MONESLEE, Richard

Admitted to the freedom of Norwich in 1401-2,7 Norwich ‘Old Free bk.’, NCR 17c, f. 40. His parentage is unknown, but he was probably related to Walter Moneslee, a sheriff of Norwich in 1409-10, and Thomas Moneslee, a ‘worstedman’ active in the city in the mid 1430s: KB9/229/1/106; 272/4. Moneslee was a mercer of considerable local status and wealth. He and his first wife were of sufficient standing to apply to the Papal Curia for the privilege of keeping a portable altar in their household, which was granted to them in April 1413,8 CPL, vi. 345. and he possessed the wherewithal to lend money to the Crown. One of the Acts passed by the Parliament of 1429 provided for the repayment of such loans, including a significant sum owed to Moneslee and two other Norwich citizens, Thomas Ingham* and John Cambridge, and shortly after the dissolution of that assembly the Crown granted them the right to recover £172 (an instalment of a larger sum of £266 13s. 4d. it owed them) from the issues of Norfolk.9 RP, v. 419; CPR, 1429-35, p. 61; E403/695, m. 2.

Moneslee derived at least some of his wealth from overseas trade and it is possible that he travelled abroad on trading ventures. It was perhaps prior to embarking on a voyage overseas that he conveyed all his goods and chattels, both at home and abroad, to a group of trustees in February 1419. Among these trustees was Elizabeth, the wealthy widow of Sir William Elmham†, who had probably taken up residence at Norwich during her widowhood.10 Norwich ct. roll, 1413-21, NCR 1/17, m. 14; The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 17. Moneslee traded through Great Yarmouth, a port frequently used by Norwich merchants and with which he must have come to establish strong links. He was already exporting cloth from Yarmouth as early as 1400, before his formal admission to the freedom of Norwich.11 E122/150/2, m. 2. Among those with whom he had dealings in that town was a local merchant, Henry Spitling†, but he came to fall out with Spitling, suing him for debt at Westminster before the end of Henry V’s reign.12 CPR, 1416-22, p. 293. It was probably also in Henry V’s reign that Moneslee filed a bill in Chancery against another Norwich citizen, William Ashwell*, and John Tilney†, a lieutenant of the admiral of England, alleging that the former had pursued a wrongful action for debt against him in an admiralty court held by the latter at Yarmouth.13 C1/5/189. Moneslee was also concerned with affairs in that port at the end of the 1420s. Shortly after completing his term as mayor, he and William Knapton rode to London to take legal action on behalf of their city, over a newly erected crane there.14 Chamberlains’ accts. NCR 18a, f. 172v; view of treasurers’ acct., 1429-30, NCR 7d.

By the time he became mayor, an office to which he was first nominated but not elected in 1424,15 Assembly roll, 1420-6, NCR 8d. Moneslee had served terms as one of the city’s treasurers and sheriffs and was an alderman (a position he probably retained for the rest of his life) of several years’ standing. He appears to have had a particularly fractious term as sheriff, given the complaints to which it afterwards gave rise. During 1417 over a dozen plaintiffs from Norwich and elsewhere brought suits against him in the Exchequer that related to his conduct as sheriff. Several of the city’s chandlers, for example, claimed that he had unjustly seized significant quantities of candles from them on Christmas Eve 1415. Others levelled more serious charges of wrongful arrest and imprisonment; and of extorting fines from them before he would release them. Among these complainants was a clerk calling himself John Johnson, who claimed that the then sheriff and his men had broken into his house in the city one night in the spring of 1416, assaulted him in his bed and dragged him off to prison. In response, Moneslee asserted that he had lawfully arrested the plaintiff, whom he referred to as John Betynes, parson of Wood Walton, Huntingdonshire. According to Moneslee, he had apprehended Johnson/Betynes after taking an indictment for rape against the cleric with his fellow sheriff, Thomas Ocle. Another plaintiff, Thomas Durham of Norwich, similarly complained that Moneslee had forcibly entered his house at night a few months earlier. Moneslee riposted that Durham was a ‘nightwalker’ and robber who had stolen lead from the late bishop of Norwich, Richard Courteney. Two further complaints were lurid in their detail. In a suit for false imprisonment, William Smyth alleged that he had suffered torture while in Moneslee’s custody, by means of iron ‘instruments’ applied to his fingers. John Cook of Norwich complained that Moneslee had entered his house in August 1416, seized pots, prayer beads and a crucifix, and had then borne him away to a ‘horrible prison’ below the city’s gaol. After refusing to pay a fine to regain his liberty, he had endured three days without food or water until he had yielded to this demand for fear of his life. Yet the Exchequer plea rolls show that only two of all these suits proceeded as far as referral to a jury and even then there is no record of a trial occurring in either case. Yet it would be unwise to accept any of these complaints at face value, even if other evidence relating to his career might suggest that Moneslee was sometimes capable of disreputable behaviour. Moreover, any ill conduct on his part as sheriff was insufficient to end his career as an office-holder.16 E13/132, rots. 5, 10d, 15d, 16, 18d, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24; 133, rot. 5.

