One of the ablest lawyers of his day, Prysote was a self-made man like so many other successful members of his profession. Despite past confusion about his origins (perhaps because these were humble), it is certain that he came from Cambridgeshire. Since at least the mid fourteenth century, his family had lived as tenants of successive Lords Scales at Haslingfield, a few miles south-west of Cambridge, where he inherited some 42 acres from his father,15 Queens’ Coll. mss, 48, Prysote terrier, ff. 4v, 10. and Richard Prysote, possibly his younger brother, appears to have served the Scales family locally as an estate official.16 Queens’ Coll. mss, 19, Margaret Prysote’s Haslingfield rental of Mich. 1466. The fact that Prysote shared the same name as his father makes it difficult to distinguish between them during the older man’s lifetime. It is nevertheless possible that it was he who was associated with Sir Walter de la Pole* and Sir William Asenhill* in a quitclaim of lands in Harlton and other parishes near Haslingfield in 1420.17 CCR, 1419-22, pp. 131-2.
By that date Prysote had almost certainly started a legal training at one of London’s inns of court but nothing definite is known about him until the later 1430s, when he attested the election of Cambridgeshire’s knights of the shire to the Parliament of 1437 and commenced his career as a local administrator. He himself was elected to sit for Huntingdon in the same Parliament, during which he was appointed to the Cambridgeshire bench. His two months as an MP are his only known connexion with that borough. Although Huntingdon was most frequently represented by its own burgesses during the fifteenth century, it did sometimes elect outsiders like Prysote, including another lawyer, Reynold Arneburgh*, and John Trevelyan of the King’s household. Presumably the burgesses chose him for his legal knowledge, but he may also have enjoyed the backing of a magnate with local influence, John, Lord Tiptoft, since a court roll for Harston, one of that peer’s manors in Cambridgeshire, shows that ‘Prisot’ was steward there in 1440.18 Add. Roll 18538, m. 7. There are good grounds for believing that this was Prysote, who at an unknown later date would stand surety for Tiptoft’s son, John Tiptoft, earl of Worcester, in an obligation to John Sutton, Lord Dudley.19 C1/52/222-3.
The first half of the 1440s saw Prysote rise to the upper ranks of his profession, for he was created a serjeant-at-law on 1 July 1443 and retained as a King’s serjeant on the very same day. As advocates, serjeants commanded the highest fees and enjoyed a monopoly of pleading in the court of common pleas, where the most lucrative property litigation was heard, but the rank committed its holder to a judicial future and service on the assize commissions.20 E.W. Ives, Common Lawyers: Thomas Kebell, 66, 74. As a result, Prysote had fewer opportunities to earn fees from private practice. He did, however, win the patronage of the young Henry Beauchamp, duke of Warwick, who retained him for his counsel with a fee of 20s. p.a. in 1445-6, and of Richard Neville, earl of Salisbury, who was paying him a like annuity by Michaelmas 1445.21 Baker, 1269; SC6/1122/3, m. 4. Furthermore, any potential loss in earnings was at least partially offset by the £20 p.a. the Crown paid serjeants-at-law,22 CCR, 1441-7, p. 193. his retainer as a King’s serjeant and the remuneration he must have received from the duchy of Lancaster, to which he provided legal counsel in the later 1440s.23 R. Somerville, Duchy, i. 451.
Prysote did not join the assizes immediately after becoming a serjeant-at-law, for it was not until the summer of 1447 that he began riding the Norfolk circuit with John Markham, j.KB. He remained on the circuit, made up of the counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire, until his death. Given its relative proximity to London it was one of the more attractive circuits, normally ridden by judges rather than serjeants. Strictly speaking, he should not have been assigned to it at all. A statute of 1330 had laid down that assize justices should not ride circuits within which they were either natives or residents; but this rule was not always observed.24 J.S. Cockburn, English Assizes, 21. Another duty Prysote assumed after becoming a serjeant-at-law was that of attending the Lords in Parliament, a role he fulfilled in every Parliament between his creation as a serjeant-at-law and his death.25 Reps. Lords’ Cttees. iv. 910, 914, 919, 924, 928, 933, 937, 942, 946. He was also a trier of Gascon petitions in the Parliaments of 1453 and 1455, and during the Coventry Parliament of 1459 he was added to the committee of feoffees of those duchy of Lancaster estates set aside for the performance of Henry VI’s will. In the event, his time on the committee was short-lived, since he was not reappointed to it when it was again reconstituted by the following Parliament.26 CCR, 1454-61, p. 462; Somerville, 212n, 213n.
