SEXTON, Richard

A butcher by trade, Richard was perhaps the son of John Sexton, another butcher and a burgess for Cambridge in the Commons of March 1416. Among those who attested John’s election to Parliament was Richard Sexton junior, but it is not clear if he was the subject of this biography or, indeed, whether the MP held all of the offices listed above. Other records provide further evidence that there was more than one Richard Sexton of Cambridge in this period, for Richard Sexton ‘senior’ attended a ‘great congregation’ between the town and Cambridge university in the early 1420s, while Richard ‘junior’ was a bailiff of Cambridge in 1426-7.4 ‘Cross Bk.’, f. 13; Add. 5833, f. 138v. Following their election to Parliament in 1427, the MP and his associate, Roger Faconer*, were allowed daily wages of just 1s., half the old rate that the borough had previously paid its representatives.5 Cooper, i. 175; Cambridge bor. recs., treasurers’ acct., 1427-8, City/PB Box X/70/6.

Notwithstanding the problems of identification, it appears that the MP’s career as an office-holder ended in the mid 1430s but that he survived for some time afterwards. Probably the Richard Sexton who had rented a garden plot from the borough since at least the mid 1420s, it is also likely that he was the burgess who obtained a 50-year lease of a croft, enclosure, dovecot and messuage from the local priory of St. Radegund in May 1436. During the early 1450s the nuns of that house employed Richard Sexton, whether the same townsman or a namesake, to kill livestock destined for their kitchen. In 1450-1, for example, they paid him 4s. 2d., along with a further 10d. as a gift.6 Cambridge bor. recs., treasurers’ accts., 1425-6, 1427-8, 1431-2, 1433-6, City/PB Box X/70/4, 6-10; Cambridge Antiq. Soc. Procs. xxxi. nos. 60, 150, 160. When assessed for taxation in 1450, the nuns’ butcher was found to enjoy a landed income of ten marks p.a.7 E179/81/103. Probably the same Richard Sexton was the feoffee of that name whom John Lok sued in Chancery at an unknown date over a tenement in Cambridge: C1/72/54.