RODES, Robert

Rodes represented the borough of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in at least eight Parliaments, making him by far the most experienced parliamentarian to represent that constituency during the fifteenth century. His career as a lawyer spanned over 50 years, and, although he seems not to have aspired to promotion to the profession’s higher ranks, he prospered in the service of both the Crown and Durham priory. He was one of two sons of John Rodes, a Newcastle merchant and lawyer who was extremely active in the administration of the town, serving several terms as mayor between 1420 and 1432 and regularly attesting the town’s parliamentary elections (the last occasion being in 1435). The family were a well-established one in the north-east and a kinsman, also named Robert, was prior of Tynemouth between 1436 and 1451.10 Life of Mr. Ambrose Barnes, 94; C66/431, m. 4d; C219/14/6.

Rodes must have been a young man when he was first mentioned in the records. In Easter 1423 he appeared at the Exchequer as attorney for his father who was due to render account, as mayor of Newcastle, for the export of staple goods.11 E159/199, recorda Easter, rot. 5d. He was elected to his first Parliament in September 1427 with his father present among the electors. This was the beginning of a remarkable sequence of returns: he is known to have been elected to seven of the eight Parliaments which met between 1427 and 1442. Further, since it is not known who represented the town either in 1439 or 1445, it is not improbable that he was elected to ten successive assemblies.12 C219/14/1-6; 15/1, 2. Such a sequence of returns implies that he was considered an effective representative of the town’s interests and, perhaps more significantly, that he was prepared to serve without wages.

For Rodes himself the main attraction of election was the furtherance of his own career as a lawyer. Educated at Middle Temple, he had completed his readings by the mid-1430s.13 He was a fellow of M. Temple by November 1437 when he witnessed the will of another fellow, Nicholas Metley*: E163/29/11. In July 1434 and July 1435 he received rewards at the Exchequer as one of the apprentices-at-law assigned by the treasurer of England, Ralph, Lord Cromwell, to attend upon the King’s business in the various Westminster courts.14 E403/715, m. 15; 719, m. 13. The Exchequer appears to have been the main focus of his professional activities. He acted there for, amongst others, Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, Sir Robert Ogle II*, Sir Ralph Gray and Sir John Radcliffe* during the mid 1430s.15 E403/715, m. 3; 719, mm. 4, 9, 10; 725, m. 10. As an apprentice-at-law Rodes frequently carried out tasks on behalf of the Crown in the Parliaments in which he sat from 1435 onwards. In the 1435 assembly he was employed, along with John Hody*, William Burley I* and William Tresham*, in writing and engrossing the grant of a subsidy. Each man was given a reward of £3 for his labours, while Rodes received a further gift of £2 by order of the treasurer. In February 1436 he was among a group of lawyers, including the King’s attorney-general, summoned by Treasurer Cromwell almost certainly to give advice on the efforts to raise loans for the defence of Calais. Later, in May 1437 he and Hody received ten marks each for their ‘labours on the King’s behalf’ in the Parliament that had ended on the previous 27 Mar. Such casual payments were supplemented in January 1438 when he was retained at an annual fee of as much as £10.16 E403/721, mm. 10, 14; 725, m. 7; 727, m. 3; 729, m. 2; 736, m. 9. Alongside his activities as a Crown lawyer, Rodes maintained a very active role in local administration, most notably in serving as escheator of Northumberland for three consecutive years from 1434. He also exercised a local judicial function. In July 1437 he was named to the commission of the peace in Northumberland and was added to the quorum in March 1439.17 E153/1363; CPR, 1436-41, p. 588; C66/443, m. 37d.

Rodes’s principal clients also, not surprisingly, came from the north-east. He was particularly closely associated with the priory of Durham. By 1433 he was retained with an annual fee of £1 by Prior Wessington (d.1446), an annuity he continued to receive under Wessington’s successor, Prior Ebchester (1446-56).18 B. Dobson, Durham Priory, 130-1. In April 1438 he leased from the priory, for the long term of 40 years, the manor of Wardley, near Newcastle, at an annual rent of 11 marks; and in the following August the terms of this lease were altered to give him a free entry and exit to the coal mines, a preferential clause which probably reflected his importance as the monks’ legal counsel. By this time he was also regularly lending money to the priory (at least £120 between September 1438 and November 1439).19 Durham cathedral muns., priory reg. iii. ff. 222v, 225, 227, 229, 243; reg. parva ii. ff. 108v, 134; DURH3/43, m. 2. The association was clearly one of significant mutual benefit, and it may explain Rodes’s marriage, contracted at some point before September 1435, to Joan, daughter and heiress of Walter Hawick, for Hawick was a kinsman of William Hoton of Hardwick, co. Durham, the steward of Durham priory from 1437 until his death in 1446. In September 1435 Hoton entailed his estates on his children with remainders to the Newcastle merchant, Roger Thornton, and Rodes and his wife.20 Life of Mr. Ambrose Barnes, 94.

