NICOLL, John II

As a woolmonger Nicoll possessed an immediate stake in the cloth industry, Malmesbury’s most important commercial activity during the later Middle Ages. He is not always easy to distinguish from his son and namesake, although it appears he was an MP just once and that it was the younger man (a woolmonger earlier in his career but primarily a lawyer thereafter) who sat for the town in at least five Parliaments of the latter half of Henry VI’s reign.3 CP40/688, rot. 204. The gap of a quarter of a century between the Parl. of 1422, in which the subject of this biography sat, and that of 1447, when a John Nicoll is next known to have represented Malmesbury, suggests that the MP of 1447 and thereafter was the son. It is however possible that the gap was not quite as wide as it first appears, since it is not known who represented the borough in the Parls. of 1439 and 1445. To add to the problems of identification, Nicoll may have possessed an alias, ‘Hopkyns’, since in late 1425 Walter Janes of Arlingham, Gloucestershire, conveyed several strips of land at Arlingham to John Hopkyns alias Nicoll of Malmesbury.4 Cat. Med. Muns. Berkeley Castle ed. Wells-Furby (Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc.), i. 110. Nicoll was active by 1392 when he and his wife Alice received a messuage in Malmesbury from Walter Toukere and his wife.5 Wilts. Feet of Fines, 155. He held at least some land in Alice’s right, since she had inherited property in the borough that once belonged to her great-grandfather Simon Bensire.6 KB27/760, rot. 56.

The loss of Malmesbury’s borough records hides to what degree Nicoll participated in the administration of the town although he did serve as a tax collector in the wider county of Wiltshire. He also attested the return of the county’s knights of the shire to the Parliament of 1422, although perhaps only because he was present in the shire court for his own election to the same assembly. Again, the lack of records ensures that the extent to which he participated in Malmesbury’s parliamentary elections is unknown. He was however a surety on at least two occasions for newly-elected MPs for the borough: John Charlton†, who sat in the Parliament of April 1414, and John Gore*, a Member of that of December 1421.7 C219/11/3; 12/6. A John Nicoll had likewise stood surety for one of the MPs for Ludgershall (of unknown identity owing to the damaged state of the return) in the Parl. of May 1413: C219/11/2.

Still alive in the early 1430s, Nicoll was perhaps the John Nicoll who appointed John West* as his attorney in the court at King’s bench at Westminster in Hilary term 1432.8 KB27/683, att. rot. The same plea roll records that ‘John Nicols’ of Malmesbury ‘senior’ was among those summoned to appear in King’s bench that term to answer a suit for trespass brought by William Grey and John Kyllyng. In the event, neither he nor his co-defendants, another John Nichols and John Corbet, appeared and further writs ensued. Possibly Nicols senior was the subject of this biography and the namesake was his son although this is far from certain, since the plea roll also refers to the former as ‘husbandman’ rather than woolmonger and to the latter as a ‘servant’.9 Ibid. rot. 42. Again in King’s bench, in Trinity term 1432 John Hopkyns and his wife sued John Burchold, a husbandman from Sopworth on the Wiltshire-Gloucestershire border, for violently assaulting her in May that year at Badminton in the latter county. Both Badminton and Sopworth lie near Malmesbury, but once more there are problems with identification. If Hopkyns was the MP using his alias, he must have remarried, for his co-plaintiff was named Agnes, not Alice.10 KB27/685, rot. 23d.

In the following year John III, identified as ‘junior’ in the plea roll, was sued for debt in the court of common pleas. The sobriquet suggests that his father was still alive at this date but it is unclear which of the John Nicolls was the defendant in a contemporaneous suit, again for debt, brought by two Dorset men, Richard Draper of Blandford and Nicholas Smyth of Milton, in the same court.11 CP40/688, rot. 204. Whenever he died, the MP certainly did not live beyond 1456, for he was already dead when John III brought a bill of no later than that year against John West in the Chancery. In the bill, the younger Nicoll complained that West had refused to release a tenement in Malmesbury that he had held in trust for his by then late father.12 C1/16/459.