STRANGE, John

With a career particularly marked by disputes and controversy, Strange was a grandson of Sir John Strange† and a member of the Strange family of Hunstanton, Norfolk, and Thorpe Morieux, Suffolk, a cadet branch of the Stranges of Shropshire. He is not known to have succeeded to any lands following the death of his father but his elder brother, Roger, was initially no better off, since their mother, Alice, enjoyed a life interest in all her late husband’s properties. CIPM, xxiv. 678-9; C140/25/34. It is not known when Alice died but she was not the woman whose death occurred in 1460, since that Alice was the wid. of Hamon Strange (probably the Hamon who was the MP’s other brother): C139/177/41; CFR, xix. 246, 249, 265; Rye, 480. As a younger son lacking estates of his own Strange looked to advance himself in the service of a great magnate, in his case John Mowbray, 3rd duke of Norfolk. He had formed a link with the duke by the early 1440s, since in January 1442 Mowbray granted him a fishery at South Walsham, Norfolk, which he appears to have held for several decades, if not the rest of his life. L.E. Moye, ‘Estates and Finances of the Mowbray Fam.’ (Duke Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1985), 433.

It was as ‘of Framlingham’, where Mowbray’s chief residence lay, that Strange and a servant of his own, John Dobyn, were defendants in a lawsuit heard at Westminster in the middle of the same decade. In pleadings of Michaelmas term 1446, the plaintiff, George Nunne, claimed that the two men had forcibly taken his livestock (ten horses and over 20 cattle) from Felsham and driven them to Soham (where the duke had a castle) a year earlier. He also alleged that they had forced him to pay £10 in order to recover them. In reply, Strange and Dobyn asserted that in fact Nunne himself had asked them to round up the beasts, but the pleadings do not explain why he should have done so and it is not known how the suit ended. It was again as one of Norfolk’s men that Strange featured in a series of trespass suits that Alice de la Pole, the recently widowed duchess of Suffolk, brought against him, John Howard* and others in the early 1450s. Later in the same decade, he and other Mowbray followers occupied the de la Pole manor of Stockton just over the county boundary in Norfolk. KB27/738, rot. 7d; 742, rot. 70; 766, rot. 71, 71d; C1/26/164.

While initially resident at Framlingham, Strange had come to live at Brampton in Suffolk by 1450, a move probably prompted by his marriage to Joan, the widow of John Duke of Hales Hall, one of the manors situated in that parish. C1/16/453; W.A. Copinger, Suff. Manors, ii. 27-28. Having settled there he soon became embroiled in a series of disputes connected with Brampton, culminating in a quarrel with the dowager duchess of Suffolk in the late 1460s. As a younger son striving to make his own way in the world, he was perhaps readier than established landowners to take risks to achieve his ambitions and, if need be, to flout the law. In the early years of Edward IV’s reign his misbehaviour in Suffolk prompted the Crown in February 1463 to commission several leading East Anglian gentry to investigate all trespasses, oppressions, misprisions, extortions, maintenances, embraceries and deceptions that he had committed in that county. CPR, 1461-7, p. 232. Strange was certainly prepared to resort to lawless behaviour in pursuit of his interests at Brampton, so incurring indictment at sessions of oyer and terminer held at Ipswich in early 1453. The presenting jury found that in the small hours of 24 Aug. 1451 he and a band of armed followers had broken into the house at Brampton of a priest, Robert Alverich. Having entered the property, they had threatened to cut off Alverich’s head unless he told them where he kept his goods and jewels and had stolen £20 from him. Following this indictment, Strange appeared in the court of King’s bench in October 1453. Initially committed to the Marshalsea prison, he was allowed bail by ‘special grace’ of the court and found not guilty at a trial held at Bungay in January 1454. KB27/770, rex rot. 5d.

