MONMOUTH, John

A minor royal official, John must have owed his seat in the Commons to his connexion with the Crown. He had a peripatetic career, for a royal pardon he received in 1452 referred to him as ‘of Reading’ and ‘late of’ Hereford, London, Dauntsey and Malmesbury.3 C67/40, m. 31 (20 June). Although his origins are uncertain, he was probably originally from Hereford, where he quarrelled with the local dean in the later 1440s,4 CCR, 1447-54, p. 31. and where a putative kinsman, Thomas Monmouth, was assessed for the subsidy of 1451.5 E179/117/64. Thomas of Hereford is to be distinguished from a contemporary, Thomas Monmouth* of Leominster, Herefs., perhaps another of John’s relatives. For the purposes of the same tax, John was assessed at Malmesbury and found to possess lands worth just £6 p.a.6 E179/196/118. Styled as both a ‘gentleman’ and esquire in his pardon of 1452,7 A royal pardon was also issued to a John Monmouth 15 years earlier but it does not mention the grantee’s social rank or place of residence, making it uncertain that he was the same man: C67/38, m. 24 (20 May 1437). he must have owed his social status to his membership of the royal establishment. Given his negligible landholdings, it is unlikely that he was born into the gentry.

Omitted from the pardon is any reference to Monmouth’s position as one of Henry VI’s serjeant-at-arms, to which he had been appointed in late 1444, presumably because he was not then in jeopardy from any lawsuits against him in that capacity. Appointed for life, he was certainly still in office in 1450-1,8 CPR, 1441-6, pp. 315, 463; E361/6, rot. 44. and he may have retained his serjeanty until the overthrow of Henry VI in 1461. Soon after becoming a serjeant, Monmouth seized wine and other merchandise for the Crown, probably in London. Rightfully the property of Venetian merchants who had been victims of piracy in the Mediterranean, the plundered goods had ended up in a Geneose vessel bound for England. Subsequently a number of the King’s subjects had bought the pirated goods, and it was from some of these purchasers that Monmouth made his seizure. Afterwards, in December 1445, the Crown ordered a fellow royal serjeant-at-arms, Thomas Belgrave, to restore the seized goods to the unfortunate Venetians.9 CPR, 1441-6, p. 463.

Upon becoming a serjeant, Monmouth received daily wages of 12d. from the issues of Herefordshire and Wiltshire, two of the counties with which he was linked, as well as the livery of an esquire of the Household.10 CPR, 1441-6, p. 315. Following the calling of his only known Parliament, he must have attended the parliamentary election for the latter county that was held at Wilton on 14 Oct. 1449. Although not listed among the attestors on the official return, he was a surety for one of the newly-elected knights of the shire, the lawyer John Dewall*. Presumably he was not chosen randomly to act for Dewall, who was also linked with Hereford and Dauntsey, and with whom he was a co-feoffee of the Wiltshire esquire William Rous (d.1452). Indeed, it is possible to view Monmouth, Dewall and the latter’s other surety, Thomas Dysswall*, elected to the same Parliament as a burgess for Calne, as part of a distinct Herefordshire element in the county court.11 C219/15/7; Tropenell Cart. ed. Davies, i. 327, 329-31. How Monmouth’s connexion with either Wiltshire or Reading arose is unknown, and it is unclear whether the town remained his principal place of residence after 1452. His HHHhousehold connexion, through which he must have spent much time in the City, must explain the reference to London in his pardon of that year. He was therefore probably the John Monmouth esquire who was a deputy searcher in the port of London in the mid 1450s,12 Although for lack of evidence it is assumed that he was not the ‘John Mounemoth’ appointed searcher of Southampton in Mar. 1466: CFR, xx. 181. and the John Monmouth to whom Londoners entrusted their goods and chattels in 1445 and 1454.13 CCR, 1441-7, pp. 292, 308; 1447-54, p. 486.

It is far from certain that the serjeant-at-arms was the lawyer of the same name who was active at Westminster during the second half of the fifteenth century. In 1451, perhaps shortly after embarking on his career, this John Monmouth was sued (as ‘late of the parish of St. Clement Danes outside the bar of the New Temple’) in the court of common pleas over debts allegedly owed to David John. Later, by 1465 until at least 1476, he was an attorney in the same court in cases emanating from Wiltshire and other counties.14 CP40/761, rot. 331; 763, rot. 77d; 814, att. rot. 4d; 848, rot. 475. During the early 1470s he took action in the common pleas against Richard Ponde of London for detaining two law books, a Natura brevium and an abridgment of the new statutes, which he had entrusted to Ponde for safekeeping, and he pursued various suits against John Tracy, a gentleman from North Piddle, Worcestershire. One of these suits was over a bond that Tracy had given to him in London in 1467 as a security for a loan; a second concerned a chest of charters that had fallen into Tracy’s hands; and a third a debt of £6.15 CP40/840, rots. 102, 142d; 841, rot. 176; 844, rot. 350; 848, rot. 475; 851, rot. 310d. Tracy’s home at North Piddle was where the Mowbray dukes of Norfolk held a manor. Coincidently or not, in 1448 a John Monmouth had acted as an attorney in a conveyance of that property and another Mowbray manor, Bretby in Derbyshire, possibly as part of a settlement made for the benefit of the then duchess of Norfolk. It is also worth noting that John Monmouth had held the office of parker of Bretby in the early 1450s.16 Cat. Med. Muns. Berkeley Castle ed. Wells-Furby (Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc.), ii. 727; L.E. Moye, ‘Estates and Finances of the Mowbray Fam.’ (Duke Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1985), 426. The plea rolls further reveal that Tracy’s opponent was an exigenter of the common pleas, suggesting that he was also the John Monmouth who was a filacer of that court from 1472 until 1479.17 CP40/844-70. In spite of this strong connexion with the common pleas, the John Monmouth who gave counsel in King’s bench in the mid 1460s was probably one and the same man: KB27/832, rot. 40. Crucially, they show also that the exigenter was of Cirencester in Gloucestershire, a town that does not feature in the MP’s pardon of 1452.18 CP40/840, rot. 102. Probably it was John of Cirencester who served as under sheriff of Glos. in 1466-7 and as ‘deputy sheriff’ of the same county in the early 1470s, who represented John Newton II* as an attorney in the Exchequer shortly after Newton had completed his term as sheriff in 1467 and who attested the return of the Glos. knights of the shire to the Parl. of 1472: CP40/820, rot. 328; KB27/841, rot. 84d; E13/153, rot. 103; 154, rot. 6d. But it is unclear whether the Cirencester John should be differentiated from the John Monmouth of Gloucester, ‘gentleman’, who was a pledge in the Exchequer in 1477-8: E13/162, m. 36. Either the MP had settled in Gloucestershire some time after that date or, as seems more likely, the lawyer was a different man altogether.19 During Ric. III’s reign Roger Brent† pursued suits for debt against a number of Londoners, among them Joan, wid. and executrix of John Monmouth of London, but it is not known whether her late husband was the lawyer, the serjeant-at-arms or a third man: CP40/890, rots. 270, 441.