ROBINSON, John

It is difficult to judge when Robinson’s long career began. As a witness at an inquisition taken in 1465 on the coming of age of Robert, son and heir of William Paulyn*, he gave his own age as 48.4 C140/18/55. If this was accurate it implies that the MP is not to be identified with the namesake active in the 1430s, although it raises the new difficulty of dividing their two careers. The two men were probably father and son. Our MP had certainly begun his career by the late 1440s when, as a widower with at least two children, he married the widow of one of Scarborough’s leading men, but any division between the two careers can only be arbitrary.5 Test. Ebor. iii (Surtees Soc. xlv), 331. The putative father was, almost certainly, the man involved in the illegal seizure of a ship of Bruges off Scarborough in 1430; and it is likely that it was he who paid tithes on catches of fish to the town’s church of St. Mary in the last period for which the records of payment survive, namely between 1434 and 1442.6 CCR, 1429-35, pp. 105-6; Rot. Scot. ed. Macpherson etc. ii. 271; E101/514/32, ff. 7v, 8v, 9, 20-21, 32, 36v-37.

References from the late 1440s onwards, however, are more likely to refer to the MP. He stood surety for William Helperby* and John Acclom* when they were elected to the Parliaments of 1447 and 1449 (Nov.) respectively; and he was himself returned to the Parliament of 1453 when, like several earlier Scarborough MPs, he was serving as one of the town’s bailiffs.7 C219/15/4, 7; 16/2. In March 1454, during the last session of this Parliament, he was summoned, on the warrant of the admiral of England, Henry Holand, duke of Exeter, to appear before the admiralty court at Kingston-upon-Hull, but it is not known why (although later he was summoned into the same court for illegally trading with the French).8 Scarborough ct. bk. 3, f. 92. More significantly, on the following 27 Aug., when the chancellor, Richard Neville, earl of Salisbury, was at his Yorkshire castle of Middleham, he commissioned Robinson and two other leading men of Scarborough, John Daniell* and Robert Hogeson*, to curtail the piratical activities of Anthony Trollope, master porter of Calais.9 CPR, 1452-61, p. 179. Interestingly, but probably only coincidentally, both Daniell and Hogeson had also been summoned by Exeter to appear in the admiralty ct. This clearly implies that Robinson was already connected with the Nevilles, and it is relevant here that at the elections to the Yorkist Parliament of 1455 he offered surety for Hogeson, not only another member of this commission but also a known Neville adherent.10 C219/16/3.

By the end of the 1450s there can be no doubt about Robinson’s strong allegiance to the cause of the Nevilles and thus indirectly to that of the house of York. On 16 Dec. 1459 he sued out a general pardon and took the further surety of having it enrolled on the patent roll: this strongly suggests that he had been in the Neville army that had marched south from Middleham in the previous autumn to victory at Blore Heath and defeat at Ludford Bridge.11 CPR, 1452-61, p. 539. Yet whether or not he fought in that campaign, the Yorkist defeat left him subject at home to the vengeance of the Nevilles’ local enemies. Robinson detailed his trouble in two later Chancery petitions. He claimed that, after the field ‘of Ludlow’, he had been forced to leave his native county by the affinity of Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, ‘for the seruice and true hert that he ought’ to the earl of Salisbury. As a result he had been unable to prevent his fellow bailiff releasing a debtor, for whose debt of £4 6s. 8d. to the London draper, Ralph Josselyn† , he now found himself wrongly liable.12 C1/28/395. His absence must, however, have been brief, for he was back in his home town by the following spring to run into a new and worse difficulty. He claimed that, on 10 Apr. 1460, he was arrested by John Lambert, a prominent Scarborough shipowner and merchant, acting on an admiralty warrant issued on the false grounds that he had illegally traded with the French. He attributed this misfortune to a conspiracy between Lambert and Thomas Percy, Lord Egremont, an ally of the duke of Exeter, who was still admiral. Egremont, he claimed, desired his downfall because he was an adherent of the earl of Salisbury. He was then imprisoned for six weeks in Egremont’s castle at Wressle until he paid a ransom of £50.13 C1/27/250. For Lambert: Med. Scarborough, 28.

