Mayor of Barnstaple

The Mayor's Pew, St Peter's Church, Barnstaple. On the chair back are shown the arms of Barnstaple: Gules a castle of three towers conjoined argent the centre tower larger than the others,[1] between two scrolls inscribed in Latin: Domini Nomen and Firmum Castellum ("The Name of God (is) a Strong Castle")

The Mayor of Barnstaple together with the Corporation long governed the historic Borough of Barnstaple, in North Devon, England. The seat of government was the Barnstaple Guildhall.[2] The mayor served a term of one year and was elected annually on the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin (15 August) by a jury of twelve.[3]

However Barnstaple was a mesne borough[4] and was held by the Mayor and Corporation in chief not from the king but from the feudal baron of Barnstaple, later known as the lord of the "Castle Manor" or "Castle Court". The Corporation tried on several occasions to claim the status of a "free borough" which answered directly to the monarch and to divest itself of this overlordship, but without success. The mayor was not recognised as such by the monarch, but merely as the bailiff of the feudal baron.[4] The powers of the borough were highly restricted, as was determined by an inquisition ad quod damnum during the reign of King Edward III (1327–1377), which from an inspection of evidence found that members of the corporation elected their mayor only by permission of the lord, legal pleas were held in a court at which the lord's steward, not the mayor, presided, that the borough was taxed by the county assessors, and that the lord held the various assizes which the burgesses claimed.[4] Indeed, the purported ancient royal charter supposedly granted by the Anglo-Saxon King Æthelstan (d.939) (King of the Anglo-Saxons from 924 to 927 and King of the English from 927 to 939) and held by the corporation, from which it claimed its borough status, was suspected to be a forgery.[4]

Since 1974 Barnstaple has been a civil parish governed by a town council.[5]

  1. ^ Per Heraldic Visitation of 1620 for the Borough of Barnstaple [1] Archived 2016-11-20 at the Wayback Machine
  2. ^ See further: Oliver, W. Bruce, Barnstaple Borough, Transactions of the Devon Association, vol. 62, (1930) pp.269–273
  3. ^ History of Parliament, Barnstaple [2]
  4. ^ a b c d History of Parliament, Barnstaple
  5. ^ "Barnstaple Town Council". Archived from the original on 25 January 2001.