JENNEY, John

From a family of lawyers of obscure origin, Jenney enjoyed a successful career in that profession. Having probably begun his legal training in the mid 1430s, he was active in his native East Anglia within a few years, engaging in a quarrel with a fellow lawyer, Thomas Cornwallis*, over property in Brome and elsewhere in north Suffolk, during the early 1440s. In 1441 he sued Cornwallis, who held a manor at Brome, in the court of King’s bench, alleging that his opponent and several associates had trespassed on his lands at Brome, Thrandeston and Stuston in March that year, but how he, a younger son, came by these lands is unknown.15 KB27/721, rot. 91.

At the end of the same decade, Jenney was associated with his father and namesake and elder brother in a series of disputes over lands in Knodishall and neighbouring parishes, namely that part of Suffolk where the elder John Jenney had acquired property and taken up residence. The disputes featured in lawsuits that several plaintiffs brought at Westminster against the Jenneys. Evidently acting in collaboration with each other, they variously accused the elder John and his sons of entering their holdings in that area of the county, of distraining their livestock and of assaulting or threatening them or their servants on several occasions in 1440, 1441, 1447 and 1448. Although mainly minor landholders, the plaintiffs included two locally important figures, the abbot of Leiston and prior of Snape.16 CP40/754, rots. 326-8, 330, 341, 374d, 404d. Such quarrels were probably an almost inevitable outcome of the Jenneys’ efforts to augment their estates in Suffolk as they grew in prominence in the county.

Like William Jenney, John was educated at Lincoln’s Inn, where he gave his first reading at Lent 1445,17 Reading and Moots, i. (Selden Soc. lxxi), p. xii. This was a little unusual, since a first reading was usually delivered in the autumn. and served several terms as one of its governors. Evidently close early in their careers, the two brothers shared lodgings at the inn, and in 1458 they sued an attorney of the court of common pleas for breaking into their chamber there in June that year.18 CP40/790, rot. 325. Although he was not to rise as far William in their shared profession, John was also a very capable lawyer, and he gained several eminent patrons and clients, among them the third Mowbray duke of Norfolk, whose retainer he became, George, duke of Clarence, for whom he was a bailiff and steward, and the Bourgchier family, for whom he was a feoffee.19 KB27/766, rot. 71; 767, rot. 30d; CCR, 1468-76, no. 1382; CP25(1)/294/74/7. Other significant clients included Ralph, Lord Cromwell, for whom by 1450 he had become a councillor, and the Knyvets, whom he assisted during their long struggle to make good their claim to the inheritance of Sir John Clifton. Jenney’s relationship with the Knyvets was a close one: for years, he was chief steward of their Norfolk estates and Thomas, his eldest son and heir, almost certainly married one of John Knyvet’s daughters.20 Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, ii. 197-8; Virgoe, 138, 188; CPR, 1446-52, pp. 421-3. At one stage Thomas was residing at Buckenham castle, the Knyvet residence which had once belonged to Sir John Clifton. Through his connexion with Cromwell, Jenney came to hold office on a manor at Wymondham that passed after that peer’s death in 1456 to his two nieces and co-heirs and their husbands, Sir Thomas Neville and Humphrey Bourgchier, younger sons of the earl of Salisbury and Viscount Bourgchier respectively.21 KB29/88, rot. 14. It is also possible that it was Jenney, rather than his father, who acted as an attorney for the executors of Sir John Fastolf in 1460, given that the elder John Jenney was a few months short of his own death at this date.22 Procs. Suff. Inst. Archaeology, xxxv. 41, 47-49. But E.W. Ives, Common Lawyers: Thomas Kebell, 467, assumes that the attorney was the MP’s father. It is not clear whether the John Jenney who in the mid 1450s helped Sir John Fastolf in his legal dispute over the wardship of Thomas Fastolf† was the MP or the elder man: Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 141-3.

