. Camb. (ser. 4), iv. 173-192; Leland, Itin. ed. Smith, 109.
  • 2. C219/26/147, 27/51, 28/188, 29/203, 30/132, 33/268, 34/100.