CORVE, John

Corve came from a family with strong historical links with the county of Shropshire, and in particular with the town of Ludlow where a possible ancestor, Richard Corve, was a long-serving bailiff and warden of the Palmers guild in the reign of Edward III.5 M. Faraday, Ludlow 1085-1660, 117-18, 185-6. Little is known about his parents, although it is clear that his father died before the autumn of 1414, by which time his mother had remarried. John had at least three brothers, of whom the most distinguished was Master William Corve, a fellow and later provost of Oriel College, Oxford, who in 1414 attended the Council of Constance as the archbishop of Canterbury’s proctor. The two men were evidently close, and in his will, proved in September 1417, William appointed John as his executor. Another sibling, also named William, seems to have been a scholar at Oriel at the time of our MP’s death, while a cousin, John, was educated at Winchester and New College before becoming rector of Saham Toney in Norfolk.6 PCC 38 Marche (PROB11/2, f. 301v); Biog. Reg. Univ. Oxf. ed. Emden, i. 487; Reg. Chichele, iii. 420; iv. 107-8. Rather than enter the Church, however, our MP became a lawyer, a career which brought him to the courts at Westminster. He was one of a group of Shropshire lawyers who established themselves in the King’s bench in the early years of the fifteenth century. They seem to have been introduced to the court by Hugh Holgot of Holdgate, who having been promoted to the chief clerkship in 1411 quite likely procured the filacerships obtained during Henry V’s reign by John and his brother Richard Corve.7 Holgot assisted the Corves in their transactions regarding land, and was associated with them in a professional capacity: Sel. Cases King’s Bench, 246; Add. Chs. 38829-30, 38832, 38838; Salop Archs., deeds 6000/12868, 12905. The latter became a filacer at Easter 1414, with responsibility for suits from Oxfordshire, Berkshire and Worcestershire, while John himself, after working as a lesser clerk in the court from the same year, obtained the filacership dealing with those from Surrey and Sussex in 1418. He held this lucrative post until Hilary term 1423 when he resigned, handing his place on to his friend Thomas Eliot, who was later to act as one of his executors.8 Sel. Cases King’s Bench, p. xvii. n. 7; KB27/647, rot. 51.

Apart from his employment in the King’s bench, Corve was active in and around Westminster from the beginning of the century both as an arbiter and as an attorney for several prominent individuals, including Thomas Beaufort, later duke of Exeter.9 CCR, 1399-1402, pp. 435, 445, 449-50; 1409-13, pp. 338, 419; 1413-19, pp. 126, 274, 517; 1419-22, p. 81. His growing reputation as a lawyer and his position in the law courts led to his involvement in transactions concerning property in those parishes and suburbs of London which lay close to the various government departments. Several of these transactions involved other King’s bench officials, such as Robert Hore, for whom he first acted in 1407 (with regard to property in the parish of St. Andrew Holborn), and last did so almost 30 years later as a feoffee of lands in Westminster and the parish of St. Giles in the Fields.10 CCR, 1447-54, pp. 364-5. Elsewhere in London, Corve was also concerned in the acquisition of property in the parish of St. Sepulchre Newgate.11 London and Mdx. Feet of Fines, 174; CPR, 1416-22, p. 308. Late in his career he was employed as a feoffee by Sir John Cornwall, Lord Fanhope, in respect of buildings in King’s Street, Westminster, perhaps owing the connexion to their shared background in Shropshire.12 CAD, i. A1457-60. His legal skills were drawn upon by prominent individuals with landed interests close to the royal court, such as John Fray†, a baron of the Exchequer, and Henry Frowyk I*, from whom in 1431 he acquired a shared reversionary interest in a number of properties in Holborn. Corve paid Fray the sum of £100 in instalments spread over four years.13 Early Holborn ed. Williams, ii. no. 1602; E159/207, recogniciones Hil.

