PRALLE, John

Although the name and occupation of Pralle’s father is obscure, his mother is known to have been the daughter of the Totnes draper Henry Herte,5 KB27/713, att. rot. 2. and he himself held property both within and outside the gates of the town, extending as far afield as Dartington, Bovey Tracy and Newton Abbot. He regularly paid a high rate in taxes, for in 1436 his income from land was thought to be £6 p.a., and after his death he was said to have drawn as much as £20 p.a. in rents alone.6 Ibid. 389, 391, 402, 415; C1/9/66; E159/212, recorda Hil. rot. 14(ii); CP40/780, rot. 154d; 781, rot. 228. John was admitted to the merchant guild of Totnes (on 21 Dec. 1444), but he had received training in the law, and in the 1450s could be described as ‘in lege terre eruditus’.7 Watkin, i. 385; J.H. Baker, Men of Ct. (Selden Soc. supp. ser. xviii), ii. 1262. He appears to have practised as an attorney in the royal courts.8 KB27/729, rot. 38; CP40/745, rot. 164; 749, att. rot. 2. Nevertheless, when appointed an executor of his grandfather’s will and forced to continue some of Herte’s pending litigation in the court of King’s bench, he preferred to draw upon the services of the royal filacers Thomas Dowrich I* and John Lynton, rather than prosecuting the action in person.9 KB27/713, att. rot. 2.

Pralle used some of his earnings to acquire property, such as the lands, wood and pasture rights around Ashprington which he leased from Richard and Agnes Knyght in late 1449 at an annual rent of 13s. 4d., on condition that they should fall to him and his heirs after the lessors’ deaths.10 CP25(1)/46/88/238; C1/40/6-8. Pralle’s purchase of holdings in ‘Gattepath Bokehay’ (probably Gappah in Kingsteignton) from the bishop of Exeter, proved fraught with problems, for his middleman in the transaction, the Bovey Tracy merchant William Wrotte, received seisin of the property and refused to hand it over to him.11 KB27/755, rot. 51. Further trouble arose regarding a house Pralle owned in Exeter, which in February 1443 he let to the draper Richard Orenge and his associate John Gage. Gage proposed to pull the house down and rebuild it and sought a lease for a term of 80 years, but Pralle was not prepared to let it for more than 60 years, and called upon his father-in-law, the prominent local Crown servant and shipowner Thomas Gille I, to mediate. The two Exeter men then had indentures for a term of 80 years drawn up and presented them to Pralle for sealing, wrongly claiming that they had been drafted in accordance with Gille’s advice. Pralle sought redress in Chancery, with two other kinsmen, Richard Pralle and John Wood IV*, standing surety for him.12 SC6/827/1, 2; C1/73/33.

Within the town of Totnes Pralle commanded some respect and occasionally served in minor office as a tax collector and headed local juries.13 Watkin, i. 390, 408, 418; ii. 940. It was probably this experience which recommended him to the townsmen for election to the first Parliament of 1449, but it is probable that his connexions with the influential Pomeroy family who owned the suburb of Bridgetown, also played a part.14 KB27/755, rot. 4. Pralle made good use of his time at Westminster, at least in transacting his private business, by pursuing a number of debtors in the royal courts, and providing sureties for the Dartmouth merchant John Gayncote*.15 CP40/752, rots. 224, 417.

A gap in the Totnes records for most of the 1450s makes it impossible to tell whether Pralle held further local office in the years following his spell in Parliament, but it is likely that he did, for in the autumn of 1460 the burgesses elevated him to the senior position of mayor. It is possible that Pralle’s family ties with the influential Gilles played their part in recommending him to the burgesses for election in the heightened political tensions of that autumn. While Pralle’s father-in-law, the elder Thomas Gille, with whom he had maintained close relations,16 CP25(1)/46/87/216; C60/254, m. 19; C1/29/74-77. had been a trusted servant of the Lancastrian administration, his brother-in-law, the younger Thomas, was close to the duke of York’s adherents who found themselves in the ascendant after the battle of Northampton. Certainly, the Yorkists were prepared to place some confidence in Pralle, too: in June 1461, following Edward IV’s accession, he was named among the commissioners charged with the sensitive task of arresting the west-country rebel (Sir) Baldwin Fulford*.17 CPR, 1461-7, p. 33.

The mid 1460s saw Pralle involved in an acrimonious quarrel with one of his neighbours, John Ritte*, who had married the supposed heiress of the Brightricheston family. The Rittes’ claim was challenged by another line of the family, one of whose descendants, William Carswell, had married Pralle’s daughter, Christine. In the summer of 1465 Carswell and his fellow claimants brought charges of forcible entry against the Rittes in the court of common pleas. Pralle for his part ventured to settle the matter by other means. He rode to Brightricheston with a gathering of armed men, and having failed to find John Ritte there, seized livestock worth £30. The armed band then lay in wait in an attempt to kill their victim, but ultimately failed in their design.18 CP40/820, rots. 277d, 405, att. 1, 2; C1/13/227.

Despite his readiness to resort to violence, Pralle was no longer a young man and in the 1460s he exerted much energy and money seeking to recover outstanding debts.19 CP40/802, rot. 366; 838, rot. 175; Watkin, i. 443, 447, 455, 457. More seriously, in 1469 he was once more embroiled in a dispute over impounded livestock in the Devon county court, but took one of his opponent’s leading supporters, the Totnes mercer John Bonefaunte, to the common pleas at Westminster under the provisions of the statute against maintenance.20 CP40/835, rot. 355. It is a measure of Pralle’s experience and the esteem in which he was held within Totnes that during the political crisis of 1470 the burgesses once more elected him to the mayoralty. Although he succeeded in steering the town through Henry VI’s Readeption and lived to see Edward IV restored, he died, still in office, in mid 1471.21 Watkin, i. 473; CFR, xxi. 5. His widow, Joan, acted as his executrix, and was for some time after engaged in litigation with the prominent lawyer Richard Wolston over her late husband’s rents in Totnes and Bovey Tracy.22 C1/9/66.