WARNER, Robert

Warner, who was descended from a family established at Gestingthorpe in Essex since at least the early fourteenth century,8 Child, Tylney, Long and Wellesley mss, D/DCw/T41/1; Cart. Knights of St. John of Jerusalem (Recs. Social and Econ. Hist. n.s. vi), 836, 841. probably came to London to practice the law. The details of his training in the profession are obscure, but he seems to have been among the earliest fellows of Staple Inn in Holborn, or at least belonged to a company of lawyers residing there, for in 1407 he headed the list of four men who held the building of that name. The inn, which in time descended to Warner’s heirs, was evidently his personal property, and – unless he merely acted as landlord to its fellowship – he may have fulfilled the functions of the company’s principal.9 Ramsay, 116; Guildhall Lib., St. Paul’s mss, 25125/55, m. 1. The survival of Warner’s father into the reign of Henry V makes it difficult to distinguish some of their activities,10 In a pardon of Apr. 1413 Warner was still styled ‘junior’: C67/36, m 15. By that date he was serving among the officers of the ct. of KB: KB9/993/11. but it was probably the later MP who in 1413 could look back on several years’ employment as a bailiff or other official by the sheriffs of London and Middlesex. He had begun his career of public service in London in the 1390s, and continued to hold a range of minor posts for more than three decades, before he was finally exempted by the city authorities from the offices of ‘taxor, assessor, collector, constable or scavager’ in November 1430.11 Cal. Letter Bk. London, K, 114. Two years earlier, he had finally surrendered the under shrievalty of Middlesex which he had held, apparently continuously, since 1408. An under sheriff’s duties could be onerous, and those of the under sheriff of Middlesex were particularly demanding, including not only the routine care for the fixtures and fittings of the royal law courts in Westminster Hall,12 KB27/602, fines rot. 1; KB145/6/6. but also other ad hoc tasks, such as, in the second half of 1413, the summoning of numerous juries to try those implicated in the rebellion fomented by Sir John Oldcastle†.13 E403/614, m. 9.

Such official business aside, Warner, like many other lawyers of his standing, busied himself with the affairs of numerous private clients, frequently serving as an attorney, arbiter and feoffee, standing surety in the law-courts and attesting his neighbours’ property deeds. His network of clients stretched across the city of London and into its immediate hinterland. He maintained connexions with his native county of Essex by assisting the future Speaker Richard Baynard* and his third wife in their property transactions,14 The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 150; CCR, 1402-5, pp. 295, 299; 1405-9, pp. 276-7, 284; 1413-19, pp. 187-8; 1419-22, pp. 224-5; 1422-9, p. 331; Corp. London RO, hr 141/94; 151/43. while establishing close links with some of the leading families of Middlesex. His services were engaged by the wealthy John Walden† of Tottenham, brother of a former archbishop of Canterbury, as well as the closely inter-related Charltons and Frowyks, particularly Sir Thomas Charlton* (his parliamentary colleague in 1425), Henry Frowyk I* and the latter’s son, Thomas II*.15 CCR, 1422-9, p. 382; 1429-35, p. 124; CPR, 1422-9, p. 483; CP25(1)152/90/55; 291/63/45; London hr 154/3, 5, 71, 74, 75; 156/19; 158/60; 163/46, 60; 183/4. A range of prominent London merchants, including the draper Walter Gawtron* and the mercers John Shadworth, William Walderne† and Thomas Osborne, requested his assistance for their conveyances.16 London hr 152/16, 35; 156/21; 163/5; 167/36; CPR, 1422-9, p. 534. Interestingly, Warner showed some reluctance to take on the onerous responsibility of executing wills and testaments. Among those who entrusted him with the provision for their afterlives were Thomas Charlton† (d.1410) of Hillingdon, John Walden and the latter’s widow, but on each occasion Warner played no part in securing probate and apparently avoided any direct involvement in the settlement of the affairs of the deceased.17 PCC 25 Marche (PROB11/2A, f. 170); 6 Luffenham (PROB11/3, f. 42); Reg. Chichele, ii. 135-6.