Yet London and Westminster were not to be the prime focus of Corve’s landed interests. Initially, these centred on Northamptonshire, where, probably by purchase, he acquired the valuable manor of Culworth. This came into the hands of his feoffees, including his brothers Master William and Richard Corve and his mentor Holgot, by April 1414, and three months later it was arranged that when John married the widowed Alice Swift it would be settled on the two of them and their issue. The marriage took place by the autumn of 1416. Meanwhile, Corve had leased Culworth out to John Lovell for four years at the handsome rent of £20 p.a.14 Add. Chs. 38829, 38830, 38832, 38835, 38838; J. Bridges, Northants. i. 163; Feudal Aids, iv. 41. Alice’s former husband, Thomas Swift, may have been the man who had held office in the exchequer of Ireland by appointment of Richard II and confirmation of Henry V, but even if so it is uncertain what she brought to Corve in the way of dower.15 CPR, 1413-16, p. 91. More important to our MP was the prospect of acquiring her inheritance from her father John Wantley, a Sussex landowner of armigerous rank, who was party to the marriage settlement of Culworth. When he died, early in 1425, Alice inherited his holdings in Sussex, consisting of some 18 messuages and over 400 acres of land in Amberley, Horsham, Sullington and elsewhere, together with the advowson of a third part of the Trinity chapel in St. Mary’s church at Horsham; while he also left her the small manor of Hills near Wheathampstead, some distance away in Hertfordshire, which was worth £5 p.a.. In June that year the Corves placed Alice’s patrimony in the hands of feoffees (prominent members of the legal profession, such as Chief Justice William Cheyne and the future judge John Cottesmore, and lawyers from Sussex and Surrey, such as Richard Wakehurst† and Walter Urry*).16 VCH Suss. vi (2), 22; Suss. Arch. Collns. lxxvi. 49-50; Add. Ch. 18710; CP25(1)/291/65/46. Wantley’s Sussex holdings at Sullington, Amberley and Steyning had been assessed at £7 p.a. in 1412: Feudal Aids, vi. 524. It was in Surrey that the couple made their home. By 1427 they had acquired the manor of Alderbury at Merstham, and Corve also held that of Chalvedon. He was described as ‘of Merstham’ when he was listed in 1434 among the gentry of Surrey required to take the general oath against maintenance.17 Surr. Arch. Collns. xx. 94; VCH Surr. iii. 216n; CPR, 1429-36, p. 380; Feudal Aids, v. 125; KB27/664, rot. 8d. The overall extent of his landholding is difficult to ascertain, but by May 1436, according to an assessment for the income tax levied that year, his lands in Surrey, Sussex and Northamptonshire were said to be worth the impressive sum of £60 13s. 4d. p.a.18 Surr. Hist. Centre, Woking, Loseley mss, LM 1719.

It had not been long after beginning his career in the King’s bench that Corve had been appointed to a number of ad hoc royal commissions, both in Surrey and Sussex and in other counties in the south-east, and in 1417 he had begun his long service as a j.p of the quorum for Surrey. By 1431, when he was returned to Parliament for the first time, he had become a respected member of the county community.19 In the parlty. returns for 1431, 1432 and 1435 Corve is described as ‘junior’, but there can be no doubt that he was the MP. His son and namesake cannot have been of age by 1431, and it is likely that the designation ‘junior’ is intended to distinguish him from an older and less important uncle or cousin. A John Corve as husband of Eleanor, da. and h. of John Gascoigne of Shrewsbury, appears in litigation in 1427: CP40/664, rot. 193d; 666, rot. 437. Corve’s ties with Reigate seem to have been particularly close: he represented the borough in Parliament on four occasions, more than any other person in this period, and was related, perhaps through marriage, to another MP for Reigate, William Bryt*, to whom he was to leave a bequest in his will. Although there is no direct proof that he was known personally to the dowager countess of Arundel, the lady of the manor of Reigate during this period, two of his feoffees, Urry and Wakehurst, had long been in her service, the former as steward of the lordship.20 The Commons 1386-1422, iv. 692-3, 732.

