NEEDHAM, John

Leland noted that John Needham ‘much set up [his] name’, and attributed to his judicial career the ‘first setting up of the house’.13 J. Leland, Itin. ed. Toulmin Smith, ii. 15; v. 29. Our MP’s extensive property purchases amply justify Leland’s estimation, although that is not to say that the Needhams were of no account before the time of the judge. Originally from High Needham in Derbyshire, the family acquired a moiety of the manor of Cranage in Cheshire by marriage late in the reign of Edward III.14 Ormerod, iii (1), 127-8; Vis. Salop (Harl. Soc. xxix), 371. In the late 14th cent. they bore the arms ‘a bend engrailed between two bucks’ heads’: Add. Ch. 12079. Our MP’s father served as a collector of subsidies in that county and as coroner of the hundred of Northwich, and in 1412 he was among the notable gathering of Cheshire gentry present in Macclesfield church to witness the settlement of a dispute.15 DKR, xxxvii. 558; M.J. Bennett, Community, Class and Careerism, 22n. In 1412 he also stood as godfather to Robert Arderne* in Acton church: CHES3/37, 12 Hen. VI, no. 1. He was also wealthy enough to send one of his younger sons to an inn of court. Judging by the probable date of his first reading, John entered Gray’s Inn in the mid 1420s before the childless death of his elder brother, Robert, in 1431 left him heir-apparent to the family estates.16 Readings and Moots, i (Selden Soc. lxxi), p. xxxii; Ormerod, iii (1), 124.

The surviving records generally have little to say about the early years of the career of even the most successful lawyers, and Needham is no exception. But it was probably during these years that he made a good marriage to a young widow from one of his native county’s principal gentry families, the Mainwarings of Over Peover, not far from Cranage. Her first husband had died in 1430, only shortly after attaining his majority, and the wardship and marriage of their infant son, John Bromley, had been granted by the Crown to her father. The latter was closely associated with our MP’s own father – on several occasions in the early 1430s Robert Needham is recorded as offering mainprise on his behalf – and no doubt this connexion contributed to the match. The marriage brought our MP a worthwhile landed stake in his native county. In the inquisition taken on William’s death the Bromley estates had been valued at as much as 100 marks, and, although none was recorded as having been settled in jointure, his widow’s dower alone must have been worth over £20 p.a. Further, her comparative youth provided an additional attraction. She had borne a son as recently as 1428, and there was every reason to suppose that she would provide her new husband with an heir.17 DKR, xxxvii. 494-5; CHES3/34, 6 Hen. VI, no. 1; 35, 9 Hen. VI, no. 1; CHES2/100, m. 4.

The lands of Needham’s wife and his new status as his father’s heir go some way to explaining the significant advance of his career in the late 1430s. In July 1438 he took a lease of the manor of Shavington, not far from Cranage on the other side of Cheshire’s border with Shropshire, from Rose, widow of John Chetwynd (d.1433/4), and her second husband, John Merston, treasurer of the King’s chamber. The term was a long one of 21 years and the annual rent of 19 marks shows that the property was a substantial one. There is every reason to suppose that he intended to make it his residence, at least until he inherited the family home at Cranage, and he is duly described as ‘of Shavington, gentleman’ in a bond of 1439.18 Muns. Shavington ed. Harrod, 20; CCR, 1435-41, p. 350.

