POPE, John II.

It is now impossible to tell if the John Pope who served as a juror at an inquisition held at Kingston-upon-Thames in 1402 later represented Reigate in Parliament. A man of the same name witnessed a deed in Reigate one year later, which suggests that Pope came from a local family. He may have owned land in the Sussex manor of West Hoathley, for in 1410 a John Pope and Joan, his wife, conveyed two messuages there to the Reigate MP Roger Chaunce II and others, but again the question of identity remains uncertain.Feudal Aids, vi. 387; CCR, 1402-5, pp. 153-4; Suss. Feet of Fines (Suss. Rec. Soc. xxiii), no. 2797. The subject of this biography was probably summoned (as John Pope junior) during the Hilary term of 1416 to appear among the defendants in a property dispute then being heard at the Guildford assizes. Save for his attendance at three Parliaments, if not more, little else is known about him until April 1429 when either he or a namesake of his held land at an annual rent of 3s. to the east of Reigate in Crowhurst. A John Pope appears some 17 years later among the feoffees-to-uses of a messuage in the borough, so the MP may still have been alive at this date.JUST 1/1528 rot. 35; CCR, 1429-35, p. 60; O. Manning and W. Bray, Hist. Surr. i. 305. Despite all these problems of identification, it is clear that Reigate was not represented (as McKisack believed) by a former bondman of John, Earl Marshal, named Pope. The evidence for such an assumption is tenuous in the extreme, and certainly cannot be regarded as proof of baronial intervention in the electoral process.M. McKisack, Parl. Repn. Eng. Bors. 115; VCH Surr. iv. 249; Surr Arch. Colls. xvi. 3.