HODINGS (ODINGS), John, of Nottingham.

Hodings traded in cloth manufactured in Nottingham.E101/343/21. He is perhaps, therefore, to be identified with the John Hodings ‘of Leicester’ whose payments of customs on wool at Hull had fallen into considerable arrears by 1396: CFR, xi. 172. Having entered the freedom of the borough by the late 1380s, he quickly struck up a friendship with a former mayor, Richard Hanneson, who not only appointed him as a feoffee of his property, but also named him as an executor of his will, in accordance with which he received a bequest of a garden in Fletcher Gate.Nottingham Recs. i. 264, 281, 293-4, 311; Nottingham Archs. ct. rolls 1292 m. 17, 1296 m. 23d, 1297 m. 22d, 1306 m. 13d. In 1401 Hodings was again a feoffee, this time to implement a gift to the local grammar school, and in the next few years his name was often included as a witness to enrolments in the borough courts. When sued there himself in 1408 over rents of 9s.3d., Hodings claimed exemption from answering the charge on the ground that the plaintiff, being illegitimate, could not legally claim to be a burgess, but he proved unsuccessful in his plea.Nottingham Recs. ii. 13, 65-67, 83, 401, 402.

Hodings’s fellow parliamentary burgess in 1397, William Gresley, was a royal archer, but he himself had earlier demonstrated his support for the Lords Appellant (an offence for which he procured a pardon in September 1398), and on 20 Aug. 1399 he was reported in Nottingham to be in the service of the duke of Lancaster, Henry of Bolingbroke, ‘for the common benefit of the King [Richard II] and the realm’.Ibid. i. 359; C67/31 m. 12. Perhaps to some extent as a reward for this assistance to the usurper, he was engaged in 1406 and 1414 in organizing repairs to Nottingham castle and the royal hunting lodges of Bestwood and Clipstone in Sherwood forest, which by then had all been assigned to Henry IV’s consort, Joan of Navarre.

Through marriage to Elizabeth Crophill, whose family boasted two former mayors of Nottingham, Hodings acquired extensive properties both in the town, in Castle Gate, Stoney Street, Barker Gate, Wheeler Gate and Hounds Gate, and outside it, on the Rye hills. However, in 1401 the couple sold Elizabeth’s landed holdings in Gedling, Stoke Bardolf and Carlton, all within easy reach of Nottingham, to a powerful neighbour, Sir Thomas Rempston I.Nottingham Recs. ii. 31-33, 77, 79, 117, 405; Nottingham Archs. ct. rolls 1293 m. 10d, 1302 m. 9d, 1304 m. 18d, 1306 m. 2d; CP25(1)186/37/4. In 1410, Hodings and his wife brought several suits at the local assizes. For instance, they accused Edmund Wheatly of disseising them of a building and lands in Nottingham, only for Wheatly to retaliate by charging them in the borough court with having broken down his wall (7ft. long and 8 ft. high) with pick-axes, and stolen the stones.JUST 1/1514 m. 84; Nottingham Archs. ct. roll 1306 m. 24d.

Following the election on 17 Jan. 1413 of Hodings and Thomas Mapperley to Henry IV’s last Parliament, rioting townsmen protested that their chosen candidate was Robert Sutton. They attacked the mayor, Henry Wilford, who, fleeing for safety to Hodings’s house, was callously refused entry by him. At the borough elections to the following Parliament Hodings went surety for Mapperley. In March 1414 he gave evidence against local lollards, and was still alive in 1416.C219/11/2; KB9/204/1 m. 27; CIMisc. vii. 469.