DAM, John

A lawyer who became recorder of Norwich, Dam was a friend and advisor of the Paston family. He is not always easy to identify, but he was almost certainly the son of an elder John Dam, also of Sustead. Dam was active by 1420, as an attorney in a conveyance on behalf of Judge William Paston and his bride,5 Norf. RO, Dr. Schram’s colln., MC 170/5, 634 x 3(a). but his senior namesake, who was still alive at the beginning of the 1440s, may have served on some of the offices listed above.6 Blomefield, viii. 168. A John Dam served a term as under sheriff of Norfolk in the 1430s,7 CP40/679, rot. 130; 702, rot. 133d; E13/140, rots. 2, 6; C1/9/37-38. but it is difficult to tell whether this official was the MP. Similarly, it is unclear which John Dam was expected to swear the oath to keep the peace of 1434, although it was John the younger, presumably the MP, who acted as a feoffee for Sir Henry Inglose* five years later. Despite these problems of identification, it is likely (taking into account his legal background) that it was the MP who was attorney in the court of common pleas for Margery, widow of Sir William Argentine†, in 1422, and for Walter Garlek, a claimant to various manors in the Midlands, in 1430.8 CPR, 1429-36, pp. 290-4, 366, 407; CP25(1)/169/188/140.

Dam may have owed his election to the Commons of 1442 to family links with Great Yarmouth (where several men with his surname lived in the 1420s and 1430s),9 Gt. Yarmouth recs., ct. rolls 1422-3, 1424-5, 1438-9, Y/C 4/132, m. 10; 134, m. 4d; 147, m. 4d. but it is just as likely that the burgesses who returned him chose him for his legal experience. Although he later served as a justice of gaol delivery in Yarmouth, he appears not to have had any other connexion with the borough following the dissolution of the Parliament. His election to the Commons of 1450 as an MP for Norwich is easier to explain, for by that date he had served as recorder there for a number of years. He formally became a freeman of the city in 1450, presumably before taking up his seat in Parliament.10 Norf. RO, Norwich city recs., ‘Old Free bk.’, NCR 17c. A few months before his election to the Commons, he acted as an arbitrator for the citizens in one of their disputes with Norwich priory.11 Norwich city recs., bond of arbitration 1450, NCR 9d/16. While still an MP, he helped to assess Norwich’s inhabitants for a subsidy granted to the King during the Parliament of February 1449. He himself was living in the city at the time, since his own assessment for the same tax occurred there. According to the return, he enjoyed an income of £13 p.a. from his lands and fees.12 R. Virgoe, ‘Norwich taxation list of 1451’, Norf. Archaeology, xl. 148-9. Other records show that these fees included an annual retainer of £5 as recorder of Norwich, an office for which he also received an additional sum for robes (13s. 6d. by 1457-8 and 15s. thereafter). Dam had a house in the parish of St. Peter Mancroft, Norwich, which he later settled on the wardens of the ‘Mass of the Blessed Jesus’ in that church.13 Norwich city recs., chamberlains’ accts. 1457-60, NCR 7d; Blomefield, iv. 225.

At this stage in his career, Dam had enjoyed amicable relations with the Paston family for some three decades. He was a trustee as well as an associate of Judge William Paston,14 CPR, 1436-41, p. 480; CP25(1)/169/189/176; C.F. Richmond, Paston Fam.: First Phase, 94, 97. and very probably related to James Gresham, one of the Pastons’ better-born servants and advisers. Upon learning (probably in December 1441) about the pregnancy of William’s daughter-in-law, Margaret, he was effusive in his congratulations, declaring that ‘he was not of gladder of no thyng that he harde thys towlmonyth than he was ther-of’.15 Paston Letters ed. Davis, i. 217. The child must have been Sir John Paston†. As one of William’s feoffees and executors, Dam was soon on hand to assist the widowed Agnes Paston following the judge’s death in August 1444. Yet he appears to have opposed her in one important respect, by supporting the claim of William’s eldest son and heir, John*, to the deceased’s manors of Sporle and Swainsthorpe in Norfolk.16 Ibid. 22-23, 44-48; H.R. Castor, Blood and Roses, 34-36. A decade later Dam, Agnes and William Paston’s other executors filed several bills in the Exchequer in an attempt to recover a sum of several hundred pounds they claimed as the unpaid arrears of William’s wages as a judge. The defendants were the customs collectors at London, Kingston-upon-Hull and Bristol, because an Act of the Parliament of 1439 had charged the wages of the King’s judges upon the customs of those ports. The suits initiated by the bills must nevertheless have come to nothing, since they dragged on inconclusively until the late 1450s, after which they disappear from the Exchequer plea rolls.17 E13/145B, rots. 5-9, 11d, 13, 17, 19d, 22d, 27d, 28, 28d, 35, 36; PROME, xi. 269-71.