Whatever the truth of the matter, the indictment may represent a falling out between former associates, since Strange and the priest feature as accomplices in a Chancery suit that William Bedston*, a follower of the de la Poles, brought against them at some stage in the first half of the 1450s. Bedston claimed that he had bought certain lands in Brampton from the executors of a fellow de la Pole retainer, John Belley, only for Strange, using ‘greet force and violence’, to enter them during the time of Cade’s rebellion. He complained that Strange continued to occupy the lands with the connivance of Alverich, a feoffee to the use of Belley’s will. In his answer to the bill Strange sought cost and damages for wrongful vexation, since he denied Bedston’s charges. C1/16/453. While part of a developing quarrel between Strange and Bedston over property at Brampton, this case, with its reference to the uprising of 1450, might also have formed part of a wider attack on Mowbray’s followers by their opponents. During the oyer and terminer sessions at which Strange was indicted in 1453, for example, there was an attempt to implicate some of the duke of Norfolk’s most prominent retainers in Cade’s rebellion. H.R. Castor, King, Crown and Duchy of Lancaster, 177-8.

Later that decade, Strange was again taken to court by two other, considerably more powerful followers of the late duke of Suffolk, Sir Thomas Tuddenham* and John Hampden II*. They alleged that he had broken into their close and house at Brampton in February 1455, cut down wood growing there and depastured the land. When the case came to pleading in the Michaelmas term of the following year, Strange denied any trespass, saying that the daughters and heirs of Peter del Clyff, whose family had once held the manor of Brampton Hall, had demised the property to him. In response the plaintiffs said that the two heiresses, Margaret, wife of William Wode, and Isabel, wife of John Gramond, had no right to make the demise, since one of their uncles had alienated Brampton Hall away from the del Clyff family over 30 years earlier. They added that John Belley had later acquired the manor, which, along with the property in question, he had demised to them. The outcome of this suit is unknown although Strange felt it worth his while to secure a royal pardon in May 1458. KB27/782, rot. 88; C67/42, m. 21. The later 1450s also saw him pursue a suit of his own over Brampton. In pleadings heard at Westminster in Michaelmas term 1458, he claimed that James Radcliffe of Attleborough and three associates had so threatened one of his servants, Walter Bolytout, there that Bolytout was too scared to collect rents and supervise husbandry on his behalf. KB27/790, rot. 99d.

In the midst of all these disputes Strange entered Parliament for the first time, possibly in order to acquire temporary relief from his opponents’ suits. It was by no means unusual for outsiders to represent Dunwich in the Commons during the second half of the fifteenth century, although he was not an obvious choice. Not only of dubious repute, he was singularly lacking in administrative experience: he appears never to have participated in local government and the position of MP is his only known public office. While Brampton was situated just a few miles north-west of Dunwich, there is no evidence to show that he had had any previous contact with the town. His links with the duke of Norfolk may have played a part in his election, since the wider political circumstances permitted Mowbray to exercise greater influence than hitherto in the East Anglian elections to the Parliament of 1455. Yet Dunwich’s growing insolvency provides the most likely explanation for the readiness of its burgesses to return him in 1455, and to three further Parliaments. As its records show, he was prepared to forgo the parliamentary wages which it could ill afford. Shortly before he took up his seat in his third Parliament, he and the bailiffs of Dunwich agreed that he should take ‘a cade of full heryns [herrings], and halff abarell full heryns’ in lieu of wages. Add. Ch. 40681.

In Easter term 1465, just after the dissolution of the same Parliament, Strange was obliged to answer a suit that William Bedston had brought against him in King’s bench. Bedston claimed that Strange and Margaret Wode, one of the del Clyff heiresses, had forcibly entered his property at Brampton, consisting of a messuage and several hundred acres of lands in the same and surrounding parishes, in April 1455. In response Strange declared that the property, along with the manor of Brampton Hall of which it was part, had descended to Margaret, from whom it had passed to various feoffees acting on her behalf. She now enjoyed sole possession, because her sister and co-heiress, Isabel, had died without heirs, and he had entered the property on her behalf. Bedston disputed this version of events, claiming that Brampton Hall had come into the possession of Thomas Payn, the remainderman of a settlement made by Margaret’s uncle, Augustine del Clyff. Payn, he said, had enfeoffed it on William de la Pole, then earl of Suffolk, John Belley and John Waryn. Possession had subsequently passed through the hands of various feoffees to Sir Thomas Tuddenham and John Hampden II (who, as already observed, had sued Strange for committing a forcible entry earlier in the same year, 1455), who had demised the property to him, Bedston. In support of his claims, Bedston cited a conveyance of January 1443, whereby Margaret and her husband, the late William Wode, had surrendered all claim to Brampton Hall to de la Pole and Waryn, two of those to whom Thomas Payn had conveyed it. Strange countered that Payn had enfeoffed de la Pole and his associates under duress and that he had later re-entered the manor and seised it upon the Wodes. Not content merely to defend himself, the MP responded to this suit by reviving an old action against Bedston and two of his servants for a forcible entry made at Brampton on 8 Apr. 1455, 13 days before the entry for which Bedston was suing him. Caught in the middle of this dispute was the wretched Payn. A few years later, Strange sued him (or perhaps his son) in the common pleas for £40, a sum the latter had undertaken to pay him in a bond made between the parties at London in late 1458. In response, Payn (referred to in the plea roll as ‘Thomas Payn junior, lately of Brampton, husbandman’) pleaded that he had not entered into the security freely, since Strange and several unnamed associates had coerced him into giving it to them while he was their prisoner. KB27/816, rot. 89; CP40/797, rot. 123.

