SPICER, Henry

A member of a prominent family of Derby, Henry Spicer poses problems of identification. He was probably the spicer of the town who was defending a plea of debt as early as 1423, and if this is the case then he is more likely to have been the uncle than the brother of the Derby MP of February 1449. No more, however, is known of him until his election to Parliament in 1442.1 CP40/648, rot. 235d; C219/15/2. While sitting in this assembly he sued John Reynold* of Leicester for a small debt, but much more significant is an action he had pending there in 1447. He claimed that four merchants of Boston had taken from Derby his goods to the value of as much as £500, implying that his commercial interests were considerable.2 CP40/745, rots. 245, 334d; 746, rot. 306 (where the value of the goods is put at only £40). This is confirmed by a stray reference that provides some details of these interests. In the early 1440s, probably at about the time he was an MP, merchants of the Hanse seized in Norway a Flemish ship in which he and two unnamed partners had a cargo of salt worth as much as £400. Thereafter, according to the petition he presented to the King in July 1446, he spent four and a half years vainly seeking restitution, both by direct appeal to the fellowship of the Hanse and indirectly through the royal council and Parliament. He now successfully asked for letters of marque allowing him to make execution against the Hanse for both the £400 and £200 in costs and damages. His victory was, however, quickly reversed, with the letters revoked in the following March after representations from the Hanse. Whether he succeeded in securing any redress does not appear.3 C81/1546/11; I.D. Colvin, Germans in England, 100.

Although clearly a merchant on some scale, Spicer generally appears in the records as either a grocer or a spicer. In 1447 it was as a grocer that he offered a pledge in the court of King’s bench for the payment of fines by 44 of his fellow townsmen, and in 1452, when sued for debt by the wealthy London draper, Ralph Josselyn†, he and his putative nephew are described as spicers.4 KB27/744, fines rot. 1d; CP40/765, rot. 399.