WITHIEL, John

Withiel came from a family which took its name from their native parish some miles to the west of Bodmin. John himself is not known to have resided there, instead making his home in the prosperous town of Bodmin itself, where he practiced the trade of a goldsmith. SC2/157/6, rot. 20. He can thus not be identified with absolute certainty with the man who in the early years of Henry IV served as effective bailiff of the Cornish hundred of Trigg, held in fee by John Chenduyt and his heirs. In spite of his craft, John also took an interest in baser metals, like many of his neighbours participating in the trade in tin. Thus, he is recorded as a party to litigation in the court of the stannary of Blackmore on several occasions, and in 1436 may be found successfully suing a local man for six stone of tin which Withiel claimed as his own. SC2/157/6, rots. 5, 20. By virtue of his trading activity he forged links within the coinage town of Lostwithiel, by the fifteenth century more important as a centre of the tin trade than Bodmin. The men with whom he thus became connected were among the leading burgesses of Lostwithiel, such as the influential former mayor William Leylond, and it is probable that these ties were sufficient to allow Withiel to seek election to Parliament there in 1432, since there is otherwise no suggestion that he fulfilled the statutory requirement for residence in any but the widest possible sense. SC6/157/6, rot. 5. He made good use of his presence at Westminster by personally pursuing litigation in the royal courts against a Fowey gentleman for a trespass, the nature of which is now obscure. KB27/686, rot. 24d; 687, rot. 47.

By virtue of a marriage contracted in the mid fourteenth century the Withiels were related to the influential Flamanks of Boscarne. The two families apparently continued to be on cordial terms into the 1430s, and in 1437 Withiel found sureties for the attendance in Parliament of his kinsman James Flamank*, who had been elected a Member for Bodmin. J. Maclean, Trigg Minor, i. 243, 283; C219/15/1. A few years later, in 1450, Flamank was among the witnesses to a deed by which Withiel granted all his property in Bodmin to the merchant tinner Robert Borlase, at a nominal rent of a red rose at Midsummer for the first 26 years, and thereafter at an annual rent of £10. CCR, 1447-54, p. 192. Nevertheless, by the 1460s relations between the Withiels and Flamanks had broken down, and in 1468 James’s son Richard Flamank accused John Withiel, now described as a gentleman, and two of his kinsmen, John junior and William Withiel, of a trespass. KB27/830, rot. 14; 831, rot. 68d.