The Pastons were not the only prominent Norfolk gentry family with whom Dam enjoyed a connexion, since he was also an executor of Sir Simon Felbrigg KG, who had died without male heirs nearly two years before William Paston. The administration of Felbrigg’s estate, which he shared with Felbrigg’s widow, Katherine, Oliver Groos† and John Baker, rector of Felbrigg, proved a troublesome responsibility because he quarrelled with Katherine, who filed a Chancery bill against him in the late 1440s. The suit concerned her sale (for just over £850) of the reversion after her death of eight of her husband’s manors in Norfolk to Thomas, Lord Scales (like Dam, a feoffee to the use of Sir Simon’s will). Now in a damaged state, the bill is impossible to read fully, but Dam’s answer reveals the points at issue. He said that Katherine had made the sale without the knowledge of either him or Groos, but that they had agreed to give their retrospective consent to it, provided she fulfilled two conditions. First, she was to allow the keeping in a coffer, with separate locks for each executor, of the money Scales had paid. Secondly, she was to declare how much she had already spent out of the money (amounting to over £1,100) accruing from the testator’s moveables and the sale of Sturston, another of the Felbrigg manors in Norfolk. Dam said that she had failed to perform either of these conditions, alleging that she had received an instalment of 550 marks from Scales without informing her co-executors and had refused to tell them how she had disposed of it. He claimed that he himself had not taken any part of Felbrigg’s estate into his hands, save for the reversion of various lands and tenements which he had bought from her and the other executors for nearly £40, a sum which he had already paid. He added that he was entitled in the right of his wife, Elizabeth, to an annual rent of 9s. charged upon certain properties in Aylmerton which had been included in the sale to Scales. He also demanded that Katherine should account for the disposal of her husband’s goods, or else provide him with a security to indemnify him in his capacity as Felbrigg’s executor, since over £800-worth of the testator’s debts and legacies were still unpaid. Katherine responded with a supplemental bill, claiming that Felbrigg had also made William Yelverton*, a man whom he had trusted above all others, one of his executors, but that Dam had secretly removed him from this position of responsibility, so that he could have his way in ‘sotille materes’ and hamper the execution of the will. (Quite what she meant by the allegation is not clear. It is unlikely that Dam could have imposed his will on Yelverton, a justice of the court of King’s bench, although Katherine might have been implying that he had tampered with Felbrigg’s will.) With regard to the reversion the MP claimed to have bought, she asserted that her husband had never agreed that he should have any of his property. She had nevertheless bade Dam to make out a deed to himself of the lands in question because he was of her council and had promised to help her in all matters, only to find after she had sealed the document that it in fact related to 34 tenements belonging to the Felbrigg manors at Felbrigg and Aylmerton. She also said that her husband had granted an annuity of eight marks to his daughter, Anne Felbrigg, a nun at Bruisyard, Suffolk, but that Dam had ‘subtly’ acquired the parcel of land upon which the annuity was drawn.18 Procs. Chancery Eliz. ed. Caley and Bayley, ii. pp. xxiii-xxv.

To complicate matters, Katherine and Dam were co-defendants in another Chancery case brought by Lord Scales. The peer claimed to have paid fully for the reversion purchased from Katherine, but that she, Dam and John Bacon, a Felbrigg feoffee, had refused to make a release to him. In her answer, Katherine said that it was Dam and Bacon who had refused to make the release; in his Dam repeated his claim that she had made the sale without the knowledge of him or Groos and had not observed the conditions they had afterwards demanded from her. Scales’s suit concluded in an award made in Chancery on 12 Mar. 1449. This upheld his purchase, but the court instructed him to confirm manumissions Felbrigg had granted to certain bondmen in his will, to ensure that Anne Felbrigg received her annuity and to allow Dam’s wife her rent charge at Aylmerton. It is unlikely that the award encompassed the separate quarrel between Katherine and Dam, since they were still at loggerheads at the beginning of the 1450s. By now John Wymondham*, who had formerly leased the manor of Felbrigg from Katherine, had purchased the reversion of it and the neighbouring manor of Aylmerton from Scales, but Dam’s continuing demands on the Felbrigg estate threatened his title. In November 1451, therefore, Katherine and Wymondham agreed to take ‘lawful and reasonable’ means to safeguard Wymondham’s purchase. By the following January they had agreed to stage a collusive legal action (in the form of a recovery) between themselves to secure Wymondham from Dam’s claims to lands and rent at Felbrigg and Aylmerton.19 Ibid. pp. xxvi-xxviii; Blomefield, viii. 112; Norf. RO, Ketton-Cremer mss, WKC 1/337.