It is possible that some of the suits emanated from factional disputes within Norwich or that they had a connexion with a long-running jurisdictional dispute between the city and Norwich priory. The quarrel prompted the prior to apply to the Crown for an investigation into encroachments by the citizens on the King’s geldable in Norwich and its hamlets, in response to which the then escheator in Norfolk and Suffolk, Edmund Oldhall†, held an inquisition in October 1417. At this a jury presented that Moneslee and other citizens had encroached on the geldable by illegally fishing at fisheries situated in the hamlets of Newton and Trowse. As it happened, a fishing expedition had indeed taken place, but it was a ceremonial rather a disorderly affair, being intended to assert the citizens’ claims to rights outside its walls. The city refused to accept the findings of Oldhall’s inquiry until it finally threw itself on the King’s mercy in 1431. Moneslee and other citizens were fined, in his case the sum of £4 6s. 8d.17 Norwich ‘Bk. of Pleas’, NCR 17b, ff. 36v-38; P. Maddern, Violence and Social Order, 180-1, 182-3.

Between the inquisition and this surrender, the city actively pursued its cause against the priory, employing several notable lawyers for that purpose. Among them was Thomas Greswold, whom Moneslee and Robert Dunston* met for discussions in London while Norwich’s MPs in the Parliament of 1422.18 Treasurers’ acct., 1422-3, NCR 7d. During the succeeding Parliament Moneslee and his fellow Member, John Gerard II* were occupied with another quarrel, using the opportunity that their presence at Westminster provided to take legal action against the city of London over certain customs and tolls it had imposed on merchants from Norwich. Apart from the expenses that his own city paid him to pursue such litigation, Moneslee received daily wages of 2s. for the Parliaments of 1422 and 1423. Wages had risen by the early 1430s, since he was assigned 40d. per day for the Parliaments of 1431, 1432 and 1433.19 Chamberlains’ accts. NCR 18a, ff. 144v, 179, 184, 188, 192.

These latter three Parliaments coincided with a dispute between Moneslee and a Norwich merchant named John Reyner. According to Reyner, the MP had unjustly seized wheat from him while mayor and, furthermore, he claimed that Moneslee owed him no less than £150. The lawsuits Reyner pursued at Westminster over these matters went to arbitration but neither of the resulting awards were to his satisfaction, prompting a separate quarrel between him and one of Moneslee’s successors as mayor, Thomas Ingham. While mayor of Norwich in 1431-2, Ingham had helped bring about both awards in the capacity of an umpire and, shortly after his term as such ended, Reyner sued him in the Chancery over his part in these allegedly unjust outcomes.20 C1/12/12; 73/91. The record of another dispute shows that Moneslee spent at least part of the recess between the two sessions of his final Parliament at its venue of Westminster. It relates to a confrontation between him and Richard Barbour, a barber who subsequently sued him in the court of King’s bench. In pleadings of Michaelmas term 1435, Barbour alleged that Moneslee had so threatened and oppressed him at Westminster on 20 Sept. 1433 that he had dared not go about his business of taking medicines to the sick. Appearing in person to defend the suit, Moneslee pleaded not guilty, but in November 1435 a jury found against him and Barbour won damages of ten marks and costs of 40s. The plea roll does not, however, reveal the background to this curious affair.21 KB27/698, rot. 23.

In the same Michaelmas term Moneslee was also obliged to appear in both the Exchequer and Chancery. His Exchequer appearance arose from the deposition that an informant, Margaret Ive, made there on 16 Oct. 1435. The widow of Ralph Ive, a Norwich merchant convicted and executed for high treason in unknown circumstances in the late 1420s, she accused Moneslee of embezzlement at the Crown’s expense. She alleged that, while mayor and escheator of Norwich, the MP had taken Ralph’s goods and chattels, worth over £154 and forfeit to the Crown, for his own use. Moneslee responded in December 1435, claiming that he had properly accounted with the Crown for those of Ive’s goods that had come into his hands and that this property had been worth no more than just over £5 18s. In subsequent proceedings the King’s attorney general, John Vampage* asserted that the MP had indeed received all of the traitor’s goods as alleged by Margaret, only for Moneslee to stay further action by purchasing inclusion in the general pardon promulgated in the Parliament of 1437.22 E159/212, recorda Mich. rots. 23-24. Moneslee’s appearance in Chancery occurred just three days before Margaret Ive laid her information against him in the Exchequer. He came there in person with two other Norwich aldermen, William Ashwell and Edmund Fuller, in response to a summons from the Crown, to which they had entered a recognizance for £100, the previous July. Upon appearing, they were duly dismissed.23 CCR, 1429-35, p. 364.

