SHARP, John III

Sharp is first heard of in April 1403 when he and his parents acquired a lease for their lives of a property in Redcliffe Street, Bristol, from Thomas, Lord Berkeley, for the nominal rent of a red rose. In the lease he is referred to as the eldest son of his father and namesake but it is possible that his brother or brothers died at an early age since no other children feature in the elder John Sharp’s will.13 Cat. Med. Muns. Berkeley Castle ed. Wells-Furby (Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc.), i. 171; PCC 1 Luffenham. A merchant, the latter was one of the co-founders of the Bristol guild of St. John the Baptist, a fraternity whose chapel occupied the south aisle of the parish church of St. Ewen. The elder John was also prominent in local administration, serving as a councillor and exercising the offices of bailiff (1408-9), sheriff (1412-13) and mayor (1415-16). His will of 4 Mar. 1423 lacks a date of probate but he probably died not long afterwards. He asked to be buried in the church of St. Audeon at Bristol and provided for a chaplain to sing masses there for eight years. He left all his holdings in Bristol and its suburbs to his wife Joan, after whose death they were to pass to his son and namesake and to the latter’s wife Elizabeth and their children. The testator named two executors, his wife and the younger John Sharp.14 F.F. Fox, Merchant Tailors of Bristol, 5, 104-6; Church Bk. St. Ewen’s ed. Masters and Ralph, p. xiv; Gt. Red Bk. iii. 64-72; E122/17/37; Little Red Bk. i. 136-40; Trans. Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc. xxvi. 130; PCC 1 Luffenham.

Several disparate sources provide the only evidence of the extensive property that the subject of this biography must have held in Bristol, because his father’s will does not mention any individual properties and his own will has not survived. He lived in a hall house in Corn Street in the parish of St. Ewen, for which he paid a rent to Henry Gildeney* and Gildeney’s heirs and where his mother, still alive in late 1430, also resided during her widowhood.15 Bristol Wills, 120. Among his other holdings were a tenement in Gropelane, a tenement and a tower on the quay, a tower in Knifesmith Street, five shops in Horse Street, a plot of land in a street leading to Brandon Hill and a tenement in Broad Street that his father had bought in Henry IV’s reign.16 . Ibid. 122; Bristol RO, St. Thomas the Martyr parish recs., P/St.T/D/311, 313; Gt. Red Bk. of Bristol, i (Bristol Rec. Soc. iv), 251; Recs. All Saints Bristol, iii (Bristol Rec. Soc. lvi), 409. At one stage he also possessed a temporary interest in a cellar beneath the church of St. Leonard, which he and his friend, Richard Trenode*, leased from its parishioners.17 Bristol RO, St. Leonard’s Vestry recs., 40365/D/2/33. The Broad Street tenement formed part of a settlement he made in 1460 for his grand-daughter Elizabeth and her husband Richard Meede, the son of Philip Meede*. Elizabeth was the daughter of his only known son, another John Sharp. By that date there was already a strong connexion between the Sharps and Meedes, for Philip Meede’s wife of the same name (otherwise known as Isabel) was the sister of the subject of this biography. Apart from the Broad Street tenement, Richard and Elizabeth Meede also received lands, tenements, shops and other properties in Corn, Broad and St. Mary le Port and Marsh Streets, including an inn called the ‘Cardinal’s Hat’ by means of the same settlement.18 Topography of Bristol, i (Bristol Rec. Soc. xlviii), 32; Gt. Red Bk. iii. 171. Outside Bristol, Sharp appears to have possessed interests in the east Midlands, possibly in the right of his wife, a lady of unknown parentage. At the end of January 1430 he and Elizabeth conveyed lands and the site of a water-mill at Welton, Northamptonshire, to John Catesby*, properties that had once belonged to Thomas Durham of Bristol. Over four decades later, the by then widowed Elizabeth held a tenement at Isham in the same county and, much more significantly, a manor and other lands at Swinford in Leicestershire.19 CAD, iv. A8425; CP40/844, cart. rots. 1-3. It is not known whether Elizabeth was Durham’s da. or if she should be identified with the Elizabeth who was formerly the wife of the lord of Welton, John Mallory (d.1429/30): CAD, iv. A7611, 8374, 9657, 9829. Similarly, it is not known whether she was a member of the Vyel fam. of Bristol, which (coincidently or not) had long held lands at both Isham and Swinford. In 1398-9 Elizabeth, da. and h. of the late Henry Vyel of Bristol, conveyed the Isham holdings to her cousin John Sutton of Bristol but, given the date of this conveyance, it is highly unlikely that she could have been the same woman as the MP’s wife: VCH Northants. iv, 192 (where ‘Vyel’ is incorrectly rendered as ‘Pyel’); J. Nichols, Leics. iv. 361-2. Even more confusingly, Elizabeth, wid. of Sir Thomas Mallory* (d.1471) of Le Morte d’Arthur fame, is known to have held a manor at Swinford during her widowhood. After her death in 1479 this manor (presumably another lordship in that parish) reverted to her gds. and h. Nicholas Mallory. Sir Thomas Mallory was from another branch of the same fam. as that of John Mallory of Welton: C140/75/46; P.J.C. Field, Sir Thomas Malory, 186.

