BRAYTOFT, Richard

The Braytofts were one of the leading families of Coventry, and our MP and his son and namesake long played a prominent part in the city’s affairs. Their careers overlapped, but the father was certainly the MP of 1460. More difficult to determine is the date at which his career began. That career was undoubtedly a long one – long enough to have a son active in local affairs some 20 years before his own death – but whether it was long enough for him to have been active as early as the 1420s is an open question. The surviving records describe what appears to be a single continuous career from 1424, when a Richard Braytoft, resident in Bayley Lane, contributed a modest 1s. 9d. to a loan of 100 marks made by Coventry to Humphrey, duke of Gloucester. The same resident of Bayley Lane paid 5s. to the £100 advanced to the King in 1430, and it was presumably he who, in the same year, was a churchwarden of the parish church of St. Michael and acquired a messuage in the city by final concord.3 Coventry Leet Bk. ed. Harris, 88, 127; Coventry Hist. Centre, Coventry bor. archs., Weavers’ Co. mss, PA100/25/7; Warws. Feet of Fines (Dugdale Soc. xviii), 2553.

These early references may refer to the MP, although it is suggestive of a distinction that the Richard Braytoft who appears in the records from 1434 is, when a place of residence is ascribed to him, described as ‘of Earl Street’ rather than ‘of Bayley Lane’. The point is beyond resolution, but it is fairly certain that it was the future MP who was elected, in 1434, to the office of warden, the first rank of the ladder in the city’s office-holding, and sat for the first of very many occasions on the leet jury, which twice-yearly dealt with administrative matters in the city. At this date he was still a junior member of the family in terms of both age and wealth. In this year, as a resident of Earl Street, he contributed 3s. 4d. to a gift made by Coventry to the duke and duchess of Bedford, compared with 10s. each paid by John and William Braytoft, both resident in Much Park Street.4 Coventry Leet Bk. 150, 154, 157, 169. These two men were father and son and appear to represent the senior branch of the family. Our MP was probably John’s nephew.5 Weavers’ Co. mss, PA100/25/27. John (d.c.1444) was a man of some property, assessed at an annual income of £5 in the Warws. subsidy returns of 1436: E179/192/59. He first held civic office in the early 1420s and was mayor in 1425-6 and 1442-3: Recs. Holy Trinity Coventry (Dugdale Soc. xix), 162-3. His son, William (d.c.1460), mayor in 1452-3, was frequently associated with our MP: e.g. Coventry bor. archs. BA/A/16/179/14; 342/1.

Little is known of Braytoft’s career in the 1440s and 1450s beyond the series of administrative appointments recorded in Coventry’s leet book. By the mid 1440s he appears to have moved from Earl Street to Smithford Street, for he was described as living there when he contributed to the loans made to Henry VI in 1444 and 1449.6 Coventry Leet Bk. 211, 236. In 1469 he was one of the captains nominated to defend Smithford ward in the aftermath of the battle of Edgecote: ibid. 344. From 1441 he generally served on the jury of 24 that elected the city officers annually on 25 Jan.; he undertook three terms as mayor, two successively between 1444 and 1446; and from 1448 he was one of the city’s j.p.s and thus ex officio one of the key keepers of the treasury.7 ibid. 195, 202, 217-18, 232. Braytoft also took more than his fair share of turns as master of Coventry’s principal guild, that of the Holy Trinity. Appointed annually on the feast of St. Luke (18 Oct.) from among the body of former mayors, the master was second in importance only to the mayor, and it is indicative of Braytoft’s high standing that he was master for at least six years between 1445 and 1460.8 Recs. Holy Trinity Coventry, 23-24, 163-4; Coventry bor. archs. BA/B/16/24/6; 463/1. In this period, he was, in short, one of Coventry’s leading citizens. As such, he was a natural candidate to serve the city in Parliament. On 14 Oct. 1460, a week after Parliament had assembled, he was returned in company with the new recorder, Henry Boteler II*, and it may be that he had earlier sat in one or both of the Parliaments of 1455 and 1459, for which Coventry’s MPs are unknown.9 C219/16/6. It is also possible that he sat in 1453, the first Parliament that met after the city’s re-enfranchisement, for only one of the MPs’ names survives in the torn return. But the probability that Braytoft was the other is diminished by the fact that a Braytoft (with the Christian name torn away) appears among the attestors: C219/16/2.

