Page 28 - Hampton in Arden Church and Village Chronicle October 24

The Tamworth Parliamentary Cons�tuency

We may forever think of Hampton-in-Arden as a village first within Warwickshire and later
a part of Solihull, West Midlands, but for most of its history it was a parish within the
Parliamentary Cons�tuency of Tamworth. This only ceased to be the case in 1945.
Tamworth was a town of some historical significance. By the end of the 8th century it had
been established by King Offa as the centre of his expanding kingdom of Mercia, and is
regarded by some historians as the first royal capital in Anglo-Saxon England.
Offa’s dynasty was ejected by the Danes in 874 and Tamworth became a fron�er town
between the Danes and the English un�l 913, when Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians,
restored Tamworth as her capital, re-for�fied the town, and led a successful military
campaign to drive the Danes back. However, following King Æthelstan's death in 939,
Tamworth was again plundered and devastated by Danish invaders. Although it was
recovered and rebuilt by Æthelstan's, successors, it never regained its pre-eminence as a
royal centre.
When in the early 10th century the new shires of Staffordshire and Warwickshire were
created, the large Manor of Tamworth was divided between them. Although the Normans
built a large castle at Tamworth, the Manor wasn’t men�oned in the Domesday Book;
probably due to its division between two coun�es confusing the surveyors.
In the Middle Ages Tamworth grew into a significant market town, but only returned
Members to Parliament a�er receiving its Charter of Incorpora�on in 1560. Two men were
sent up to the 1563 Parliament, and Tamworth was effec�vely regarded as an
‘enfranchised borough’ from that point onwards.
In the pre-1832 House of Commons, each county elected two ‘knights of the shire’ while
each enfranchised borough elected ‘burgesses’ (usually two). The franchise varied, with
some giving many residents votes, and ‘ro�en boroughs’ with hardly any voters. With the
Tamworth cons�tuency s�ll covering large parts of both Staffordshire and Warwickshire,
the original idea was that one burgess would represent ‘Staffordshire Tamworth’ and one
‘Warwickshire Tamworth’.
By 1604 the no�on that each Member represented a different part of the cons�tuency had
broken down; Tamworth merely ‘elected’ two MPs to the House of Commons although
vo�ng was controlled by the Lords of the Manor of Drayton Basse�, which was acquired
by the Peel family in the 1790s. Sir Robert Peel, the future Prime Minister (1834-35 and
1841-46), was elected as one of Tamworth’s two MPs in the General Elec�on of 1830.
So, from the sixteenth century un�l 1945, Hampton-in-Arden, and indeed most of modern
Solihull, were represented in Parliament by the MP(s) for Tamworth, and when the Peels
acquired the Hampton Manor Estates in the 1830s, they were actually buying up property
within the Peel family parliamentary cons�tuency. Moreover, it explains be�er the close
interest the Peels had in the construc�on of the London Birmingham railway line in 1838
and the Stonebridge line in 1839 which all ran through their Parliamentary cons�tuency.
Or to look at it another way, the UK Prime Minister from 1841 to 1846 was actually
Hampton-in-Arden’s MP.

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