ST. JOHN, William

The history of the Sussex branch of the distinguished family of St. John is a complicated and poorly-documented one. Confusion has resulted, and both Vis. Suss. (Harl. Soc. liii), 45 and VCH Hants, iv. 268 miss out several generations of the fam. by stating that Eve St. John (née Dawtry), who died in 1354, was the mother of Elizabeth Dyke, whereas Elizabeth Dyke was the child of our MP and died in 1506. There is also the danger of confusing our MP with others of the same name, such as William St. John of East Luccombe, Som., whose father was also called Edward. That William, who inherited lands worth at least £33 p.a. in Devon and Som. when his father died in 1457, obtained a royal pardon in 1458: C67/42, m. 33; CIPM, xix. 201-2; Reg. Bourgchier, 184; PCC 12 Stokton (PROB11/4, f. 92). He died in 1473, leaving as his heir his sis. Joan, who had married Nicholas Arundell* of Trerice, Cornw.: CFR, xxi. no. 160; CCR, 1461-8, p. 173; CPR, 1485-94, p. 375. Our MP was a descendant of Edward St. John† (d.c.1348), who represented Sussex in possibly as many as ten Parliaments between 1327 and 1340, and through his marriage to the heiress Eve de Alta Ripa (Dawtry) acquired the manors of Barlavington, Lurgashall and Verdelay as well as substantial landed holdings in Petworth, the Mardens and elsewhere. All these estates were eventually to descend to William, although the way they did so was far from straightforward. Eve Dawtry had been married twice before she wedded Edward St. John and already had children, so by no means all of her very substantial inheritance fell to her sons by this third husband. Even so, at her death in 1354 Barlavington with its members of Bewgenet and Lurgashall passed in accordance with an entail to her son John St. John (b.c.1332), Suss. Feet of Fines (Suss. Rec. Soc. xxiii), 1493; VCH Suss. iv. 108; Peds. Plea Rolls ed. Wrottesley, 40; CIPM, x. 189. and further settlements ensured that Eve’s St. John descendants also received other of her estates in west Sussex, including the advowson of Hardham priory near Pulborough, which her ancestors had founded. To this inheritance, the St. Johns added the manor of Litchfield in Hampshire, which they acquired by purchase. Suss. Feet of Fines, 1846, 2082; VCH Hants, iv. 268; Suss. Arch. Collns. lviii. 1. Although it is certain that our MP’s father was called Edward, the latter’s precise relationship to Edward and Eve is less clear. He was evidently not their eldest son of this name, who, born in about 1334, inherited manors in Yorkshire in 1357, for when that Edward died in 1389 his heir (by Anastasia, the eldest daughter and coheir of William, Lord Aton), was a daughter named Margaret, the wife of Thomas Brounflete. CIPM, x. 317; xvi. 763; CP, i. 325-6; xii (2), 285-6. Brounflete was to be chief butler to Ric. II and controller and treasurer of the Household for Hen. IV. His s. Henry was summ. to Parl. in 1449 as Lord Vessy. See also VCH Yorks. (N. Riding), i. 533-4. Nor was he the latter Edward’s nephew and namesake, who married Joan (d.1386), the widow of Henry, Lord Tregoz, for that Edward died childless. VCH Suss. iv. 66; Suss. Feet of Fines, 1877, 1888, 2286; CP, xii (2), 26-28; CIPM, xvi. 150-2, 426-30. Yet there can be no doubt that William’s father was a close relation of these namesakes, or that he was the Sir Edward St. John who occupied the shrievalty of Surrey and Sussex in 1388-9 and 1394-5. This much is clear from the descent of the Hampshire manor of Willhall in Alton, which Edward and Eve de St. John had settled on their sons John and Edward in tail. In 1373 Willhall was leased out or mortgaged by Edward for 25 years, and by 1407 it was in the hands of the above mentioned Sir Thomas Brounflete and other feoffees acting on behalf of the late Sir Edward. Winchester Coll. muns. 1949-66. Furthermore, Brounflete (who, as already noted, was the son-in-law of the Edward St. John who died in 1389), had agreed to act as co-executor of Sir Edward’s will with the latter’s widow, Alice. CP40/555, rot. 12.

