WARNER, John

Originally from London, where John’s grandfather and namesake traded as an ironmonger, Suff. RO (Bury St. Edmunds), Hengrave mss, 449/2/731. the Warners acquired their initial interests in Kent through his mother, who brought the manors of Foot’s Cray and Ruxley, the advowson of St. Paul’s Cray and other lands in that county to their family. C1/28/155. It is this suit that identifies the MP’s mother as Amy Ludlow and reveals that the manors had previously belonged to her fa., Thomas Ludlow. Evidently, E. Hasted, Kent ed. Drake, ii. 136-7, is in error in claiming that it was Eleanor, da. and h. of Hamon Vaughan (d.1394), who brought the manors to the Warners, although the fact that the arms of Vaughan impaling Warner were once depicted in Foot’s Cray church shows that there was a connexion between the two families: Archaeologia Cantiana, xxviii. 200. During Henry V’s reign, John’s father William Warner served as a customs collector at Sandwich, E13/131, m. 17d. and by December 1422 he was deputy butler in that port and those of Faversham and Dover. Reappointed a customer at Sandwich and its adjacent ports by Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester, in February 1423, William relinquished that position in August 1433 but became controller of the customs there in February 1435. CFR, xv. 20, 152, 199, 299; xvi. 74. Early in Henry VI’s reign, he acquired the custody of the royal manor at Eltham in Kent. He also owned property in the Isle of Sheppey, as well as the manor of Noke in Wennington, Essex, which his father (another John) had purchased in 1408. E159/226, brevia Mich. rot. 1; VCH Essex, vii. 187. By the mid 1430s William was a landholder of some significance – his income from real property was calculated at £50 p.a. for the purposes of the subsidy of 1436; E159/212, recorda Hil. rot. 14 (viii). and in 1430 and 1439 he was distrained for failing to accept a knighthood. The recipient of a royal pardon in 1437, he obtained another such pardon in May 1444, in relation to parliamentary subsidies for which he had been charged as custodian of the manor of Eltham. In 1445 he was in dispute with the London draper, William Northampton, who sued him for failing to pay for a purchase of woollen cloth. C67/38, m. 19; CPR, 1441-6, p. 264; CP40/738, rot. 416d. For lack of subsequent references to him, it is likely that he died shortly afterwards.

The subject of this biography already enjoyed a flourishing career in his father’s lifetime, and by the later 1430s, before attaining any public office, he was associating with prominent Kentish gentry like the Cheynes of Shurland. He appears to have enjoyed a close and lasting friendship with Sir John Cheyne II* and their respective arms came to be displayed side-by-side in Minster-in-Sheppey church, suggesting that their families formed bonds of kinship through marriage. CP40/711, rot. 422; Archaeologia Cantiana, xxviii. 200. In November 1441 Warner became sheriff of Kent, even though he had not held any previous office in the county and had yet to come into his inheritance. His connexion with the royal household probably explains why he was pricked, for by September that year he was receiving a fee as an esquire of the King’s chamber, a position he held until at least 1452. E101/409/9, f. 38; 11, f. 39v; 16, f. 34; 410/1, f. 30; 9, f. 42v. It is perhaps testimony to his inexperience in local administration that he appointed at least three under sheriffs, John Alphewe, John Roger III* and Stephen Slegge*. R. Virgoe, ‘Ancient Indictments in K.B.’, in Med. Kentish Soc. (Kent Rec. Ser. xviii), 223, 232; CP40/723, rot. 116. Possibly he owed his rapid rise to prominence to the influence of James Fiennes*, the most important Kentish landowner holding office within the Household. While there is no evidence to link the pair at this stage in their careers, Warner’s connexion with Fiennes’s kinsman Cheyne may have been a factor. On the other hand, given his father’s links with the house of Lancaster and Cardinal Beaufort, Warner may have advanced in the royal service independently of Fiennes’s patronage.

Following his shrievalty, Warner appears not to have played any further significant role in the affairs of Kent until 1449. After witnessing the return of his friend Cheyne and Fiennes’s son-in-law, William Cromer*, to the first Parliament of that year, he himself won a seat in the Commons in the autumn. C219/15/6, 7. His fellow knight of the shire was William Isle*, who had married his sister, Isabel, in the mid 1430s and was a close associate of James Fiennes, now Lord Saye and Sele, while another of Fiennes’s servants, Stephen Slegge, presided over the election as sheriff. Such circumstances might suggest that Warner owed his brief parliamentary career to his membership of the royal household and Fiennes’s patronage; yet his association with the heads of two important Kentish families, Cheyne and Isle, may also have helped him to win election. C1/72/3. Immediately after the Parliament, Warner was obliged to answer a lawsuit that a London grocer, William Laurens, had brought against him in the court of common pleas at Westminster. Laurens sought a debt of over £5 arising from a couple of bonds that the MP had entered into with him in London in June 1448; Warner riposted with the pro forma claim that he had put his name to these securities under duress, while a ‘prisoner’ of the grocer and his associates. CP40/758, rot. 111; 759, rot 347d.

