EDWARD, John

Edward was a witness in May 1430 when John Parker I* of Hastings made a grant of his goods and chattels to other Hastings men and to the clerk of the Parliaments, William Prestwick.1 CCR, 1429-35, p. 44. Richard Huntingdon*, Edward’s fellow MP for Hastings in the Parliament of 1427, made him a feoffee of his lands, and in April 1431, not long after Huntingdon’s death, he and his co-feoffees conveyed to the dead man’s niece, Katherine, and her husband, Richard Whatton, esquire, a tenement and rents in the parish of St. Clement. However, Whatton, who was a household retainer of the duke of Gloucester, the warden of the Cinque Ports, petitioned the chancellor to complain that Edward and a different group of feoffees had refused to hand over to his wife other property elsewhere in Sussex and Kent.2 CCR, 1429-35, p. 116; C1/69/354. In these positions of trust Edward was linked with two other sometime MPs for Hastings, Thomas Julyan† and William Goldyng*.

It is not impossible that the parliamentary baron for Hastings was the same John Edward as he who was associated with the brothers Thomas Hoo I* and II*, both of whom held substantial estates in east Sussex. A man of this name received letters of protection as going overseas in the retinue of Thomas I (afterwards Lord Hoo and Hastings) in the spring of 1434,3 DKR, xlviii. 298. and a few years later a John Edward was recorded holding lands and tenements at Roffey in Horsham, the home of Thomas Hoo II. At that John’s death, before May 1449, these properties passed to his son Thomas Edward of Lewisham, Kent.4 CAD, i. B1540, 1670; iii. B4043, 4052-3. But caution is needed in making this identification, for in 1456 Hoo, as lord of the rape of Hastings, made complaint against another John Edward in a plea of account: Lathe Ct. Rolls (Suss. Rec. Soc. xxxvii), 80.