FELAWE, Richard

The Felawes were probably of relatively humble origin, since Richard’s father began his career as a tanner. By the early 1430s, however, John Felawe was a merchant exporting grain to the Low Countries, and he was of sufficient local status to serve as one of the bailiffs of Ipswich in 1439-40.10 N.R. Amor, Late Med. Ipswich, 109; DKR, xlviii. 280. Richard first appears in 1436, when he was among the feoffees to whom Thomas Yerdherst demised a messuage at Harwich.11 Cal. Muns. Harwich, 57. He appears to have spent the earlier part of his career in that Essex port, possibly as his father’s agent there.12 According to Amor, 249, he was born at Harwich. He was described as a merchant of Harwich in October 1442, when he and John Caldwell* of Ipswich entered into a recognizance for £100 with the King, and in the following June he witnessed a quitclaim of properties in Harwich to which his father was a party.13 CCR, 1441-7, pp. 113, 142.

The recognizance shows that Richard was already a shipowner by that date, since it was intended to guarantee that neither he, nor Caldwell, nor any of their vessels, would hinder (Sir) Miles Stapleton*, recently appointed to safeguard the seas. (Why they might have wanted to obstruct him is unknown.) In the later 1450s Felawe was in the process of building ‘a grete shippe’, a vessel which features in a petition that he and William Herman, a fellow customs collector at Ipswich, submitted to the Crown in 1458. They did so to gain an exemption from having to account at the Exchequer as collectors in person, since Herman was ‘sore seke’ and Felawe was fully occupied building the vessel at the King’s ‘Wele’.14 E159/234, brevia Trin. rot. 9d; E28/88/29. It is now impossible to ascertain how many ships Felawe came to own or acquire a share in although, as a Chancery suit of the first half of the 1460s shows, he was certainly the part-owner of a vessel named the Gyles of Hull. The plaintiff was his co-owner, with whom he had fallen out: Sir William Ryther of Yorkshire, the son and successor of Sir William Ryther* (d.1440). Ryther held a three quarter share of the Gyles and Felawe the other quarter, but the knight was a sleeping partner, having agreed to allow Felawe to use the ship at his own initiative in ventures on their behalf. In his bill, he complained that Felawe had enjoyed sole control of the Gyles for the past five years but had failed to deliver to him any share of the profits of those ventures.15 C1/27/84. The only surviving evidence of this Chancery case, the bill does not reveal how the partnership originally came about.

Active in the overseas trade,16 CPR, 1446-52, p. 528; DKR, xlviii. 431. Felawe sometimes used his vessels to carry passengers as well as goods, for the Crown licensed him and others to carry pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain in the spring of 1445.17 DKR, xlviii. 365. With regard to goods, woollen cloth and grain were among the commodities in which Felawe dealt. In March 1452, for example, he and Henry Brooke of Harwich obtained licence to ship 2,000 cloths, or grain, from Ipswich in March 1452. The licence, prompted by a petition from the residents of Harwich, the target of recent French raids, assigned the money which the two men would normally have paid to the Crown in customs towards the costs of building defences for the town.18 CCR, 1446-52, p. 528. Felawe received another royal licence six and a half years later, when the Crown granted him and William Baldry* (with whom he would sit in the Parliaments of 1460 and 1461) permission to trade abroad.19 DKR, xlviii. 431. Felawe’s trading ventures made him one of the wealthiest Ipswich merchants of his day, and he lent £50 to Henry VI in 1456 and £40 to Edward IV a decade later.20 E401/853, m. 6; 837, m. 1.

It appears that Felawe had moved to Ipswich from Harwich by the mid 1440s. It was as ‘of Ipswich’ that he and the grocer, John Wyston, acquired in 1445-6 a plot of land in the parish of St. Clement there in fee farm from the town’s authorities,21 HMC 9th Rep. pt. 1, 235. As recently as June 1445, when receiving a papal indult to keep a portable altar, he had been styled ‘lord of the place of Keystrete’ in Orwell, Essex: CPL, ix. 517. and it was as ‘now of Ipswich’ that he was the defendant in a Chancery suit later in the same decade. The plaintiff, Nicholas Peyton, said that he had bought ‘Crewches place’ in Harwich from Felawe for 40 marks in the mid 1440s, but that the latter had refused to fulfil his side of the contract. He also claimed to have paid the first two instalments of the purchase price on time, and to have spent an extra 20 marks on ‘howsing’ and repairs to the property. Through his bill, he demanded his money back if Felawe still refused to fulfil his side of the bargain. Nothing else is known about this case, but in 1460 Felawe made a formal release of all legal actions to Peyton’s widow, Isabel.22 C1/16/377.

