MARKEBY, William II

From a Lincoln family with strong connexions with London, where a branch set up in business as goldsmiths, Markeby became a significant landholder in the capital through marriage. His mother-in-law was the heiress of a London alderman and woolmonger, William Bricklesworth alias Courteys†, who had represented the City in the Parliaments of 1340 (Mar.) and 1341. On the death of her first husband, Thomas Dyster, a wealthy mercer, in 1403, she married his business partner, Robert Domenyk. By Dyster, she left a daughter, who, while still a minor, married one of Domenyk’s former apprentices, John Hertwell of Preston (Northamptonshire); by Domenyk she had another daughter who married our MP.2 A.F. Sutton, ‘Alice Domenyk’, Ricardian, xx. 23-34. The connexions that brought this marriage about, in the late 1420s, can only be a matter of speculation. Markeby, as a young lawyer, was already established in London and a local heiress had obvious attractions for him. Alice’s expectations were not, however, free from encumbrances: as long before as 1407 her father had defaulted on a large debt owed to his former master, John Shadworth†, and Henry Somer*, chancellor of the Exchequer, and these creditors had a continuing charge against her inheritance. It is a reasonable speculation that Markeby’s ability to discharge this debt recommended him as a husband for her to the feoffees in her lands, namely, the London aldermen, William Estfield* and John Whatley†, both mercers, John Carpenter II*, the common clerk, and Richard Osbourne, the clerk of the city chamber. They were acting for her father’s creditors, and the settlement they made on 8 Sept. 1427 probably marks the extinction of the debt. They demised to Alice in tail general, as her share of her mother’s property, four messuages in the parish of St. Michael Bassishaw and many other tenements in the City. The remainder was settled in an interesting manner: if she were to die without issue within ten years, so that her husband was not entitled to courtesy, then the property was to remain to him and his heirs until either they had levied £100 from the issues or the feoffees had paid them that sum. Thereafter the feoffees were to be free to re-enter. This settlement was clearly part of the marriage agreement, designed to provide the groom with compensation both for the money he had laid out to redeem his wife’s lands and for the luckless eventuality of her childless death. On the following 22 June these arrangements were complete when Somer quitclaimed to the couple his right in these properties.3 Ibid. 30-31, 36-37; Corp. London RO, hr 156/4; CP40/674, cart. rot. 2.

By this date Markeby was already a man of some substance. In Easter term 1424 he had become one of the filacers of the common pleas at the appointment of the recently-appointed chief justice of that court, Sir William Babington. He had also begun to acquire property of his own. In Michaelmas term 1425 his father had conveyed to him 20 messuages with 20 acres of land and meadow in Lincoln in return for an annual rent of five marks. To this he added property in London and its environs, although probably not until after his marriage: in the late 1420s, on the death of John Cockayne, j.c.p., he took over Cockayne’s house in the close of St. Bartholomew’s hospital in Smithfield; and at an unknown date he became the tenant of Syon abbey in respect of a large house in Isleworth. Together his Lincoln and London properties were valued at as much as £41 p.a. in the tax returns of 1436, the bulk of this sum deriving from his wife’s inheritance.4 CP25(1)/145/156/22; Sutton, 34-35; E179/238/90.

Markeby’s connexions within the legal community are demonstrated by the feoffment he made, on 20 June 1430, of his London property: first among the feoffees was Babington; another was a future justice, Richard Bingham; and a third, the lesser lawyer Robert Walsh*, who was to be Markeby’s fellow MP for Lincoln in the Parliament of 1435.5 Corp. London RO, hr 158/65; Sutton, 37-38. He was also well connected within the city of London, particularly among members of the Grocers Company: in February 1425 he was a feoffee of John Godyn; in April 1430 he served in the same capacity for the widow of John Cosyn; and one of his own feoffees in that year was Richard Keteridge, whom he later named as an executor.6 Corp. London RO, hr 153/44, 59; 158/55. Less positive was Markeby’s relationship with a former warden of the Goldsmith’s Company, Stephen Colney. According to a Chancery petition of the 1440s, in 1427 Colney had advanced the sum of £43 5s. to his fellow goldsmith and our MP’s kinsman, another William Markeby, taking as security a tenement in the parish of St. Vedast Foster Lane. Our MP, knowing that his kinsman could not repay this sum, approached the lender and offered to repay the loan if Colney would convey the tenement to him in fee. The elder Markeby agreed to this arrangement, and on 15 Nov. 1433 Colney made a feoffment to our MP, his father, and Keteridge. Thereupon Colney was paid £20, but the rest of the sum had not been paid at our MP’s death or that of his executor, Keteridge.7 ibid. hr 162/17-19; C1/16/274-5, 431.