Of Jenney’s corporate clients, the most important was the city of Norwich. Already associated with Norwich by the mid 1440s, he and a more senior member of his profession, Walter Moyle*, provided counsel to its MPs, Robert Toppe* and Thomas Ingham*, during the Parliament of 1445, which sat at Westminster.23 Norwich city recs., roll of debts claimed by Ingham’s sons after his death, NCR 7d. Within a decade, he himself sat for Norwich in the first of the two Parliaments in which he is known to have represented it. By the late 1450s the city was paying him 20s. p.a., a retainer he was still receiving 30 years later. For several months in the early 1460s he temporarily filled the position of recorder of Norwich, an office left vacant by the death of John Dam* in the second half of 1462 and not filled until the election of Dam’s successor, Henry Spelman, in the following January. Jenney served as steward of the sheriffs’ court at Norwich in the latter part of his career, and on more than one occasion he was accused of corruptly using the office to influence the outcome of lawsuits which he himself had brought there. During the late 1460s and early 1470s, he was one of the lawyers who advised the city about founding a chantry in the guildhall chapel, and in 1476 he, along with his elder brother and Spelman, represented Norwich in negotiations with the council of the abbot of St. Benet of Hulme. A few years later, both Jenney brothers and William Jenney’s son, Edmund†, were among the lawyers who advised the citizens in connexion with a suit which the abbot had brought against them.24 Ibid. chamberlains’ accts., 1458-60, 1463-4, 1469-90, 1479-88, NCR 7d, 7e, 18a; NCR 16d, ff. 78, 90v, 103; C1/64/230, 787.

Jenney’s connexions with Norwich were also personal, since he married Elizabeth, one of the daughters and coheirs of Thomas Wetherby, an alderman of the city. (It is possible that it was Elizabeth’s father who introduced Jenney to Lord Cromwell and the Knyvets, given that Thomas was one of Cromwell’s servants and that his kinsman, John Wetherby, was a longstanding retainer of the Knyvet family.) The leader of one of Norwich’s political factions, Wetherby was a controversial figure, but there is no evidence that he drew his son-in-law into the city’s turbulent politics. He owned an estate outside Norwich, and in due course Elizabeth succeeded to the manor of Intwood and other properties to the south-west of the city. She had to wait for some time to do so, since her mother Margaret held a life interest in her husband’s lands and survived until 1458. Shortly after Wetherby’s death in the summer of 1445, Elizabeth and Jenney (one of his father-in-law’s executors), fearing that she might lose her title to Intwood, filed a bill in Chancery against a Wetherby feoffee, John Hawk of Norwich, to prevent him from conveying the manor to Margaret Wetherby in fee simple. Such a conveyance would have breached the dead man’s will and given Margaret the power to alienate the most important part of Elizabeth’s future inheritance. Whatever Margaret’s intentions, this Chancery suit does not say much for her relationship with her daughter and son-in-law. It is worth noting that neither of them features in her will.25 Norf. Archaeology, xli. 257, 275; Norwich consist. ct., Regs. Wylbey, ff. 30v-32, Brosyard, ff. 83-84; C1/17/136.

During the early 1440s Jenney, his brother, William, and their father incurred the enmity of William de la Pole, earl (later duke) of Suffolk. It cannot have helped that they were associated with John Mowbray, duke of Norfolk, a rival of the earl in East Anglia, even though the elder John Jenney had once served as a de la Pole feoffee.26 Corp. London RO, hr 169/17. De la Pole sued them for allegedly trespassing on his warren at Benhall, Suffolk,27 CP40/727, rot. 475. and they became targets for his followers. The power and influence of de la Pole, who became the King’s chief minister, meant that it was not until after his impeachment and death that the Jenneys were able to voice their grievances against him and his henchmen. Indictments taken by commissioners of oyer and terminer sitting in East Anglia in late 1450 included the charge that Suffolk’s retainers had pursued a vendetta against them because they had provided legal advice to three young sisters and coheiresses whom John Ulveston* and other de la Pole men had unjustly disseised of a manor at Westleton in 1440. It was also alleged that Ulveston and John Belley had threatened the Jenneys with their master’s vi potencia’, and that two of de la Pole’s leading retainers, Sir Thomas Tuddenham* and John Heydon*, had so oppressed them that they had given bonds to the peer to try to soften his indignation against them. In due course Suffolk had used one of the bonds to sue them for £100, and in execution of this suit Ulveston and Belley, along with the abbot of Leiston and others, had entered the Jenney lands at Knodishall and elsewhere in Suffolk and seized a large number of William Jenney’s livestock. According to other indictments, Ulveston had extorted 100 marks from the Jenneys at Norwich in 1441; Ulveston and Belley had procured two men to smash a stained-glass window depicting the supposed arms of the Jenneys’ ancestors in Buxlow parish church in July 1450; and de la Pole’s men had illegally maintained the abbot in a long-running quarrel with the elder John Jenney.28 KB9/267/25; KB27/788, rex rot. 9; CCR, 1447-54, pp. 287-9.

