Locality, Polity and the Politics of Counsel: Royal and Urban Councils in England, 1420–1429

Abstract

Historians have tended to examine royal and municipal councils in later medieval England as fundamentally incongruous institutions: the former an advisory body of a political character, and the latter an executive and representative body that served as a battleground for warring socio-economic classes. In this chapter, the king’s council and urban councils are shown, instead, to be units with similar functions and purposes, which both went through periods of greater regulation and standardisation in response to political crises. Moreover, a case study of the years 1420–9 reveals that royal and urban councils not only drew from a shared fund of political ideas, but also responded to one another’s activities. The ‘politics of counsel’, in this respect, can be used to demonstrate the mutually reinforcing contributions of crown and locality to political culture and political practice.