Markeby’s election, on 19 Sept. 1435, to represent Lincoln in Parliament must have owed something to his father, who stood as one of the mainpernors for his attendance.8 C219/14/5. Although there is no evidence that he played any part in the city’s administration, he was, like other filacers, an attractive candidate from the electors’ point of view since, as a London resident with Lincoln property, he was no doubt prepared to serve cheaply. At this date he must still have been a relatively young man, but arrangements he made two years later suggest that he believed that his life was not to be a long one. On 8 June 1437, he sued out a royal pardon as ‘of Lincoln, junior, alias of London, gentleman’, and shortly afterwards the property that he held in right of his wife was resettled. Babington and his fellow feoffees of 1430 had conveyed these holdings to Estfield and his surviving cofeoffees, who had retained a reversionary interest in Alice’s property under the conveyance made in 1427; and on 20 June 1437 these feoffees settled them on our MP, styled ‘as of Lincoln, junior, gentleman’, and Alice in joint tail general, with successive remainders to Alice’s issue, and the issue of her half-sister, Ellen Hertwell.9 C67/38, m. 20; Corp. London RO, hr 165/48; Sutton, 38. In the following year, on 2 Nov., these properties, together with those he held in London in his own right, were conveyed to a new set of feoffees, namely William Chapman and Richard Nordon, both London tailors, and Philip Leweston*, one of his fellow filacers in common pleas.10 Corp. London RO, hr 167/10. Beyond the houses he leased in the close of St. Bartholomew’s hospital and at Isleworth, the only London property he held in his own right was the tenement in the parish of St. Vedast Foster Lane, acquired from his namesake, and a shop in that of St. Mary Magdalene in Milk Street, acquired from the Cutler’s Co. in 1433: hr 162/25; 167/2. No doubt this new feoffment was preparatory to the drafting of his will on 18 Dec. 1438.

Markeby’s will is a lengthy document.11 PCC, 26 Luffenham (PROB11/3, ff. 203-4v) (short abstract in Assoc. Archit. Socs. Reps. and Pprs. xli. 85-86). First to be remembered was the hospital of St. Bartholomew, within the close of which he appears to have lived in the house once of Justice Cockayne. He wished to be buried in the choir of the hospital church, leaving small bequests to the master and fellowship of the hospital for the expenses of his interment and 60s. for the erection of a marble stone. But he also remembered the city of his father, leaving 20s. each to the cathedral and the church of St. Peter at Arches, where the rector and two clerks were to celebrate a mass for his soul as soon as they should have notice of his death. Not surprisingly he left his lands in Lincoln to his father for his life, and his property in the close of St. Bartholomew’s and at Isleworth to his widow for her lifetime. He divided his personalty in a similar way: she was to have his household goods, the bulk of his plate, and £20 in cash, while the rest of his plate and £10 in cash was to go to his father. The most interesting of the will’s provisions concerns the disposal of his Lincoln property on the latter’s death: it was to be sold and half the proceeds were to go to the funding of a chaplain at St. Bartholomew’s to pray for his soul, those of his mother Emma and brother John, and the good estate of his father and widow. The chaplain was also to keep his anniversary and to distribute 13d. each year to 13 poor men. The other half of the money raised was to be divided equally between his widow for her dower, and poor men in alms. The closeness of his relationship with the former head of the court in which he had made his career is expressed in bequests of gold rings with sapphires to Sir William Babington’s wife, Margery, and Babington’s daughter, Elizabeth Neville, and the appointment of Babington himself as supervisor of the will. For his executors, however, he looked to his London rather than his legal connexions: John Wakeryng, master of the hospital, Richard Sturgeon, a royal clerk and another resident of the hospital close, and Keteridge.12 N. Moore, Hist. St. Bartholomew’s Hosp. ii. 32; Cart. St. Bartholomew’s Hosp. ed. Kerling, App. I, no. 43. He died on 11 July 1439 and was buried in the church of St. Bartholomew the Less, where a monumental brass to him and his wife remains.13 R. Gough, Sep. Mons. ii. 126; G. Godwin and J. Britton, Churches of London, ii. 7.

Markeby’s widow long survived him. By February 1440 she had married Richard Shipley, one of her late husband’s fellow filacers in the court of common pleas. This marriage was ended by Shipley’s death on 31 May 1445, and she was then the victim of a serious crime. Having undertaken to marry another lawyer, Thomas Portalyn*, she was abducted by a rival suitor. This, at least, is the story told in a petition she and Portalyn presented to the Commons during the third session of the Parliament of 1445-6 (that is, between 20 Oct. and 15 Dec. 1445). They claimed that, on the previous 6 Sept., as she made her way from the chapel of Muswell ‘where she had been in pilgrimage’, she was seized at Highgate by William Gargrave (no doubt a kinsman of John Gargrave* and his son John, joint marshals of the Marshalsea) at the head of a group of 40 felons, largely drawn from the prisoners of King’s bench. She was then taken before a priest (probably at the home of Nicholas Morley*, at Aspenden in Hertfordshire) who was ready to marry her to her abductor. On her refusal to say the words of matrimony, Gargrave ‘manassed hure hydously to dye’ and she reluctantly abandoned her resistance. How she subsequently made her escape does not appear, nor is it known what interest Morley, as MP in the Parliament, had in the affair. In any event, Alice certainly succeeded in establishing lawful matrimony with Portalyn and repudiating Gargrave.14 KB27/741, rots. 16, 82; Sutton, 46-47. She also survived her third husband, making her will on 21 Aug. 1479. She wished to be buried in the choir of the hospital of St. Bartholomew beside ‘her welbelouid husbond’, a reference to Markeby, who is known to have been buried there. Her heir was her eldest son, John Shipley, who dissipated his inheritance.15 Guildhall Lib. London, commissary ct. wills, 9171/6, ff. 282v-283; Sutton, 62-65.