COVENTRE, John III

Coventre came from an old established family of Devizes clothiers, members of which regularly represented their borough in Parliament in the reigns of Richard II and the Lancastrian kings. His own father and namesake did so no fewer than six times between Henry V’s first Parliament and 1427. By contrast with his kinsmen, John III, who had been present in the Wiltshire county court alongside his father in 1422 (on the occasion of one of the latter’s multiple elections), is only known to have sat in the Commons once.

Although the two John Coventres were generally distinguished as ‘senior’ and ‘junior’, not all of their activities can be clearly separated. Like his father, the younger John was a prosperous clothier. The volume and geographical range of his business dealings were extensive: betwen 1441 and 1443 alone he and his associates sold cloth worth more than £2,000 to Venetian merchants, while his trade among the English is exemplified by the debt of £120 which Richard Joynour* owed him at the end of his life. In early 1451 Coventre’s Wiltshire property was deemed to be worth some £30 p.a.3 Brokage Bk. 1443-4 (Soton Rec. Ser. iv), p. xxxv; E101/128/30, m. 10, 31, mm. 3, 12, 13, 51, 54; E179/196/118; CPR, 1429-36, p. 314; 1467-77, p. 498. While the regular attendance in Parliament of one or other of the Coventres may have brought them to the attention of the government, John’s wealth also caught the eye of the permanently cash-strapped administration. He was probably the man who in association with some of his neighbours found loans totalling £10 in early 1430, as well as a further £6 just over a year later, and three years later, in February 1433, he was charged to undertake the repair of the castle of Devizes and to enclose the royal park there (a task with which his father had been entrusted more than a decade earlier).4 E401/724, m. 2; 727, m. 14; CPR, 1429-36, pp. 61, 277. By this date, Coventre (who had cut his teeth in local administration in the reign of Henry V, when he served as churchwarden of the parish church of St. Mary), was already serving in the first of his two documented mayoralties of Devizes.

Yet, his connexions clearly extended beyond the ranks of the clothiers of his home town into those of the county gentry. In May 1431 he was among Edmund Pyne†’s feoffees of the manor of Westrop, and if further evidence of Coventre’s own gentrified status were required, it may surely be found in his inclusion (alongside his putative uncle William *) among the Wiltshire gentry required to take the general oath not to maintain peace breakers in 1434.5 CPR, 1429-36, p. 371; CP40/698, rot. 371d.

For much of the reigns of the first two Lancastrians the men of Devizes had shown a marked preference for members of their own mercantile community as their parliamentary representatives. This attitude slowly began to change in the early 1430s, when in men like John Giles* and John Whittocksmead* external men of law began to secure the borough’s seats. In the first instance, however, these lawyers were accompanied to Parliament by colleagues with strong local credentials. In 1431, 1432 and 1433 Giles and Whittocksmead had respectively been joined in the Commons by William Smith*, John Craye* and William Coventre, and in 1435 it was John Coventre who was returned alongside the more experienced Giles. In that same year, Coventre was also present in the Wiltshire county court and set his seal to the sheriff’s election indenture.

Coventre’s single return to Parliament brought to an end four decades of his family’s dominance in the parliamentary representation of Devizes, and his own public career also petered out not long after. He served as mayor of Devizes at least twice more, in 1436-7 and 1453-4, and is subsequently found serving occasionally on local juries.6 KB9/133/14d. He was evidently well respected among his neighbours, who periodically called upon him to settle their disputes and attest their property transactions. Thus in 1434 Coventre and Robert Chandler* were named as arbiters in a dispute between Robert Ismell* and the executors of William Walshot, and ten years later he was associated with John Whittocksmead in the acquisition of the manor of Lydiard Tregoze from Peter Beauchamp.7 CCR, 1429-35, p. 302; 1461-8, p. 240; Wilts. deeds, 212B/2279; CPR, 1441-6, p. 312; 1452-61, p. 461. Conversely, the litigation in which he was periodically embroiled was unexceptional and of the nature of the petty disputes common among the landowners and tradesmen of the period.8 CP40/688, rot. 387; 715, rots. 189, 208d; 721, rot. 53; 724, rot. 49. Some of these may, indeed, have resulted from Coventre’s service in local government: in early 1433 he was associated with William Smith and William Bremesgrove* (the latter explicitly styled a ‘former mayor of Devizes’) in seeking to recover a debt from the butcher John Rogger.9 CP40/688, rot. 387d.

Coventre is last definitely recorded in 1458, although he may have survived into the mid 1470s. He seems to have left no surviving offspring, for like his father and grandfather before him, he endowed a chantry in the Devizes church of St. Mary, on which – in keeping with his wealth – he settled no fewer than 33 tenements, as well as other lands. It is not surprising that at the Reformation this valuable property should have attracted the covetise of the radical regime conducted in the name of the young Edward VI. At the dissolution of the chantries, part of the endowment of Coventre’s chantry in St. Mary’s was thus granted to the duke of Somerset’s servant John Berwick†, while others helped themselves to the rest.10 The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 675; Wilts. Arch. Mag. x. 71.