By then he had held one of the highest legal offices for over a decade. His appointment as chief justice of the court of common pleas in early 1449 followed the death of his predecessor as chief justice, Sir Richard Newton, the previous December. To support his new rank, he received an annual fee of £93 6s. 8d., as well as a further £9 p.a. for his robes, linen and furs. It would appear he was already a knight when he became a judge.27 CPR, 1446-52, p. 230. The earliest ref. to him as a knight is dated Feb. 1448, but he was not always accorded this status in documents of a later date. Although he never served as a junior or puisne judge, it was not unprecedented for the Crown to appoint as chief justices men with widely differing experience. In Prysote’s case this may have been because he was a particularly able lawyer, since he is said to have given ‘great furtherance’ to Thomas Littleton when the latter was composing his famous Newe Tenures.28 Ives, 89; E. Foss, Judges, iv. 356-7. During his period as chief justice, he presided over an administrative reform in the common pleas, for in the late 1450s he, with the advice of his puisne judges, drew up a set of ordinances to regulate the conduct and fees of the clerks and other officials of the court.29 M. Hastings, Ct. Common Pleas, 250-5.
As a judge Prysote was appointed to many judicial commissions as a matter of course, although he would not have served on them all. He did, however, ride into Kent as a commissioner of oyer and terminer in the wake of Cade’s Rebellion, sitting as such at Maidstone and Canterbury in September 1450, and again at Tonbridge in the following June.30 R. Virgoe, ‘Ancient Indictments in K.B.’, in Med. Kentish Soc. ed. du Boulay (Kent Rec. Ser. xviii), 229, 238, 245, 252. Another troubled part of the country at this time was Norfolk, which was plagued with disputes between followers of magnates associated with the Court and their opponents from other affinities. In the spring of 1451 Prysote and William Yelverton* were sent on a commission of oyer and terminer to the county to investigate complaints about the activities of John Heydon* and Sir Thomas Tuddenham* and other followers of the late William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk. The sessions opened at Norwich on 29 Apr. but were adjourned to Walsingham five days later, and in a letter of 9 May the chaplain, Thomas Howes, wrote to his master, Sir John Fastolf, to explain what had happened. He said that although strong complaints had been made at Norwich against Tuddenham and Heydon on the part of the city, the town of Swaffham and various individuals, including Fastolf himself and John Paston*, the two justices ‘toke it to derisioun’. Prysote, who would ‘suffre no man that was lerned to speke for the pleyntyfs, but took it as a venom’, was particularly biased, so much so that even Yelverton felt obliged to rebuke him. According to Howes, the removal of proceedings to Walsingham was intended to benefit Tuddenham and Heydon, since the town was situated in a part of the county where they had most support (‘the most parcial place of alle the shire’). There the two accused were accompanied by a strong body of horse (some 400 according to Howes) and Paston was the only complainant who dared to turn up. At another point in his letter, the chaplain recommended Fastolf to try to avoid having any legal matters heard before Prysote in the future, ‘for than all wole be nought’.31 Paston Letters ed. Davis, Beadle and Richmond, 129-30.
While this is a highly partisan account, Prysote’s behaviour was scarcely impartial. In his defence, he would have been well aware that Tuddenham and Heydon had the support of powerful patrons at Court, an important consideration since late medieval judges were obliged to defer to their political masters if they wished to remain on the bench.32 Ives, 232-3. He and his fellows must have found it difficult to maintain any sort of impartiality in the midst of factional strife involving powerful interests, although overtly political judges like (Sir) John Fortescue*, c.j.KB, were the exception rather than the rule. Given the strained political conditions of the time, he must have sympathised with Henry VI’s efforts to secure peace between his magnates in early 1458. At the beginning of March that year, he and Fortescue took bonds from several prominent magnates, both lay and ecclesiastical, apparently as a preliminary to Henry’s ‘loveday’ of the 24th of that month.33 CCR, 1454-61, p. 281. The two judges in their turn bound themselves to Robert Kirkeham, keeper of the hanaper. Subsequently, in 1460, he was appointed to several anti-Yorkist commissions around the country, but this was a matter of course for one of his judicial rank. Prysote died shortly after Henry VI’s overthrow but, had he lived longer, he would probably have gone on to serve Edward IV, as did most of his fellows in the judiciary.