Neither Bedston’s suit nor Strange’s counter-suit reached a conclusion. In 1466, however, a year before Strange became an MP for the last time, Alice, the dowager duchess of Suffolk, intervened in their interminable quarrel. She persuaded Strange and Margaret Wode, on the one hand, and Bedston on the other, to submit their differences to her arbitration. Despite his past differences with the duchess and his ties with the Mowbrays, Strange agreed (perhaps reluctantly, given Bedston’s connexion with the de la Poles), to accept her as an arbiter, and the parties entered into bonds of arbitration on 16 Jan. The duchess referred matters to her legal counsellors, John Fyncham, Henry Spilman and John Sulyard*, assisted by Sir William Yelverton*, j.KB, and John Heydon*, who reported back to her a few days later. In their report they outlined the descent (in so far as they were able to make it out), of the manor through the del Clyff family but, despite their legal eminence, they were unable to reach a firm conclusion, hampered as they were by the ‘craft and ymagynacons’ of both parties. Their indecision is reflected in the award the duchess made on 21 Jan. 1466. First, both parties were, under the direction of Fyncham, Spelman and Sulyard, to have title tried between them at common law at her cost. Secondly, Strange was to pay Bedston the substantial sum of £50 for wrongfully entering certain lands in Brampton to which he definitely had no title. KB27/826, rot. 105.

Notwithstanding Alice’s intervention, the quarrel rumbled on. Bedston, supported by a fellow de la Pole retainer, Edward Grimston, continued with a suit they had brought in King’s bench against Strange and Margaret Wode for entering Brampton Hall in the autumn of 1455, KB27/821, rot. 75. and at the beginning of 1467 Strange declared that he was ‘sore troblyd with Bedston, as wele be the wey of tachements owte of the Chauncer [sic] as oderwyse’. Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 392-3. During 1467 Bedston pursued another suit in King’s bench, alleging that the MP and his servants had attacked him and badly wounded him at Norwich in June 1465. In bringing this suit, he enjoyed the support of the chancellor, Archbishop Neville, whose service he had joined, and by the Trinity term of 1467 Strange found himself a prisoner in the Marshalsea. Although probably brief, Strange’s confinement is puzzling, given that he had secured a seat in the Parliament of 1467 (as indeed had Bedston), of which the first session coincided with the same Trinity term, and ought thereby to have enjoyed freedom from arrest or imprisonment. During his probably brief spell in the Marshalsea, the duchess of Suffolk took the opportunity to file a bill against him in King’s bench. She asserted that Strange owed her £400 for breaching the conditions of the bond he had entered into as a preliminary to the arbitration between him and Bedston in January 1466; namely, that the parties would obey her award and bring to her all relevant written evidences in their hands. By this stage the common law action arranged for by the award was well under way (although it appears not to have reached a conclusion), so she must have believed that Strange had failed to produce all the deeds in his possession, something he denied in response to her bill. The initial pleadings over, the parties were licensed to imparl until Hilary term 1468, after which the judges put off proceedings while they sought advice about the case. In the meantime Strange appears to have looked to his old patrons, the Mowbrays, for protection and assistance, since he was among those of their followers to whom the young 4th Mowbray duke of Norfolk illegally distributed liveries in June 1469. The court of King’s bench had still not reached a decision in the duchess’s suit when Edward IV was forced into exile in the autumn of 1470. In mid 1471, a few months after the King’s return, she resumed her action and Strange was ordered to reappear in court in the following Michaelmas term, but there is no further trace of the case on the plea rolls. KB27/825, rot. 122; 826, rot. 105; 839, rex rot 31d.