In July 1441 Rodes made a further gain from his service to the Crown with appointment as controller of customs and subsidies in the port of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and on the following 19 Sept. Prior Wessington, on the Crown’s commission, took his oath of office.21 E356/19, rot. 38d; Durham cathedral muns. priory reg. iii. f. 271v. Interestingly, he appears to have assumed some of the duties of controller before his official appointment, for on 1 June 1440 he had sealed an indenture alongside the collectors of customs and Simon Weltden*, the controller, with three local men who had apprised some uncustomed merchandise seized in the port.22 E159/216, recorda Easter, rot. 12. At Newcastle-upon-Tyne on 17 Jan. 1442 Rodes was elected to his last known Parliament. Two days later he was nominated as parliamentary proxy by Prior Wessington.23 C219/15/2; Durham cathedral muns., priory reg. iii. f. 273. Two matters of importance to the men of Newcastle-upon-Tyne (the establishment of a fleet to keep the seas under eight ‘knyghts and worthy Swyers of the West, of the South, and of the North’ and the grievance of William Bedford, former lieutenant of the duke of Bedford when admiral, concerning Scottish ships held captive at Newcastle), were the subject of parliamentary petitions, but it is unclear whether Rodes was involved in their presentation.24 PROME, xi. 320, 342-3, 373-5. He does not appear to have been engaged in the government’s business in this Parliament, and it is likely that he was no longer retained by Treasurer Cromwell, who left office the following year.

From this point in his career Rodes’s administrative activities began to diminish. He may possibly have sat in the Parliament of 1445, but it is unlikely that he sat thereafter. Further, on 18 May 1441 he had secured a lifetime exemption from appointment as mayor, sheriff or escheator, and although this did not prevent his appointment as escheator in 1442 and 1444 it may indicate his diminishing inclination to maintain a busy workload. His removal from the county bench in July 1442 is certainly consistent with such an interpretation, and although he continued to serve as customs collector until 1448, he did not hold office in the service of the Crown thereafter.25 CPR, 1436-41, p. 508; 1441-6, p. 476; 1446-52, p. 105; CFR, xvii. 241, 304.

Rodes’s reduced public role left him time to divert to other projects. At some point before April 1450, for example, he embarked on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, only to be forced to turn back by ill health when he had reached Basel.26 CPL, x. 66. For the rest he concentrated his efforts on the interests of his private clients, principally the priory of Durham, which ‘to repay the completeness of his sincere affection’, had admitted him to its confraternity in August 1441.27 Durham cathedral muns. priory reg. iii. f. 306v. In the autumn of 1446 he succeeded Hoton as the prior’s steward; and in October 1447, to cite only one example of his myriad services, Prior Ebchester entrusted him with a tally for the payment of the clerical tenth, instructing him to confer with the priory’s attorney in the Exchequer in order that the monks might be discharged of their liability for the tax.28 For this and other services to the priory: ibid. priory reg. iv. ff. 61v-63, 80, 306v; reg. parva iii. ff. 4, 24, 27v, 79, 88, 89. As well as his service to the prior and chapter, Rodes was also an important counsellor to Bishop Robert Neville. In April 1441 he had been present in the cathedral alongside the leading men of the palatinate to witness Neville’s installation as bishop.29 Durham cathedral muns. 1.7. pontificalia 6. In July 1448, along with the bishop’s chancellor, John Lound, and William Raket, another lawyer employed by the bishop, he was licensed to found a guild dedicated to St. Mary in the cathedral’s Galilee Chapel (built by Bishop Langley during the previous decade); and in September 1449, described as one of the bishop’s counsel at law, he was licensed to construct a gate in Durham’s South Bailey near to the Water Gate in order to provide access to his mansion there.30 Ibid. priory reg. iv. f. 144; DURH3/44, mm. 1, 6.