A considerable part of Prysote’s work occurred outside the common pleas, particularly the resolution of private disputes. In June 1452, for example, he, Fortescue, all the serjeants-at-law and other notable lawyers gathered in Exchequer chamber to witness the drawing up of a written declaration concerning a quarrel between the dowager duchess of Suffolk and Drew Barantyn* over the Oxfordshire manor of Nuneham Courtenay.34 CCR, 1447-54, pp. 346-7. See VCH Oxon. v. 240 for the background to the dispute. In the same year he was one of those chosen to arbitrate in the well known dispute between Henry Holand, duke of Exeter, and Ralph, Lord Cromwell, about the manor of Ampthill and other properties in Bedfordshire. Besides Prysote, the panel consisted of Thomas Bourgchier, bishop of Ely, Ralph Boteler, Lord Sudeley, the prior of the Hospitallers and John Portington, j.c.p. Although Prysote was a Holand feoffee and associated with Exeter in receiving a conveyance of several properties in Essex and Buckinghamshire from Thomas, Lord Richemont Grey, in 1460, the panel has all the appearance of an impartial body. It is not known if any award was made, but Exeter was unlikely to have called for the arbitration – probably imposed by the Crown – since his claim to the manor was blatantly unjust.35 CPR, 1452-61, p. 513; S.J. Payling, ‘Ampthill Dispute’, EHR, civ. 889-90; M.M.N. Stansfield, ‘Holland Fam.’ (Oxf. Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1987), 221, 222; CCR, 1447-54, p. 360; 1454-61, pp. 482-3 Prysote arbitrated in at least two other magnate disputes. First, in November 1456 he made an award between John Bourgchier, Lord Berners, Humphrey Bourgchier (Berners’s son and heir), and the latter’s wife, Elizabeth, on the one hand, and her uncles Hugh and Robert Tilney* on the other, after a dispute between the parties over the estates of Philip Tilney, her late grandfather.36 CCR, 1468-76, no. 920; F. Blomefield, Norf. v. 150-1. Secondly, he mediated between Richard Fiennes, Lord Dacre, and his younger brother, Robert Fiennes*, a few years later.37 CIPM Hen. VII, i. 190. Prysote also helped to resolve quarrels among those below the rank of the peerage: in 1460, for example, Thomas Vaughan* and John Fogg† agreed to lay their differences concerning the title to two Kent manors before him and one of his junior colleagues, Walter Moyle*, j.c.p.38 CCR, 1454-61, p. 480. On at least one occasion, his part in an arbitration caused no little trouble for himself, since some ten years earlier he had been sued in Chancery for allegedly failing in his duties as an arbiter between John Heynxtworth and three associates, on one side, and Alexander Marchall, a Hertfordshire gentleman, on the other. In the bill Heynxtworth and his fellows alleged that Marchall had breached the conditions of a bond he had submitted as a preliminary to arbitration, and that Prysote, to whom he was bound, had failed to go to law against him. Prysote responded by asking the court to examine the truth of the plaintiffs’ claims.39 C1/19/174.
Besides acting as an arbiter, Prysote also performed as an executor and feoffee for private individuals, among them Philip Butler* and the well-connected (Sir) Edmund Ingoldisthorpe*. In 1460 he and others of Ingoldisthorpe’s executors obtained a licence to found a chantry at Burrough Green, Cambridgeshire,40 E159/230, recorda Mich. rot. 88, Hil. rot. 61; CCR, 1454-61, pp. 156, 157; CPR, 1452-61, p. 634. and in the same year Robert, Lord Hungerford and Moleyns, appointed him a feoffee of properties spread over several counties.41 CCR, 1454-61, pp. 451-2. At about this date or, perhaps, a few years earlier, he was sued in Chancery in his capacity as a feoffee for a lesser landowner. The plaintiff, John Culham*, complained that Prysote had refused to release his interest in a manor at Haddenham in the Isle of Ely, a property he had held in trust on behalf of the late Thomas Freman. Culham claimed to have bought the property from the deceased, but Prysote replied that Freman had instructed him not to release the manor until Culham complied with the covenant of sale.42 C1/26/481-3.