This quarrel is not the only evidence of Felawe’s continuing links with Harwich. In June 1452, for example, he and Thomas Denys* (his father’s co-bailiff of Ipswich in 1439-40) demised a messuage to John Felawe of that town (almost certainly a relative and possibly his brother) and others, including the same Isabel Peyton.23 Cal. Muns. Harwich, 53. Some years later, he quarrelled with the widowed Joan Draughton of Harwich, who sued him in the Chancery during one of his terms as bailiff of Ipswich, apparently that of 1465-6. She accused him of malfeasance, alleging that he had gone to law against her at Ipswich (where he was ‘both Juge and party’) over a supposed debt, and that he had secured a conviction against her from the jury through embracery.24 C1/33/202. Felawe was still involved in affairs at Harwich as late as February 1477, when he conveyed a messuage there to a group of people, among them John Felawe and his son, another Richard.25 Cal. Muns. Harwich, 50, 53, 58. This John and Richard Felawe were of Harwich: G.H. Ryan and L.J. Redstone, Timperley of Hintlesham, 5; CAD, iii. B4200; C1/59/56.

It was some three decades earlier that Felawe began to play a part in the administration of Ipswich. In April 1448 he was among those appointed to supervise a building project beside the hall of pleas,26 Add. 30158, f. 11. and he took up office as a bailiff a few months later. He started his parliamentary career during this same first term as bailiff, and while an MP of the Parliament of February 1449 he took the opportunity to join Thomas Denys in a lawsuit in the common pleas. In their suit, they alleged that a London draper, John Copmyll, owed them £20, having entered into a bond for that amount with them at Ipswich in March 1448. In Trinity term 1449, Copmyll acknowledged their claim and the court ordered him to repay the debt and damages of 10s.27 CP40/754, rot. 320d. (The circumstances of the bond are unknown but it probably arose from a commercial transaction. Although Denys was a lawyer, he seems to have had some sort of business partnership with Felawe, with whom he received another bond, for £40, again from a Londoner, in 1460.)28 E13/150, rot. 5. Felawe’s first Parliament dissolved on 16 July 1449 but the wages owed to him and his fellow MP, John Andrew III*, were a bone of contention for some time afterwards. At the end of November 1451, the Crown sent a writ to the bailiffs of Ipswich to reprimand them for their contempt in failing to pay the £11 6s. due to each man for the 113 days, at a daily rate of 2s., they had spent attending and travelling to and from the Parliament. In their return to the writ, however, the bailiffs asserted that Felawe and Andrew had agreed that they should receive just 12d. per day for as long as the assembly met at Westminster, and double that rate only if and when it adjourned elsewhere. As it happened, the Parliament had sat at Westminster for its first two sessions before moving to Winchester, meaning that each of them had been entitled to a total of £7 8s., that is, 78s. for the 78 days that the Westminster sessions had taken up of his time, and a further 70s. for the 35 days he had spent attending and travelling to and from the final session at Winchester. Furthermore, the bailiffs asserted, each of them had received £4 3s. 4d. from the borough on that basis but had then refused to accept the remainder due to him. An entry in the borough’s records suggests that this dispute over wage rates concluded in a compromise. In March 1452 the authorities at Ipswich directed that Felawe should receive £4 9s. from the issues of the ‘Marsh’ farm for his parliamentary wages, presumably indicating that he ended up with £9, some way short of the £11 6s. he had claimed but more than the £7 8s. that the borough had asserted was his due.29 Parliamentarians at Law ed. Kleineke, 264-7; Add. 30158, f. 15. The returns for Felawe’s later Parliaments are now lost but he probably attested his own election in 1461, as he had done in 1449, since he was likewise then one of the bailiffs of Ipswich.

On occasion official business could take Felawe away from the town. Shortly after completing his fourth term as bailiff, for example, he and Thomas Denys went to London, to represent Ipswich in a suit between it and the Crown.30 Ibid. f. 23. Apart from his borough offices, Felawe served terms as collector, and one as controller, of customs in Ipswich and other Suffolk ports, positions to which he was directly appointed by the Crown. At least two of the three royal pardons he is known to have received covered his duties as an office-holder: that of 10 Jan. 1459 referred to him as late bailiff and escheator of Ipswich; and that of 27 Nov. 1468 to his tenures of the positions of bailiff, escheator and customs official. By contrast, the third, issued on 10 Dec. 1471, simply described him as a ‘merchant’.31 C67/42, m. 26; 46, m. 19; 48, m. 11.