Then too Corve had established other important connexions among the landowners of Surrey, such as John Feriby*, the controller of the royal household, who had drawn on his services as a trustee of the manor of West Horsley in the 1420s, and was to do so for estates elsewhere in the 1430s,21 CP25(1)/232/71/18; CAD, ii. B4038; CPR, 1429-36, p. 265; London and Mdx. Feet of Fines, 236. The two men sat together in the Parliament of 1433. and the wealthy local landowner Nicholas Carew† (d.1432) engaged him for a similar purpose.22 CCR, 1429-35, p. 189. Towards the end of his life, in March 1437, he was acting as a feoffee of property in Southwark formerly belonging to the distinguished architect Henry Yevele, whose heir was Katherine, widow of John Burgh†.23 CCR, 1441-7, p. 481. At that time he was sitting in his last Parliament.

Perhaps because Corve and his wife Alice had produced no surviving children, they disposed of their estates in other ways. It may have been for the provision of prayers for their souls that Corve conveyed their manor in Hertfordshire to the abbot of Westminster in March 1433 (although without first procuring the necessary royal licence).24 VCH Herts. ii. 307; C145/308/7. His family had long been closely linked with the Cluniac priory of Wenlock in Shropshire, and many years earlier, in 1419, he and his brother, Richard, had stood bail for the prior, John Stafford, who was accused of involvement in a plot in which forged coins had been supplied to the heretic-traitor Sir John Oldcastle†.25 VCH Salop, ii. 43-46; Sel. Cases King’s Bench, 244-6; CCR, 1435-41, p. 133. His service to the prior was evidently appreciated, for at an unknown date he was granted a corrody at the priory, of which he was in possession at the time of his death. In his will, dated 6 May 1437 (just a few weeks after his last Parliament had been dissolved), he left six marks for priests to celebrate in the church at Wenlock for his soul and those of his parents and siblings, and £5 to the feoffees of the lands of St. Mary’s chapel there for the same purpose. It is worthy of remark that Corve left £2 for masses for the soul of Richard II and 20 marks for those of Richard’s successors, Henry IV and Henry V, although there is nothing in the records of his career to explain why he should have done so. Foremost among his concerns was his family, and he made bequests of cash to a number of relatives, including his sisters and their daughters, and his nephew, John (son of Richard), who was to receive £5 and his best saddle, armour and sword. Particularly striking are his bequests of books, which reflected his family’s academic leanings. His will listed a number of devotional texts, of which the most learned, including commentaries on Ezekiel and Revelation, were left to his brother, William, and the scholars of Oriel College. Tracts of a more everyday nature, among them several psalters, were bequeathed to the parish church at Amberley in Sussex (where his father-in-law lay buried), and to churches at Wenlock, Wonersh (Surrey) and Culworth. Several contemplative works, including a meditation of St. Bernard, were to be given to priests charged with praying for his soul, while William Bryt was left all his books written in English. Corve did not specify a place of burial although he left sufficient funds to cover the funeral, as well as another book of psalms, to the church eventually selected by his executors – his widow Alice and Thomas Eliot, his colleague in the King’s bench. The will was proved on 16 July, but Corve was dead by the 13th when an under clerk of the royal spicery replaced him as corrodian of Wenlock.26 PCC 16 Luffenham (PROB11/3, ff. 167v-68); CCR, 1435-41, p. 133.

In May 1438 Corve’s widow conveyed Culworth and other holdings in Northamptonshire to feoffees acting for the future judge Robert Danvers*.27 CCR, 1435-41, p.175. As late as 1492 members of the Eliot family and other trustees provided, in a sale of lands in Sussex at Horsham and elsewhere, that the proceeds should be used to perform the last wills of our MP and his widow.28 Add. Ch. 8909.