SAY, John I

Long identified with the famous fifteenth-century Speaker (John Say II*), this MP was almost certainly another person altogether. Although the Speaker had links with Cambridgeshire, the assumption that it was he who sat for the borough of Cambridge in 1447 is unwarranted, not least because his name was a common one.1 J.S. Roskell, ‘Sir John Say of Broxbourne’, Trans. E. Herts. Arch. Soc. xiv (1), 20-41, makes exactly this assumption. It is worth noting that the borough did not elect outsiders to Parliament on any other occasion in the 15th century. The MP of 1447 is far more likely to have been a namesake, a Cambridge butcher who was the defendant in three lawsuits in the court of common pleas during the early 1440s.2 CP40/722, rot. 445d; 725, rot. 48; 730, rot. 241. In one he was sued by John Scot (a bailiff of Cambridge later in the decade),3 C1/18/144. for allegedly detaining chattels worth 40s.; in the others he was accused of withholding a couple of debts he owed Thomas Rauley or Raulyn, perhaps a fellow burgess. Say had a namesake, quite possibly his son, since he is given the sobriquet ‘senior’ in the plea rolls. No doubt it was the younger man who owed an annual rent of 20s. to the corporation of Cambridge for a house in the town in the early 1480s.4 Cambs. Archs., Cambridge bor. recs., treasurers’ acct. 1483-4, City/PB Box X/71/1.

The chances are that it was the younger John Say who served several terms as one of the bailiffs of Cambridge in the 1460s,5 E368/236, rot. 2d; 242, rots. 2d, 8d; 243, rot. 6d. and was party to a dispute of the same decade. Yet the dispute is worth recounting, since, although relatively trivial, it caused quite a stir at the time. The evidence for it is provided by a deed, drawn up in the form of a certificate issued in the name of 30 burgesses. Dated 24 Feb. 1465, it was intended to justify the local authorities’ handling of the affair, and describes what had happened (presumably shortly before this date). The quarrel was bound up with the Cambridge guild of St. Mary, to which most of the leading burgesses seem to have belonged, and began after Robert Palmer, one of its wardens, was called to account for the 19s. worth of goods entrusted to his care. Being unable to do so, he was sued in the mayor’s court by the alderman of the guild, Robert Garland, and imprisoned for debt. He did not remain in prison for long, however, for his wife was able to raise the sum owed by pawning ‘a gowne of murrey furred with conies grey’ to John Say, a fellow member of the guild. The matter did not end there because Palmer subsequently refused to redeem the pledge and, after ‘many and grete delayes’, Say took action against him in the university chancellor’s court. The gown was officially valued and sold and more than enough money was raised to repay Say and leave a surplus, which was given to Palmer. Say’s involvement in the affair now came to an end, but Palmer subsequently took action against Garland in one of the King’s courts, pleading that the alderman had ‘spoyled hym of a gowne with a certein summe of money in the trayne of the same gowne, knytte in a kerchief’.6 J.A.F. Williams, ‘A Medieval Squabble’, Cambridge Antiq. Soc. Procs. liv. 109-10. It is not clear why Say pursued his action in the chancellor’s court, since the chancellor’s right of ‘conusance’ usually applied only to those cases, whether civil or criminal, in which a university clerk was involved