SQUYER, John

In his will of 12 Feb. 1411 Robert Squyer, a former mayor of Nottingham, made plans for the descent of his property in the town. A significant part of it was to be sold with the proceeds disposed to charitable purposes and the payment of his debts. However, rather more than half, including his chief messuage on the Rowell in Castle Gate, was to remain in the hands of his widow Agnes for her life, with successive remainders in tail to his ‘kinsman’ Robert Squyer and the younger Robert’s brother John. At this date both Robert and John were young children, and their care was committed to the executors, two prominent townsmen, John del Heath, a draper, and Simon Ilkeston, a mercer, for a period of ten years. It is likely that this John is to be identified with our MP, and not improbable that he was the grandson of the elder Robert, whose will makes reference to his children who had predeceased him.3 Ibid. 72-83. For the sale by the executors of property in Castle Gate: Nottingham ct. rolls CA1306/I, rot. 14d. Robert died within a few days of making his will: ibid. rot. 13d.

The young John first appears in an active role in January 1429 when a Nottingham dyer, Thomas Stretton, entered into a bond to him in the sum of £17. The dyer’s alleged failure to discharge this bond led to litigation in the borough court in 1431, and Stretton countered by suing Squyer in the court of common pleas for a debt of £19. Curiously Squyer was here described as ‘lately taverner’, and if this was his early trade it was one he soon abandoned. The next reference to him is more interesting: on 4 Jan. 1432 he was granted letters of protection, in which he is more loftily described as ‘mercer or gentleman’, as about to proceed to Aquitaine in the company of Sir John Radcliffe*, seneschal there. This suggests that he had trading interests in the duchy, although his failure to depart led to the revocation of these letters on the following 24 May.4 Nottingham ct. rolls CA1322/I, rot. 4d; CP40/682, rot. 297d; CPR, 1429-36, p. 193.

Little else is known of Squyer before the late 1440s. A rental of the common lands of 1435 records that he was then paying a rent of 12d. for ‘his palys and his porches’ in Castle Gate, where the bulk of his property lay. His appearance as a litigant in the borough court are unrevealing. In 1440, for example, he was joint-plaintiff with his wife when they sued Alice Bonnington for her failure to pay 5s. owed to his former guardian, Simon Ilkeston, for linen cloth; and on 13 Sept. 1447 he appeared in person in the court to sue a tiler for breaking into his house and taking a spoon and knife worth 3s. 8d.5 Nottingham Recs. ii. 360; Nottingham ct. rolls CA1331, rot. 1336/II, rot.10. One reason for his obscurity in these years may have been that he was labouring under the disability of minor outlawry. A later reference shows that he had been put in exigend for failure to answer Richard Duppa of Southwark for a debt of £7 12s. Since Duppa had sued his action at an unknown date before 1436, it may be that John was an outlaw over several years. Further, at an unknown later date he was again outlawed, on this occasion for failure to reply to one Alexander Galyard of York for a debt of £8. His disadvantageous position at law cannot have been a decisive factor in keeping him out of borough office. He was elected bailiff more than a year before he sued out a royal pardon for his outlawries on 13 Nov. 1449.6 CPR, 1446-52, p. 290. In Duppa’s plea our MP is oddly accorded the exaggerated status of ‘esquire’. In 1448 he is more accurately described as a mercer when the recipient of the goods of a Notts. chaplain: CCR, 1447-54, p. 166. Yet, for want of a better explanation, it may have suppressed his activities.

Squyer’s appointment as bailiff came shortly before the administration of Nottingham was reorganized under the terms of the important borough charter of 28 June 1449. The post of bailiff was replaced by that of sheriff, and our MP and his fellow bailiff, Thomas Ivenet, were duly elected as the first townsmen to hold the new office. Only a fortnight later, however, two new sheriffs were chosen, for although the charter had provided for elections to be held on 15 Sept. it had also decreed that new sheriffs were to be chosen at Michaelmas and at every subsequent Michaelmas. The brief term of John and his colleague may have been designed to ensure that the bailiffs of 1448 accounted as sheriffs at the end of their year in office. However this may be, his first recorded experience of borough administration was the prelude to a period of intense activity. He attested the parliamentary elections of 14 Jan. 1449 and 12 Oct. 1450, a role in which he had not previously appeared, and he was himself returned at the next election of 26 Feb. 1453.7 C219/15/6; 16/1, 2.