Suffolk’s fall from power marked the collapse of a government dominated by a Household faction and the intervention of Richard, duke of York, in national affairs. At the summoning of the Parliament of 1450-1 other opponents of the de la Pole affinity in East Anglia regarded both Jenney brothers as suitable candidates for election to the Commons. In a letter to John Paston*, William Wayte (a servant of William Yelverton*) wrote that the ‘Jenneys mown ben in the parlement, for they kun seye well’.29 Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 48. He suggested that William Jenney should stand for Norwich and his brother for Great Yarmouth, although in the event William was returned for Dunwich and John was not elected at all. During the Parliament, it appears that John and several retainers of the duke of Norfolk took the law into their own hands, because Suffolk’s widowed duchess, Alice de la Pole, later sued them for forcible entry on to various de la Pole properties in Norfolk in February 1451.30 KB27/767, rot. 30d. There were, however, limits to how far Jenney was prepared to defy the de la Pole following. In December 1450, for example, he had faced criticism from Sir John Fastolf for not defending Ralph, Lord Cromwell’s East Anglian interests against Tuddenham and Heydon.31 Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, ii. 197-8. His failure to act probably arose from the fact that Thomas Wetherby had made the latter the trustee for his lands at Cringleford. As these were properties which Elizabeth Jenney expected to succeed after the death of her widowed mother, Jenney could not afford to antagonise Heydon too far.32 C. Rawcliffe, Medicine for the Soul, 148. He had also to take into account that Tuddenham and Heydon were still powerful figures in the region. Despite the death of its patron, the de la Pole affinity had proved resilient, and many of Suffolk’s followers had rallied around his widow. Political events were moving back in their favour by the beginning of 1453, for the Household faction in which Suffolk had played such a leading part had regained control of the government. In February that year Jenney’s father and brother and several Mowbray men were indicted at Ipswich for various ‘traisons’ and felonies, although a few weeks later the King, for ‘certaine causes and consideracions’, halted further proceedings against them.33 KB9/118/2/165.

It is somewhat ironic that Jenney gained election to the Commons in the same February, given that the Parliament of 1453 proved especially sympathetic to the cause of the Household and the queen, the duke of York’s principal opponent. Both he and his fellow burgess for Norwich, William Barley*, were obliged to forswear their wages as MPs, probably because of the financial difficulties faced by the city’s corporation.34 F. Blomefield, Norf. iii. 165. During the Parliament Jenney pursued a quarrel with a past adversary, Thomas Cornwallis, this time over lands at Pulham and Hardwick in Norfolk, possibly properties he had purchased. In pleadings of Easter term 1453 he accused Cornwallis and a husbandman associate of having trespassed on the lands in question, which Cornwallis claimed had passed to him from his father.35 KB27/768, rot. 35.

