WELLES, Henry

A suit brought in the King’s bench in the 1440s gives Welles’s place of residence as Northiam, situated near the border of east Sussex with Kent, and describes him as a ‘gentleman’.4 KB27/725, fines rot. d. How long he had lived there is uncertain, although earlier transactions regarding land associate him with the same part of the county, where, at Beckley, he had acquired a messuage and 30 acres in 1435, two years before his election to Parliament. By a final concord of November 1440 this same 30 acres were settled jointly on him and Agnes Belhurst and his heirs, in an arrangement probably made in preparation for their wedding.5 CP25(1)/241/87/20; 88/24.

A lawyer by training, Welles may have been the man of this surname who held office as a filacer in the King’s bench for some 25 years. More definitely, he served as clerk to the j.p.s of Sussex for a similar period of time, beginning in 1424. His duties nurtured a personal association with Richard Wakehurst†, by far the most experienced of the justices, on whose behalf he acted as an attorney in the King’s bench in the late 1430s.6 KB27/710, att. rot. d. This association, and his clerkship of the peace, were undoubtedly important factors in Welles’s election to Parliament for Horsham, a borough with which he had no recorded connexion. Besides his work in the King’s bench, Welles also appeared occasionally as an attorney for Sussex litigants in the court of common pleas.7 CP40/724, rot. 456d; 740, rot. 464. Sometimes, too, he was asked to be a feoffee of property in the county. For instance, in the same decade of the 1440s he was enfeoffed by Wakehurst’s son-in-law Edward Sackville (d.1450), of his manors in Sussex and Essex and his principal estate at Emmington in Oxfordshire. Welles was the last of Sackville’s feoffees to survive, and as such, then described as a gentleman living at Burstow in Surrey, he gave up his interest at Emmington in April 1464 to Sackville’s son.8 C139/141/10; CIPM Hen. VII, i. 416, 425, 431.

Neither the date of Welles’s removal to Burstow from his home in Sussex, or that of his death is known, although it may be speculated that he lived on a few years longer, for a Henry Welles was recorded in July 1471 as a mainpernor for John Clerk, the secondary baron of the Exchequer, who along with members of the Culpepper family was given custody of ‘Shelleys tenement’ in London. Although that Henry was described as ‘of Goudhurst in Kent’, it should be noted that two of the Culpeppers for whom sureties were offered were married to the grand-daughters and coheiresses of the MP’s former mentor, Richard Wakehurst.9 CFR, xxi. no. 54. The MP’s family continued to hold property in Burstow, which later became known as the manor of Redhall.10 VCH Surr. iii. 179.