STOUGHTON, John

While there is no doubt that John was the elder brother of Thomas Stoughton, who was to represent Rye, another one of the Cinque Ports, in the same Parliament of 1447, their background remains obscure. It might be assumed, on the basis of the reference in Thomas’s will to his property in Surrey, that the brothers came from the Stoughton family of Guildford in that county, but the Surrey pedigrees are confused, and no contemporary evidence has been found to show that they were related to Peter Stoughton*, who joined them in the Commons as a representative of Guildford. Nor is there anything to confirm that their presumed father, Thomas, was the Surrey coroner of that name. The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 489-90; Surr. Arch. Colls. xii. ped. at p. 274.

Jurors at an inquisition post mortem conducted at Lincoln in March 1437 reported that John Stoughton’s paternal grandmother had belonged to the family of Oudeby (whose principal estates lay in the Midlands in Rutland and Leicestershire), and that following the recent death of her kinsman, Ralph Oudeby, John was the heir to the important manor of Hacconby in Lincolnshire, which was held of the King in chief. Yet this was incorrect, at least in part, for Ralph’s next male heir was in fact his nephew John Oudeby*. In reality, less than a year earlier Ralph had obtained a royal licence to grant the manor to feoffees, in return for an annual rent of £10 (thus defeating an earlier entail settling it on members of his family). Whether Stoughton was related to the Oudebys or not, by a further licence, granted in June 1437, he took possession of Hacconby from the feoffees. CIPM, xxiv. 688-9; The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 884; CPR, 1401-5, p. 260; 1429-36, p. 594; 1436-41, p. 63. Five years later he obtained from the King confirmation of a number of charters relating to his newly-acquired property. These charters, dating back to the time of Richard I, granted to previous owners of the estate privileges of free warren and a market and fair. CPR, 1345-8, pp. 373, 529, 538; 1441-6, p. 76. Then in 1443 he was permitted to entail Hacconby on himself and his wife Alice and his heirs, and completed the first part of the process, whereby the manor and the properties he had by then accumulated in Boston and in Leicestershire (at Leicester, Oadby, ‘Sterton’ and Stoughton), two years later. CPR, 1441-6, p. 196; CCR, 1447-54, p. 363; CP25(1)/145/159/33.

The access to Henry VI’s patronage manifested in these grants had come about through Stoughton’s employment as a groom of the Chamber. As such he had been retained in April 1430 to cross to France in the royal entourage, with wages of 6d. a day, and probably remained overseas with other members of the Household until after Henry’s coronation at Paris. E404/46/302-3; E403/693, m. 16. By the autumn of 1436 he had been transferred to the catery, the purchasing department of the Household, where he officiated as its clerk, and he continued to wear the King’s livery for several years longer. CPR, 1436-41, p. 24; E101/409/9, 11, 16; 410/1, 3, 6. There are other signs that Stoughton was personally favoured by the King. While there was, perhaps, nothing exceptional about his appointment in August 1437 as collector of the tax charged on each sack of wool passing out of Calais, there can have been little or no justification for the conversion of this office of financial importance into a grant for life, which happened on the following13 Dec. DKR, xlviii. 319; CPR, 1436-41, p. 123; R.A. Griffiths, Hen. VI, 330. And this was not all. Less than two years later Stoughton received, again for life, the offices of feodary and bailiff of the honour of Richmond in Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire, together with the farm of various perquisites there which had previously been enjoyed by the duke of Bedford. CPR, 1436-41, p. 345.

