FERROUR, John II

This MP’s name was a common one, but although he is difficult to identify with certainty, he is likely to have been the man who was a tenant of the Fitzalan earls of Arundel in the early fifteenth century, then holding a messuage and seven acres of land in Warningcamp, about a mile away from Arundel.2 Two Fitzalan Surveys (Suss. Rec. Soc. lxvii), 127. Two other namesakes were both connected with the Mowbrays, who like the Fitzalans also held substantial estates in west Sussex. One accompanied John Mowbray, earl of Norfolk, to France in 1415 and 1417, and as a yeoman in his service received a fee of £2 p.a., which was in arrears in 1420-1. A blacksmith, he was reimbursed for money spent in Paris and Rouen on iron and nails for shoeing the earl’s horses in the same year, and in 1422 he was a member of the garrison at Pontoise. Having returned to England following the death of Henry V, he again supplied Mowbray’s retainers with horseshoes in the following year, when he was living in London. Another or the same John Ferrour had been engaged in shipping oats to Normandy from Sussex in early 1421 to victual the English forces.3 L.E. Moye, ‘Estates and Finances of Mowbray Fam.’ (Duke Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1985), 390, from Arundel Castle mss, A1642, mm. 17, 19; Berkeley Castle mss, 1415, mm. 20, 21; E101/50/19, m. 5, 51/2, m. 29; Add. Ch. 17209, mm. 2, 11.

There is a strong possibility that the MP was he who having served at Pont de l’Arche under Robert, Lord Willoughby, in the spring of 1430, was subsequently appointed as lieutenant of the same garrison by John, earl of Arundel, thereafter holding the post until replaced at the close of 1434.4 Add. Ch. 11660. The earl, who was lord of the castle and borough of Arundel, died of his wounds at Beauvais the following year, leaving a young son as heir to the earldom. The borough was represented in the Parliament of 1435 by John Cobbehay*, who like Ferrour had served under Earl John’s command in France, and may have been elected so as to help sort out the deceased lord’s affairs at Westminster. Quite likely, Ferrour’s career followed a similar pattern, and his election to the subsequent Parliament, in 1437, was for the same reason.