PYNNE, Robert

A merchant of some standing like his father, Pynne had attained his majority by November 1431, when he appeared in the borough court at Great Yarmouth to sue another burgess for debt.5 Gt. Yarmouth ct. rolls, 1431-2, 1444-5, 1457-8, Y/C 4/140, m. 2; 151, m. 1; 163, m. 4; E122/151/75, m. 1d. Two years later, he appears to have become caught up in a dispute between Yarmouth and the Cinque Ports. Quarrels with the Ports, which possessed officially-recognized fishing rights off the East Anglian coast and sent representatives to the borough’s herring fair every autumn, were not uncommon. In December 1433 the Ports decided to prosecute a suit at Westminster against the authorities at Great Yarmouth for their actions during the most recent fair. They drew up a schedule of grievances, including the complaint that a band of townsmen had forcibly freed a ‘Commen woman called Alyson’ on 19 Oct., after the Ports’ officials in the borough had arrested her for wandering the streets at night. Among Alison’s rescuers was ‘Pynne’s son’, probably Robert, since ‘Pynne’ was almost certainly the MP’s prominent burgess father, John.6 White and Black Bks. of Cinque Ports (Kent Rec. Ser. xix), 2-3.

A few years later, Robert married his first wife, Joan. In January 1436, within a year of their marriage, the couple were among the defendants in a plea of contract sued in the borough court by John Crowmere, whose widow Robert would marry after Joan’s death. Joan herself was a widow when Pynne married her, and in mid 1436 Richard Falke sued the couple in the same court over a minor debt of 12s. Falke claimed the sum from the estate of Joan’s previous husband, John Hastyng, a prominent burgess who had died during the winter of 1434-5, having appointed her one of his executors.7 Gt. Yarmouth ct. roll Y/C 4/144, mm. 4, 5d.

At the end of the same decade, Pynne was appointed one of the bailiffs of Great Yarmouth, an office in which he would serve three further terms over the following 20 years. In the later 1440s, during his second term, he and his co-bailiff, Thomas atte Fenne*, were sued in the Chancery by John Elger, John Stroude and John Westgate. Acting in their capacity as the executors of Joan Cranele, the plaintiffs accused Pynne and atte Fenne of biased conduct in the borough court. They said that when they had brought a suit for debt against Albright Yansone de la Wyke (presumably a foreigner), the bailiffs had unfairly favoured the defendant and delayed giving a judgement, thereby forestalling the recovery of the money owed to them.8 C1/16/573. During his same second term as bailiff, two royal commissioners, Richard Heynes and Robert Pylton, ‘aspied’ that Pynne was organizing illegal shipments of wool and woolfells from Great Yarmouth, causing the Crown to lose £1,000 in customs, subsidies and other charges. Reporting back to the government, they said that they had tried to hold an inquiry in the borough, only for Pynne to use his authority as bailiff to obstruct them. In response, the King’s council ordered Pynne to appear before it on 26 May 1448. It also instructed Thomas atte Fenne and (Sir) Miles Stapleton* to help Heynes and Pylton execute their commission in the meantime.9 PPC, vi. 328-30. Whatever the outcome of these investigations, it bore no serious consequences for Pynne. Returned to the Commons the following year, he was again bailiff in 1451-2. He did, however, take the trouble of purchasing a royal pardon, dated 16 May 1452.10 C67/40, m. 32.

A month after the opening of his son’s only known Parliament in November 1449, John Pynne drew up his will, appointing the MP one of his executors.11 Reg. Aleyn, f. 46. Earlier that year, John Geete of Ipswich sued John and Robert Pynne in the Chancery, complaining that they had had seized a ship of his at Yarmouth.12 C1/17/131. While Robert was evidently the subject of this biography, it is not certain whether his co-defendant was his father, who survived until late 1450, or another John Pynne active at this time. Perhaps a younger brother of the MP, the latter was sometimes known as ‘John Pynne junior’ while the elder John was still alive.13 Gt. Yarmouth ct. rolls, 1437-8, 1446-8, Y/C 4/146, mm. 5, 10d; 153, m. 16d; 154, mm. 14, 15.

Very late in life, the elder John Pynne was obliged to answer a lawsuit that Thomas Niche, a merchant from London, had brought against him in the court of common pleas. In pleadings of Michaelmas term 1450, Niche alleged that John still owed him 40s. for a butt of malmsey wine that he had sold to the Yarmouth man in the City in April 1448. John responded by obtaining licence to treat with the plaintiff out of court until early in the new year, only to die in the meantime. Niche had also had dealings with Robert, whom he likewise sued in a parallel action. In pleadings of the same Michaelmas term, he claimed that Robert had failed to pay him for wine purchased – again in London – in February 1448. In this suit he sought the significantly larger sum of £7 13s., for a butt of malmsey and another of the much rarer and more expensive ‘Tyre’ wine.14 CP40/759, rots. 348d, 350d; S. Rose, Wine Trade in Med. Europe, 83.

A few days after making his will, John Pynne and his second wife, Alice, had appeared in the borough court to enrol two deeds. Both dated October 1445, these recorded that the couple had settled properties which had belonged to Alice’s former husband, Bartholomew Drayton, upon themselves for their lives with remainder to the MP, and Alice’s daughter, Rose. Robert subsequently married Rose, so Alice was evidently his stepmother (nothing is known about his mother, John Pynne’s previous wife). The marriage, a second match for Rose as well as for Robert, probably took place in the early 1450s. Presumably the MP’s ship, Le Rose, was named after her.15 Gt. Yarmouth ct. rolls Y/C 4/156, m. 8d; 163, m. 3d; 174, m. 9d.