By this date, Dam was embroiled in another quarrel, for he was an ally of the Pastons in their dispute with Robert Hungerford, Lord Moleyns, who had made a spurious claim to their manor at Gresham. When Moleyns sent a large force to drive Margaret Paston from the manor in January 1449, she found refuge with Dam’s wife at his manor in nearby Sustead.20 Paston Letters, i. 52. On the following 30 Nov. Dam wrote from Sustead to John Paston in London, informing him that he had spoken on his behalf to John de Vere, earl of Oxford, who had responded favourably to his requests for help. He added that he had also spoken to Moleyns’s agent, John Partridge, who was keeping Gresham for the peer with the assistance of John Mariot. The two men, he reported, were putting on great airs and holding big ‘junkeryes and dyneres’ at the manor.21 Ibid. ii. 29-30 (where, however, this letter is misdated ‘30 Nov. 1448’: M.A. Rowling, ‘Disseisin of the Pastons’, Norf. Archaeology, xl. 305). Dam was taking a risk in supporting the Pastons against such a powerful opponent, for in February 1450 Margaret Paston warned her husband that he and the MP, both of whom were then in London, were in danger. She asked Paston not to venture out unaccompanied, for Moleyns (who was presumably attending the second session of the Parliament of November 1449) had ‘a cumpany of brothell wyth hym that rekk not qhat they don, and seche are most for to drede’. She added that ‘I wold not Jon of Damme xuld com hom tyl the cuntré be storyd otherwyse than it is’.22 Paston Letters, i. 227-30. By October the Pastons had renewed hopes of redress, for Moleyns’s ally, William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, was by now disgraced and dead, and Moleyns himself was rumoured to have fallen out of favour with the powerful Richard, duke of York. John Paston’s friend, William Wayte, urged him to take advantage of these changed political circumstances by seeking election as a knight of the shire for Norfolk to the impending Parliament. He also advised him to ‘labour’ the mayor of Norwich to have either Dam or another ally, William Jenney*, returned as a burgess of that city. He added that Dam should ‘be ware for the Lorde Moleyns, and, syr, late the cetye be ware, for he wyll do hem a velony but yf he may have hese men’, whom he described as ‘bestys’.23 Ibid. ii. 48-49. Wayte was writing on 6 Oct., apparently unaware that the citizens of Norwich had already returned Dam to Parliament the previous day.24 C219/16/1. Following his election, Dam attested the Norfolk county election to the same assembly, which opened at Westminster on 6 Nov. He and James Gresham wrote to Paston from London five days later, to inform him that York’s retainer, Sir William Oldhall*, was the new Speaker, that the earl of Oxford would take his place on a forthcoming commission of oyer and terminer in Norfolk, and that Lord Moleyns had ‘hadde langage of yow in the Kyngges presence’. They also recommended him to come to London, the better to look after his own interests, and advised him that those who wished to present a petition to Parliament should file it in the Commons by St. Edmund’s Day (either 16 or 20 November, depending on the saint meant). Paston had petitioned a previous Parliament about the wrongs done to him by Moleyns, so presumably he was considering making another appeal for redress.25 Paston Letters, ii. 55-56.

In this period the Pastons, along with Sir John Fastolf and other friends, were also planning action against the de la Pole retainers, John Heydon* and Sir Thomas Tuddenham*, by having them indicted for their activities in East Anglia. Dam was very much associated with such plans, since he was included in a list of people the two men had allegedly wronged.26 Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, ii. 216-17. Despite the death of its patron, the de la Pole affinity was nothing if not resilient. In March 1451, there was a rumour at Norwich that its members had gained revenge against those who had promoted the commission (the earl of Oxford, Yelverton, John Paston and Dam) by securing their indictment in Kent, the scene of Cade’s Rebellion the previous year. According to the same rumour, Dam’s indictment was for treason, for having supposedly schemed to ensure the indictment of Heydon for the same offence, after Heydon had cut down the displayed quarter of an executed man.27 Paston Letters ed. Davis, i. 238; ii. 67.

Dam remained a faithful ally of the Pastons in subsequent years. During the first half of the 1450s, he was involved in negotiations for a marriage between John Paston’s sister, Elizabeth, and John, the son of William Clopton.28 Ibid. i. 40. He also kept the family informed of developments in the Norfolk property market. In about 1452 he told Agnes Paston that Sibyl Boys had talked privately about selling her place called ‘Halys’ and that Sir John Fastolf, reported to have sold his manor of Hellesdon to Geoffrey Boleyn* of London, was perhaps about to sell more property. Agnes was sceptical about Sibyl’s intentions (although it is likely that Dam had reported them accurately, since he had acted as a Boys feoffee in the mid 1440s), but she appeared hopeful of obtaining property from Fastolf. She asked her son, John, to bid for any property which the knight might put up for sale, since she was sure that Fastolf would prefer to see his lands go to his kinsmen, rather than to complete strangers.29 Ibid. 38-39; CP25(1)/169/188/121, 143; 170/190/205. In the event, the Pastons obtained much of the Fastolf estate, including Hellesdon, at the end of the decade. Margaret Paston was living on that manor in October 1460, when she invited the mayor of Norwich, his wife and Dam to dine with her.30 Paston Letters ed. Davis, i. 259. The Pastons’ hold on the Fastolf lands was nevertheless far from secure, and earlier in the same month Friar Brackley had advised John Paston, if he were in London when the Parliament of 1460 opened, to seek a commission against his opponents, and to have Dam included on it. Busy as he was with the Pastons’ concerns, Dam soon needed to look to his own affairs. In March 1461, during the chaotic early weeks of Edward IV’s reign, there were reports that a man who had returned to Norfolk after fighting in the battle of Wakefield the previous December had ‘gadered felaship to have mordered John Damme’.31 Ibid. i. 520; ii. 260.

