STODELEY, John

Stodeley, who, appropriately enough, was to become known to posterity as the writer of a revealing ‘newsletter’ composed at a time of political and constitutional crisis for the Lancastrian monarchy, made his living as a ‘scriptor’. He was admitted to the craft of scriveners in London on 2 Apr. 1433, Ibid. 21. but it is not known whether he was a Londoner by birth, and little is recorded about him in the years before he became warden of his Company at some point in the mid 1440s. What there is on record provides only glimpses of his activities. There is nothing surprising about his appearance as a witness to a gift of goods and chattels made in the capital in June 1440, CCR, 1441-7, p. 75. but more unexpected was his nomination in the previous year as a feoffee for the London mercer John Abbot II*, for the lands and rents concerned were located in the liberty of Winchelsea in Sussex. E326/5434. Abbot, who had been warden of the Mercers’ Company for four annual terms, may well have recommended Stodeley to his fellow liverymen: henceforth he was regularly employed by the Mercers to write the fair copies of the Company’s accounts, and to keep a careful record of their affairs. A.F. Sutton, Mercery of London, 255-6.

Yet Stodeley’s activities were by no means confined to the capital. The appearance of the London scrivener in the King’s bench in Michaelmas term 1442 as the defendant in a plea of trespass said to have been committed in Sussex, deserves close scrutiny, for the plaintiff in this suit was William Fitzalan, earl of Arundel. No specific details of the charge against Stodeley are given in the plea roll – all that is known is that he presented himself at the Marshalsea on 29 Nov. along with a pewterer and three London lawyers, including William Moyle II*, who provided bail on his behalf. KB27/726, rot. 98d. It may be conjectured that Stodeley had been in Sussex in his capacity as a servant of John Mowbray, 3rd duke of Norfolk, the owner of substantial estates in the county as one of the coheirs of his great-uncle Thomas Fitzalan, the earl of Arundel who had died childless in 1415. Perhaps arguments over the inheritance between the duke and Earl William, Thomas Fitzalan’s heir-male, had led to confrontations between their followers. By the autumn of 1447 Stodeley was acting as an auditor of accounts drawn up for the administration of the duke’s manors of Cuckfield and Reigate in Surrey. W. Hooper, Reigate, 115; Arundel Castle mss, A509. That he held a position of trust in the duke’s service is clear enough, for three years later he was elected to represent the Mowbray borough of Reigate in Parliament.

The precise terms for Stodeley’s subsequent employment by Mowbray are unknown, but his usefulness to his lord as an accurate reporter of current events can be discerned from the remarkable ‘newsletter’ he wrote to the duke on 19 Jan. 1454. Although he had not been returned to the Parliament of 1453-4, then in recess, he was fully aware of the political manoeuvrings taking place in this time of chaos and uncertainty. The letter contained information ‘espied and gadred’ by Stodeley, John Leventhorpe II*, Laurence Leventhorpe* (also Mowbray men) and other informants concerning the events in London following the collapse of Henry VI’s health in the previous summer. The contents would have been of great interest to Mowbray, who was now clearly in sympathy with the duke of York’s cause, and at the great council held in November 1453, had appealed York’s opponent Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset, of treason – a charge which had led to Somerset’s imprisonment in the Tower. Indeed, Stodeley was careful to relate Somerset’s military preparations and the doings of his spies, and passed on the concerns of ‘my lordes servauntz and wel willers’ that Norfolk should ‘at his comyng hider ... come with a gode and clenly feliship’ and ‘loke wele to hym selfe and kepe hym amonge his meyne and departe nat from theym’, for his own safety. Stodeley confirmed rumours of the King’s incapacity, stating that when the new-born Prince Edward of Wales had been presented to him at Windsor castle by the duke of Buckingham ‘the Kyng yave no maner answere’. In addition, as well as noting the activities of prominent Lancastrian servants such as Thomas Tresham*, Thomas Daniell* and John Trevelyan*, he made particular mention of the reports that the duke of Exeter and Thomas, Lord Egremont, ‘ben sworne togider’. Perhaps most significant, especially in view of the birth of an heir to the throne, was the growing assertiveness of Queen Margaret who, according to Stodeley, had ‘made a bille of five articles’ in which she sought the transfer of key royal powers to herself, presumably in order to pre-empt the appointment of a Protector. Stodeley’s sources of information were not infallible, however, for he was only able to supply four of Margaret’s articles: ‘as for the vth article I kan nat yit knowe what it is’. Stodeley had news of the Speaker of the Parliament, warning his lord that ‘Thorpe of th’escheker [Thomas Thorpe*] articuleth fast ayenst the Duke of York’. Paston Letters ed. Gairdner (Lib. edn.), i. 263-8; R.A. Griffiths, Hen. VI, 715-22. Intriguingly, he had been Thorpe’s co-feoffee of land at Winchelsea back in 1439: E326/5434.

