USSHER, Stephen

Unusually among the MPs for Dartmouth, a sea port whose greater merchants in this period normally returned two of their own number to the Commons, Ussher seems to have been a landed gentleman from his constituency’s hinterland. No details of his career prior to his return to the troubled Parliament of 1450 have come to light, although a petition to the chancellor of about 1454-5, by which one William Babbecomb complained of having been disseised of landholdings in Newton Abbot by one Stephen Holcombe and a group of associates, including Ussher, is suggestive. Babbecombe described Holcombe and his associates as ‘great and mighty jurors and bailiffs ... of lordes and common maintainors of quarrels in the said shire’,2 C1/24/229. and it is possible that Ussher already possessed a connexion – perhaps by feudal tenure – with the lords of Totnes, the Lords Zouche of Haringworth, with whom he would be linked in the 1460s.

There is otherwise little in Ussher’s documented career to support Babbecombe’s indignant hyperbole. In the spring of 1463 he was prosecuting a carpenter and a groom from Broadhempston of stealing the pigeons from his dovecote there, while in early 1465 he accused two men respectively from Little Hempston and Staverton of abducting his servant John Josselyn from London, where he was by this date evidently pursing otherwise obscure interests.3 CP40/808, rot. 365d; 814, rots. 46, 350. The extent of Ussher’s own landholdings is likewise hard to determine. His property in Broadhempston aside, he had property in Totnes, some of which was settled on him and his wife Joan in jointure in late 1465, while a close he held in the town as a tenant of William, Lord Zouche, was by the summer of 1466 in the hands of one John Ryder.4 Watkin, i. 450-1, 464-6.

Ussher’s public career remained unremarkable. He occasionally served on local juries, but is not otherwise known to have held office. He is last recorded as a juror in October 1480,5 C140/69/10, m. 3; 75/33. and had probably died before his putative kinsman, Thomas Ussher, served as provost of Totnes in the reign of Henry VII.6 Watkin, i. 517.