STOKKES, John

John was a member of the leading family of fifteenth-century Derby. Between November 1384 and 1442 a Stokkes was returned to represent the borough in Parliament on at least 20 occasions. The family’s pedigree is beyond accurate reconstruction but our MP’s parentage is provided by a surviving deed: on 30 Sept. 1409 the abbot and convent of Burton-upon-Trent leased to Thomas Stokkes, Agnes, his wife, and their children, Robert, John and Denise, a watermill in the town for a term of 39 years at a rent of 40s. There can be no doubt that this Thomas is to be identified with the town’s bailiff of 1411-12 who was dead by early in 1414.2 Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. (1937), 156; CP40/613, rot. 156. More speculatively it may be that he was the brother of two more prominent men, Elias and John. However this may be, it is difficult to determine when our MP’s career began and that of his putative uncle John ended. There is little reason to doubt that it was the latter who sat for the borough in the Parliament of October 1404 and attested the election of 1411, and the former who was acting as the town coroner in 1421. But we can only guess as to which of them performed jury service at the inquiry into lollardy in March 1414.3 C219/10/6; KB9/204/1/78.

What is certainly known of the younger John’s career can be quickly set down. On 2 Mar. 1422, a few months before his first election to Parliament, he was named on a jury panel to deliver the Derbyshire prisoners in Nottingham gaol, but was not pricked for service. Following his second Parliament in 1427, he attested the borough election of 1432. His appearance at this election is curious. The hustings were held at a time of acute tension with the town’s established elite, prominent among whom were the Stokkes family, in conflict with a fraternity of lesser townsmen, headed by Nicholas Meysham*, with whom our MP had represented the borough in 1427. Two of this fraternity, William Orme* and Robert Colman*, were elected, and it can only be assumed that either John was at odds with the rest of his family or he had attended the hustings in a failed attempt to prevent their return.4 JUST3/56/19/18; C219/13/1; 14/3.

What became of Stokkes after this is difficult to say. He either died or moved to London: on 23 Oct. 1434 a namesake was appointed as gauger in the port of London. It would be easy to dismiss the gauger’s identification with our MP but for one consideration. In July 1423 John Stokkes ‘of London’ had entered into a recognizance as an executor of the Derbyshire knight, Sir Philip Leche† (d.1420); and since other members of the Stokkes of Derby family were later to be connected both with the Leches and with London, there is an obvious possibility that Sir Philip’s executor is to be identified with our MP. Moreover, on both occasions John sat in Parliament the executors’ dispute with Leche’s coheiresses, particularly Sir Sampson Meverel, was in active agitation.5 CPR, 1429-36, p. 442; CCR, 1422-9, p. 73. It is far less likely that the MP is also to be identified with the London grocer active in the 1440s and 1450s or even with the namesake who attested the Derby election on 18 Jan. 1449. The latter is more likely to have come from a younger generation of the family.6 C219/15/6. This attestor is probably the John Stokkes, ‘junior’, who in Mich. term 1432 was a co-defendant with Elias and Robert Stokkes in a plea of trespass: KB27/686, rot. 79.