BELTON, John

In terms of offices held, Belton was one of Cambridge’s most prominent burgesses in the mid fifteenth century. Given the loose sobriquet, ‘merchant’ when sued for debt by several plaintiffs, including John Ansty*, at the end of the 1440s, he was described as a ‘gentleman’ when he, Ansty’s son John†, William Allington† and others bound themselves in a recognizance to Thomas Bray of Colchester in the early 1460s.4 CP40/753, rot. 382; CCR, 1461-8, pp. 138, 267. He was again styled ‘merchant’ when sued for trespass on another occasion in the same period, in a lawsuit that suggests that had business dealings in London. The plaintiff, John Langwith, alleged that in September 1461 Belton and several co-defendants, among them Richard Bole† of Winchester and John Croft* of Cambridge, had forcibly seized various lengths of cloth from him in the City.5 CP40/803, rot. 108. Belton also had commercial dealings in Norfolk, for in the same decade he bought four millstones from the guild of the Holy Trinity at Bishop’s Lynn.6 Norf. RO, King’s Lynn bor. recs., accts. scabins Trin. guild, KL/C38/20, 21. Whatever the extent of his business interests, he was no great landowner, since when assessed for the purposes of the subsidy of 1450 his holdings – some of which lay at Newnham – were valued at a mere £5 p.a.7 PROME, xi. 453; E179/81/103.

Earmarked for possible jury service at the gaol delivery sessions held in Cambridge in February 1435,8 JUST3/8/15. Belton achieved his first prominent office in the borough, that of bailiff, in September 1440. Within months of this initial term as bailiff concluding, he gained election to his first known Parliament. Having sat again in 1447, he may subsequently have entered Parliament for a third time. Damage to Cambridge’s election return for 1450 means that the name of only one of the MPs, John Cook II*, is fully visible on that document but it is possible to discern the first name and last four letters of the surname of Cook’s associate, ‘John […]lton’. Belton’s appointment to the Cambridge bench in October 1453 probably arose from his elevation to the mayoralty the previous month, for the mayor played a judicial role in the borough, where he presided over several borough courts.9 The Commons 1386-1421, i. 288. Belton’s terms as mayor coincided with his membership of the quorum as a j.p. but it is impossible to tell whether his omission from the bench between February 1460 and July 1461 had any political connotations.

Possibly the legal experience that Belton had gained as a j.p. prompted William Gray, bishop of Ely, to appoint him to a gaol delivery commission in 1470. In the same year, he and other burgesses gave evidence at an inquisition instituted by the bishop, at which they swore that the patronage of the rectory of St. Botolph, Cambridge, belonged to Queens’ College, so upholding the college’s claim to that living.10 W.G. Searle, Queens’ Coll. 75-76. During the 1470s, Belton was embroiled in a dispute in his capacity as a feoffee of Thomas Burgoyne*. On one side of the dispute was Burgoyne’s widow, Alice, and on the other, (Sir) John Cheyne II*. Among the issues at stake was the right of patronage over one of the churches at Long Stanton, and during the course of her quarrel Alice sued in Chancery Belton and other Burgoyne feoffees for failing to support her claim to the advowson.11 C1/47/232. This was not the first Chancery suit in which Belton was a defendant, since in the early 1460s a trustee had brought an action against him in the same court for failing to make an enfeoffment as instructed by a testator.12 C1/28/295.

Still alive in 1480 when he took a lease of two cottages in St. Peter’s parish, Cambridge, from the nuns of the local house of St. Radegund, Belton was certainly dead by 1490, when named as one of those whom Henry Chichele had appointed feoffees of his manors at Wimpole in 1465.13 CIPM Hen. VII, i. 543; Gray, 18.