Political circumstances had changed dramatically by the time of the next Parliament, called after the duke of York and his allies had regained control of the government in the wake of their victory at the battle of St. Albans in May 1455. Jenney was actively involved in canvassing for the Mowbray interest and in a couple of well-known letters he wrote to John Paston immediately after the county election in Norfolk, he described how he had ‘labored’ many of the shire’s electors. The electors had responded by saying that they would accept one of the Mowbray candidates, Sir Roger Chamberlain*, but not the other, John Howard*, ‘in asmeche as he hadde no lyvelode in the shire’ (a sentiment with which Jenney himself sympathized). On hearing this news Howard had been ‘as wode as a wilde bullok’, but in the end he as well as Chamberlain had gained election, no doubt because of the influence which Mowbray, an ally of the duke of York, then enjoyed in the shire. In the first of these letters Jenney also revealed his own hopes of securing re-election as one of the MPs for Norwich, where a return was not made until 7 July, a mere two days before Parliament opened. Expressing his belief that all of the aldermen there except Richard Brown II* were well disposed towards him, he asked Paston to canvass for him in the city. If the citizens did not respond favourably, Paston was to say that it had been his own idea to put forward his name, presumably to ensure that the latter did not lose face. In the event, neither Jenney nor Paston, who had hoped to enter the Commons as one of Norfolk’s knights of the shire, gained election. At the end of his first letter to Paston, Jenney declared that some ‘holde it right straunge to be in this parlement, and me thenkith they be wyse men that soo doo’, a somewhat odd remark given his efforts to gain a seat in it.36 Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 119-21; K.B. McFarlane, Eng. in the 15th Cent. 6.

During the later 1450s, Jenney quarrelled bitterly with John Selot, master of St. Giles’s hospital in Norwich. He appears to have initiated the dispute, which began after of the death of his mother-in-law, by seizing 200 acres of land occupied by the hospital in Cringleford to the south-west of Norwich.37 Unless otherwise indicated, the following is based on Rawcliffe, 147-50. Rawcliffe suggests that it began in ‘about 1457’, probably because she mistakenly assumes that Margaret Wetherby died in that year rather than 1458. He claimed that the hospital was a mere tenant of this property, which was part of his wife’s manor of Cringleford; in response Selot asserted that in fact the 200 acres belonged to the hospital and that Jenney was his tenant. It was a particular irony of the dispute that Jenney enjoyed the support of John Heydon in his role as a Wetherby trustee, particularly since Selot was closely linked with the de la Pole circle. By February 1459 he and his opponent had agreed to submit their quarrel to the arbitration of the two chief justices of England. Despite the appointment of such distinguished mediators, the enmity between the two men was too bitter to allow an immediate resolution of their differences. In the following summer, Jenney managed to have Selot committed to the Marshalsea prison in London, charged with having breached the statute of maintenance. A bill he subsequently presented to King’s bench alleged that his adversary had tried to influence the outcome of a lawsuit heard before the mayor of Norwich a few months earlier. In this earlier suit the prior of Horsham St. Faith had charged Jenney with having disseised him of a messuage in that city, but in his bill Jenney claimed that Selot had tried to pervert the course of justice by lavishly entertaining the prior’s attorneys at his house. In another suit heard in King’s bench in the same year, Jenney claimed that Selot had led a raid on his fishery at Cringleford. Selot did not deny entering the property, but claimed that he was its owner and Jenney the trespasser. Before the end of 1459, new mediators attempted to settle the quarrel between the two men but this second attempt at arbitration proved as equally abortive as the first. There was a fresh effort to negotiate a settlement in April 1461, when the matter went before the priors of Norwich and Woodbridge and others. Rather than try where others had failed, they referred it to two umpires of sufficient rank to impose a solution. The umpires, Walter Lyhert, bishop of Norwich, and the young John Mowbray, who succeeded his father, the third duke of Norfolk, during the deliberations, came to a decision very much in John Selot’s favour. They assigned the Wetherby manor in Cringleford to the master and his successors and ordered both parties to cease all litigation. In return, they expected Selot to compensate his opponent with no more than £13, a sum the master ‘paid’ by pardoning the arrears of rent he claimed that Jenney owed him. Whatever he might have felt about this outcome, Jenney had no choice but to obey the umpires’ ruling, and he and his wife conveyed their title in the manor to Selot and his feoffees in the winter of 1462-3.38 Norwich city recs., memo. of a plea of ‘freshforce’, NCR 8a/11; KB27/793, rot. 103; CP25(1)/170/192/3.