Westminster Abbey was not alone in regularly offering the under sheriff douceurs of up to a mark of silver,18 Westminster Abbey muns. 18629-31, 19903. and such payments together with the rewards of office and the fees of his private practice brought Warner considerable wealth. This he invested in the expansion of his landed estate in Middlesex. Between 1410 and 1422 he acquired some 24 properties in and around Holborn,19 E210/4098; CCR, 1429-35, pp. 126-7; E. Williams, Early Holborn, ii. 1192, 1226, 1594-5, 1598-1602. to which he added in 1428 the building called ‘Clitterhouse’ in Hendon, and in the 1430s land at Colham and the manor of Poplar.20 Cart. St. Bartholomew’s Hosp. ed. Kerling, 1132, 1138-40; CCR, 1435-41, pp. 47-48; CP25(1)/152/90/66; C1/27/82. But his principal acquisitions were the manor of Cowley Peachey, which he purchased from Sir Thomas Charlton in 1431,21 CP40/789, rot. 322; R. Newcourt, Repertorium, i. 593; G. Hennessy, Novum Repertorium, 131; CCR, 1429-35, p. 124; VCH Mdx. iv. 27; The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 517. and the house in Hayes known as ‘Talbottes’, where he seems to have made his home with his third wife.22 VCH Mdx. iii. 173; iv. 27.

By contrast, Warner seems to have acquired little if anything by his three marriages. Of his first wife, Cecily, nothing is known, except for her name. The parentage of her successor, Eleanor, is equally obscure, but she is unlikely to have brought him any London property, since in 1418 the couple had to lease a vacant plot in the parish of St. Martin Ludgate on which to build a house.23 Cal. Letter Bk. London, I, 195, 202. His third wife, the Flemish-born widow of an Italian broker, Davide Galganetti, probably brought him an interest in trade, for Galganetti had been a member of the prestigious Mercers’ Company. While there is no evidence that Warner himself was ever admitted to the Company (he had already been a freeman of London for some years prior to this marriage, although of what mistery is uncertain), he was at least in some quarters assumed to have joined it.24 CPR, 1436-41, p. 352; London hr 183/4.

It is not clear what motivated Warner to seek election to the Parliament of 1425. He was not unfamiliar with parliamentary affairs, for his care for the fixtures of Westminster Hall regularly demanded his attendance at Westminster when the Lords and Commons were in session. Moreover, in his capacity as under sheriff he was more often than not present at the parliamentary elections in the Middlesex county court, and although the standard diplomatic practice adopted when drawing up the election indenture preserved the fiction that the sheriffs of London and Middlesex had presided in their own persons (thus allowing Warner to take his place among the attestors countersealing the document), the reality of the under sheriff’s leading part in proceedings is hinted at by occasional engrossments.25 C219/12/4, 5. Although the statutory prohibition of returning serving sheriffs to the Commons did not apply to an under sheriff, in 1425 Warner neither attested the Middlesex return, nor is there any other indication of his role in the election. His return was in any case not an unusual one: the electors of Middlesex frequently chose members of the Westminster administration, such as the Exchequer official Henry Somer*, to represent them in the Commons, and Warner’s increasing wealth and standing may have made him seem a suitable candidate.

In spite of his profession, Warner does not appear to have been a litigious man in his own right. His appearances in the law courts on his own affairs were few and far between, mainly dating from the later years of his life, after his surrender of the Middlesex under shrievalty. Thus, in the summer of 1429 he quarrelled with one John Ogham over a bond for £20; that autumn he accused one of his tenants at Stanwell of unlawfully retrieving livestock which he had seized in distraint for customary services; and a year later he was embroiled in a suit of trespass against a rather more prominent opponent, William Hulles, the prior of St. John of Jerusalem in England, probably in connexion with Staple Inn or another of his properties in Holborn in the vicinity of the Temple.26 E5/486, no. 37; KB27/670, rot. 30; 678, att. rot. 1. In 1436 Warner accused a husbandman from Walden (Essex) of taking his goods to a value of £5 and £20 in money, from Westminster, while two years later John Pafford (one of Warner’s neighbours at Hayes) sued out a writ of corpus cum causa to secure his release from the arrest under which he had been placed by the sheriffs of London at Warner’s suit.27 KB27/701, rot. 75; KB29/72, rot. 3.

By 1436 Warner’s estates in London, Middlesex, Essex, Oxfordshire and Surrey were believed to be worth at least £50 p.a.28 EHR, xlix. 638. Manors in Oxfordshire and Surrey had fallen to him as a consequence of the important marriage he had contracted for his daughter, Elizabeth, to Henry de la Poyle, heir apparent to a family of some standing in those counties. Prior to the marriage Warner had been made a feoffee of the de la Poyle estates and when Henry and his father, John de la Poyle, died in rapid succession in 1422 and 1423, leaving his own infant grandson Robert as their heir, he secured for his own lifetime the manors of Hampton Poyle and Poyle in Guildford.29 CPR, 1422-9, p. 164; 1436-41, p. 151; VCH Surr. ii. 618; iii. 503; CP25(1)/292/69/215; VCH Oxon. vi. 161; C139/10/26; 90/12. The widowed Elizabeth took as her second husband William Somercotes, the former yeoman of Henry V’s robes, and before her father’s death she married a third time, the prominent Middlesex esquire Walter Green*. As her sister Agnes had become a nun at Haliwell, she was their father’s sole heir, and it was this valuable inheritance as well as her dower lands that proved so attractive to Green.30 C139/10/26; H. Kleineke, ‘Schoolboy’s Tale’, London and the Kingdom, ed. Davies and Prescott, 152; O. Manning and W. Bray, Surr. iii. 174; F.C. Cass, Parish of Monken Hadley, 127; Trans. London and Mdx. Arch. Soc. xx. 180.