In the spring of 1470, one of Strange’s fellow Mowbray retainers, Richard Southwell* appears to have intervened in the interminable quarrel between him and Bedston by making a bid (probably unsuccessful) to buy up the interests both claimed in Brampton. Suff. RO (Ipswich), Iveagh (Phillipps) mss, HD 1538/146/1. It is unlikely that Strange was ever to make good his claim to Brampton Hall, although Roger, son and heir of William Payn, conveyed lands in Brampton and neighbouring parishes to him and his wife Joan at the end of 1471. The conveyance, perhaps simply an acknowledgement of possession, was not a permanent arrangement since it was limited to Joan’s lifetime only. Ibid. HD 1538/341/32. Furthermore, it appears that Strange had ceased residing at Brampton several years earlier. Still of that parish when elected to the Parliament of 1463, it was of Norwich and ‘lately of Brampton’ that he received royal pardons in 1465 and during Henry VI’s Readeption. Add. Ch. 40681; C67/44, m. 3; 45, m. 4. It was at Norwich in April 1466 that he had heard the details of the duchess of Suffolk’s arbitration award of the previous January. KB27/826, rot. 105d. He was then with Margaret Wode: the exact nature of his relationship with her is a matter for speculation; so far as is known, his first wife, Joan, who owned several manors in Norfolk, was still alive at this date.

Shortly after moving to Norwich, Strange was yet again a defendant, this time in the Chancery. The plaintiff was John Sennowe, a servant of his nephew, John Strange of Thorpe Morieux (son of his elder brother Roger Strange). In a bill of about 1466, Sennowe claimed that the MP, motivated by the ‘great malice and evil will’ he felt towards his nephew, had commenced three ‘forged’ actions against him, Sennowe, at Norwich after having had him arrested in that city. In effect, the servant was seeking an injunction against the city court, for he claimed that he faced wrongful imprisonment by reason of the great favour and support that Strange enjoyed from the mayor and other municipal officers. C1/32/374. Sennowe’s claims that the MP was on bad terms with his nephew were probably at variance with reality. In fact, the complete contrary was probably true, since on 12 Jan. 1467 Strange found time to write to Sir John Paston† to seek the hand of the knight’s sister, Margery, on his relative’s behalf: ‘my nevyewe, John Straunge, wold make her sur of xlli. joynture and CC. marke be zer of inherytaunce’. Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 392-3. Davis gives 1467-9 as the date range of the letter, which was written on ‘Monday after Twelthe Day’, but 1467 must be the exact date, since John Strange of Thorpe Morieux died on 30 Apr. that year: C140/25/34. As it happened, the negotiations with Paston were to no avail. The younger John Strange died just a few months later and Margery disgraced herself by marrying her family’s servant, Richard Calle. It would appear that the MP himself married twice although the evidence for his apparent second match is inconclusive.

There is no evidence for Strange’s later years, other than that he was sued in Chancery in his capacity as a feoffee of the late John Bacon (d.1462), either during the second half of the 1470s or in the reign of Richard III. The principal plaintiffs were Bacon’s son and heir and one of his daughters, of whom the former sought possession of the Bacon manor of Loddon in south-east Norfolk from Strange and his co-feoffees. C1/50/82; 54/192, 233; Blomefield, x. 157. If still alive in the earlier 1480s, the MP probably did not survive into the following decade. Whatever the date of his death, he is said to have been buried in the collegiate church of the Chapel-in-the-Fields, Norwich, having predeceased his putative second wife, Elizabeth. He is also supposed to have left her an annuity of ten marks charged upon the Norfolk manors of Aslacton, Wacton and Hedenham. If he really did make such a provision, it is a curious one, since these properties had belonged to his first wife. Even if Joan Park had borne him children, his resulting courtesy interest should not have allowed him to make dispositions concerning them after his own death. Blomefield, x. 317-18. Blomefield confuses the John Strange who married Elizabeth with Strange’s nephew.