MEYSHAM, Nicholas

A butcher by trade, Meysham may have hailed from a minor family established at Little Eaton, a few miles outside Derby, since the early fourteenth century, and he was perhaps the younger brother of Thomas Meysham, who was one of the collectors of the 1428 subsidy in Derbyshire.1 S.M. Wright, Derbys. Gentry (Derbys. Rec. Soc. viii), 199; CFR, xv. 219. It is also possible that he was a kinsman of John Meysham, a brazier of Derby, who was executed in Jan. 1414 as a supporter of Oldcastle’s rising: M. Jurkowski, ‘John Fynderne’ (Keele Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1998), 306-8. In Hilary term 1425 writs of outlawry were issued against the putative brothers at the suit of one of the leading townsmen, John Booth*, who claimed that they had ambushed and wounded him.2 KB27/654, rot. 45; 655, rot. 35d. This dispute with Booth did not prevent Nicholas establishing his own prominent place in the town’s affairs. On 28 Aug. 1427 he was elected to represent the town in Parliament, and on 19 Dec. 1431 he sat on a jury of townsmen before commissioners for the assessment of a subsidy.3 C219/13/5: Feudal Aids, i. 277.

Knowledge of Meysham’s career would extend little beyond these bare details if it were not for indictments laid before the commissioners of oyer and terminer who came to the town on 1 Apr. 1434. If these are to be credited, he was the leader of a confederacy formed to overturn the customs of the borough and replace them with others of its own making. According to a jury of his fellow townsmen, on Midsummer day 1430 he and 22 others, including Robert Nundy*, William Orme* and Robert Colman*, had formed a fraternity called ‘St. Mary guild of the Newlond’, distributing caps of green and motley among its members and taking oaths to maintain one another’s quarrels. They then embarked on a long campaign of intimidation against their fellow townsmen, culminating at the election of the bailiffs at Michaelmas 1433 when they forced their choice of Meysham on their unwilling fellows. Moreover, Meysham’s election was doubly objectionable to those outside the fraternity because, on the previous 10 May, he had allegedly murdered one Nicholas Gomon (the husband of the widow of Ralph Shore*).4 KB9/11/17d, 18. Gomon had been one of the attestors of Derby’s parlty. election in 1432: C219/14/3.

This account of events receives some support from other evidence. Shortly before the indictments were taken, Gomon’s widow had both petitioned the Commons in the second session of the Parliament of 1433 against Meysham and his adherents, asking for expeditious legal process against them, and then appealed them of murder in King’s bench.5 SC8/113/5619; KB27/691, rot. 55d; 694, rot. 4. Further, indictments made by one of the two grand juries provide a similar, although less detailed, narrative. A jury headed by the two leading local gentry, Sir Thomas Chaworth* and Sir Richard Vernon*, indicted Meysham for the murder of Gomon, and, with several others, for having distributed liveries of caps. Interestingly, this jury made an implicit connexion between these two events dating both to 10 May 1433, and implying, perhaps, that there had then been a clash between two factions in the town in which Gomon had been killed. One piece of evidence, however, slightly contradicts the account of both the Derby and the grand jury: the unfortunate victim did not die in the town. Four months later, on 16 Sept., an inquisition was taken in the city of London after Gomon’s body had been found in the parish of St. Martin Ironmonger Lane. A jury returned that he had died as a result of injuries inflicted upon him by Meysham in Derby not on 10 May but on the previous 19 Apr.6 KB9/11/17; KB27/779, rex rot. 21. None the less, although the precise truth about Gomon’s murder is beyond recovery, there seems no reason to doubt that the indictments taken in Derby in 1434 show that our MP was centrally involved in violent disturbances. It is a reasonable speculation that he and his confederates were reacting against a clique, headed by the Stokkes family and John Booth (with whom Meysham had been on hostile terms ten years before), which dominated office-holding in the town.7 Significantly, the Derby jury which laid the indictments was headed by Booth and Thomas Stokkes*: KB9/11/10. See the biog. of Robert Nundy.

In the short term Meysham paid the price for his lawlessness: at the county court held at Derby on 14 Oct. 1434 he was one of many men outlawed for failure to answer the indictments laid against them. He was also outlawed on an appeal sued against him by Gomon’s widow. Not until 1 Dec. 1440, when he received a general pardon enrolled on the patent roll, did he put himself back on the right side of the law.8 KB9/11/17; CPR, 1436-41, p. 482. Thereafter he makes only sporadic appearances in the records. In 1446 he was the defendant in an action of debt for 40s. sued by the Debyshire esquire, John Statham of Morley. In the following year, described as ‘of Derby, yeoman’, he was one of 44 townsmen each fined 20s. for unspecified offences of which they were impeached in a return into the court of King’s bench by the county sheriff, Sir Thomas Blount†.9 CP40/740, rot. 495; 742, rots. 152d, 383d; KB27/744, fines rot. 1d; CPR, 1446-52, p. 418. His date of death is unknown. Thomas Meysham, who attested the Derbyshire parliamentary election of January 1449 and who, styled as ‘of Little Eaton’, was assessed on an annual income of £2 in the subsidy returns of 1450-1, was probably either his elder brother or nephew.10 C219/15/6; E179/91/73.