In the autumn of that year Needham was nominated as one of the King’s serjeants-at-law in the county palatine of Chester, and it may be that he had already completed his first reading. This has been tentatively assigned to the autumn of 1440, but this appointment implies that it may have been slightly earlier.19 CHES2/112, m. 3; Readings and Moots, p. xxxii. His lease of Shavington justified his addition to the Shropshire bench soon afterwards, and in May 1441 he strengthened his local influence by leasing from the Crown the manor of Waranshall, forfeited at the time of Glendower’s revolt and once farmed by a previous tenant of Shavington, William Chetwynd.20 CFR, xvii. 189. Both this royal grant and his nomination as a j.p., if not explicable by his legal standing alone, may have owed something to a nascent connexion with the leading local magnate, Humphrey, earl of Stafford and, from 1444, duke of Buckingham. Not until May 1453, when he was granted £2 p.a. from the castle of Maxstoke in Warwickshire, did our MP draw a fee from Stafford; and the only direct evidence of an earlier association dates from July 1447, when he was named as feoffee of the London property of John Virly in company with the duke and several prominent Stafford retainers, including Ralph Egerton* and William Hextall*.21 C. Rawcliffe, Staffords, 220, 240; Corp. London RO, hr 179/32. None the less, an earlier association is implied by his election to represent the borough of Newcastle-under-Lyme in the Parliament of 1442. Stafford’s men were prominent among the borough’s MPs; and on this occasion Needham’s companion was another lawyer, William Cumberford*, one of the filacers of the court of common pleas, who was to be retained by Stafford soon after the end of the assembly. It may also be relevant here that Egerton, who sat for Staffordshire in this assembly, was the husband of another of the Mainwaring daughters.22 C219/15/2.

The returns are lost for the next Parliament, but in view of the fact that Needham was elected for the same borough to the assemblies of 1447 and February 1449 it is probable that he also sat in 1445.23 C219/15/4, 6. If this was the case then his parliamentary career ran in a very close parallel with that of his kinsman, Richard Needham*, who, as a servant of Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, sat in the assemblies of 1442, 1445 and 1447.24 The precise nature of their kinship is unknown. Richard cannot have been our MP’s brother of this name, for the latter, who was a feoffee with our MP and the mercer in property in Bread Street, London, was dead by 1452: London hr 181/3. Nor, on chronological grounds, is the mercer likely to have been John’s nephew, and it is most likely that the two MPs were first cousins. They were acting together as late as 1473: London hr 202/33. Richard’s arrest for treason with other of the duke’s servants in the aftermath of the last assembly had no effect on our MP’s career (nor, after he narrowly escaped execution, on Richard’s). The kinship between the two men may have helped John to extend further the family estates. Richard was not only a servant of Gloucester but he was also a London mercer; and it was from another mercer of the city, Thomas Kirkeby, and his wife, Alice, that, late in 1446, our MP purchased the moiety of the manor of Cranage which the family did not hold.25 CHES31/32, 25 Hen. VI, no. 1.

Needham’s returns for a Staffordshire borough and his practice in the court of the county palatine of Chester should not be allowed to disguise the fact that his main career lay in the Westminster courts. He probably gave his second reading in about 1446, and not long afterwards, in August 1449, he was elected to replace Thomas Billing* as common serjeant of London, an office that lay on an assured path to further progress in the legal profession. Since it was then the almost exclusive preserve of fellows of Gray’s Inn, it was an obvious way for him to forward his career, and the standing of his kinsman as a city mercer may have helped him secure the appointment. As serjeant he was elected to represent London in the turbulent Parliament of November 1449, probably his fifth successive appearance in the Commons.26 Guildhall Miscellany, ii. 385; N.L. Ramsay, ‘The English Legal Profession’ (Cambridge Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1985), 143; C219/15/7. His promotion in the legal profession makes it likely that this was his last attendance there. Such a parliamentary career – several returns for a borough or boroughs while a legal practice was built – is typical of that of the successful lawyer. Attendance in the Lower House was no doubt an effective way for the young lawyer to forward his own affairs and those of his clients, although direct evidence is hard to find. Needham’s career in the Commons provides two instances where he appears to have turned attendance to such advantage: on 1 Apr. 1449 the Crown granted him in fee the King’s moor at Rudheath, near Cranage, at an annual rent of 4d.; and on 2 Mar. 1450, during the next Parliament, he was one of the feoffees of James Tuchet, Lord Audley, pardoned for alienations of property held in chief.27 CHES2/122, m. 2; CPR, 1446-52, p. 322.