Much of Felawe’s career as an office-holder, whether in Ipswich or elsewhere, occurred in the reign of Edward IV, with whose regime he was immediately associated following the Yorkist seizure of the throne. In May 1461 the Crown appointed him, William Baldry and others to supply wheat, malt, oxen, mutton, fish, salt and other provisions to the King’s fleet. By early 1465 he had spent just over £157 on repairing and maintaining a royal ship, the Margarete of Ipswich, for which costs the Exchequer received the order to reimburse him.32 E404/72/4/97. It is likely that Felawe owed his valuable links with the Yorkist Crown to the good offices of (Sir) John Howard*, a prominent supporter of Edward IV. Howard was a shipowner whose commercial interests made him a frequent visitor to Ipswich and Felawe became his factor or agent in the town. The earliest evidence for a connexion between the two men dates from 1463, but they had probably known each other for some time previously. In August that year Felawe helped Howard to fit out a fleet he was assembling on behalf of the King, to protect the east coast and prevent French aid reaching Lancastrian supporters in the north of England. In his book of expenses Howard recorded delivering various sums of money to Felawe to spend on victuals, supplies and other expenses connected with the fleet. The two men must have had a close working relationship, for Howard would go to Felawe’s house in person to hand over money or conduct his commercial affairs, and from time to time the latter delivered money to people with whom Sir John did private business. Felawe appears also to have retailed produce from the Howard estates and sometimes to have looked after bonds of obligation for him. On one occasion he stood surety when Howard, who was acting for the duke of Norfolk, bought damask from a London merchant. In May 1464 Felawe was present when Howard bargained with a ‘Frenshe man’ for wine, and in the following month he himself paid for another consignment ordered by the knight as a means of repaying a debt he owed the latter. Also in June 1464, Felawe arranged for the carriage of wine to Howard’s manors at Stoke by Nayland and East Winch in Norfolk and Sir John gave 6s. 8d. to Felawe’s ‘priest’ (presumably a household chaplain).33 Howard Household Bks. ed. Crawford, i. 154, 161, 162, 185, 186, 191-4, 270, 271, 274, 280, 286, 301, 337, 348. In the following year Felawe joined Howard and others in suing John Twyer and his wife, Alice, for trespassing on a purparty of the Suffolk manor of Shelley. The Twyers said that the property had descended to Alice from her uncle, Nicholas Peek*, but at a trial held in July 1465 the jury accepted the claim that the plaintiffs had received seisin from two of Peek’s feoffees.34 KB27/816, rot. 84. Later, in the spring of 1467, Felawe was assigned to collect £10 which the bailiffs of Ipswich owed Howard.35 Howard Household Bks. i. 396. This sum was probably an instalment of the £20 p.a. from the fee farm of Ipswich which the King had assigned to Howard in 1461: CPR, 1461-7, p. 27. Despite his Yorkist links, Felawe sat in the Readeption Parliament of 1470, but then so did his patron, whom the new government summoned to Parliament as Lord Howard in a fruitless bid to win his support.

In about the same period, either in the late 1460s or early 1470s, William Wade and his wife Margery sued Felawe in the Chancery, over his conduct as executor of one of her previous husbands, his old associate Thomas Denys. Accusing him of withholding the jointure Denys had provided for her, they also alleged that he had promoted an unsuccessful marriage between her and Thomas Wath after Denys’s death, in return for a reward from Wath (from whom she was later estranged) for helping to secure the match. Felawe responded by claiming that Denys had left insufficient lands to support such a jointure, adding that he had taken 100 marks from the testator’s estate to dispose of for the good of his soul.36 C1/40/64-65. Later, in 1475, the Wades conveyed various properties in Ipswich and elsewhere to Felawe and the lawyer, Roger Townshend†. Presumably this transaction was linked with Denys’s estate since the couple afterwards surrendered all title to properties that the testator had held in Ipswich and Whitton to Felawe and Townshend.37 CP25(1)/224/221/4; Suff. RO (Ipswich), Ipswich bor. recs., composite roll, 1478-9, C/2/10/1/8, m. 4d. The dispute with the Wades was not the only trouble Felawe encountered as Denys’s executor, since he was the plaintiff in another (probably concurrent) Chancery case concerned with the Denys estate. To recover 40 marks that the late Richard Skylman of Southwold had owed Denys, he filed a bill against Robert Hopton* and John Hoo, the surviving feoffees of a property that Skylman had put forward as a security for the debt.38 C1/41/152.