In July 1443 Stoughton was made controller of customs at Boston, and it was as ‘of Lincolnshire, esquire’ that he provided sureties for the alnager appointed there in the following year. CPR, 1441-6, p. 149; CFR, xvii. 307. Promotion within the Household gave him the post of serjeant of the catery, CPR, 1441-6, p. 310. and he advanced the fortunes of other members of his family by introducing his brothers to its permanent staff. Thus Thomas became a King’s serjeant and purveyor of fish for the Household, and William soon joined them in receiving fees and robes there. That the three brothers were close is clear from the appearance of Thomas and William as John’s pledges in a suit in Chancery: C1/39/288-9. John gained another lucrative appointment at the end of 1445, when he became joint alnager in Boston. CFR, xviii. 7. Included among those standing surety for his farm of the alnage was Thomas Vestynden*, sometime common clerk of Hastings on the Sussex coast, where a few months earlier John’s brother Thomas had been appointed King’s bailiff. Although in February 1446 Thomas was removed from his office after the townsmen protested that his appointment was contrary to the liberties of the Port, he retained contacts at Hastings (where the mother of his illegitimate child, Colette Arnold, was living at the time of his death), and John himself acquired some land in the neighbourhood. Several years later, in 1460, the widow of Sir Thomas Lewknor* brought a suit against him and his wife regarding a messuage and 40 acres at Fairlight. CP40/799, rot. 123. Colette was probably a kinswoman of John’s putative wife.

Even so, Stoughton’s election for Hastings to the Parliament of 1447 cannot be ascribed to a particularly close connexion with the Portsmen. Rather it lay in his role as serjeant of the royal catery, which the fishing fleets of Hastings supplied with fish. His important position is underlined by the grant made to him in November 1446, of preference over all others for payment of tallies assigned on the collectors of customs in Boston and four other eastern ports, so that he might provision the Household with saltfish, stockfish, herring, pikes and other victuals. CCR, 1441-7, pp. 416-17. His prominent place in the Household is also evident from his several appearances at the Exchequer to receive payments on behalf of its successive treasurers, Sir Roger Fiennes* and John Stourton II*, Lord Stourton. Indeed, he did so in February 1447 while the Parliament was in progress. E403/759, m. 13, 765, mm. 8, 15, 767, mm. 1, 5, 14, 769, m. 1, 771, m. 4, 773, m. 3, 777, m. 6, 781, m. 7. In the following September, on surrendering at the Exchequer seven invalidated tallies levied for the expenses of the Household in divers ports, he was allocated £504 15s. 8d. from the customs revenues at Boston (once again taking priority over all other grants made from this source of revenue). CPR, 1446-52, p. 104. On one occasion in 1448 he received assignments at the Exchequer on behalf of Queen Margaret, who in a letter referred to him as her ‘welbeloved servant and squire’. E403/773, m. 3; Letters Margaret of Anjou (Cam. Soc. lxxxvi), 145-6. The post of serjeant of the great catery left Stoughton vulnerable to suits for debt. To protect himself from prosecution, on 8 May 1449 he obtained a pardon of all offences and liabilities arising from his office. Although by then he had resigned as serjeant, he continued to have links with the catery, for his brother William remained employed there, notably, in 1454 as ‘yeoman for the King’s mouth’. CPR, 1446-52, p. 250; PPC, vi. 229.

After 1450, although still an esquire of the Household, John spent more time overseas. On 15 Apr. 1451 he was granted letters of protection as engaged in the defence of Calais castle, and on 2 June, presumably in preparation for his departure, he placed all his goods and chattels in Lincolnshire and elsewhere in the hands of men he could trust: Master John Faukes (now clerk of the Parliaments), who was a feoffee of Hacconby, John Fenwick (a colleague in the catery) and his own brother William. Then, on 25 Oct. he obtained further protection as a member of the retinue of Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset, the captain of Calais, engaged on the safekeeping, defence and victualling of the garrisons. Yet he did not immediately devote all his energies to the task. The first letters of protection were revoked on 5 Feb. 1452, on the ground that he was tarrying at Rayleigh in Essex, and in the following June the second letters were revoked because he was in Middlesex. Nevertheless, further protection was granted him, once more in Somerset’s retinue, a month later. CCR, 1447-54, p. 268; CPR, 1446-52, pp. 512, 549-50; DKR, xlviii. 389, 392. At the same time, Stoughton’s brother William received a royal grant of all of John’s moveable goods, after petitioning the King to explain that John had conveyed all these goods to him and others before he sailed to Calais, but that various people had brought suits against him, so that he had been outlawed and the escheator of Lincolnshire had accordingly seized into the King’s hands all his possessions in the county. CPR, 1446-52, p. 572. On 13 May 1454 John obtained a formal pardon of outlawry in Essex and the husting court of London, after he had failed to appear to answer one Thomas Persons for a debt of £71 and damages of ten marks. He had given himself up at the Fleet prison, and had now satisfied both Persons and the King for his fines for trespasses and contempt. CPR, 1452-61, p. 150. The latter were in respect of his having joined with the widowed Alice Arnold of Morton, in illegally entering a manor which in law pertained to James, earl of Wiltshire, and his associates. The background to this dispute is obscure, although it may be pertinent that in her previously mentioned letter Margaret of Anjou had thanked certain officers and tenants of the duke of York’s hundred of Rochford in Essex for the friendship they had shown Stoughton and Alice Arnold his ‘cousin’ touching their possession of the manor of Clements. Letters Margaret of Anjou, 145-6. The letter has been assigned a date of ‘probably before 1450’. It may well be that this was the manor disputed with the earl of Wiltshire. No clues are to be found in Morant’s acct. of the manor: P. Morant, Essex, i. 290.