It was probably on account of his advancing years that in 1428 Warner had been replaced as under sheriff, and his exemption from office-holding in London in 1430 explicitly referred to his ‘infirmities’.31 Cal. Letter Bk. London, K, 114. On 1 May 1439 he made a will containing provision for the disposal of his lands, most of which were settled on his widow, Margaret, for life. After her death, Warner’s brother Thomas was to keep the manor of Cowley until he died, whereupon it was to be donated to St. Bartholomew’s hospital in return for prayers for the testator’s soul. ‘Talbottes’, Warner’s house at Hayes, was to fall to his servant John Bysshop after Margaret’s death, while other lands in Norwood were bequeathed to John Stanes alias Hale, with successive remainders to Warner’s daughter Elizabeth and her descendants. Lands in Gestingthorpe which had previously belonged to Warner’s mother were assigned to the son of his half-brother, Thomas Howe. Yet Warner soon revised his plans, in view of his wife’s age and frailty and his elderly brother’s blindness. Less than three weeks later, on 20 May, he drafted a fresh will. Cowley and his lands in Hendon were now to be settled on St. Bartholomew’s more immediately, in return for an annual pension of 20 marks payable first to Margaret and after her death to Thomas Warner, and the establishment of a chantry in the hospital’s Lady chapel. The chantry chaplain was to receive a generous stipend of ten marks a year, increasing to 12 marks after Margaret and Thomas had died; from then on he was to be assisted by four boys between the ages of six and 21 years. Margaret was to have all of her husband’s plate, jewels and household goods, but not his clothing, which was to be sold. Warner requested burial in the church at St. Bartholomew’s, and specified that eight torches and four wax candles provided for his funeral would subsequently be distributed in pairs to the parish churches of Hayes and St. Vedast, London, and Haliwell priory, while six were to remain near his tomb, to light the rood-beam and the host elevated during the mass. On the anniversary of his death one mark was to be offered for the benefit of the brethren and inmates of the hospital, while the dean of St. Paul’s, to whom supervision of the will was committed, was to receive 6s. 8d. As his executors Warner chose his widow, John Wakering, the master of St. Bartholomew’s hospital, and Henry Aubrey. He died ten days later, on 30 May.32 E.C. Roger, ‘Blakberd’s Treasure’, in The Fifteenth Cent. XIII ed. Clark, 100-1; Cart. St. Bartholomew’s Hosp. 1143-4; PCC 25 Luffenam (PROB11/7, f. 200); C44/28/2, f. 2; C139/90/12; 102/2.

In December 1439 Margaret Warner procured letters of denization which allowed her to hold land in her own right.33 CPR, 1436-41, p. 352. She lived long enough to become embroiled in litigation over Warner’s debts, but died in the course of 1442. By her will, made on 17 Feb. that year, she asked to be buried without undue pomp next to Warner, and left bequests of money, plate and other household goods to her two grand-daughters (the children of the son of her second marriage).34 Commissary ct. wills, 9171/4, f. 103v; J. Stow, Surv. London ed. Kingsford, ii. 23. Meanwhile, in February 1440 Warner’s feoffees had secured a royal licence to grant Cowley Peachey and Clitterhouse to St. Bartholomew’s hospital, but Elizabeth and Walter Green lost little time in mounting a challenge against the provisions of his will. Warner had foreseen this circumstance, for he had stipulated that Green should be disinherited, should he prove difficult, but the couple nevertheless successfully maintained their possession of the property, and a few years later they also fought off an intervention by (Sir) Thomas Charlton* who sought to recover in the law courts some of what his father had sold.35 C143/448/26; C44/28/2; C1/39/122; CP40/789, rot. 322. In 1446 they released Clitterhouse to St. Bartholomew’s, but the rest of the estates Robert Warner had assembled eventually passed to Elizabeth’s eldest son by Walter Green and his descendants.36 VCH Mdx. v. 20; Cart. St. Bartholomew’s Hosp. 1141, 1142, 1144, 1145; E150/461/11; C1/27/82.