NUNDY, Robert

Nundy was a mercer and one of the wealthier townsmen of Derby. While a young man he was implicated in the disorders that seriously disrupted the peace of the town in the early 1430s. He was one of a confederacy, headed by Nicholas Meysham*, and formed, at least in the view of its opponents, to overturn the customs of the borough and replace them with others of its own making. According to indictments laid by a jury of his fellow townsmen before royal commissioners of oyer and terminer in April 1434, on Midsummer day 1430 our MP, along with Meysham, William Orme* and others, 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, resulting in the murder of Nicholas Gomon by Meysham on 10 May 1433 (an offence to which our MP is said to have been an accessory), and culminating at the election of the bailiffs in Michaelmas 1433 when the confederates forced their choice of Meysham on their unwilling fellows.2 KB9/11/17d-18. The alleged murder was also the subject of an appeal, soon abandoned, by the victim’s widow: KB27/691, rot. 55d; 694, rot. 4. There can be little doubt that this was an ex parte description of events. Other evidence suggests that Nundy was one of a group of townsmen reacting against a dominant clique in the town, headed by the Stokkes family. Revealingly, while one of the county grand juries sitting before the same commissioners indicted four members of the Stokkes family, including Thomas Stokkes*, and another influential townsman, John Booth*, for felonious theft from our MP’s house in March 1429, the borough jury, headed by the same Stokkes and Booth, made no mention of this offence.3 KB9/11/16d. The indicted were acquitted before the justices of assize on 26 Feb. 1435: KB27/695, rex rot. 1. The circumstances of the acquittal of our MP and others in Michaelmas term 1435 are also instructive: the town jurors that acquitted them returned their verdict before the justices of King’s bench at Westminster not, as they would have done in normal circumstances, before the justices of assize at Derby, an indication, perhaps, that the defendants could not expect a fair trial in the locality.4 KB27/695, rex rot. 17. This is not to say that the confederacy did not happen, only that the town jury that laid the indictments did not give it its proper context.

Nundy’s involvement in Meysham’s conspiracy is probably to be put down to youthful indiscretion, and he went on to become one of the leading men of Derby. Judging from the large number of suits of debt he brought in the court of common pleas during the 1440s and 1450s, his business activities were more extensive than those of most of his fellow burgesses. In 1448, for example, he had actions for a series of small sums pending against ten tradesmen from as far afield as Wolverhampton and Doncaster, and in 1453 he was suing 17 defendants, including another mercer of Derby, for debts totalling as much as £100. His suits also show that he had property interests outside the town. In 1443 he was joint plaintiff with John Chaterley in an action against several husbandmen for breaking their close at Chaddesden near Derby and hounding their sheep with dogs. Such interests help to explain why Nundy was assessed on an annual income of £4 in the subsidy return of 1450-1 and he was soon to add to them. On 6 Mar. 1452 he took the farm of a manor in Locko on the outskirts of the town for a term of eight years at an annual farm of 30s.5 CP40/748, rot. 75d; 770, rots. 212, 237; E179/91/73; Derbys. RO, Derbys. Arch. Soc. recs., D369G/ZE5.

Not until the late 1440s is there any evidence of Nundy’s involvement in the administrative affairs of Derby. Perhaps his conspiracy with Meysham had left him out of favour with his fellow townsmen. However this may be, his reputation had recovered by the autumn of 1446 when he was elected as one of the bailiffs, and, while in office, he was returned to represent the borough in Parliament with Thomas Chaterley*, no doubt a relative of his co-plaintiff in the suit of 1443. Soon after the end of this Parliament he was one of 44 men of his home town fined 20s. each in King’s bench for unspecified trespasses, but there is no other evidence to give these fines a context.6 C219/15/4; KB27/744, fines rot. 1d. On 12 Apr. 1451 the Crown granted the fines to the bailiffs of Derby: CPR, 1446-52, p. 418. Thereafter he became a regular attestor at the borough’s parliamentary elections: his presence is recorded at five of the six elections held between January 1449 and November 1459 and he may also have attended that of 1455, for which the return is largely illegible. On the third occasion, in 1450, he offered surety on behalf of one of those returned, Thomas Agard*.7 KB145/6/25; C219/15/6, 7; 16/1-3, 5. Nundy did not long survive his last appearance at an election. He died intestate before Michaelmas term 1461 when his widow, Margery, and Thomas Nundy, who was probably his son, had actions of debt pending as the administrators of his goods. A later lease provides some evidence of his landholdings in Derby. In March 1468 his fellow mercer, Edmund Dey, took over his lease of the burgages of the abbey of Burton-upon-Trent there at an annual rent of 36s., undertaking to build a tavern on the side of the capital messuage in which our MP had lived.8 CP40/802, rots. 148, 149; Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. (1937), 175.