STONHAM, Robert

More may be added to the earlier biography. The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 481-3.

On 1 Dec. 1426 Stonham and Robert Gonyld, vicar of St. Neots, Huntingdonshire, entered into a bond in statute staple at Westminster with John Pycot of Hitcham, Suffolk, as a security that they would pay Pycot £200 two months later. Whatever the circumstances giving rise to the bond, they failed to honour their undertaking and the sum remained unpaid at the MP’s death. The authorities finally took action in October 1458, when the sheriff, Giles St. Loe, seized lands that the by then deceased Stonham had held in Suffolk. These comprised a small estate in Little Stonham, Mendlesham and Micklefield valued at £6 13s. 4d. p.a., and holdings at Burgate, worth a further 16s. 8d., that had once belonged to his late mother. In the following March St. Loe’s successor as sheriff, William Calthorpe*, put Pycot in possession of these properties. C131/70/25; 236/33.

Nearly a year after entering this statute staple, Stonham was party to a transaction involving the lands of his wife’s inheritance. By means of a fine made at Westminster in November 1427, he and Mary conveyed these estates to the clerks, Robert Smyth and Robert Goneld, and others, among them Walter Taylard* and the same John Pycot. Presumably the grantees were the couple’s feoffees. CP25(1)/292/66/72. This transaction included the Lincs. holdings referred to in the previous biography, so confirming its suggestion that they had come to the MP through marriage. The previous biography failed to mention other former Bernak lands that Mary’s family had held in the Newark area of Nottinghamshire. As a consequence, she inherited a claim – or a possible claim – to the manor of Besthorpe, ensuring that Richard Bingham, a rising lawyer from that county, needed to gain their agreement to his acquisition of that property in the early 1430s. CP25(1)/186/39/16. On a more acrimonious note, the couple became embroiled in a quarrel with the Wakefelds of Newark over former Bernak lands in that town, a dispute spanning from at least the late 1430s to the mid 1440s or beyond. By 1438 they had begun an action against Richard Wakefeld in the court of common pleas at Westminster, a suit suspended in the autumn of that year when their opponent, having acquired royal letters of protection, embarked across the Channel in the service of Sir Thomas Rempston†, lieutenant of Calais. CP40/711, rot. 305. By 1444 the Stonhams, claiming in the right of Mary as the daughter of Sir John Bernak, had resumed action in that court against Wakefeld (or perhaps his son and heir of the same name) for the same lands, over which they also pursued a Chancery suit. CP40/733, rot. 110; C1/165/15.

In the meantime, Stonham was for at least a year surveyor of the royal forests of Weybridge and Sapley, an office not mentioned in the previous biography. Presumably he owed the appointment to the keeper of Weybridge and Sapley, John, Lord Tiptoft†, then the leading magnate in Huntingdonshire, so suggesting a possible link with that lord. In this respect, it is worth noting the connexion between Tiptoft and Sir Thomas Waweton*, the knight with whom Stonham was himself associated during the disputed Huntingdonshire election of 1429. It is also worth noting that his fellow knight of the shire when he was returned for the county in 1439 was Everard Digby*, a follower of Tiptoft and the then riding forester and ranger of Weybridge and Sapley forest. The outcome of the Huntingdonshire election to the Parliament of 1439 bears all the hallmarks of an assertion of local influence by Tiptoft, a stark contrast to neighbouring Cambridgeshire where Sir James Butler’s challenge to his dominance led to a serious dispute at that county’s election to the same assembly.

While attending the first session of the Parliament of 1439, Stonham entered into a statute staple at Westminster, bearing a penalty of just over £82, with the bishop of Lincoln, William Alnwick, the chief baron of the Exchequer, John Fray†, and the clerk, Nicholas Dixon. The circumstances in which he did so are unknown although the mayor of the staple initiated proceedings against him on the strength of this security nearly six years later. C241/232/28.

A common pleas suit of the later 1450s appears to show that Stonham made a will although this is no longer extant. In this suit the plaintiffs, Robert Mildenhale of the Exchequer, Thomas Umfray* and William Bolton, sued his widow, whom they named as her late husband’s executrix, in their capacity as executors of the late tailor of London, Robert Holbeche. They sought a debt of £37 7s. 8d. arising (or so they claimed) from a bond that Stonham had entered into with their testator in the City on 27 Mar. 1442, the very day of the dissolution of the Parliament of that year. In pleadings of Trinity term 1457, Mary responded by asserting that she was not the MP’s executrix, only for them to riposte that she had received administration of his goods in London (suggesting perhaps that he had died in the city). The matter was referred to a trial but a jury had yet to sit over a year later. CP40/786, rot. 373.