In the 1460s Braytoft was less active in civic affairs, although he remained an elector and j.p. It is, however, from this period that comes by far the single most interesting reference to him. In Easter term 1470 he was among those appealed by Jacquetta, dowager-duchess of Bedford, for the murder of her husband, Richard Wydeville, Earl Rivers, at Gosford Green, just outside Coventry, on 12 Aug. 1469.10 KB27/836, rot. 61d. This strongly suggests that he was an adherent, by repute at least, of the principal of those appealed, namely Richard Neville, earl of Warwick. Such an affiliation would explain his willingness to sit in the Yorkist Parliament of 1460. Yet, even though his place among those allegedly complicit in the execution of Rivers implies that he was prepared to follow the earl into opposition to Edward IV, there is no other evidence to place him among the earl’s followers. In any event, he did not suffer for that allegiance. Although Warwick himself was at Coventry just before the battle of Barnet on 14 Apr. 1471, there is no evidence that Braytoft or any other prominent Coventry man was in his army at that battle. None the less, the city authorities found themselves compromised by their equivocal attitude during this great crisis of Edward IV’s reign, and this placed a financial charge on its leading citizens. Braytoft contributed as much £10 to the loan of 400 marks with which they sought to palliate the restored monarch, and no doubt made a comparable contribution to the further £200 they paid him for the restoration of their liberties.11 Coventry Leet Bk. 367, 370.

In the midst of these dramatic events Braytoft was involved in a conveyance that reveals something of his family circumstances. On 2 Jan. 1471, as one of the feoffees of Master Thomas Chesterfield (d.1452), formerly a canon of Lichfield cathedral and vicar of the city church of St. Michael, he conveyed a grove and two crofts in Keresley, a little to the north of Coventry, to the Holy Trinity guild. This grant was conditional on the annual payment of two marks to his sister Joan, widow of John Braunston, for her life, and then 10s. p.a. to the guild of Our Lady in Chesterfield. In return the Chesterfield guild was to celebrate an annual obit for the souls of Master Thomas, the Braunstons and our MP. The canon had acquired this property from Braunston in 1442 and one can infer from this that part of the price was an annuity to the seller’s widow and the endowment of prayers for the Braunstons. Significantly, Braytoft was one of the canon’s executors – in 1462 he had sued out a general pardon as such – and it is not surprising that, in carrying this arrangement through, he should have added himself to the bederoll.12 Coventry bor. archs. BA/B/16/428/18-19, 21. For Chesterfield’s notable clerical career: Biog. Reg. Univ. Oxf. ed. Emden, iii. 2088.

In the 1470s Braytoft’s place in Coventry’s affairs was increasingly taken by his son and namesake, who was elected mayor for the first time in 1474, with our MP as one of the electors. During the younger man’s term in office, Edward, prince of Wales, visited the city, and, although a child himself, did the family the honour of standing godfather to the mayor’s son.13 Coventry Leet Bk. 388; Reg. Holy Trinity Guild, 69n. The younger Richard first appears in the records in the mid 1460s: CP40/820, rot. 324. Clearly, if our MP had been tainted by his supposed involvement in the murder of the prince’s grandfather Earl Rivers, that taint had been thoroughly removed. Soon after his family were accorded this honour, Richard appears to have taken up residence in Much Park Street, perhaps in the property once occupied by John and William Braytoft. He is listed among that street’s residents in 1481 when he contributed 6s. 8d. towards the cost of sending troops to Scotland, and in 1485-6 he owed a rent of 20s. to the guild of Holy Trinity for property there.14 Coventry Leet Bk. 482; Recs. Holy Trinity Coventry, 54.

Braytoft’s commercial interests are not well documented, but they must have been extensive. In Hilary term 1464, for example, he had pleas of debt pending against nine defendants, including a mercer of Sleaford (Lincolnshire), for at least 80 marks. He too was a mercer, and by 1472, and probably for some years before, both he and his son numbered among the merchants of the Calais staple.15 CP40/811, rot. 205; A.F. Sutton, A Merchant Fam. of Coventry, London and Calais, 71; SC1/57. He is routinely described as ‘mercer’ in the records from the early 1440s onwards: e.g. Weavers’ Co. mss, PA100/25/19; CCR, 1454-61, p. 458; Coventry bor. archs. BA/B/16/417/10. On at least one occasion his involvement in the wool trade led him into dispute with a fellow stapler. Early in Henry VII’s reign John Wychecotes complained to the chancellor that Braytoft, having nominated a factor to act for him at Calais, had repudiated a debt of £99 10s. incurred by the factor on his behalf, and then, to deprive the creditor of remedy by law merchant, had ‘full craftely’ shipped goods to Calais and elsewhere in the names of others.16 C1/78/138-40.

This matter was still pending in November 1487, and was probably left unresolved at Braytoft’s death. He last appears in an active role on 25 Jan. 1488 when, as he had done on so many former occasions, he was an elector of the civic officers. By this date he must have been very old, having held his first office more than 50 years before, and he died on the following 25 July. On 16 Aug. his son placed eight cottages and three shops into the hands of feoffees, who were to provide an anniversary mass in the chapel of St. Katherine in St. Michael’s church for his father’s soul.17 Coventry Leet Bk. 533; Coventry bor. archs. BA/C/9/3/1.