In spite of his landholdings Sharp was first and foremost a merchant. In 1433 he took legal action against a fellow merchant, Thomas Erle, to whom he had sold ‘divers merchandise’, over a debt of £80. In the following year, he and John Budde of Bristol obtained a royal licence permitting a Spanish ship with a cargo of wine, iron and oil to sail unmolested in English waters.20 C241/225/12; Overseas Trade (Bristol Rec. Soc. vii), 63; DKR, xlviii. 303. In the summer of 1452 Sharp purchased another such licence, this time to export merchandise to Bordeaux or Bayonne, either in a vessel of 300 tons or in two of 160.21 Gt. Red Bk. i. 201. Even though he dealt in more than one commodity, it is likely that the cloth was one of his principal interests. Customs records, for example, show that he shipped cloth to Bordeaux on English vessels in September 1429 and again a year later.22 E122/18/22, 25.

Like his father, Sharp was a prominent office-holder at Bristol, serving as a councillor and holding the offices of bailiff, sheriff and mayor. His term as sheriff ended in some controversy, for when he came to account at the Exchequer in October 1428 William Babington, c.j.c.p., took the opportunity to bring a suit against him there. Babington’s bill related to a writ that Sharp, as sheriff, had returned to the court of common pleas at Westminster in the previous summer. By means of that writ, the common pleas had directed Sharp to empanel a Bristol jury to try a case between some fellow burgesses, and Babington alleged that he had included the names of several dead men among the jurors listed in his return. Through his attorney, Sharp twice obtained further time to prepare his answer before protesting in Easter term 1429 that he should not have to reply to Babington’s bill since it was insufficient in law. At that point the barons of the Exchequer reserved judgement and it is not known how, or if, the matter was concluded.23 Little Red Bk. i. 86-88; ii. 147-8, 169; Gt. Red Bk. i. 128-30, 135; Gt. Red Bk. of Bristol, ii (Bristol Rec. Soc. viii), 48-52, 57; E159/205, recorda Mich. rot. 10; CP40/670, rot. 320d.

Within a year of completing his term as sheriff, Sharp began a parliamentary career that spanned over three decades and extended into Edward IV’s reign, and during which he was returned to the Commons on no fewer than four occasions.24 Although it is conceivable that the MP of 1461 was a younger namesake, possibly the John Sharp ‘gentleman’ who was living in Bristol in the early 1490s: Bristol Wills, 17. It is also possible that the subject of this biography was the same person as John Sharp II*, who sat for Lyme Regis in 1426. It is worth noting that from 1415 Sir Thomas Brooke† (d.1418) of Holditch, Devon, and his wife Joan (d.1437) held that Dorset borough by royal grant for term of their lives, and associates of theirs were elected to represent Lyme in the Commons during the period of that grant. Joan was the wid. of Robert Cheddar† of Bristol (a clothier like the subject of this biography) and had very substantial properties there: CPR, 1413-16, p. 325; The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 377-9. He was appointed to his first term as mayor a few months after the dissolution of his second Parliament. One noteworthy event of this term was an eclipse that, as the Bristol-born antiquary William Worcestre noted, occurred on 17 June 1433.25 William Worcestre: The Topography of Med. Bristol ed. Neale (Bristol Rec. Soc. li), 79. Worcestre, who must have known (or known of) Sharp’s father, refers to him as ‘Sherp the younger’. Elsewhere he erroneously recorded that the eclipse took place in 1446: William of Worcestre, Itins. ed. Harvey, 307. During both of his terms in the mayoralty Sharp was concurrently mayor of the local staple, a body for which he was also several times a constable.

