PRESCOTT, John

Few details of the career of the Taunton MP of 1435 have been discovered, but he was evidently one of two local men of this name. One of these was a carpenter, and it is likely that it was his more prominent namesake, who by the 1440s was able to style himself a gentleman, who sat in the Commons.2 The carpenter is found in 1434 serving as an attorney to convey the seisin of some of the endowment of Osborne’s alsmhouse in Taunton to the trustees: E326/5047. This second John Prescott was a lawyer, who by the early 1430s was practising as an attorney in the Westminster common law courts,3 CP40/679, rot. 548. and about the same time entered the service of Bishop Beaufort of Winchester as bailiff of his liberty in Somerset and Dorset. It was probably in Beaufort’s service that he first became acquainted with John Avyle alias of Ile, with whom he may have shared the bailiwick. In the spring of 1439 Prescott and Avyle (the latter then serving Robert, Lord Poynings, as bailiff of the hundred of Cannington) were said to have colluded in bringing and maintaining false prosecutions against a number of men including William Dodesham* the younger.4 KB9/230B/192; KB27/746, rex rot. 5.

This was not the only time that Prescott fell foul of the law: in 1445 he was forced to surrender formally to the Marshalsea prison in order to procure a pardon from a sentence of outlawry passed against him in the London court of husting as a result of his failure to ensure the court appearance of the Salisbury hostler John Stonard; and four years later he was once again outlawed, this time on account of his own failure to appear in court to answer for a modest debt.5 CPR, 1441-6, p. 377; 1446-52, p. 290. On other occasions Prescott appeared as a plaintiff. Thus, in the autumn of 1439 he charged a Shorditch brewer and his wife with a trespass, and just over ten years later he is found pursuing a group of artisans and peasants from Taunton and its hinterland for debt.6 KB27/714, rot. 99; CP40/756, rot. 151d. There is nevertheless no reason to suppose that he was an unusually quarrelsome or even lawless man: the charges against him were in their majority of the kind that any minor lawyer might expect to face periodically, and he was evidently held in some regard by his neighbours, who not only returned him to the Commons but also made him part of the delegation that communicated the borough’s election result to the shire court, employed him as an executor, and called upon him to witness their property transactions.7 C219/14/3; CP40/716, rot. 390d; CCR, 1447-54, p. 45. It has not been possible to demonstrate conclusively whether, as suggested by J.H. Baker, Men of Ct. (Selden Soc. supp. ser. xviii), ii. 1263-4, the Taunton MP was the same man as John Prescott of Tiverton, Devon, who was associated with the Courtenay fam. from the early years of the 15th cent. This man, born in about 1372, was named among the witnesses in 1425 to the proof of age of Philip Courtenay*, when he deposed that on the day of Philip’s birth on 18 Jan. 1404 his wife, Werburga, had died giving birth to twin boys. He was probably the man who in 1450-1 was receiving payments from the estates of Henry Bodrugan†, but died bef. 1464, when his s. and h., Walter, was intriguingly styled ‘of Taunton’. CIPM, xxii. 530; Devon RO, Shelly of Shobroke mss, Z1/34/1/2-4; Cornw. RO, Edgcombe mss, ME1836, rot. 4d.