REPINGHALE, Nicholas

The outlines of Repinghale’s brief career are clear, although there is no evidence to indicate why he should have been returned for Newcastle-under-Lyme in 1437. He was probably the son of Thomas Repinghale, who was assessed on an income of ten marks p.a. in the Lincolnshire subsidy returns of 1436, and a kinsman, perhaps an elder brother, of Robert Repinghale, a clerk in the King’s signet office in the 1440s.2 Lincs. Archit. and Arch. Soc. iv. 47; A.J. Otway-Ruthven, King’s Secretary, 131-3; J.H. Baker, Men of Ct. (Selden Soc. supp. ser. xviii), ii. 1307. Thomas may have been a lawyer – if one may judge by the frequency with which he was employed as a feoffee by his neighbours – and our MP certainly was. Admitted to Lincoln’s Inn in 1433, he rose through the ranks there.3 L. Inn Adm. i. 7. On 5 Nov. 1436 he was one of the 19 fellows who agreed to remain at the Inn during vacations, probably with the intent of providing the quality of the legal education it offered. Our MP’s particular promise was ‘to contynwe alle the vacacions … by iij hole yere’.4 L. Inn Black Bks. i. 7; E.W. Ives, Common Lawyers: Thomas Kebell, 41. The surviving records of the Inn provide glimpses of his involvement in its domestic affairs over the next few years. During his term as pensioner in 1441-2 he paid 10s. 7d. out of his own pocket to fund a ‘potatio’, probably a reference to the communal dinner to which the pensioner was entitled. This charge should have fallen on the fellows, but although money had been collected from them the steward had refused to put it to its intended purpose, and the society later compensated him. In 1442-3 he was responsible for collecting funds for the maintenance of the Inn’s chapel, paying out the modest sum of 4d. for ‘cutting out the vanes for the Chapel’ (pro cindicione venearum Capelle), and in the following year he acted as one of the Inn’s four governors.5 L. Inn Black Bks. i. 13, 16.

Aside from his activities at Lincoln’s Inn little is known of Repinghale. In the spring of 1440 he offered surety in a royal grant of a marriage to a more senior member of his Inn, Robert Sheffeld*, another Lincolnshire man, and a year later he was named as trustee in the goods of William Agas. Later, on 8 Jan. 1442, he attested the parliamentary election in his native county, when Sheffeld was one of those returned. At this date his putative father, Thomas, was still alive, and it must be doubtful whether our MP survived to inherit.6 CFR, xvii. 134-5; CCR, 1435-41, p. 462; C219/15/2; CP40/727, rot. 451. Nicholas disappears from the records in 1444, and death, just as he appeared set to enjoy the sort prosperous career that was the usual lot of senior men of the inns of court, is the most likely explanation.7 It has tentatively been suggested that he was the autumn term reader for L. Inn in 1445, but there is no firm evidence: Readings and Moots, i (Selden Soc. lxxi), p. xii.

It is not known whether Repinghale married. When he was governor of Lincoln’s Inn, a ‘Repynghale junior’ was, ‘for certain special causes’, admitted to repasts without any continuation (that is, he was exempt from remaining at the Inn during vacations), and it is possible that this was his son. It is, however, more likely that the admission refers to the signet clerk.8 L. Inn Black Bks. i. 15.