LOWER, John

Lower came from a family resident in the parish of St. Winnow since the fourteenth century or before.5 Maclean, iii. 375, conflates the Lower and Lawhire families. John’s early life and parentage are obscure, but he evidently owed his advancement to connexions within the duchy of Cornwall hierarchy which he had forged by the end of Henry V’s reign. As for his offices, he relied on the duchy for his landholdings, and at successive assession courts secured grants of duchy holdings. Thus, from at least Michaelmas 1423 until his death he held the cellar under the duchy’s great hall at Lostwithiel to farm, and in 1429 he shared a grant of the site of the derelict castle of Tintagel with John Bartha, an arrangement which seems to have been renewed in 1441.6 SC6/814/7, m. 1; 22, m. 1; 815/1, m. 1; 816/4, m. 1; Maclean, iii. 202, 375. Lower still held property in Tintagel in 1448: Cornw. RO, Arundell mss, AR2/719/5, m. 5. Within a few years of Henry VI’s accession Lower rose to considerable prominence among the duchy’s officers, for from the accounting year 1429-30 he served as lieutenant to three successive receivers-general of the duchy. In May of the same year, he successfully petitioned the young King for the additional appointment as clerk of the staple at Lostwithiel, a request which was approved by the lords of the council headed by the duke of Gloucester on 26 May 1430.7 SC8/185/9238. He continued in post until the early 1440s, but by the spring of 1443 he had moved to the lesser office of deputy to the clerk John Nayler.

As an important duchy official, Lower was a man of considerable standing in the duchy’s south-western headquarters, the borough of Lostwithiel, where he appears to have dwelt ‘atte Briggesende’,8 CP40/684, rot. 121. and it was thus only natural that the burgesses should return him to Parliament in 1432. Certainly, he was well connected within the wider county too: the men whose deeds he witnessed and whom he served as a feoffee included important shire gentry, including Sir William Bodrugan* and John Wyse* of Sydenham, as well as prominent Lostwithiel burgesses such as Stephen Kendale† and his sons Richard* and Thomas*.9 C1/18/76; Cornw. RO, Arundell (Tywardreath) mss, ART3/60; Edgcombe mss, ME1540; Coode and French mss, CF2/215/54/1. Thomas Kendale chose him as one of the guardians of certain tin mines, which he had set aside to provide a chantry for his soul, and it was ownership of this property that in the summer of 1444 Lower and the Kendales disputed with the tin merchant Odo Vivian (an associate of the notorious Richard Tregoose*), who had married Thomas’s widow, a quarrel which would continue into the 1450s.10 KB146/6/22/4; C1/18/76.

Lower’s reasons for seeking election to the Commons in 1432 cannot be established beyond reasonable doubt, but it is possible that personal motives played a part, for in the early months of that year he was being sued in the court of common pleas by Isabel, the widow of another John Wyse, for breaking into her house in the London parish of St. Margaret Moses and stealing jewels worth £40, including ten gold rings and a gold rosary. Lower denied these charges, but nevertheless saw fit to appear in court in person.11 CP40/684, rot. 121.

The date of Lower’s death has not been discovered. He is last recorded as deputy clerk of the staple in August 1460, but it is not clear whether he was still alive at Michaelmas, when his son and heir, Nicholas, was appointed duchy havener in Cornwall. Nicholas, who attested the Cornish shire elections of 1467, later went on to serve in his father’s former office as clerk of the staple at Lostwithiel.12 SC6/816/6, m. 1; 821/11, m. 21; C241/256/26, 258/51, 110; C219/17/1. The John Lower who attested the shire elections of June 1483 was probably Nicholas’s younger brother: Trevelyan Pprs. i (Cam. Soc. lxvii), 87, 88; Vivian, 298.