Despite Rodes’s apparent retreat from public life, his old connexions were not forgotten: in April 1453 when Ralph, Lord Cromwell, sought to clear himself from charges that he had been implicated in the unrest of 1450 Rodes supplied testimony on his behalf. The slanderous charges against Cromwell had been made by Robert Collinson, a priest who had been confessor to John Wilkins, executed for treason in June 1452 after the duke of York’s abortive rising at Dartford. In his defence Cromwell called on his associates for evidence of Collinson’s own untrustworthiness and treasonable activities. He described how Collinson visited Newcastle-upon-Tyne and was ‘of such demeanynge and governaunce that all the people were sore sett ageyns him and had not the help be of a gentilman, j. called Robert Rodes, which of pitee gate him prevely away be boot’ fearing for the priest’s life. The testimony, we can assume, came directly from Rodes, who claimed he had been misled by Collinson into assisting a man accused of preaching seditious sermons by the rest of the town’s clergy.31 CPR, 1452-61, pp. 93-101.

After the accession of Edward IV in March 1461 there may have been some question about Rodes’s loyalty to the new regime for in the following July he entered into a recognizance for 500 marks payable to the King at Michaelmas that year. Its conditions are not known, but it might have been connected to Rodes’s involvement in the efforts by Bishop Booth of Durham to dispossess Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, of the lordship of Barnard Castle. In any case it was cancelled by letters patent in August 1464. By then he seems to have gained the new government’s trust: in the previous February he was among those commissioned to arrest shipping at Newcastle for the campaign against the Lancastrian rebels in Northumberland.32 CPR, 1461-7, pp. 304, 336; A.J. Pollard, North-Eastern Eng. 295-6. This, however, was the last responsibility that came his way from the Crown, and, as befitting his advanced age, he soon moved into a complete retirement. At some date before June 1465 he surrendered the stewardship of Durham priory to Geoffrey Middleton.33 Durham cathedral muns., halmote ct. rolls, summer 1465.

Rodes’s principal concern in the last years of his life appears to have been his spiritual welfare. Neither of his wives had brought him surviving issue, and he was thus free to dispose of the bulk of his resources in charitable purposes. In 1461 he and his second wife received a licence to found a chantry in St. Nicholas’s church, Newcastle, and in June 1466 Bishop Booth of Durham licensed him to build a chapel dedicated to St. John the Baptist in the parish church of Stanhope in Weardale. This latter foundation was to be maintained with £5 p.a. from Rodes’s manor of Wheatley, county Durham; and its chaplain was to pray for the souls not only of members of the Rodes family but also of the King, Archbishop George Neville, Bishop Booth and Elizabeth, once wife of Sir John Burcester (he had purchased a share of the manor of Benwell from her in 1446). Rodes is also known to have given money for works in the Newcastle churches of All Saints and St. Andrew, and it may be that he was responsible for the construction of the steeple of the church of St. Nicholas. There was also a cathedral chantry at Durham dedicated to Rodes and his second wife with payments being made to monks to celebrate mass there as late as 1532.34 Life of Mr. Ambrose Barnes, 95-96; DURH3/48, m. 18; Archaeologia Aeliana, ser. 4, ix. 120, 122; Durham cathedral muns. bursar’s bks. J, K. For his purchase of Benwell: Hist. Northumb. ix. 149-50n.

Rodes appears to have had a special devotion to St. Cuthbert: in 1447 he had presented a gold cross, containing portions of the stone from Christ’s tomb, to the saint’s shrine at Durham. The same devotion is implied in a letter he wrote to Bishop Booth on 29 Apr. 1461 requesting his absolution for false statements in an inquisition post mortem he had returned as escheator of Northumberland. This concerned the lordship of Barnard Castle, previously held by Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick (d.1439), and now in dispute between Booth and Richard Neville, earl of Warwick. The inquisition had stated that the lordship lay in the county of Northumberland, ‘qwarin’, Rodes went on, ‘I hurte the liberte and title of the Seynt Cutbert of Dureham, qwlyk me sore repentis’. While this was doubtless connected to Booth’s unsuccessful suits to the King to have Warwick dispossessed of the lordship, it nevertheless revealed Rodes’s commitment to Durham’s patron saint.35 Pollard, 148-9; Life of Mr. Ambrose Barnes, 95.

Rodes died on 20 Apr. 1474. An inquisition post mortem held in county Durham in the following July showed him to have been seised of the manors of Little Eden (the property of his first wife), nearby Wheatley (conveyed to him by another local man, William Thomson, in 1451 and also once of his first wife’s family), and ‘Colyerle’. His heir was named as Alice, the daughter of his dead brother, John. Before his death Rodes’s estates had been placed in the hands of his feoffees and executors, two Newcastle men John Hebburn and William Lawson, for the performance of his will.36 DURH3/4, f. 67. Agnes outlived her husband by some years. In 1495 the grateful monks of Durham granted her letters of confraternity for ‘your well-known deeds, your gifts, and precious presents conferred upon us’.37 R. Welford, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Gateshead, i. 368.