Not long afterwards, Jenney fell out with the Paston family. He does not appear to have participated in William Jenney’s dispute with the Pastons over the will of Sir John Fastolf, but the fact that he was William’s brother was probably sufficient reason for them to turn against him. He was still on good terms with the Pastons at the end of 1461, since in December that year he carried a message from John Paston to his wife, Margaret, but in a letter she wrote to her husband in May 1465 she declared, ‘I wold ryght fayn that John Jenney werre putte ovte of the comyssyon of the peas and that my brothere Wyll Lumner were set yn hys stede, for me thinkyth it were ryght necessare that there were such a won in that countray that oght you gode wyll’.39 Paston Letters ed. Davis, i. 276-8, 299-300.

When the next commission of the peace for Norfolk was issued in the following February Jenney was indeed dropped from the bench for several years, but it is impossible to tell whether his exclusion was due to the Pastons’ machinations. Ironically, given that the family might originally have turned against him because of their disputes with his brother, Jenney had also fallen out with William Jenney by the late 1460s. In about 1468 he filed a bill in Chancery, asserting that the elder John Jenney had left the manor of ‘Raffys’ in Norfolk, along with certain lands at Knodishall and elsewhere in Suffolk, to him and his wife, Elizabeth, and accusing William of using a forged version of the elder John’s will to claim the property for himself.40 C1/33/295-6.

Like his brother, Jenney was still an opponent of the Pastons at the time of the Readeption Parliament of 1470. The return for Norfolk has not survived and the names of those who represented the county in the Commons are unknown, but it is evident that there was a contested election, in which he and the Pastons were on opposite sides. On 22 Nov., four days before the Parliament opened, Margaret Paston wrote an anxious letter to her son, John†. She had heard from those that were ‘conversaunte with the toder parte’ that the election would be annulled, a new return made and Jenney ‘set there-in’. She therefore asked her son to find out as soon as possible if these rumours were true, ‘for the seid Jenney this day rideth vp to London ward, and I suppose because of the same’, and in a postscript she added that ‘Geney seth he wull attempt the law there-in’.41 Paston Letters ed. Davis, i. 368; McFarlane, 9-10. Davis dates Margaret’s letter ‘19 Nov. 1472’ but McFarlane shows that it dates from two years earlier and refers to the Readeption Parl. Margaret’s letter suggests that Jenney himself had stood as a candidate, had failed to gain election and was now seeking to have the result overturned on the grounds of some procedural irregularity. Although certainly not one of the leading gentlemen of the shire, as a candidate he could have expected the backing of the Knyvets, local supporters of Henry VI’s Readeption, and probably George, duke of Clarence, who had helped to overthrow Edward IV. After Clarence’s earlier rebellion against Edward in the previous year, a jury had indicted Jenney, a bailiff and steward for the lands in Norfolk pertaining to the duke’s honour of Richmond, for having organized raids on manors belonging to Anthony Wydeville, Lord Scales, Edward’s unpopular brother-in-law, in the west of the county.42 Virgoe, 141; Hicks, 36; KB27/848, rex rot. 8d. If there was a contest at the election of Norfolk’s knights of the shire in 1470, it is unlikely that this was due to political divisions within the county, since the Pastons were among those who supported the Readeption.

The Pastons and his own brother were not the only people with whom Jenney fell into dispute during the latter part of his career. In the late 1460s he quarrelled with Henry Gray, whose manor of Ketteringham neighboured that of Intwood. In a suit filed in King’s bench, Gray (son of the late Henry Gray*) claimed that the Suffolk esquire, Robert Martin, Jenney and others had maliciously accused his wife, Joan, of having taken goods belonging to Martin, so leading to her indictment and temporary imprisonment in Norwich castle at the beginning of 1466. The lawsuit was just one manifestation of the bitter enmity between Gray and Martin, who were brothers-in-law: it is not known how Jenney had become involved, but his support for Martin prompted Gray, by then a knight, to sue him for maintenance in the early 1470s. In the same period Jenney and Gray clashed in a subsidiary property dispute over holdings at Ketteringham.43 KB27/828, rot. 79; 843, rot. 25; 845, rots. 109, 110; 848, rot. 26d.

