REVER, John

Active in the overseas trade, Rever was a mercer who dealt in commodities besides cloth, including alum, bow staffs, fish, iron, madder and soap. N.R. Amor, Late Med. Ipswich, 134, 260, 278. Of unknown antecedents, he became a freeman of Ipswich on 8 Sept. 1447. Add. 30158, f. 10. It is possible that the namesake who was master of a ship called ‘Le Cristofre of Ipswich’ in 1403 was one of his forebears: CCR, 1402-5, p. 209. There is no evidence to link him with the John Reve of Boxford who attested the Suff. county elections of 1435 and Nov. 1449, or with a namesake from Harkstead who, like him, was a mercer: C219/14/5, 7; CPR, 1452-61, p. 197. The holder of a tenement in the town’s parish of St. Mary at the Elms, he also acquired leases from the borough of a plot of land and a garden in the later 1460s and early 1470s. HMC 9th Rep. pt. 1, 230; Add. 30158, ff. 27v, 29v.

Five years after becoming a burgess, Rever served as collector of a tax imposed by the borough on its inhabitants to raise money for its legal disputes with the town of Bury St. Edmunds and the prior of Ely. Add. 30158, ff. 16, 17. He attained his first major local office upon becoming one of the chamberlains of Ipswich in September 1453. Upon his election to his only known Parliament, called for Coventry later in the same decade, the borough decided that he and his fellow MP, William Worsop*, should each receive daily wages of 18d. while it sat there or if it adjourned to York, but only 12d. if it should happen to meet at London or Canterbury. Both rates were, however, less than the 2s. per diem which boroughs were expected to pay their representatives. Ibid. f. 23.

During the later 1460s a chaplain named Thomas Wode sued Rever in the Chancery. His suit concerned an action of debt that John Wolsey had sued before the bailiffs of Ipswich against the chaplain and the MP in their capacity as executors of John Palmer. Wode claimed that Wolsey had brought the action with Rever’s connivance, the intention being somehow to have him, Wode, charged with the supposed debt. C1/32/169; 33/151. Rever was also involved in suits at common law. In February 1466, for example, he was pardoned his outlawry for failing to appear at Westminster to answer a London mercer, Geoffrey Feldyng*, over a debt of £8 3s. 1d. Later, in November 1476, Andrew Hewke, a husbandman from west Norfolk, was similarly pardoned in connexion with a suit for a debt (of £15 12s. 6d.) that Rever had begun against him. CPR, 1461-7, p. 418; 1467-77, p. 579.

On several occasions during the early 1470s Rever helped audit the accounts of Ipswich’s chamberlains, Add. 30158, ff. 29-31. and he was one of four portmen chosen in May 1474 to assess tolls on merchandise passing through the town. In the following year he began his first term as one of the bailiffs of the borough, a position in which he again served later in the decade. While he ceased to hold public office after 1480, he may have outlived his son-in-law, William Wimbill†, who left him £5 in his will, drawn up in May 1485 and proved in November 1487. HP Biogs. ed. Wedgwood and Holt, 954. If so, he did not long survive Wimbill, since he was certainly no longer alive in June 1488. Iveagh (Phillips) mss, HD 1538/253/124. Wimbill was the first husband of Anne, Rever’s daughter and heir. Like his father-in-law, he sat for Ipswich in Parliament, as did her second and third husbands, Thomas Alvard† and Thomas Rush†. The Commons 1509-1558, i. 315; iii. 228.