Three months later, Dam supported John Paston in the controversial election of the knights of the shire for Norfolk to Edward IV’s first Parliament. The under sheriff, William Prys, presided at the county court that met at Norwich on 15 June 1461, when the ‘grettyst voyse’ was for Paston, John Berney† and Henry Gray, son of the Norfolk MP of 1450. As it happened, the election was for nothing because the opposition that the King faced in northern England obliged him to postpone the Parliament to November. The sheriff himself, (Sir) John Howard* conducted a fresh election on the following 10 Aug., when the electors chose Paston and Berney, an outcome not to his liking since he wished to return Gray and Sir William Chamberlain†. A violent altercation ensued, during which one of his servants struck Paston with a dagger, although the latter’s ‘good dobelet’ saved him from serious injury. Howard’s version of events has survived in a petition to the Crown. Accusing Paston, Berney and their supporters, including Dam, of threats and intimidation, he alleged that they had attended the August election with some 1,000 men, many of them heavily armed and unqualified to take part in the proceedings, and that they had forced him to seal an election indenture confirming Paston and Berney as knights of the shire. Yet these were partisan and exaggerated claims, and it seems clear that Paston and Berney were the candidates most favoured by the electorate. When another shire court opened at Norwich on 28 Dec., a rumour that William Prys, now working under Howard’s successor as sheriff, Sir Thomas Montgomery†, had received a writ to hold yet another election spread through the city. An angry crowd gathered outside the shire hall, forcing Prys to flee for his life. Dam and others present managed to usher him out of the shire-house and, with ‘moche labour’, to get him to ‘Sporyer Rowe’ (now London Street). A mob gathered here as well, obliging Prys’s rescuers to take him into a house and to bar its door, while they waited for the mayor to convey him away to safety. No doubt with a view to quashing this rumour, the court confirmed the election of Paston and Berney when it reconvened in early January, although it is far from certain that they had joined their fellows in the Commons by that date or, indeed, that they were ever actually able to take up their seats there.32 C.H. Williams, ‘A Norf. Parlty. Election, 1461’, EHR, xl. 79-86; K.B. McFarlane, Eng. in the 15th Cent. 7-9; Paston Letters ed. Davis, i. 201-2, 392, 270-1; ii. 238, 242-3, 246-7, 261-2; H. Kleineke, ‘East-Anglian Elections’, in The Fifteenth Cent. X ed. Kleineke, 168, 171-4, 179, 181-2, 185-7.

Dam died within a year of this fracas, although he was still active during the spring and summer of 1462. He served on several commissions in May that year and he went to London the following July, when he took part in discussions about the Paston family’s affairs.33 Paston Letters ed. Davis, i. 166-7. Given his intimate relationship with the Pastons, it is surprising that none of them is mentioned in his will, which he made on the following 4 Aug. He requested burial in Sustead parish church, to which he bequeathed small sums for its fabric, its high altar and various lights. He also gave a local fraternity 3s. 4d., and he left sums of money to the churches at Melton, Aylmerton, Gresham, Bessingham and Thurgaton. For the good of his soul, he requested 100 masses and a ‘trentale of St. Gregory’ after his death. With regard to his lands, he left his widow, Elizabeth, and her heirs various properties at Aylmerton, Gresham and Felbrigg, but his heir, his eldest son Simon, was to succeed to the rest of his estate, centred on Sustead. Should Simon die without male heirs, another son, Clement, was to succeed him, with like remainders to five younger sons (the sixth, James, was excluded from this settlement because he was a Benedictine monk). As for his daughters (the will does not indicate how many he had), Dam directed that each of them should have 20 marks for her marriage. He died before 19 Dec. 1462, the will’s date of probate. His heir was his son, Simon, to whom, along with James Gresham and John Coke of Antingham, he had entrusted its execution.34 Reg. Brosyard, ff. 305-6. Like his father, Simon practised law and was an attorney in the court of common pleas. He died in 1498.35 CPR, 1494-1509, p. 3; PCC 26 Horne (PROB11/11, f. 209v).