By this date Needham’s career had been forwarded in another way. His father’s death in 1448 had brought him the family’s Cheshire estates (although they were burdened by the survival of Robert’s widow, Agnes, probably our MP’s stepmother),28 On 12 Dec. 1448 she named our MP as a feoffee in those lands she held of the inheritance of her son by her 1st marriage, Ralph del More: Add. Chs. 44201-3. and he was quick to employ his legal skills in the service of the community of his native shire. In accordance with the subsidy voted by the Parliament of November 1449 (of which he was a Member), commissions had been issued for the levy of the subsidy in Cheshire, a contravention of the county’s ancient exemption from parliamentary taxation. Accordingly, the ‘commonalty’ of the shire, headed by Edmund, Lord Grey of Ruthin, John Sutton, Lord Dudley, and Sir Andrew Ogard*, drew up a petition for confirmation of this exemption, and Needham was one of five men given the task of suing this petition to the King. He was the only lawyer among these five, and it is thus probable that he took responsibility for the petition’s drafting.29 Clayton, 45-48. A copy of the petition survives among the Needham muns.: Archaeologia, lvii. 75-78. His prominent place in both his native county and the legal profession was further recognized when, on 28 Nov. 1450, the royal justice of Cheshire and Flint, Sir Thomas Stanley, constituted him as his deputy, a burdensome post when the justice was not a lawyer, but one handsomely remunerated at an annual fee of £40.30 CHES29/156, rot. 7.

Thereafter Needham’s professional progress was rapid. By Michaelmas 1452 he was one of five prominent lawyers retained de consilio by Queen Margaret at an annual fee of two marks;31 A.R. Myers, Crown, Household and Parl. 194. The accts. misleadingly describe them all as apprentices-at-law when three were serjeants (two of whom were elevated to the judiciary during the period of the acct.), our MP and Billing being the exceptions. and on 1 Feb. 1453 he was called upon by the Crown to take the degree of serjeant-at-law on the following 2 July.32 CCR, 1447-54, p. 381; Order of Serjts. at Law (Selden Soc. supp. ser. v), 261-3. This promotion entailed his surrender of the office of common serjeant, and his addition to the ranks of the justices of assize. In June 1454 he was duly named to the unattractive northern circuit. A month later the elevation of Walter Moyle* to the bench of the common pleas left a vacancy among the ranks of King’s serjeants, which Needham was promoted to fill; and, on the following 13 Dec., the authorities of London named him to replace Moyle among their counsel. This latter place, together with his other private retainers, he was obliged to surrender in the spring of 1457 when the death of Thomas Fulthorpe resulted in his own promotion as a puisne justice of the common pleas.33 CPR, 1452-61, pp. 157, 158, 354; Guildhall Miscellany, ii (9), 385. He thus became the first of the 1453 call to be become a judge; and, from his point of view, this was not an unmixed blessing. The profits of an energetic serjeant’s practice in the common pleas was far greater that the puisne’s justice’s salary of 110 marks, albeit it was the judge who enjoyed the greater prestige. None the less, for Needham the financial gap was reduced by the assumption of additional responsibilities in the courts of his native north-west. In July 1456 the chief baron of the Exchequer, Peter Arderne, resigned as chief justice of Lancaster, and the second justice, our MP’s colleague on the northern assize circuit, Ralph Pole, j.KB, was promoted to replace him, with our MP as his second. On Pole’s own resignation in November 1458, Needham took his place. At the same time he also continued to serve as deputy justice of Cheshire and Flint, being confirmed in the office when John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, succeeded as chief justice. The combined fees of all his judicial offices exceeded 250 marks.34 DL37/24/32; PL14/156/2/33; CHES29/164, rot. 21.