Evidence about Prysote’s own lands is patchy, not least because his inquisition post mortem has not survived.43 It was once thought that he held a manor as far afield as Rucking in Kent (E. Hasted, Kent ed. Drake, viii. 355; Arch. Cant. v. 27), but the descendant of this John Prysote of Kent, Thomas Prysote (d.1518), did not inherit any of the MP’s lands, so disproving that assumption: C142/33/84. At some stage before 1438, he acquired the manor of Fynors Fee in Over, Cambridgeshire,44 VCH Cambs. ix. 344. and over the years he made various minor land purchases in Haslingfield, to add to the holdings he had inherited from his father.45 Queens’ Coll. mss, 48, Prysote terrier, ff. 4v, 9; deeds in Queens’ Coll. mss 50-52; VCH Cambs. v. 232. It is possible that he did not gain full control of the elder John Prysote’s lands in that parish until relatively late in life, since his mother was still alive in mid 1440.46 Queens’ Coll. mss, 48, deed of 27 May 1440. Before the end of the 1440s, Prysote took a bond for £40 from a gentleman of Haslingfield, Thomas Owtelawe, but it is not known whether this security related to his own holdings there since its conditions are unrecorded. At the end of 1449 Prysote delivered the bond to William Cotton* for safekeeping, although afterwards he took action in the common pleas against Cotton for not returning that security upon demand.47 CP40/776, rot. 312. Later, in 1456, he was party to a conveyance of two manors at Elm in the Isle of Ely, but the purpose of this transaction is unknown.48 CP25(1)/30/99/86; VCH Cambs. iv. 181-2. Outside Cambridgeshire, he was in possession of a manor in Wallington, Hertfordshire, by the 1440s, evidently in the right of his wife, Margaret, whose former husband, William Walkern, came from that parish.49 CFR, xiii. 181; xiv. 152; CCR, 1419-22, pp. 251-2. In June 1453 it was settled on the Prysotes for their lives with remainder to Margaret’s heirs by Walkern.50 CP25(1)/91/116/175. Wallington gave Prysote a sufficient connexion with Hertfordshire for him to attest the election of its knights of the shire to the Parliament of 1447. One of Prysote’s last acquisitions was a manor in Thornton, Buckinghamshire, which he bought from the trustees of the deceased John Barton I* in 1457. This was undoubtedly an extensive and potentially valuable property, since it came with the advowson of the local parish church, 600 acres of land, 1,000 acres of wood and two parks.51 VCH Bucks. iv. 244-5; C1/29/99.
Prysote died in the spring of 1461, while the country was in the grip of civil war. On 12 May that year Margaret Prysote was ordered to deliver to Robert Danby, his successor as chief justice, the rolls, writs and other memoranda belonging to the common pleas which had been in her late husband’s possession.52 CP40/801, rot. 59. Five days later, the ecclesiastical authorities gave orders for his will (which has not survived) to be proved, so that administration of his estate could be passed to his executors, comprising his widow, John Powlter and John Fililode.53 Reg. Bourgchier (Canterbury and York Soc. liv), 197. Fililode is to be distinguished from John Filoll* of Dors. Prysote’s executor was ‘of London, gentleman’, and married Margaret, wid. of John Dunstaple of Steeple Morden, Cambs.: KB27/818, rot. 115; VCH Cambs. viii. 114. Prysote was buried in an altar tomb in the north chapel of the parish church at Wallington. The Prysote arms can be seen on both the tomb and the stained glass windows in the chapel; also depicted are those of the Pygots, probably because they were his wife’s family.54 Trans. E. Herts. Arch. Soc. ix. 255; VCH Herts. iii. 287; N. Pevsner, Buildings of Eng.: Herts. 374. Thomas Pygot was associated with Margaret in conveying away some of the Prysote lands in Haslingfield after the judge’s death: Queens’ Coll. mss, 50, deed of 7 Oct. 1475.