In the later 1470s the disputatious Jenney engaged in further quarrels. One of these was with the twice widowed Margaret Radcliffe, formerly the wife of the Norfolk esquire, John Bacon, who had died in 1462.44 Reg. Brosyard, ff. 304v-305v. Her son and heir by Bacon had married the MP’s eldest daughter, another Margaret, in January 1475 but not long afterwards she and Jenney fell out over the terms of the marriage settlement and he sued her in the common pleas.45 CP40/862, rot. 405; 863, rot. 116. In another dispute of the second half of the 1470s, Jenney clashed with two past adversaries, John Selot and Sir Henry Gray, one of Selot’s friends. The controversy concerned the case of Christine Baker of Intwood, excommunicated and imprisoned at Selot’s instigation after she had allegedly defamed Gray. Christine felt so aggrieved by the sentence passed against her that she decided to appeal to Rome. In December 1476 Jenney (quite probably her manorial lord) and three others stood surety for her at Westminster, to guarantee that she would prosecute her appeal. (It is tempting to assume that his dislike of Selot and Gray prompted him to act on her behalf.) The affair dragged on until 1480, when Christine failed to continue with her appeal and Jenney forfeited the £40 he had put forward as her guarantor. To make matters worse, Gray was one of those to whom the Crown granted the confiscated sum.46 Rawcliffe, 150-1; CPL, xiii. 727; CCR, 1476-85 no. 610.

Although disputes and litigation loomed large in the latter part of Jenney’s career, they did not completely dominate it. He was again elected to Parliament as one of the MPs for Norwich in 1478. This time he did receive parliamentary wages from the city, although he agreed to accept £4 rather than the full £4 16s. due to him.47 Norwich chamberlains’ accts., NCR 18a, f. 106v. If he was still one of Clarence’s servants at this date, he cannot have felt particularly comfortable attending the Parliament, given that it attainted the duke, who had finally exhausted the King’s patience with his treasonable activities. Jenney was no longer one of the j.p.s for Norfolk when he entered the Commons of 1478, but he remained active as a commissioner of gaol delivery and as a member of various ad hoc commissions throughout the 1480s. In 1481 he and his wife Elizabeth conveyed their title to a manor at Limpenhoe in south-east Norfolk, to the London alderman, Henry Colet†. It is likely that Limpenhoe had once belonged to Thomas Wetherby, given that the Jenneys had made a release to Colet of the Wetherby manor at Brundall four years earlier. Originally, Wetherby had intended Brundall for Elizabeth Jenney’s sister, Joan, but she had predeceased (or died very shortly after) him. Afterwards Humphrey Bourgchier had bought the reversion of the manor (to vest after the death of Margaret Wetherby) from Wetherby’s executors, but it is not known when Colet had acquired the property.48 CP25(1)/170/193/66; C1/26/281; Blomefield, vii. 220.

As for the manor of Intwood, this remained in the hands of Jenney and his wife, and in November 1481 they made a settlement to ensure that it would pass to their eldest son, Thomas, and his heirs after their deaths.49 CP25(1)/170/193/77. Should Thomas (a lawyer like his father) die without heirs, it was to pass to their second son, Andrew (who had entered the Church), and after Andrew’s death to a third son, John (another lawyer),50 L. Inn Adm. i. 15; L. Inn Black Bks. i. 52. The yr. John was probably the man known as ‘John Jenney of London’ in the late 1460s: CAD, ii. B1969; CCR, 1468-76, no. 150. and his heirs. A fourth son, Edward, and each of Jenney’s three daughters were likewise awarded contingent interests in the property. As it happened, Jenney outlived both his wife and eldest son, and after his death on 18 Apr. 1496 the manor and advowson of Intwood passed to Thomas’s son, William.51 CIPM Hen. VII, ii. 32.