As for ad hoc commissions, Sharp served more regularly on these bodies than many of his fellow burgesses, and the Crown also chose him to perform other miscellaneous tasks on at least four occasions. First, in November 1431 he and others were entrusted with the responsibility of supervising the loading of certain goods at the port of Bristol. Sharp and his fellows subsequently found themselves facing demands from the Exchequer in connexion with this commission, and it was not until early 1438, after he and one of them, John Twyneho, had appeared personally in the Chancery, that the Crown ordered the cessation of all process against them relating to this matter. Secondly, in late August 1442 Sharp was among those at Bristol whom the King’s council appointed to see to the purveyance and transport of 1,000 quarters of wheat to Bayonne. To recover the expenses they would incur, he and his associates were licensed to export other merchandise free of custom or subsidy. Thirdly, during the same summer the Crown tasked Sharp and John Wych*, one of the searchers of ships in the port of Bristol, with appraising and selling a quantity of cloth which Wych had confiscated from a Breton ship. Finally, in July 1461 the Crown chose him and three other burgesses to help in the task of distributing compensation to those subjects who had suffered losses at the hands of Genoese pirates.26 E159/214, brevia Hil. rot. 17; PPC, v. 207; E122/185/2; CPR, 1461-7, p. 54.

Another responsibility exercised by Sharp was that of a customs collector at Bristol, an office to which he was appointed with Thomas Bateman in 1443. Unlike Bateman, his was not a direct Crown appointment, for he was nominated for the office by Henry VI’s great-uncle, Cardinal Beaufort. Only a month earlier, the King had granted Beaufort the right to recoup from the customs of London, Bristol and other ports a huge sum of £11,000 he had lent to the Crown, and to appoint one of the customers in each of these ports until that sum was fully repaid. As Beaufort’s nominee, Sharp made liveries of the money he collected in customs to the Cardinal’s officials rather than sending it to the Exchequer. Within two weeks of becoming a customs collector, Sharp received royal letters, dated 8 July 1443, granting him the right for life freely to buy and sell merchandise, wares and victuals of both alien and denizen merchants, and to act as a host to such merchants at Bristol.27 CFR, xvii. 235-7; CPR, 1441-6, pp. 182, 183; E403/751, m. 2. In the spring of 1445 Sharp and Bateman were co-defendants in a couple of lawsuits heard in the Exchequer, both relating to assignments that the Crown had made on the customs of Bristol. In one, the mayor and commonalty of Bristol claimed that the collectors should have paid them £160 out of the customs, in order to settle a loan that the town had made to the King. In the event, Sharp and Bateman were subsequently exonerated with regard to that sum, since in April 1447, by which time they had left office, the responsibility for paying it was transferred to the then customers. In the other suit the recorder of Bristol, Thomas Young II*, sought £40 from the customs, likewise in repayment of a loan that the Crown had received from him.28 E13/143, rots. 30, 38, 44d. This was not the first time that Sharp had clashed with Young, who over a decade earlier had sued him and others in the Chancery over a bond relating to a debt owed to the estate of his late father, Thomas Young† (d.1427) of Bristol.29 C1/7/147; Little Red Bk. ii. 49-51.