In the early 1450s Needham’s stepson, John Bromley, who had only recently come of age, took as his wife Joan, daughter of Buckingham’s retainer, William Hextall; our MP is likely to have played his part in brokering a marriage which principally came about through the great Stafford affinity. It was a good match for his stepson, and in 1457 the judge acted in the final concord by which the bride’s maternal inheritance, the lands of another branch of the Bromleys, was settled on Hextall for life with remainder to the couple and their male issue.35 CHES3/43, 28 Hen. VI, no. 1; CP25(1)/211/24/27. His close connexion with such prominent members of the Stafford affinity as Hextall, together with the strong affiliations of his native county, might have inclined Needham to the Lancastrian side during the civil war of 1459-61. Indeed, it is striking how militantly Lancastrian were his associates among the peerage. He was a feoffee of Lord Audley, who died for Lancaster at the battle of Blore Heath, and of Thomas, Lord Roos, attainted in the first Parliament of the new reign;36 CCR, 1454-61, pp. 53-54; CPR, 1446-52, p. 322; C67/41, m. 14. as well as being an annuitant of the duke of Buckingham and a judicial deputy to the earl of Shrewsbury, both of whom fell at the battle of Northampton.

Nevertheless, as in the case of nearly all the royal justices, Needham’s career was entirely unchecked by the accession of Edward IV. Although his connexions may initially have made him an object of distrust to the Yorkists – this is implied by his removal from the Shropshire bench in the aftermath of the battle of Northampton – he soon made some gains, albeit minor ones, from the change of regime. On 8 Apr. 1461, the same day as his judicial fees were re-granted to him, he was transferred from the northern to the midland assize circuit, which was, from his residence at Shavington, far more personally convenient.37 CPR, 1461-7, p. 14; JUST1/1547, rot. 3. A month later he received promotion of a sort when the exercise of office of chief justice of Cheshire (in which he had previously deputized) was jointly committed to him in company with the earl of Warwick and Thomas, 2nd Lord Stanley; and in the following July (a month after he had been reappointed as chief justice of Lancaster) the office was granted to him during pleasure. To these marks of favour he added nomination as one of the triers of petitions in the Parliament of 1461; and it is likely that he was responsible for securing the grant to his nephew in the previous May of the bailiwick of Rudheath.38 CHES29/166, rots. 1, 2; PROME, xiii. 10; CHES2/134, mm. 2d, 4, 16.

Needham’s private affairs also prospered for it was at this time that he converted his lease of the manor of Shavington into a purchase. By a final concord levied late in 1461 the owners of Shavington, the Merstons, surrendered the property to him in fee in return for an annual rent of £11 payable for the term of their lives. He chose to act with him in this important conveyance not his neighbours but rather his colleagues in the law: Billing, a Gray’s Inn man and another of the call of 1453, Thomas Urswyk II*, also of the same inn and his successor as common serjeant of London and now recorder there, and a present and future filacer of his own court, William Praers (who may also have been a Cheshireman) and William Brayne.39 CP25(1)/195/23/1; Muns. Shavington, 21.

The last 20 years of the judge’s career are poorly documented. On 1 Jan. 1462 Lord Stanley replaced him as chief justice of Chester, but immediately named him as his deputy, and this cannot be said to have marked a setback for him. Thereafter his appointments to commissions of oyer and terminer and of the peace in many counties were numerous but routine. Even the knighthood conferred upon him in honour of the coronation of Elizabeth Wydeville in May 1465 was a matter of form, for he shared the honour with all the other unknighted justices.40 CHES29/166, rot. 11; Coronation Eliz. Wydevile ed. G. Smith, 62, 65. Similarly, the general pardon he troubled to sue out late in 1468 was an ordinary precaution not an insurance against a particular offence. Nor is there any certain evidence of any further extension of his estates, although in 1467 he leased the manor of Adderley, near Shavington, from the widow of Thomas, Lord Roos.41 C67/46, m. 10; H.D. Harrod, Hist. Shavington, 20. There is little else to be said about his part in the private affairs of the nobility. The apparent exception is final concords levied early in 1470 by which the young John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, and his cousin, Thomas, Viscount Lisle, conveyed property in three counties to him and three other royal justices; here, however, our MP was probably acting as a royal broker in the settlement of a long-running family quarrel.42 CP25(1)/294/74/74; CHES31/31, 10 Edw. IV, no. 1; E404/74/2/104.

