BRUSHFORD, John

The Brushfords took their name from a village in central Devon, where the family may have originated. John’s parentage is obscure, but by the 1430s he had acquired extensive property in the port of Dartmouth, including a tenement adjacent to the cellar rented by John Walsh alias Gregory*, another in Hardness near ‘La Bakeway’, and a third ‘to the north of the salt sea’, as well as land near Newport Street in Hardness and a garden in ‘Le Forche Lane’.4 Watkin, 115, 121, 131, 133, 139. While the value of these holdings cannot be established, it is indicative of Brushford’s status and self-esteem that he was armigerous and used an armorial seal.5 He bore the arms ‘quarterly, a buck’s head and a cross’: ibid. 140, 143.

Brushford began his long career of office-holding in 1436 when he was elected one of the bailiffs of Dartmouth. The mayor that same year was the prominent Nicholas Stebbing* and the two men formed an alliance which was to endure throughout their lives. Over the course of three decades Brushford and Stebbing regularly witnessed each other’s property transactions, and provided mutual assistance in other ways.6 Ibid. 115-16, 125, 132, 138. Thus, Stebbing called upon Brushford to arbitrate in a dispute over a tenement in Dartmouth with Sir Nicholas Carewe, Lady Elizabeth Carewe and the local merchant Hugh Yon*, a choice indicative of the friendship between the two men, as the Carewes and Yon nominated as arbiters for their part the prominent lawyers William Hyndeston* and John More of Collumpton.7 Ibid. 396. Conversely, Stebbing came to Brushford’s aid in a drawn-out quarrel over an act of piracy. In 1441 Peter Stephan, master of a barge called La Marie of St. Malo in Brittany, and Nicholas Fevere, a merchant of Nantes, the owner of the barge, claimed that La Marie had been taken at sea by two balingers of Falmouth, Le Jesus and Le Flour or La Flour de la Mer, and that her cargo of 43 tuns of white wine had been sold to various individuals. A commission of inquiry was able to ascertain the names of the buyers, and restitution was ordered to be made. However, probably as a consequence of the sheer number of different individuals who had purchased the wine, this proved a complicated task, and although repeated commissions were issued ordering the imprisonment of all men who refused to make restitution, the task had still not been completed five years later.8 CPR, 1436-41, pp. 573, 575; 1441-6, pp. 47, 106-7, 289, 423. Fourteen tuns of the wine had been purchased by Michael Mulner, a Dartmouth merchant, and in consequence Stephan sued out a writ directed to the mayor of that town, then John Brushford. By this time, Mulner had died and Brushford forced Alice, his widow and executrix, to put down sureties of silver plate and spoons to a value of £10. Apparently, however, he failed to make a return to the writ or to make restitution to Stephan, who was thus forced to take legal action against him at considerable cost.9 C1/45/54; Watkin, 119. In June 1444 he sued out writs of attachment against Brushford and Alice Mulner, but Stebbing, who by now had assumed the mayoralty of Dartmouth, returned that he had been unable to find Brushford within his jurisdiction. As a result, Stebbing now found himself faced with a series of claims in Chancery brought by Stephan for the damages and costs incurred as a result of his return, and although Stephan paid one of the King’s serjeants-at-arms to have Stebbing arrested, there is no indication that the latter was ever convicted.

On his own territory, Brushford was clearly not above high-handed behaviour. Thus, when the chancellor’s messengers entered his house to deliver the writ of sub poena sued out by Stephan, he had them driven out with threats to their lives, calling one of them a ‘false traitor and thief’. When the two frightened men retreated to their inn, the infuriated Brushford assembled a rabble of some 400 Dartmouth men armed with poleaxes, swords and other weapons and led a savage assault on the building. Being prevented from entry by a sturdy door, the mob attempted to set fire to it and was only prevented from completing their intent of murdering the messengers by the intervention of a priest. Stephan again complained to the chancellor, but there is no indication that Brushford was ever held to account for his riotous behaviour or forced to surrender the confiscated plate to the Breton.10 C1/13/46-47, 15/12, 17/332; C244/43/36, 38. Other similar complaints followed. In early 1447 Brushford and Stebbing, along with their neighbours Robert Steven*, Robert Wenyngton* and Thomas Lanoy I*, were accused by the lawyer John More of having assaulted him at Kingswear and Dartmouth in April 1445, robbing him of his purse and killing his horses,11 KB27/743, rot. 46d. while in 1450 Brushford and other prominent Dartmouth men were said to have ambushed the local esquire Walter Reynell* near Totnes with a band of armed malefactors in an attempt to murder him. Brushford procured an essoin to avoid an appearance at Westminster, and once again there is no indication that he was ever brought to justice for his alleged part in the disturbance.12 CP40/760, rot. 208d; 761, rot. 200.

