The Berkshire elections were held at Abingdon under the direction of the sheriff of Oxfordshire and Berkshire. The two shires had the same sheriff until 1567 and many gentlemen had interests in both, as well as in Buckinghamshire. In Berkshire itself there was no resident temporal peer and before the reign of Elizabeth no family powerful enough to dominate the shire. Until the Dissolution the major landholders, next to the crown, were the great Benedictine abbeys of Reading and Abingdon. Henry Norris was ennobled in 1572 (by which time he had settled in Oxfordshire), but when he sat for Berkshire he was young and inexperienced and probably owed his return to his father-in-law Sir John Williams.

Of the 12 knights of the shire identified for the period—or 13 if Sir Thomas Englefield, Speaker in 1510, sat for his native shire—six (the two Englefields, Richard Brydges, Henry Norris, William Hyde and John Fettiplace) were the sons of Berkshire gentlemen, and three (Sir William Essex, Thomas Weldon and Sir Henry Neville) had settled there before their first election. Thomas Denton’s father resided at Caversfield, a Buckinghamshire enclave in Oxfordshire, and Denton himself made his home in Buckinghamshire, but the family had earlier come from Berkshire and still retained interests there: Denton served as knight for all three shires, a distinction he probably owed to his standing as a lawyer. Sir Richard Weston, crown servant, lived in Surrey but held land and offices in Berkshire and was on the commission of the peace there for over 30 years. Although Henry VIII is not known to have intervened in the Berkshire election to the Parliament of 1529, he was at Windsor when the writs for other counties were sent for and both Essex and Weston were probably royal nominees. Ten years later (Sir) Thomas Pope, an Oxfordshire man by birth, was probably returned through the influence of Cromwell who had found him a seat at Buckingham in 1536. The Anglo-Irishman (Sir) William Fitzwilliam was recommended by the Council, then dominated by the Duke of Northumberland who had earlier appointed Fitzwilliam lieutenant of Windsor castle and keeper of the Great Park: Fitzwilliam’s friend and fellow-nominee Neville had recently acquired his Berkshire estate through Northumberland’s favour. Both were Protestants and they were not to sit again until after the reign of Mary, which in Berkshire saw the personal dominance of Sir Francis Englefield, a Catholic Privy Councillor whose own career ended with the accession of Elizabeth. Englefield took the senior seat in four out of Mary’s five Parliaments and he probably had a hand in the return of the other knights, especially William Hyde, who held land of him (and of (Sir) Richard Brydges), and John Fettiplace, his kinsman by marriage. The prolific Fettiplaces were the most important element in the system of relationships which, as in other counties, bound the gentry together: John Fettiplace was a stepson of Thomas Denton and the eventual heir to Sir Francis Englefield’s wife, Catherine Fettiplace.

Election indentures survive for the two Parliaments of Edward VI and all those of Mary save that of April 1554. All are in Latin (except that for the last Marian Parliament) and are in the usual form between the sheriff, a dozen or 20 named gentry—they are generally too faded or torn for the precise figure to be recoverable—and many other unnamed freeholders. In 1547 the named electors are headed by William Grey II, a follower of the Protector Somerset, and in the autumn of 1554 William Hyde and his son Oliver are among those listed. A schedule with the names of the knights of the shire and the Members for the boroughs is extant from November 1554.3

Berkshire was one of the counties where new gaols were to be erected under an Act of 1532 (23 Hen. VIII, c.2), which was renewed three times before 1558. A bill transferring certain liberties from Wiltshire to Berkshire failed after its third reading in the Commons late in 1554.4