The Readeption of Henry VI produced no changes on the judicial bench. On Edward IV’s restoration, however, Needham was moved to the court of King’s bench, changing places with the less experienced Richard Neel*. With the removal, perhaps for political reasons, of Robert Danby, c.j.c.p., and Walter Moyle, our MP had been briefly left as the most senior of the justices of the common pleas and might have hoped for promotion to the head of the court, but that honour went to a much younger man, Thomas Bryan. His translation to the higher court of King’s bench may have been intended as compensation of a sort. A further honour came to him in February 1473, when he was named tutor and councillor to the prince of Wales as an addition to the prince’s council established in 1471, but there is nothing to suggest that he played a significant part in the prince’s affairs.43 CPR, 1467-77, p. 366; D.E. Lowe, ‘Patronage and Politics’, Bull. Bd. Celtic Studies, xxxi. 556-7. By this date he must have been in his sixties, and yet he continued to hold his judicial appointments until his death, even serving as a trier of parliamentary petitions in 1478. Soon after this assembly, however, he began to make preparations for his demise: on 24 Sept. 1479 he conveyed his manor of Cranage to Sir Robert Fouleshurst, the son of his wife’s sister, Sir Thomas Fitton of Gawsworth, Ralph Coton and Robert Needham to hold for the life of his wife; and, in the same year, he granted his manor of Shavington to another group of feoffees, headed by his neighbour, Thomas Croxton of Croxton, coroner of Northwich hundred.44 Muns. Shavington, 21; CHES3/51, 1 Hen. VII, no. 4.

The precise date of Needham’s death is uncertain. His monumental inscription in the church of Holmes Chapel (near Cranage) dates it to 25 Apr. 1480, but an inquisition of 1486 favours the following 18 May. The latter date corresponds with that on which his successor as deputy justice of Chester was appointed; on the other hand, his successor as a puisne justice of the King’s bench had been appointed four days before.45 Ormerod, iii (1), 124; CHES3/51, 1 Hen. VII, no. 4; CHES29/184, rot. 22d; CPR, 1476-85, p. 270. His will does not survive. Fortunately, however, some of its terms were rehearsed in an answer in Chancery in 1485, the testimony of which there is no need to doubt. This claims that he instructed his feoffees to settle, after the payment of his debts and legacies, his manor of Shavington and other lands in Shropshire upon his eldest nephew, William, in tail male, with successive remainders, again in tail male, to two other kinsmen, Robert and Hugh Needham, who were perhaps William’s younger brothers. The profits of the family’s ancient lands at High Needham were to provide a priest to pray for his soul at Holmes Chapel during the lifetime of his widow. His other charitable bequests included the completion of the steeple there, and a local tradition also attributes to his charity the erection of a stone bridge over the river Dane at Cranage.46 C1/58/83, 67/263-6; Ormerod, iii (1), 128.

Shortly before his death the judge had advanced the career of his nephew, William, by securing for him the hand of his wife’s grand-daughter, Isabel, one of the daughters and coheiresses-presumptive of Sir John Bromley by Joan Hextall. The nephew did not live long enough to enjoy his wife’s inheritance, and on his death in about 1485 the family lands descended to his son, another William, who was but a boy.47 Leland estimated that the combination of the judge’s purchases and the family’s share of the Bromleys’ lands gave his gt.-nephew, Sir Robert, an income of 400 marks: Leland, iii. 66; v. 29. On 8 July 1486 the King granted the latter’s wardship and marriage to the younger Sir John Savage†, who had fought for Tudor at Bosworth. Yet the bulk of the Needham lands remained in the hands of the judge’s widow and the feoffees for the implementation of his will, and it may have been Savage’s frustration at this situation that led to the issue of a writ for a further inquiry into our MP’s estates.48 CHES2/158, m. 2; CHES3/51, 1 Hen. VII, no. 4. The original inqs., if any were held, do not survive. A later head of the family, Sir Robert Needham† of Shavington, sat for Shropshire in 1593 and 1604, and secured an Irish peerage from Charles I.