By the latter date Squyer may already have been numbered among the seven aldermen the burgesses were empowered to elect under the terms of the charter of 1449, and he was certainly so by September 1455 when elected for the first of his three terms as mayor. If a later suit in the court of common pleas is to taken at face value, at about this time he made a significant, albeit a temporary addition to his landholdings in the town: on 1 Sept. 1454 he took a six-year lease at a rent of £4 p.a. of all the property there of William Stokes, namely six messuages, including a ‘wolhous’, ‘kylnehous’ and brewhouse, three acres of land and just over four acres of meadow.8 CP40/812, rot. 292; 813, rot. 411. It may be that the lessor was the same William Stokes, mayor in 1416-17 and 1425-6, as had been named by Robert Squyer in 1411 as supervisor of his will, but was more probably a descendant.

Only incidental references survive of Squyer’s activities in the late 1450s. In the financial year Michaelmas 1457-8 he loaned 13s. 4d. to the repair of the Hethbeth bridge over the Trent.9 Nottingham Recs. ii. 220, 222. On 26 Nov. 1459 he witnessed the election to the notorious Coventry Parliament, and soon after he was called upon to contribute to the exactions suffered by the town during the campaigns of 1460-1: he paid 40s. to aid the King’s cause at the battle of Northampton and the same sum towards the ‘reward’ paid to the servants of Henry Beaufort, duke of Somerset, in the following year.10 C219/16/5; Nottingham recs. CA7452.

Squyer was again elected to the mayoralty in 1464, a second term that came to most of those who were aldermen for more than a short period. In 1466 he was one of the burgesses who paid 20s. each to further the community’s cause in its dispute with Henry Pierrepont over a mill obstructing the river Leen; and, on 31 July 1467, he was among the burgesses who swore an oath in accordance with the terms of an arbitrated settlement in the community’s dispute with Pierrepont.11 Nottingham recs. CA7452; Nottingham Recs. ii. 383-4. By this date he was already an old man. On 29 Aug. 1468 he granted all his lands in Nottingham together with his goods to Gervase Clifton, a leading local esquire, William Squyer, his son, and two townsmen, a draper, Richard Ody, and an image-maker, Walter Hylton.12 Borthwick Inst. Univ. of York, York registry wills, prob. reg. 4, f. 2. This feoffment was probably part of his arrangements for death, but his advanced age did not prevent his third election to the mayoralty in the following month.

In the military campaign of 1471, during which Nottingham briefly afforded a base for Edward IV, Squyer was again called upon to contribute to the exactions suffered by the townsmen. On 26 Mar. he paid a mark to the maintenance of soldiers in the mansion of the guild of Holy Trinity with a further 3s. 4d. a month later; and on 18 May as the townsmen raised a force to go to resist the rebellion of the Bastard of Fauconberg in Kent, he paid a further half a mark. The fact that his contributions were smaller than those of his fellow aldermen suggests that he was not one of the richest townsmen, and this is confirmed by the surviving tax returns. In the subsidy returns of 1450-1 he was assessed on an annual income of £4; and early in 1473, when he himself was one of the subsidy commissioners, he paid 10s. 2½d. for a tenth part of his freehold in the town.13 Nottingham recs. CA 7452; E179/238/78, no. 6; Nottingham Recs. ii. 294.

Squyer again appears as an attestor to the election of 12 Oct. 1472, which was held six days after the scheduled assembly of Parliament. This was nearly the last recorded act of his long career. He was still alive on the following 20 Jan., when he entered into an indenture as one of the commissioners for the subsidy granted in this Parliament, but was dead within the year. On 6 October 1473 administration of his goods was granted to Clifton and the others to whom he had entrusted his property five years earlier, in the mistaken impression that he had died intestate. On the following 5 May the grant of 1468 was itself proved and execution awarded to the grantees.14 C219/17/2; York registry wills, prob. reg. 4, ff. 2, 202.