Even if not always on the best of terms with Young, Sharp certainly enjoyed good relationships with other Bristol burgesses, among them his brother-in-law Philip Meede, Thomas Fish* and Richard Trenode. In late 1437 he bound himself in no less than £1,000 to the Crown on behalf of Fish, as a guarantee that Thomas would answer in the Exchequer for his conduct while of one of the customers of Bristol.30 E159/214, recogniciones Mich., Hil. Just over four years later, Trenode appointed Sharp an overseer of his will, drawn up on 22 May 1442.31 Bristol Wills, 132. Given his prominence as a burgess, it is not surprising that Sharp also associated with members of the Gloucestershire gentry. In 1439, for example, he and other townsmen joined Sir Maurice Berkeley I*, Sir Maurice de Berkeley II*, Robert Greyndore*, John Kemys* and others in witnessing a quitclaim to John Blount esquire of pasture rights at Bitton to the south-east of Bristol.32 Cat. Med. Muns. Berkeley Castle, ii. 844. Later, in about 1450, he helped to bring about the marriage of Henry, a younger son of the late Robert Stanshawe*, to an orphan of unknown parentage named Margaret. He did so in his capacity as a guardian (‘gouvernour’) of the girl – the heir to estates in Gloucestershire worth 20 marks p.a. and perhaps the offspring of a fellow burgess – a role he shared with John Kemys, a gentleman with strong Bristol connexions, and Thomas Exeter.33 C1/22/149.

When the match was made Margaret’s inheritance was entrusted to several of her Stanshawe in-laws, who undertook to settle these lands on the couple before the Christmas then following and gave obligations to Sharp and her other guardians as a guarantee that they would honour their undertaking. In the event, it was a short-lived match because by 1453 Henry had died and Margaret was the wife of Hugh Mille*. Soon after her second marriage, she and Mille submitted a bill to the chancellor to complain that her former Stanshawe in-laws were withholding her inheritance from them and that she had no redress at common law because her former guardians, against whom the bill was directed, were detaining the obligations. Taken at face value, the bill suggests that Sharp and his two associates were conniving with the Stanshawes to withhold the lands from the Milles, but this is far from certain since the outcome of the suit is unknown. It was nevertheless probably in relation to this dispute that in January 1453 he and his fellow guardians came to some sort of agreement with the couple.34 Ibid.; Little Red Bk. ii. 192.

The best-documented quarrel involving Sharp was one in which he was a principal party and which dominated his old age. The dispute was between him and his wife on the one hand and the rector and churchwardens of his home parish church of St. Ewen on the other. Until the quarrel, the couple were probably highly esteemed as parishioners, not least for their donations. In the mid 1450s, for example, Elizabeth Sharp contributed 40s. towards the making of a silver cross for St. Ewen’s. She also presented a pair of vestments to the parish, which at some stage appears likewise to have received a gift of altar cloths from her husband. Furthermore, the Sharps’ son, John Sharp V, who died in 1455 or early 1456, must have left a sum of money to St. Ewen’s, since its churchwardens’ account for March 1455-6 records that the elder John paid them 6s. 8d., ‘of his son’s bequest’. The cause of the dispute was Sharp’s shop adjoining his house in Corn Street, a property from which the parish, by virtue of a deed of 1365, claimed a rent of 30s. p.a. By the early 1460s the rent had long lapsed into abeyance, but this state of affairs was challenged after Thomas Sywarde became rector of St. Ewen’s in 1459. An energetic figure who built a new parsonage for himself in 1461-2, Sywarde was evidently determined to assert the rights of his living and in due course the non-payment of rent became a bone of contention. There was no immediate confrontation between Sywarde and Sharp, who in 1460 helped to settle a disagreement that had broken out between the parish and the guild of which his father and namesake had been a co-founder, and it was not until 1463 that matters came to a head. In the late spring or early summer of that year, Sywarde and the churchwardens, having retained the lawyer Roger Kemys* for their counsel, sued Sharp in the Chancery. The court responded by issuing Sharp with a subpoena and, by means of a writ of dedimus potestatem dated 20 June 1463, commissioned the recorder of Bristol, Thomas Young, Roger Kemys, and two local merchants, William Canynges* and John Shipwarde*, to judge the case. The commissioners first met to hear evidence at the beginning of October the same year and Sharp was supported in his appearances before them by his brother-in-law Philip Meede. In the event, it took them another three months to reach a conclusion, for matters were delayed by Young’s need to return to London, where he was created a serjeant-at-law on the following 7 Nov. and a King’s serjeant a day later. Young returned to Bristol, resplendent in his serjeant’s robes, on 2 Jan. 1464. On the following day he again met with Shipwarde, by now mayor of Bristol, and Canynges and then pronounced judgement. Kemys appears not to have participated in these final deliberations, although he was named with his three fellow commissioners in the judgement. He had nevertheless remained active on behalf of the parish throughout the dispute, and the churchwardens’ accounts record frequent payments and gifts to him in cash or kind, including two bottles of malmsey to him and his wife.35 Church Bk. St. Ewen’s, pp. xxii, xxix-xxxi, xxxiv, 6, 30, 31, 45, 52-58, 65-66, 70; C1/28/344.