Following Sir Edward St. John’s death, Alice, the ‘lady of Bewgenet’, took a vow of chastity in the bishop of Chichester’s chapel at Amberley on 9 Apr. 1399. Reg. Rede (Suss. Rec. Soc. viii), 53, where Bewgenet is given as ‘Regenet’ in error: see Suss. Arch. Collns. xvii. 197. On p. 175 she is wrongly identified as a da. of Lord St. John. For the next 24 years she retained the bulk of the St. John estates as her jointure and dower, and the tax assessments of 1412 recorded her annual income from the manors of Barlavington and Bewgenet as £50. CIPM, xviii. 55; Feudal Aids, vi. 524. In her will, made on 20 May 1423, she requested burial in Hardham priory. PCC 1 Luffenham (PROB11/3, f. 4v). A writ de diem clausit extremum was issued on 30 June, but no post mortem survives: CFR, xv. 3. Her son William, who must have been a mere infant when his father died, came of age before 1421, and began to take a responsible role in local society. In March that year he was acting as a feoffee of land in Horsham by grant of Gilbert Holbrok, and on 3 Apr. he attested the shire elections held at Chichester. It is a measure of his family’s standing in the county that his name headed the list of attestors recorded on the indenture, and that it was to be similarly placed whenever he attested the parliamentary returns again – that is, on 12 Sept. 1427, 28 Dec. 1430 and 20 Dec. 1436. Add. Ch. 8867; C219/12/5; 13/5; 14/2; 15/1. William witnessed a deed at Petworth for a kinsman in January 1423. Nevertheless, there seems to have been some delay before he took full possession of his inheritance following his mother’s death, for he did not have seisin of the family manor in Alton until 1425, and when the tax assessors came to Sussex three years later local juries appear to have been uncertain as to who actually occupied the St. John estates. While William was noted as the tenant of part of a knight’s fee in North Marden and as chief lord of a whole fee in Hardham (which was held of him by the priory), the jurors reported merely that ‘the heirs of Edward de St. John’ owned the Barlavington estate. W. Suss. RO, Add. mss, 12310; Winchester Coll. muns. 1962; Feudal Aids, v. 153, 158.

Precision was probably not required, for neither the manor of Barlavington or other of the family lands were held of the Crown in chief, but rather of the earl of Northumberland’s honour of Petworth (by service of two and a half knights’ fees). Following his mother’s death St. John had been required to pay relief amounting to £12 10s. to his feudal lord the earl, and although he was permitted to pay by instalments by 1430 only £4 had been handed over. Petworth House, Suss. mss, ct. rolls 6762-3. In July that year, as ‘of Bewgenet, esquire’, he presented a new incumbent to the parish church at North Marden, Reg. Chichele, i. 266. but his title to this advowson and other family holdings had met with a challenge from Richard Ask and John Baynton*, whose claim rested on their descent from the heiress Eve Dawtry and her husband Roger Shelvestrode. Litigation in the court of common pleas on this matter was still in progress in Easter term 1433, and it may be conjectured that St. John sought election to Parliament that summer in order more effectively to defend his rights at Westminster. CP40/661, rot. 327; 679, rot. 315; 687, rot. 302.

Shortly before the start of the second session of the Parliament, in October 1433, St. John was appointed to the Sussex bench, and in the few years remaining to him he also served on ad hoc commissions, beginning with three directly related to the business of the Parliament. There can be little doubt of the esteem in which he and his relations were held among the dignitaries of Sussex. A leading local landowner, Sir John Bohun (d.1433) of Midhurst, made him a feoffee of his estates and called upon him to witness his deeds, CIPM, xxiv. 51, 53; Add. Ch. 20114. and his sister Eve St. John, who had become a recluse living in the precincts of Chichester cathedral, was so highly regarded as to be specially remembered in the wills of Master Simon Northew, one of the cathedral canons, and of the former bishop of Chichester, Thomas Polton. Indeed, Polton, by then bishop of Worcester, left to this ‘devotissime mulieri’ the sum of 20 marks and a precious relic. On the same day that Eve obtained a papal licence to have a portable altar (25 Mar. 1431), her brother William and his wife Elizabeth did likewise. Reg. Chichele, ii. 401, 493; CPL, viii. 364. To support his sister, in June 1430 William had settled on her land at Lydd and elsewhere in Romney Marsh in Kent, from which she could receive a rental income of £10 6s. 8d. a year: CP40/679, cart. rot. d.

Elizabeth, as the younger of two daughters of Sir Thomas Sackville and grand-daughter of Sir Edward Dallingridge, belonged to the higher gentry of the county. The date of their marriage (which may have been planned by St. John’s mother, herself a Dallingridge widow), is not known, although their daughter and eventual heir was born in about 1429. CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 959. No details of the marriage contract survive, yet we may be reasonably sure that Elizabeth brought little with her in the way of land, for under the terms of the will her father declared in May 1432 his estates in Sussex, Essex and Oxfordshire would only be inherited by her in the unlikely event of the deaths without issue of her two brothers and elder sister. Presumably, a substantial payment in cash was made to secure St. John’s hand. N. Saul, Scenes from Provincial Life, 8; CCR, 1429-35, pp. 234-5. Among those who held the Sackville estates in trust was another Sussex landowner, Sir Hugh Halsham, who in 1434 named St. John as a feoffee of his manors in Norfolk. C139/107/27. St. John and his wife procured a second papal indult in January 1436, this time obtaining permission to choose their own confessor. CPL, viii. 573.