It was the outbreak of Cade’s rebellion that had prompted the dissolution of Warner’s only known Parliament, and both Fiennes and Cromer were prominent victims of this serious uprising. Cade’s followers also identified Slegge and Isle as two of ‘the grete extorcyoners’ and ‘fals traytoures’ principally responsible for the oppression of the commons under Fiennes’s malign rule of the county, and a petition submitted to the King during the Parliament of 1450-1 identified the former as one of those ‘mysbehavyng aboute youre roiall persone’. R.A. Griffiths, Hen. VI, 638; John Vale’s Bk. ed. Kekewich et al. 206; PROME, xii. 184-6. Warner himself was not accused of the alleged corrupt practices, although on 21 Aug. a Rochester jury indicted John Roger III and John Alphewe for extorting 40s. from a local cordwainer while serving as his under sheriffs in May 1442. Virgoe, 223-4. The evidence suggests that Roger took an active role in many of the abuses that were the subject of bitter complaint in 1450, so he, at least, had probably taken advantage of the MP’s lack of experience as sheriff.

In the aftermath of the rebellion, Warner’s involvement in Kent affairs increased dramatically. In December 1450 he joined the commission of the peace, a position he would retain until his death, and in January 1451 he was appointed to an ad hoc commission given the sensitive task of attempting to raise a loan in the county. Between his appointment as a j.p. and July 1452, he sat for six days at sessions of the peace, with only the lawyers, Richard Bruyn*, Walter Moyle*, Thomas Burgeys and John Martin, attending more assiduously. E101/567/3. In the following autumn he took the precaution of purchasing a royal pardon, although whether in connexion with his activities as an office-holder is unknown. C67/40, m. 3. While his attendance at the quarter sessions apparently lessened during the course of the decade, Warner continued to be appointed to a variety of ad hoc commissions in the county.

In the same period, Warner was also concerned with important personal matters, for in August 1451 he received a dispensation from Rome legitimizing his marriage to Denise Fynch – probably not his first or only wife – who was related to him in the third and fourth degree. At some point after June 1447, Vincent Clement, a canon of the Kentish college of St. Mary’s, Wingham, had granted the couple a dispensation to marry; but allegations that he had already made more than his statutory 12 dispensations had called his right to do so into question, so prompting the appeal to Rome. CPL, x. 532-3; Biog. Reg. Univ. Oxf. ed. Emden, i. 432-3. In the same period, Denise (who curiously continued to use her maiden name) engaged in disputes over the estates of her late brother William Fynch, and in 1452 she and her sisters sued his widow and executrix, Agnes, and her new husband, Babylon Grantford*, over his will. Later, because William’s daughter, Isabel, had died unmarried, Denise and her sister, Parnel, sought 100 marks each from revenues of the land held by his feoffees, but they refused to comply, even after a judgement in a Chancery suit against them in 1455. The two women also pursued their nephew, John Fynch, for their legacies after he came of age; in December 1457 he was bound over to pay them £140, an undertaking he failed to meet. C1/17/155; 26/12-15; CP40/766, rot. 40d; C131/76/2; CCR, 1468-76, no. 560. There is only a little evidence for Warner’s own estates: these were valued at £60 p.a. for taxation purposes in 1450, indicating that his landholdings were more extensive than those of his father, if not very significantly larger. E179/124/218. The circumstances of an agreement that he and Denise made with John Ashburnham over the manors of Foot’s Cray and Ruxley in 1453 are unknown, although it cannot have related to a permanent alienation of those properties. CP40/770, rot. 26. He did, however, dispose of the Essex manor of Noke, which passed to William Pert of Aveley in that county in the later 1450s. CCR, 1454-61, p. 269; VCH Essex, vii. 187; Essex RO (Chelmsford), Barrett Lennard mss, D/DL/T1/430, 434, 438-9, 447, 450, 455.

It is likely that Warner died in the autumn of 1460, apparently intestate since Richard and William Bruyn took over the administration of his estate. On 7 Oct. that year, the Chancery issued a writ of clausit diem extremum ordering the escheator in Kent to hold an inquisition post mortem for him, although the records of any subsequent inquiry have not survived. CP40/808, rot. 192; 813, rot. 498d; CFR, xix. 282. By 1464 the Bruyns faced litigation in the common pleas on the part of the executors of Robert Chamberleyn of London, over a bond for 20 marks that Warner had allegedly entered into with that testator in August 1455. CP40/813, rot. 498d. In the same period, the MP’s son and heir, William, who married a daughter of John Guildford of Halden in Rolvenden, took action in Chancery against the feoffees of Foot’s Cray and Ruxley for refusing to allow him seisin of these manors. Archaeologia Cantiana, xiv. 4-5; C1/28/155. Later that decade or early in the next, Warner’s daughter, Elizabeth, and her husband, John Westbrooke, brought a bill in the same court against William Cressell, one of her late father’s feoffees, over a sum of £40 charged on the manor of Foot’s Cray that she claimed as her marriage portion. C1/41/254. As for the MP’s widow, she returned to Sussex where she continued to remain embroiled in disputes over the estates of her brother, William Fynch. She was still alive in the mid 1490s, when she and her then husband, Roger Tong, were engaged in other lawsuits, this time over the Warner holdings in Kent, with the MP’s feoffees and son and heir. CP40/897, rots. 337d, 425d.