Nor were these the only difficulties that Stoughton encountered in the 1450s. While contending with his creditors he was also making fruitless attempts to recover money owing to him. On 3 Dec. 1454 he brought a bill of debt in the Exchequer court, alleging that Alan Thomson, a collector of parliamentary subsidies in Lincolnshire, owed him as much as £100. Thomson repeatedly failed to come to court to answer the charge over the following nine years, and it looks as if Stoughton failed in his suit, for when the defendant did eventually appear, in November 1463, he was merely fined 3s. 4d. for contempt. E13/145B, rots. 24d, 26d, 55d. When Stoughton took out further pardons, in November 1455 and January 1458, he was living in Calais, C67/41, m. 18, 42, m. 21. where he still held the office of collector of customs. In addition, at an unknown date he had been appointed bailiff of Guînes, a post which probably required his residence there. Perhaps he had owed the appointment at Guînes to the duke of Somerset at the beginning of the decade. His absence from the Household and perhaps also his dispute with the earl of Wiltshire (treasurer from October 1458), meant that he no longer had direct access to royal patronage, and by 1460 his loyalty to the house of Lancaster had begun to be questioned. In March that year the bailliwick of Guînes was removed from him and granted for life to Andrew Trollope, in compensation for the goods in Calais that Trollope had lost to the rebels (that is, the followers of the earl of Warwick). CPR, 1452-61, p. 553. Quite likely, Stoughton crossed to England from Calais with the Warwick and the other Yorkist earls three months later, and it was certainly while they were in control of the government that on 9 Oct. following he was awarded the office of tronage and pesage in Sandwich. CPR, 1452-61, p. 634. Furthermore, in February 1462 he was to receive letters of protection from the new King, Edward IV, as serving for one year in Warwick’s retinue at Calais. C76/145, m. 5.

All this while Stoughton had continued to be customer of Calais, by virtue of the grant for life made to him long before by Henry VI, and at an unknown date the office had been extended to his son John in survivorship. When father and son were removed from the office, they were granted on 11 Mar. 1462 an annuity of 40 marks from the issues of the wool customs to compensate for their loss of income. The annuity also compensated Stoughton for his removal from the bailliwick of Guînes. His son probably died shortly afterwards, for Stoughton alone received a fresh grant of the annuity in November 1464. C76/146, m. 15, 148, m. 5, 149, m. 10. The pardon he had purchased meanwhile, in the previous March, again indicates that he had made his home in Calais, for he was described as ‘of Calais, esquire’ and ‘alias burgess and alderman’ of the town. C67/45, m. 9. He was still living there in November 1467 when instructions were sent for payment of arrears on his annuity, but is not mentioned thereafter. Hacconby did not descend in his family. A year later a gentleman and a cutler of London conveyed the manor with the advowson of a chantry there to Sir John Scot† and Henry Auger esquire. CCR, 1461-8, p. 421; 1468-76, no. 150.