The reason for the summons to the Chancery is unrecorded but it may have arisen from the government’s concerns about divisions within Norwich.24 B.R. McRee, ‘Peace Making and its Limits in Late Med. Norwich’, EHR, cix. 858n-859n. During the 1430s Moneslee was associated with Thomas Wetherby*, the leader of a minority faction in the city, and he was admitted to the guild of St. George, an institution which numbered many of Wetherby’s supporters in its ranks, in 1436.25 Maddern, 186. In January the following year William Goodred†, j.KB, held an inquisition in the city about the appointment of one of Wetherby’s allies, John Hawk, as under sheriff. At this inquiry a jury declared the appointment illegal and condemned Wetherby for his part in the disputed mayoral election of 1433. Moneslee and Richard Brasier raised the only dissenting voices to these findings although they restricted their protest to a defence of Hawk.26 McRee, 859-62. There was another serious dispute at the mayoral election of 1437, a controversy that prompted the Crown to revoke the city’s liberties two months later. Wetherby and his allies claimed that their opponents had rioted and physically prevented them from attending the election. In a certificate outlining their version of events, Moneslee was recorded as having joined Wetherby and others in informing two royal commissioners (present in Norwich on election day) about the behaviour of the ‘rioters’.27 KB9/229/1/106. These were of course partisan claims on the part of Wetherby and his friends and a bid to represent themselves as the injured parties.

In the following December Moneslee was among those chosen to audit the accounts of the city’s treasurers.28 Assembly bk. NCR 16d, f. 2. By now nearing the end of his life, he is not known to have held any office at Norwich after 1438. An Exchequer plea roll reveals he died in late 1441 or early 1442. Notwithstanding his pardon of 1437, the Crown had either continued to pursue or resurrected its claims against him over Ralph Ive’s goods in that court. In Hilary term 1441 he reiterated that the goods that had come into his hands had been worth far less than the Crown claimed and again referred to his pardon of 1437. The matter was referred to a jury but a trial was still pending when Moneslee’s attorney, Thomas Ruycolf, appeared in the Exchequer on his behalf in Michaelmas term 1441. When Ruycolf reappeared there in the following Hilary term it was to inform the court that the MP had died.29 E159/217, recorda Hil. rot. 12.

Moneslee had married at least twice but there is no evidence that either match produced any children. There is also a lack of firm evidence for his holdings in Norwich although he did participate in property transactions in the city and appears to have owned a messuage in the parishes of St. Gregory and St. Peter Mancroft.30 CCR, 1441-7, p. 199; ct. rolls NCR 1/17, mm. 5, 10d, 17, 13d; 1/18, m. 16. Elsewhere in Norfolk, he was party to transactions at Great and Little Melton, just to the west of Norwich, and it is possible that he possessed lands at Witton, a few miles east of the city. He, John Swan and Thomas Hilton received a conveyance of Melton Hall, formerly of Roger Blickling†, from John Alderford*, Walter Eaton* and others in 1415, and he and Swan ‘mortgaged’ the same manor to Sir John Briston and others in 1419.31 Norf. RO, Norwich municipal charity deeds, N/MC1/13; F. Blomefield, Norf. v. 12. A royal pardon and an entry in an Exchequer plea roll provide the evidence of a possible connexion with Witton. Dated 10 Nov. 1455, the pardon was acquired by Robert Lethum of that parish, whom it names as one of the executors of Sir John Radcliffe* and the ‘tenant’ of (unspecified) lands and tenements formerly held by the MP.32 C67/41, m. 21. The plea roll entry, of Michaelmas term the following year, refers to the conviction and forfeiture suffered by Ralph Ive and Moneslee’s alleged failure properly to answer for the condemned man’s goods. It further records the Crown’s initiating of proceedings against Lethum, obliging him, as holder of the lands formerly held by Moneslee, to answer the demand it had made upon the late MP. In response, he appeared in the Exchequer in the same Michaelmas term and on a succession of return days over the following nine years, and the matter was still pending in the mid 1460s.33 E159/233, recorda Mich. rot. 36. It is not known whether Lethum (who earned some notoriety as an unruly servant of the duke of Norfolk),34 KB9/118/2/165; H.R. Castor, King, Crown and Duchy of Lancaster, 172-3. had inherited or purchased the lands once belonging to Moneslee, or whether his manor in that parish and those lands were one and the same.35 Blomefield, vii. 265.