Thereafter Robinson’s fortunes recovered with the Yorkist victory at the battle of Northampton in July 1460. In the following autumn, with government once more in the hands of the Nevilles, he stood pledge for the election for Scarborough to Parliament of two fellow Neville adherents, Thomas Gower II* and Thomas Sage II*, who were no doubt returned against the wishes of Lambert as bailiff.14 C219/16/6. What, if any, part he took in the battles of Wakefield and Towton is not known, but, given that both were fought in Yorkshire, he may well have been present. He did not, however, benefit, in the way that his fellow Scarborough man William Helperby did, from royal patronage after the change of regime. He had to content himself by taking advantage of the appointment as chancellor of Salisbury’s brother, George Neville, bishop of Exeter, to present petitions concerning the difficulties he had suffered in the Yorkist cause.

Given the apparent drama of this part of Robinson’s career, it is disappointing that only sporadic references to him survive thereafter. He sued out yet another general pardon in June 1462, and it is interesting to find that, in 1463, he sued Eleanor, the widow of the earl of Northumberland who fell at Towton, for a debt of £15, but it is not known how this debt arose.15 C67/45, m. 21; CP40/809, rot. 253; 810, rot. 98d. Curiously, Eleanor is described as ‘once of Scarborough’. It was also at about this time he secured some small measure of revenge against Lambert, suborning the bailiffs into entering false process in the town court against a defendant for whom Lambert had stood as pledge so causing Lambert to forfeit a series of distraints.16 C1/28/408. He was again elected to Parliament in 1467 with the designation of ‘senior’ in the return to distinguish him from his son and heir.17 C219/17/1.

Nothing known of him in these years suggests that he transferred his loyalties from the earl of Salisbury, who had been executed after the battle of Wakefield, to the earl’s son, the earl of Warwick. None the less, it is clear that he supported Warwick’s Readeption government. On 20 June and 4 July 1471, after Edward IV had retaken the throne, commissions were issued for his arrest and those of his son, John, and another kinsman, Richard Robinson. Yet he was not to suffer any very severe consequences. He and Richard were certainly free by the following 26 Oct., when our MP witnessed Richard’s will.18 CPR, 1467-77, pp. 286-7; Borthwick Inst., Univ. of York, York registry wills, prob. reg. 4, ff.168v-9. He again obtained a general pardon in the following April, and at the election to the Parliament of the following autumn he offered surety for the return of Thomas Sage, another of the townsmen whose arrest had been ordered.19 C67/49, m. 21; C219/17/2.

This is where the story of Robinson’s career effectively ends. He lived on until 1489, but almost nothing more is known of him. He may again have been one of the town bailiffs in 1477-8, but it is not improbable that the bailiff was his son.20 C219/17/3; KB9/349/235. His will was made on 4 Feb. 1489. Like all the other leading townsmen, he wanted to be buried in the town’s church of St. Mary. He left £4 for a monk in the Cistercian abbey of Byland to pray for his soul for two years. All his property, lying in Scarborough and neighbouring Falsgrave, he bequeathed to his son John for life, with remainder to his grandson, Henry, in tail, and further remainders over to his daughter, Elizabeth, and other kin. The son was to pay £4 p.a. to the testator’s wife, Agnes, for her lifetime. He was dead by the following 14 July, when the will was proved.21 York registry wills, prob. reg. 5, f. 359.

Robinson’s death was followed by a dispute. His son and executor, John, did not survive him long, and in his own will named Henry as his executor. Henry then, or so it was claimed in a Chancery petition of the 1490s, behaved dishonestly to avoid paying the debts of the two Johns. He refused to take on the role of his father’s executor and caused a stranger to take on the administration of his father’s goods. He then made a deed by which the administrator gave him all those goods, said to be worth over 200 marks (no doubt an inflated valuation), to the loss of the creditors of his father and grandfather and to the endangerment of their souls as he refused to carry out their charitable bequests.22 C1/210/61.