From his mother St. John had inherited the manor of Shelve in Kent, which he placed in the hands of feoffees, including John Bartelot* and the brothers Edmund* and Edward Mille*, whose title was confirmed in May 1439 by St. John’s kinsman Andrew Dawtry. According to an inquiry about this manor conducted more than 60 years later, in 1500, St. John died a few months after this transaction, on 4 Nov. 1439, and following his death the Mille brothers received the revenues of the manor. CCR, 1435-41, p. 265; CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 959. Ten years earlier, St. John had enfeoffed a different group of well-wishers, including William Sydney*, of the manor of Barlavington and the advowsons of Hardham priory and North Marden, in whose keeping they remained at his death. It seems likely that these arrangements obscured an attempt to evade feudal dues owed to the earl of Northumberland, Petworth ct. rolls, 6766. for his only child, Elizabeth, was still a minor.

The heiress may have initially stayed with her mother, the MP’s widow, who not long after St. John’s death moved to Oxfordshire, where she married Reynold Barantyn of Chalgrove (the father of Drew*). The widow’s subsequent marital history was to come under the scrutiny of royal commissioners. Having been widowed again in 1441, when Barantyn died, she went to reside at the house of the late Sir John Cottesmore, c.j.c.p. at Brightwell in the same county, and within a few weeks accepted the hand of John Upham, a member of the Cottesmore household. Notwithstanding her promise to Upham, one John Tycheborne esquire persuaded her to contract marriage to him, and promptly, in April 1443, took possession of her goods and chattels. Among these, comprising jewelry and valuable furnishings worth £45 5s., were many items previously belonging to St. John, such as a silver pot worked on the lid with his heraldic arms. Tycheborne also took control of the St. John lands which Elizabeth had received by grant of the late MP’s feoffees, and enjoyed their revenues, which amounted to 150 marks before he was made to divorce her on the following 4 July. She rejoined Upham, but had still not been able to retrieve her possessions by the time royal commissioners launched an investigation in April 1445. C1/15/175; CIMisc. viii. 190; CPR, 1441-6, p. 339.

This apparently coincided with the marriage of the young heiress Elizabeth St. John, for in July 1445 her husband Roger Dyke paid his dues to their feudal lord the earl of Northumberland. Following Dyke’s death, which occurred before 1455, she took as her second husband Nicholas Hussey, the younger son and eventual heir of Sir Henry Hussey* of Harting. Elizabeth’s son Henry Dyke adopted his grandfather’s name – calling himself ‘Henry St. John of Bewgenet, esquire’ in 1470 – and in his mother’s lifetime he took possession of the family manors in Hampshire, at Litchfield and in Alton, only to grant the latter to Winchester College in 1474. Nine years later the warden of the college made Elizabeth and her third husband, Ralph Massey, a payment of £20 for arranging his formal ‘recovery’ of the premises. Petworth ct. roll, 6768; Add. 39376, ff. 68, 180; Winchester Coll. muns. 1964, 1966, 1969, 1971, 1974, 1978, 20228; CFR, xx. 279. Meanwhile, the Masseys had successfully petitioned the chancellor in 1476 for assistance in regaining possession of Elizabeth’s manor of Lurgashall from the son of one of her late father’s feoffees, although Ralph had to enter recognizances in 500 marks to the chancellor and the keeper of the rolls as a guarantee that should the property ever be alienated, to the disinheritance of Elizabeth’s children, then half this amount would be paid to the latter and half to the King. C1/51/294-5; CCR, 1476-85, nos. 131, 134. Another petition to the chancellor confirms that Elizabeth’s inheritance from our MP included the manors of Barlavington and Bewgenet and the advowsons of Hardham priory and North Marden church: C1/57/290. Besides her patrimony in Sussex, Elizabeth inherited a claim to the manor of Kemberton, far away in Shropshire, which had once been held by her distant ancestor Eve Dawtry. This she sold in 1502. CCR, 1500-9, no. 159; R.W. Eyton, Antiqs. Salop, iii. 7, 9; CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 959. Already in her seventies at this date, the elderly heiress died in 1506, whereupon the substantial holdings in Sussex which she had inherited from her father our MP passed to her great-grandson John Dyke. PCC 9 Adeane (PROB11/15, ff. 73v-74); CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 31.