The earliest reference to Le Rose by name is from 1458,16 Ibid. Y/C 4/163, m. 4. although Pynne certainly owned a ship, probably the same vessel, by 1452. Four years earlier, he used another man’s vessel, Le John, to transport a cargo of salt to Yarmouth.17 E122/151/70, m. 2; 194/9, m. 6. Customs accounts from the 1450s show he dealt in salt, wine, oil, iron, soap and herring, and the borough’s court rolls indicate that he had trading links with Newcastle-upon-Tyne and the Low Countries.18 E122/151/70, m. 2; 75, m. 1d; Gt. Yarmouth ct. rolls 1451-2, 1457-8, Y/C 4/158, m. 4; 163, m. 7. During the mid 1450s Pynne had an interest in another ship, the Cokke John, as one of its victuallers. In 1456 that vessel’s owner, Thomas Gower I*, sued him in Chancery for not paying his share of compensation to the owner of the Marye, a Dutch ship seized by the Cokke John and two other English vessels, one of which belonged to Thomas, Lord Roos. Gower said that he had agreed that he and his victuallers should reimburse the owner, who had sought redress from the King, for his losses, but Pynne had refused to comply with this agreement.19 C1/25/200.

Soon afterwards, the same Lord Roos brought actions of debt against the MP in the borough court at Colchester. Roos was just one of several plaintiffs (who also included Sir Henry Inglose*, Robert Toppes* of Norwich, Hugh atte Fenne* and Sir John Fastolf) to sue Pynne for debt there in the 1440s and 1450s, probably in most cases in connexion with business dealings.20 Gt. Yarmouth ct. rolls Y/C 4/151, mm. 1, 5; 158, m. 1; 160, m. 3; 163, mm. 1d, 2, 3d, 4, 6, 7. In the later 1450s, while two of the suits that Roos had brought against him at Yarmouth were still pending, the MP also faced action in the common pleas on the part of the executors of a London fishmonger, John Sigar. The plaintiffs sought £18, a debt arising from a bond for that sum that he had given the fishmonger in December 1454. In pleadings of Hilary term 1458, he responded by claiming that he had entered into the security under duress, while a prisoner of Sigar and his ‘coven’ at Yarmouth.21 CP40/787, rot. 654; 788, rot. 152. Just a few months later, Pynne suffered a serious blow in connexion with one of Roos’s suits, which concerned a recognizance for £6 he had entered into with the peer. In April 1458 the borough authorities seized Le Rose and its cargo of coal. Valued at £14, these were sold so that Roos might recover the money owed to him.22 Gt. Yarmouth ct. roll Y/C 4/163, m. 4.

Notwithstanding this setback, Pynne began a fourth term as a bailiff at Great Yarmouth a few months later, and he became a j.p. in the borough before this term had ended. While bailiff, he became embroiled in yet more controversy. In the spring of 1459 he was named as an accessory to murder in the court of King’s bench. The appellant, Robert Burton, accused him and several associates, including his wife Rose, of having afforded shelter and assistance to William Snelling after the latter had beaten his brother, Seman Burton, to death with a stick at Caister near Yarmouth in February 1458. Yet when the case eventually reached trial in mid 1462 a jury sitting at Norwich found Snelling not guilty, so clearing Pynne as well.23 KB27/792, rot. 77. However Seman had met his end, rivalries within Yarmouth may have lain behind the whole affair. Like Pynne, Snelling was a merchant from the borough, serving a term as one of its chamberlains in 1455-6. It is likely that he was on good terms with the MP, for whom he had stood surety in the borough court with regard to one of the suits brought by Lord Roos.24 Gt. Yarmouth ct. rolls Y/C 4/162, m. 1; 163, m. 6. As for Seman Burton, a local ‘gentleman’, it is worth noting that he had been a collector of customs at Great Yarmouth at the very time that the authorities were investigating Pynne for extensive evasion of those duties.25 E403/751, m. 4; 755, m. 6; 757, m. 2; 759, m. 11; 767, m. 3; 769, m. 11; 777, m. 6; 781, m. 6.

Notwithstanding Robert Burton’s appeal, the Crown appointed Pynne to a commission of inquiry in May 1460, charging him and his fellow commissioners with investigating the complaint of David Blabour, a merchant and shipowner from Aberdeen. Blabour alleged that the crews of two Yarmouth vessels had boarded and looted one of his ships, which had been driven into their port by bad weather, and the commissioners were ordered to arrest the culprits and recover the stolen merchandise.26 CPR, 1452-61, p. 607. In the same month, Sir Roger Chamberlain* sued Pynne in the borough court for a debt of £24. During the 1460s, the MP featured in other actions heard there, as a plaintiff as well as a defendant; such litigation might explain why he took out a royal pardon in January 1468.27 Gt. Yarmouth ct. rolls Y/C 4/164, m. 12; 166, m. 7; 168, m. 3; 170, m. 5; 174, m. 7; C67/46, m. 8. He also appeared in the court in 1470, to have two conveyances enrolled there. In the first, made at the beginning of that year, he, along with his wife Rose and his relative, John Pynne junior, demised to feoffees a fish house and other properties in Yarmouth which Rose had inherited from her mother. In the second, dated the following July, Pynne and Rose demised a plot of vacant land she had similarly inherited to John Ingram, a Yarmouth hosier, and others.28 Gt. Yarmouth ct. roll Y/C 4/174, m. 9d. Still alive during the accounting year 1472-3, Pynne died some time before 1476, when his widow was a plaintiff in two suits for debt in the borough court.29 Ibid. Y/C 4/177, m. 7; 180, mm. 2, 3d.