SHAWE, John II (d.1431), of Oxford.

A fishmonger, like his putative father, Shawe first appears in 1398 when he sat as a juror at an inquisition taken before the county escheator. In 1401 he and his first wife rented two tenements in St. Aldate’s parish, Oxford (which had once belonged to her father and grandfather) from Robert Boterwyk, the university beadle, in return for rendering 40s. and a barrel of red herring every year. In 1408, following the death of the elder John Shawe, whose property known as Laurence Hall he subsequently occupied, he received a licence from the bishop of Lincoln to hear mass privately at his home. From that year onwards he served in a number of local offices, and is known to have been present at the borough elections to the Parliaments of 1419, 1420, 1422, 1425, 1426, 1427 and 1429.Oxf. Hist. Soc. xxviii. no. 327; (ser. 2), xiv. 35; Reg. Repingdon (Lincoln Rec. Soc. lvii), 113; C219/12/3, 4, 13/1, 3-5, 14/11.

By 1421 Shawe had married his second wife, Agnes, possibly a relation of a fellow burgess and six times mayor, Walter Dauntsey, and certainly one of the nieces of Walter Metford, the dean of Wells, who in December that year left her £5 in his will.Reg. Chichele, ii. 253; Biog. Reg. Univ. Oxf. ed. Emden, ii. 1252-3. Ten years later Shawe was dead, and his own testament, made on 14 Nov. 1429 and proved on 27 Apr. 1431, shows him to have held a considerable number of properties. Apart from unspecified lands and tenements within Oxford itself, he owned land at Beaumont and Osney, outside the town boundaries, and at Hungerford in Berkshire, where was then his ‘domicilium’. Perhaps this last was held in right of his wife, who, with his son and heir, Thomas, acted as his executor. He was buried in St. Aldate’s church, to which he left a total of £2 6s.8d. His widow married John Eastbury (quite likely of the family from Lambourn in Berkshire) and outlived him by at least 25 years. In 1456 she sold Laurence Hall.Liber Albus Oxoniensis ed. Ellis, no. 208; Bodl. Top. Oxon. b. 42, f. 64; Oxf. Hist. Soc. (ser. 2), xiv. 35.