Of less interest to the duke of Norfolk, but of considerable import to Stodeley’s friends in the Mercers’ Company was his narrative, in the same letter, about a visit the mayors of London and the Calais staple, accompanied by numerous merchants, had made to the chancellor, Cardinal Kemp, at his palace at Lambeth the previous Monday (14 Jan.). The merchants complained about the actions of Lord Bonville* the previous summer, when his ships had attacked vessels from the Low Countries, causing the duke of Burgundy to retaliate by seizing staplers’ goods in December 1453. The chancellor was too frightened to respond to their vociferous demands for ‘Justice, justice, justice’. Paston Letters, i. 267-8. The Mercers purchased from Stodeley a copy of the Act of the Parliament relating to the subsidy: Sutton, 255-6. Stodeley’s later activities in the duke of Norfolk’s service are not well documented, but he clearly remained on good terms with several other Mowbray retainers. Three months after writing his newsletter he was associated with John Paston* and Gilbert Debenham I* as a co-feoffee of the manor and advowson of Hintlesham in Suffolk, which belonged to John Timperley I*, the duke’s constable of Reigate; and, more important, in May 1457 he joined Timperley as a feoffee of the manor of Kenninghall in Norfolk which was settled on the Duchess Eleanor for her lifetime. CPR, 1452-61, p.150; L.E. Moye, ‘Estates and Finances of the Mowbray Fam.’ (Duke Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1985), 162, 400; E210/9417. A year later he was party with another of the duke’s affinity, Richard Southwell*, to a conveyance of lands in Cheshunt and Waltham Holy Cross (Hertfordshire), which apparently comprised the dower of Southwell’s mother Isabel, the widow of John Ledes*, yet another leading member of this close-knit group. CCR, 1454-61, pp. 286-7.

Stodeley was still attached to the duke of Norfolk in the autumn of 1460, when he was returned to the Commons as an MP for Gatton, the Surrey borough which the duke had made over to John Timperley. The Parliament met after the battle of Northampton, in which the duke’s allies had proved victorious. Duke John died at the close of 1461, leaving his son and heir a minor, and it is an indication of Stodeley’s place in the administration of the ducal estates that in the following year he was placed on a royal commission to provide a list of these holdings in Surrey and Sussex. Another of the commissioners was the Sussex lawyer Thomas Hoo II*, one of the late duke’s most prominent councillors. Hoo had also acted as principal agent in the south of England for Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, so it was probably through him that Stodeley now became involved in transactions concerning the earl’s finances, which were in a parlous state. Back in 1450, in his role as an executor of Thomas Balle, a London ironmonger, Stodeley had brought a suit against the earl in the court of common pleas for a debt of £23, CP40/757, rot. 48. but after the earl’s death at the battle of Towton in 1461 he was among those whom Hoo brought in to help the widowed Countess Eleanor to pay off her late husband’s many other creditors and wind up his affairs. Thus, in the spring of 1463 all the widespread estates that the countess had inherited from her grandfather, Robert, Lord Poynings, were placed in the hands of feoffees, including Stodeley, for a period of 17 years, so that they might hand the huge sum of £4,455 over to Hoo to settle the late earl’s debts once and for all. Collectanea Topographica et Geneaologica ed. Nichols, iii. 266-70; Suff. RO (Bury St. Edmunds), Hengrave mss, 449/2/651, 655, 657; CIPM Hen. VII, i. 468, 548, 552.

Stodeley continued to be of service to his fellow citizens of London, and in particular to the mercers. In April 1463 the wealthy Richard Rich left him five marks for writing out his long and detailed will, and a year later a London bowyer named him among the recipients of his moveable goods. PCC 4 Godyn (PROB11/5, ff. 32v-35v); CCR, 1461-8, p. 240. Even so, his links with other Mowbray retainers remained strong: as ‘scrivener of London’ he was one of those to whom John Southwell* (an esquire of the late duke with whom he had sat in the Commons of 1450), granted his chattels in December 1464. CCR, 1461-8, p. 251. Stodeley was included on a body of prominent feoffees, headed by Archbishop Bourgchier, who were authorized to perform the will of John, 4th duke of Norfolk, but died before September 1467 when a number of Mowbray manors were settled in jointure on the duke and his duchess Elizabeth Talbot. Moye, 448-9; Berkeley Castle mss, BCM/D/1/1/20 (ch. 4343). As he had died intestate, on the previous 9 Feb. the archbishop had commissioned John Stokes of London to administer his goods. Reg. Bourgchier (Canterbury and York Soc. liv), 213.