Soon after Prysote’s death, his widow filed a bill in Chancery against Thomas Shotbolt, one of the feoffees of Thornton, for failing to convey it to her as directed by her late husband’s will. Shotbolt, then a debtor in Ludgate prison, acknowledged that he was a feoffee but said that he had entered several bonds on behalf of Prysote, who had agreed that the manor should serve as a surety until the bonds were discharged; since that had not happened he was holding on to the property. He also provided details of the bonds in question. Two were connected with Prysote’s purchase of Thornton and a third was given as a security when the MP bought ‘divers stuff’ from the executors of William Alnwick (d.1449), bishop of Lincoln. There was also another bond, for £100, relating to the office of exigenter of London in the common pleas, which he and his father had given the late chief justice, the conditions of which they had afterwards fulfilled.55 C1/29/99-100. The exigenters, clerks whose duties were to make out exigents, writs of proclamation and writs of supersedeas, were appointed by the chief justice: Hastings, 108, 151. Presumably Prysote had sold the office to Shotbolt. In February 1462 Margaret offered to discharge those bonds still outstanding, after which the court ordered Shotbolt to release his interest in the manor to her.56 C1/29/101. He complied by making the desired release in the following June.57 CCR, 1461-8, p. 135. This dispute was not Margaret’s only challenge with regard to Thornton, since she also faced claims from George Loughton and William Gernon, both descendants of the Chastillons, the family from whom John Barton had acquired the manor.58 VCH Bucks. iv. 244-5. In mid 1461 Loughton made an entry on to Thornton, prompting Margaret to begin a suit against him in the following November. By then her opponent was a prisoner in the Marshalsea, although whether in connexion with this dispute or another matter is unclear. According to Margaret, Loughton had entered Thornton at the head of a sixty strong armed following on 9 June 1461, looting the manor house of its household goods and furnishings, taking away livestock and mistreating four of her servants. In response, Loughton denied taking many of the items while claiming that he had returned the rest to two of Margaret’s men. When the matter was tried locally at Aylesbury’s lammas assizes of 1462, the jury found against Loughton although Margaret was awarded costs and damages of £60, considerably less than the £500 she had sought.59 KB27/803, rots. 73, 73d. While this case was still in progress, Margaret and her feoffees won an assize of novel disseisin at High Wycombe against Loughton, again over Thornton in March 1462, and her opponent was ordered to pay her a further £130 in costs and damages as a result.60 C66/499, m. 22d. Soon afterwards, she sold the manor to Robert Ingleton*61 VCH Bucks. iv. 245. but even after disposing of the property she was embroiled in further litigation relating to it. Having failed to pay her the £130 and to make fine with the Crown, Loughton was sent to the Fleet, where he languished until the warden of that prison, Elizabeth Venour, released him in 1467. In November that year, Margaret began a lawsuit against Elizabeth for allowing Loughton his liberty even though the damages were yet unpaid.62 CP40/825, rot. 575.
It does not necessarily follow that Margaret sold Thornton because it was more trouble than it was worth, since she disposed of most – if not all – of the estates of her late husband, who appears to have died without any surviving male issue.63 He had at least one daughter, Anne, who m. George Dallyson: H. Chauncey, Herts. i. 357. It seems likely that Prysote had had a son and namesake who had predeceased him, for in the early 1450s the Crown granted a pardon to a John Prysote, ‘gentleman’, lately of Wallington, Herts., Clerkenwell, Mdx. and London: C67/40, m. 4. This cannot have been the MP, who was a knight and c.j.c.p. by that date. The Agnes Prysote, wid., who in 1478 sold some lands in Haslingfield has not been identified: Queens’ Coll. mss, 52, deed of 6 May 1478. Among her recorded sales were those of the manor at Over to Corpus Christi College in 1473,64 VCH Cambs. ix. 344. and of the Haslingfield properties to feoffees acting for another Cambridge college, Queens’, two years later.65 Queens’ Coll. mss, 50, deed of 7 Oct. 1475; VCH Cambs. v. 232. Margaret appears to have outlived her husband by nearly 40 years, since a writ of diem clausit extremum relating to her was issued in 1498.66 CFR, xxii. 620.