TOGOOD, Richard

A ‘pikemonger’ by trade, Togood possessed property in Cambridge worth at least £4 p.a. when he entered Parliament.3 E179/81/103. By the mid 1450s, he was a burgess of considerable standing, having served seven consecutive terms as a bailiff of the town.

During his second term as bailiff, he obtained a papal dispensation, dated 29 Jan. 1442, legitimising his match with his second wife, the widow of Andrew Sturmyn. The dispensation waived a two-fold spiritual impediment to their marriage, namely that Togood’s first wife, Emota, had been the godmother of Sturmyn’s daughter, and Sturmyn the godfather of Togood’s son by Emota.4 CPL, ix. 284. Three years later, a quarter sessions jury at Cambridge indicted Walter Ingham, a student from the university, for breaking into Togood’s house and close in the town and taking 30 fish worth 60s. Ingham, who was in due course outlawed, eventually gave himself up at the Marshalsea prison in Southwark in early 1454 and was able to prove error in the process against him and to have the case overturned.5 KB27/772, rex rot. 7. The fish taken were pike (‘dentrices’).

During the latter half of the 1440s and the earlier 1450s, Togood engaged in a lengthy quarrel with the London mercer, Thomas Kyrkeby. The latter, having received an assignment of debts that the MP owed the late William Hankyn of Newport, Essex, from Hankyn’s executors, had taken action in the court of common pleas to recover them, prompting Togood to sue him in the Exchequer for maintenance in 1446. While a resolution over the debts was subsequently reached through the mediation of the serjeants-at-law, Robert Danby and Raulyn Pole, Togood again sued Kyrkeby for maintenance in 1447, this time successfully, in the borough court at Cambridge. Kyrkeby reacted by suing William Mate*, Simon Rankyn* and 15 others of Togood’s fellow burgesses in the common pleas, alleging that they had illegally maintained the suit that the MP had brought against him at Cambridge. Togood subsequently returned to the Exchequer, this time to take action against John Scot, one of the bailiffs of Cambridge in 1446-7, for permitting Kyrkeby to travel to London following his condemnation in the town court. In response, Scot sued Togood in Chancery in February 1451, asserting that he had taken sufficient surety from Kyrkeby – who, in any case, had been wrongly condemned – before he left for London. Presumably Scot won his suit and succeeded in staying Togood’s Exchequer action, for witnesses examined the following April confirmed the substance of his bill.6 E13/144, rot. 21d; CP40/746, rot. 512d; 749, rot 117; C1/18/86, 144-8.

Just under three years later, a suit that the disputatious Togood, in association with John Brunne of Willingham and two carpenters, had brought against a fellow burgess, John Battysford*, reached pleadings in the common pleas. In Hilary term 1454, he and his co-plaintiffs alleged that Battysford had given them a bond at Westminster in mid 1446, in acknowledgement of a debt of £37, and asserted that he still owed them £20 of that sum. Responding by his attorney, Battysford claimed that, in fact, they had extorted the security from him at Cambridge, while he was a prisoner of them and their ‘coven’. Both he and the plaintiffs opted for a trial but it is unclear whether a jury ever considered the matter, and the full circumstances of this case are a mystery.7 CP40/772, rot. 40.

Togood died within a decade of leaving Parliament. As a common pleas lawsuit of the mid 1460s indicates, he was still alive in late 1459 but dead by the latter part of 1465. In this action, the plaintiff, John Wulle, a ‘fisher’ from Cambridgeshire, sought £17 from the MP’s widow, Joan. In pleadings of late 1465 and early 1466, Wulle asserted that Togood had entered into a bond with him at Upwell, Norfolk, as a security for the payment of that sum, on 10 Dec. 1459, and complained that neither Togood nor Joan, his executrix, had paid him. In response, Joan pleaded that she was not her late husband’s executor and nor had she taken up the administration of his goods and chattels. Wulle riposted that she had in fact accepted that role and received possession of Togood’s goods at Upwell.8 CP40/818, rot. 153. These pleadings raise the possibility that Togood had ended his days in west Norfolk, and that he had originated from that part of East Anglia. It is worth noting that a Richard Togood of Wormegay (within 20 miles south-west of Upwell) had been party to several land transactions in that area during the later 1430s and early 1440s, some of them in association with Sir Thomas Tuddenham* and other members of the local gentry.9 Norf. RO, Hare mss, 253, 3014, 3433-5.

It is possible that Joan Togood long outlived her husband, since a widowed plaintiff of that name sued another Richard Togood in the Chancery at some stage between 1486 and 1515. Her suit concerned the alleged detention of deeds relating to a tenement in Kingsbury, Somerset, perhaps indicating an otherwise unknown connexion between the MP – or at least his widow – and the West Country. Alternatively, she was simply a namesake of the Joan who married the subject of this biography, whose name the defendant, also coincidentally, happened to share.10 C1/172/21.