It was perhaps in connexion with another dispute that Felawe, along with several fellow burgesses and a couple of yeomen from Suffolk, entered into a bond for £200 with (Sir) William Calthorpe*, sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk, in late 1475. Calthorpe subsequently successfully sued in the Exchequer two of those who had put their names to the bond, John Lytell of Ipswich and William Levysson of Hemingstone, although the plea roll reveals nothing about the original reason for the security.39 E13/162, rots. 3, 4d. Felawe may also have helped to resolve a quarrel in his later years. In July 1472, he was among those whom the authorities at Ipswich chose to arbitrate in a dispute in which Benet Caldwell†, the eldest son of his erstwhile associate John, was one of the parties.40 Add. 30158, f. 30v.

After the mid 1470s, Felawe largely withdrew from local government although he remained a justice of Ipswich until he died. Late in life, he was one of the feoffees of Elizabeth, widow of (Sir) Thomas Brewes*, being named as such in a deed of 1480.41 Stowe Ch. 233. He and his own wife had provided for the hereafter by this date, having arranged for the Dominicans at Ipswich to pray for them and the souls of their parents.42 Add. 19129, f. 90. Felawe died on 2 Jan. 1483 and was buried in the church of St. Mary at the Quay, presumably his home parish. The ‘Great Domesday Book’ of Ipswich, compiled for the borough by Richard Percyvale in 1520, includes an extract from his no longer extant will. This relates to his foundation of Ipswich’s grammar school, still in existence, and of an almshouse for the sick. Felawe directed that his messuage near the town’s Dominican friary should become the schoolhouse, as well as the living quarters for the schoolmaster and his successors, for whose support he also left an adjoining messuage and curtilage, along with other lands in Whitton. He laid down that the master (John Squyre, one of his executors, was the first to fill the position) should teach children born and resident in Ipswich free of charge, if their parents enjoyed an annual income of less than 20s. p.a. and did not possess goods worth more than £20. In addition, the master and his pupils were required to attend a daily mass in the friary church at six o’clock in the morning. As for his almshouse, Felawe left for its support two other messuages.43 Ipswich bor. recs., ‘Gt. Domesday bk.’, C/4/1/4, ff. 144v-5; I. Gray and W. Potter, Ipswich School, 7-9, 11-12.

Within three weeks of Felawe’s death, the Crown ordered an inquiry into his lands.44 CFR, xxi. no. 666. The records of the subsequent inquisition post mortem have not survived although he may have held a manor in Creeting, some ten miles north-west of Ipswich.45 According to W.A. Copinger, Suff. Manors, vi. 161, but the error-prone Copinger is a notoriously unreliable authority. Evidence for his property interests in Ipswich itself is very fragmentary, and some of these interests were temporary, being leases from the borough. In September 1461, for example, the borough granted him a mill for two years (subsequently renewed for a further 12 months) at a rent of £10 p.a., and in March 1465 it demised a marsh and the ‘Portmen’s meadow’ to him, intending to use the rent to pay off municipal debts. At the end of the 1470s he obtained a plot of land between the ‘Mert diche’ and ‘Chestains close’, to hold for life at a rent of 12d. p.a. At one stage Felawe also owned a messuage with ‘divers’ attached tenements in Ipswich, but he sold these holdings to a fellow burgess, John Depyng, and his wife at an unknown date.46 Bacon, 119, 143; Add. 30158, f. 25v, 26v; C1/82/30.

Felawe’s widow Agnes found a new husband in William Timperley, apparently one of the younger sons of the Howard follower, John Timperley II*.47 Add. 19129, f. 90. She also outlived William, and when she drew up her will in 1505 she asked to be buried in St. Mary at the Quay, in a sepulchre between those of her two husbands.48 Reg. Garnon, f. 103. Her daughter by Felawe, another Agnes, was the MP’s heir. The younger Agnes married John Fastolf †, son of Thomas Fastolf†, both of whom were MPs for Ipswich in Henry VII’s reign.49 Add. 19129, f. 90; CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 1417; LP Hen. VIII, i. 438 (3), m. 10.