Although the judgement upheld the right of the parish to the rent and provided for the proving of its title at law, Sywarde and his parishioners did not achieve an outright victory since the commissioners’ decision was somewhat akin to an arbitration award. First, Young and his associates ordered Sharp within ten days to pay the rector 30s., of which Sywarde was immediately to repay 28s. 4d. Secondly, the parish was to forswear altogether the 41 years’ arrears of rent that it had claimed from Sharp. Thirdly, during his lifetime he was to pay it no more than 1s. 4d. p.a. in rent, which was revert to 30s. only after his death. Finally, in recognition of the ‘dyuers gret benefites doon afore this tyme’ by Sharp and his ancestors to the church, and for ‘the grete kyndenesse and other good meritory dedes whiche he purposith to doo to the seide Chirche hereafter’, the Sharp family was to gain important spiritual benefits. From then on and in perpetuity, the rectors of St. Ewen’s were to pray at every Sunday mass for the good estate of Sharp and his wife during their lifetimes, for their souls following their deaths and for the souls of Sharp’s parents and his late son and namesake. Furthermore, the parish was to hold an annual obit for the couple after they had died. On Saturday 7 Jan. 1464 the parties met in Sharp’s house to assent formally to the judgement. Elizabeth Sharp borrowed Philip Meede’s signet to seal the indentures, and during the formal handshaking that followed she kissed Sywarde, each of the churchwardens and the notary Robert Core, a former churchwarden. At mass the next day, she supplied the cake (leavened bread blessed by the celebrant after the service and distributed to the congregation as a symbol of brotherly love) and candles, made a speech to Sywarde and the other parishioners and promised to leave the parish a ‘towel’ (communion cloth) for use at Easter. Further legal formalities were initiated eight days later, for the judgement had also directed that the parish’s title to the rent should be upheld in law, to ensure it was not again challenged in the future. Accordingly, on 16 Jan., Sywarde began proceedings against Sharp in the Bristol guildhall, leading to a confirmation of that title on the following 5 Apr.36 Church Bk. St. Ewen’s, pp. xxxi-xxxii, 59-67, 69-76, 79, 83-86, 96, 254-5.

The same churchwardens’ accounts that provide the details of the dispute also show that Sharp lived for just another 18 months after it was resolved, since they record that he died on 6 July 1465. His heir was his grand-daughter Elizabeth Meede. In 1471 the widowed Elizabeth Sharp established anniversary services for her late husband, herself and others in another of Bristol’s parish churches, that of St. John the Baptist. To support the holding of these services, which were to take place at the beginning of every Holy Week, she set aside the income from a tenement and two tofts, amounting to 5s. p.a. In the summer of the following year, she relinquished her holdings in Bristol, Leicestershire and Northamptonshire to her grand-daughter and the latter’s husband Richard Meede, by means of conveyances to which Richard’s father was also a party. Sharp’s widow appears to have died in about 1474, for the accounts of the churchwardens of St. Ewen’s for the year March 1474-5 included 3s. 4d. received ‘of Maistres Sharp. is be quest’. By the following accounting year, Richard Meede was paying the rent, now restored to the full 30s., that had caused so much controversy between the parish and the late MP.37 Ibid. 74, 94, 96; Trans. Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc. cv. 184-6; CP40/844, cart. rots. 1-3.