WORTHY, John I

By the end of the fourteenth century the Worthys were well established in Totnes, where the later MP’s putative father served as reeve in the final year of Richard II’s reign. John himself was a minor merchant, involved in the town’s cloth trade. He is known to have traded in thread and acted as supplier to some of the local weavers. Ibid. i. 301. On 16 Oct. 1424 he paid the customary entry fine of 13s. 4d. and was formally admitted to the merchant guild of Totnes. His sureties included the influential Thomas Vele who was elected the town’s receiver at the same mayor’s court. Ibid. i. 350. Although not among the wealthiest men in Totnes, where he owned a house as well as other property, Worthy was fairly affluent. His contribution to parliamentary subsidies was regularly assessed at 2s. 4d. for a tenth, whereas the highest rate paid by anyone in the town came to 3s. 4d. Ibid. i. 364, 391, 403, 416; Devon RO, Totnes bor. recs., deeds, 136M/T/15, 17. Similarly, his contribution to the local levy from the freemen of the town amounted to 3d. (close to the top rate of 4d.). Worthy’s payments of only 2d. in 1424-5 and of 3½d. in 1444-5 were exceptional: Watkin, i. 354, 386, 398, 405, 414. Soon after his admission to the freedom he gained his first administrative experience, serving as a juror in 1425 and elected reeve in 1430. In this capacity he attended at the guildhall, where he sat in judgement alongside the mayor, steward and others ‘between the four benches’, determined disputes and attested deeds. Ibid. i. 351, 361, 363.

Service as reeve presumably gave Worthy sufficient standing to be chosen to represent Totnes in the Parliaments of 1437 and 1442. He may well have had personal reasons to seek election, for not long after the dissolution of his first Parliament he appeared in person in the court of King’s bench to sue two butchers, a tailor and a skinner, all from Totnes, for a trespass. KB27/706, rot. 49d. Yet, Worthy’s parliamentary service was not paralleled by simultaneous involvement in the domestic administration of Totnes. Although he occasionally attested his neighbours’ deeds, it was not until 1444 that he was again elected to a minor borough office, as one of two wardens of the Leechwell which helped supply the town with water. Watkin, i. 376, 382, 383, 392, 400, 419, 423; ii. 946. He continued in this office for a number of years and it would appear that this appointment revived his interest in the affairs of the borough. He began to be regularly empaneled on local juries and in 1448 was appointed to assess a parliamentary subsidy ‘within the gates’ of the town. Ibid. i. 392, 394, 399, 408-10, 418, 420, 421, 426. He also continued to be active in the merchant guild, occasionally standing surety for newly-admitted freemen. Ibid. i. 401, 419.

By the end of the 1440s the energies of many of the leading men of Totnes were absorbed by the ambitious plan to build a new belfry for the parish church of St. Mary. The church itself had been rebuilt in the 1430s and in July 1442 the bishop of Exeter’s suffragan had consecrated four bells. In 1444 the timber of the old belfry was ordered to be sold, but, whether for lack of money or other reasons, progress then slowed down, and it was not until 1449 that the foundations for the belfry were laid and the porch of the church taken down. Men of experience in financial matters were urgently needed to raise the necessary funds, and in 1450 Worthy was appointed to collect ‘Sunday pence’, a special levy collected on that day of the week entirely for the communal building project. Worthy’s appointment was probably a direct result of his previous experience as a tax assessor, for he was familiar with his neighbours’ financial circumstances and knew whom to approach for contributions. Ibid. i. 406, 423. Yet, as opposed to some of his fellows whose lives became deeply absorbed by the building project, Worthy’s involvement remained limited to his work as a collector. No accounts of the money collected survive and the precise date of the completion of the belfry, which survives to the present day, is uncertain. N. Pevsner, Buildings of Eng.: Devon, 868. The depletion of the surviving town records of Totnes between 1452 and 1465 makes Worthy’s later activities hard to trace, but he continued as warden of the Leechwell until at least 1452, and periodically served on local juries. One such jury he headed was summoned at Easter 1459 to determine a dispute between the local authorities and one Richard Hoigge who was said to have obstructed the town’s water supply. Worthy’s inclusion among the jurors was probably a consequence of his earlier service as warden of Leechwell, for in 1471 he was again empanelled to give evidence in a similar matter. Watkin, i. 342, 409-10, 473.

Worthy appears to have only rarely ventured far outside his home town, and what is known of his affairs suggests that they were concentrated in Totnes and its hinterland. In the mid 1460s he clashed with a local weaver, Richard Marten, whom he accused of unlawfully keeping 40lb. of woollen thread. The hearing of this dispute in the manor court of Totnes was delayed several times, but was eventually decided in Worthy’s favour in May 1466. A counter-suit by Marten, claiming for his own part that Worthy had kept 10lb. of linen thread for 1½ years failed, for Worthy was able to cite three verdicts in support of his claim that he had received it on behalf of the lord of the manor, and the outcome of a second claim by Marten that Worthy owed him 22d. for a web of blood-red colour is unknown. Ibid. i. 443, 447, 460, 463, 466. Other disputes were more whimsical: perhaps in his capacity as warden of the Leechwell, Worthy was forced to defend his seizure of a water bucket with an iron handle and an attached rope from one John Noseworthy, Ibid. i. 455, 463, 466. while in April 1466 it was evidently the extent of his property which was in question when he accused his neighbour John Ryder of infringing on his close and digging it up. Ryder defended himself on the grounds that the close had recently escheated to William, Lord Zouche*, who had granted it to a local man, Stephen Ussher*, from whom Ryder in his turn claimed to derive his right. By contrast, Worthy denied that there had been any cause for the land to escheat to the lord and maintained his right by direct inheritance. Ryder’s claim represented a serious challenge to Worthy’s tenure, for Ussher was known in the shire as one of a group of ‘great and mighty jurors and bailiffs ... of lordes and common maintainors of quarrels’. As a result of Ussher’s intervention the hearing of the dispute was deferred several times, and it took until mid August before a jury was finally summoned to settle the matter. Even so, no verdict is known to survive. Ibid. i. 458, 464-6; C1/24/229. More often than not, Worthy’s suits appear to have been successful, perhaps not least on account of his own regular service on local juries. At least one of his opponents, Thomas Soper, realized this to his cost, when he was forced to defer a suit against Worthy for several weeks, as on his arrival in court he found him sitting among the jurors. Watkin, i. 463. Unable to defeat Worthy by legitimate means, some of his frustrated enemies went further, and in February 1466 all the constables of the peace in the manor of Totnes were ordered to seek out and arrest a local cobbler, John Goneton, who had unsuccessfully attempted to murder him. Ibid. i. 457; KB27/823, rot. 29d.

Worthy last occurs in the records in May 1471 and died at some point in Edward IV’s second reign. He was certainly dead by March 1480, when his son John was party to a land transaction in Totnes, and it was this younger man who served as a juror at the inquisition post mortem of Anne, duchess of Buckingham, in November of that year. Watkin, ii. 1085; C140/75/40, m. 2.