Relations between Brushford and Stebbing continued to be close and in February 1449 when Stebbing was again returned to Parliament, Brushford was present at Exeter castle at the shire elections, most likely as part of the Dartmouth delegation sent to communicate their own election result. Brushford had an interest in sending his friend to Westminster: around the time Parliament assembled, he stood accused of having broken into the house of Robert Cappes, a prominent Dorset esquire, at Nethway and taken goods worth £40.13 CP40/752, rot. 273d.

Although Brushford was only occasionally appointed to royal commissions and never held other Crown office, he was nevertheless of high standing in Dartmouth, as is plainly illustrated by his repeated elections to the office of mayor which he held no fewer than nine times between 1441 and 1463. Tenure of the mayoralty brought with it a plethora of duties, including mundane ones such as the upkeep of the guildhall, a purpose for which Brushford was purchasing timber in 1443 during his second consecutive term of office.14 Watkin, 337. He certainly had personal experience of the consequences of neglected maintenance, for in early 1441 he had been in dispute with Alice, the widow of William Mountfort*, and her associates Thomas* and William Oliver I*, for their failure to repair a gutter between their house and his. As a result of their negligence, so Brushford claimed, the rain water from the gutter had run down the walls of his house causing them to rot and crumble.15 CP40/720, rot. 161. Another of the mayor’s duties was the conduct of parliamentary elections in the borough, and the certification of their results to the sheriff. This gave him a degree of influence over the choice of the town’s representatives, and it is not surprising to find Brushford’s close associate Stebbing returned during his first mayoralty in early 1442, while John himself was elected twice, in 1450 and 1453, on the latter occasion alongside Stebbing.

Even when Brushford was not serving in town office, his neighbours frequently called upon him to serve as a feoffee or to attest their property transactions. Among those who did so were members of the county gentry such as the widowed Lady Margaret Pomeroy, but also local folk like Elizabeth, widow of Hugh Yon, the important merchant John Walsh, and subsequently the latter’s widow Isabel. Walsh’s affairs in particular proved complicated, for in his will the merchant had stipulated that his lands should descend to his widow, and to John Clerk*, now a merchant of Salisbury, and Katherine his wife. From the Clerks the claim descended to their daughter Katherine, who had married the Londoner Thomas Gay the younger, and as late as 1466 Brushford found himself attesting documents concerned with the Walsh inheritance.16 N. Devon RO, Chichester of Arlington mss, 50/11/43/18; Devon RO, Seymour of Berry Pomeroy mss, 3799M-0/ET/17/1; Watkin, 134; C1/32/275; CCR, 1461-8, pp. 403-4.

In 1461, for the first time in the town’s history, the burgesses of Dartmouth elected three aldermen. In line with their dominance in the town’s administration in the 1440s and 1450s, Brushford and Stebbing were two of the men chosen. In this capacity, Brushford was once more regularly attended the guildhall, but he by no means treated his new dignity as an honourable retirement from active politics: less than two years later he once again held the mayoralty of Dartmouth. However, his dignity did not protect him from the unruliness of others. Around the time of his election as alderman a group of lesser men led by a local mariner broke his close at Stoke Fleming, and when Brushford sought to stop them, physically assaulted him.17 CP40/802, rot. 46d. While Brushford’s claim that as a result of the attack his life was despaired of was a common plea, it may have contained at least a grain of truth. He was no longer a young man, and concerns for the welfare of his soul began to claim their place among his preoccupations. Thus he took on the feoffeeship of the chantry originally founded by Robert Bowyer, which by the second half of the fifteenth century also provided for the spiritual welfare of its deceased trustees.18 Watkin, 141. Brushford last occurs in the records in 1467, but is likely to have died not long after, for he was not among the feoffees of his old friend Nicholas Stebbing, when the latter made his will in 1469.19 Ibid. 142, 144-5.