DAVELL, John

The identity of the John Davell who represented Lostwithiel in the Parliament of 1447 has not been established beyond reasonable doubt. While his colleague, Richard Perkyn*, appears to have been a Cornish yeoman, no suitable local candidate has been traced. By the reign of Henry VI Lostwithiel regularly returned outsiders, and in the case of the Parliament of 1447 (summoned successively to the unattractive provincial backwaters of Cambridge and Bury St. Edmunds) many other Cornish boroughs resorted to similar measures. It is thus reasonable to suppose that Davell was also a foreigner to Cornwall, but it is worth observing that Lostwithiel was one of only two Cornish boroughs whose election return in 1447 shows no obvious signs of tampering, and that the two men who stood surety for Davell’s parliamentary attendance, Nicholas Tresithney and John Treffry alias Tremure*, possessed impeccable local credentials.1 C219/15/4.

If Davell was nevertheless an outsider, he may have been any of several possible candidates. There seems to be little reason to follow Wedgwood in assigning the MP origins in Devon or Somerset, where parliamentary seats were as abundant, and where the local communities were experiencing as much difficulty in finding willing candidates as in Cornwall.2 HP Biogs. ed. Wedgwood and Holt, 261; C1/27/87, 286/9; C146/3284; C142/40/37. A more likely supposition is that Davell, like a number of other men elected by Cornish boroughs in the 1440s, came from the east of England. If this was so, he may have been a scion of the Deyvyll family, members of which attested the Suffolk elections of 1432, 1437 and 1453.

Alternatively, it is possible that the MP was a Londoner. Probably during Bishop Rotherham’s chancellorship the Colchester merchant William Hody complained of having been defrauded by one John Davell, then factor of the London grocer Henry Denys in Spain. According to Hody’s account, Davell had lost all his money by loose living, and had sought a remedy in blatant fraud. To this end, he had induced a middleman, one Thomas More, to approach Hody with the request that he might exchange a sum of the local currency into an English florin of gold. More was then to claim publicly that Hody had given him a broken counterfeit florin, which was known among the English merchant community to be Davell’s property, while Davell would simultaneously claim to have been burgled and robbed of English money in crowns and florins to the value of five marks. The conspiracy was, however, revealed by More’s confession and Davell was forced to return to England in disgrace, where, rather than own up to his misuse of his master’s goods, he claimed that Hody had stolen £10 from him, and used Henry Denys’s influence in the city to procure a favourable jury.3 C1/66/230.

It was probably a different John Davell who entered the trade of the London drapers, but by the early 1480s had fallen upon hard times and found himself in the debtors’ prison of Ludgate. In spite of repeated petitions by Davell’s wife to the chancellor, he eventually died there, and before too long his widow was herself imprisoned for her husband’s debts.4 C1/80/12, 131/68, 132/46. He may have been the John Devale who served as one of the executors of Elizabeth Malpas (d.1484), wid. of (Sir) Thomas Cook II*: C1/57/13.