SULYARD, John

Of obscure parentage, Sulyard made his way in the world as a successful lawyer. Very little is known of his father but it is likely that it was the elder John Sulyard who attested the Suffolk county election to the Parliament of 1449-50 and turned out at Eye on behalf of Alice de la Pole, dowager duchess of Suffolk, nearly five years later.19 Egerton Roll 8779. The subject of this biography was admitted to Lincoln’s Inn in 1451, quite possibly at an early age since a legal training could begin at the age of 15 in the fifteenth century. He proved himself an able student and in 1455 the Inn’s governors assigned a particular chamber there to him and John Herbert because they were two of the best barristers.20 L. Inn Black Bks. i. 26; Baker, 1484. He read there in 1459, only eight years after his admission.21 Ives, 48. In the same year he became one of its governors for the first time and was returned to Parliament as an MP for Dunwich.

By 1459 he was serving as steward at Eye for the duchess of Suffolk, for whom he was a legal counsellor in the following decade,22 KB27/826, rex rot. 105. but there is no evidence that the burgesses of Dunwich elected him at her request. As for Sulyard’s second Parliament, it is not clear how he came to represent the Wiltshire borough of Hindon in the Commons of 1472. He could have owed his seat in that assembly to William Waynflete, bishop of Winchester, who was lord of Hindon, although the government, preparing for the invasion of France, may have encouraged the election of compliant lawyers to this important Parliament.

Typically for a lawyer, Sulyard was not exclusively identified with any one patron. It is worth noting that his second wife was the daughter of Alice de la Pole’s enemy, John Andrew of Baylham, and (Sir) John Howard*, who had quarrelled with the duchess of Suffolk in the 1450s, retained him for his counsel in the mid 1460s.23 Howard Household Bks. ed. Crawford, i. 481, 485-6, 500, 510. Other clients included the towns of Ipswich, which conferred the freedom of the borough and an annuity of 20s. on him in 1465, and Colchester, which appointed him its recorder in 1473; the city of Norwich, which retained him and Roger Townshend† for their counsel, each at 20s. p.a., in 1481;24 Add. 30158, f. 26v; Norf. RO, Norwich city recs., assembly bk., 1434-91, NCR 16d, f. 113v. Richard, duke of Gloucester, who was paying him a yearly retainer of 40s. p.a. by the later 1470s;25 DL29/637/10360A; R. Horrox, Ric. III, 86. and St. George’s chapel, Windsor. In late 1465 the dean and chapter of Windsor paid him 23s. 4d. for his counsel in a suit it was pursuing at the Exchequer, and by 1479 he was their steward (with a fee of 20s. p.a.) at Chelworth, a manor in Suffolk that Gloucester had endowed on them the previous year.26 St. George’s Chapel, recs. XV. 34/45, m. 5d; XV. 48/47, m. 8d; XV. 57/13, no. 10; F. Blomefield, Norf. viii. 133. Sulyard also received a retainer from the Crown as a councillor of the infant prince of Wales in February 1473, a good indication of the esteem he enjoyed as a lawyer.

Sulyard was useful to the Crown at a local level as well. Between 1461 and his death he served as a j.p. in Suffolk and elsewhere and on numerous ad hoc commissions. Much of the work of such commissions fell on the shoulders of lawyers, although many of those on which Sulyard was placed as a serjeant-at-law and a judge were nominal appointments that he held in his capacity as an assize justice. Another important role he performed at a local level was that of an arbiter. In 1467, for example, he and William Jenney* made an award between Thomas and William Catesby†, who were quarrelling over property in Southwark;27 KB27/824 rot. 26. in the early 1470s he and Roger Townshend, a contemporary of his at Lincoln’s Inn, arbitrated between Thomas Stonor II* and Richard Osbern, who were disputing lands in Surrey.28 Stonor Letters, ii (Cam. Soc. ser. 3, xxx), 167. Later that decade, Sulyard and Townshend were associated with the King’s attorney, William Hussey*, in adjudicating in a quarrel between the Daniel and Berney families about two manors in Norfolk.29 CCR, 1476-85, no. 274. Lawyers were also often in demand as feoffees as well as arbiters, and Sulyard was a trustee for Anthony Wydeville, Earl Rivers, and for fellow East Anglians like Sir John Wingfield†, the Hoptons of Suffolk and Roger Townshend. Related to Townshend’s wife, he counted Roger as a friend with whom he went hunting in their spare time. Townshend valued Sulyard’s professional expertise as well as his friendship: for example, he turned to the MP for advice in the mid 1470s, before embarking upon a complicated suit in Chancery.30 CIPM Hen. VII, i. 681; C140/81/59; CPR, 1476-85, pp. 142-3; CCR, 1476-85, no. 492; Richmond, John Hopton, 241; C.E. Moreton, Townshends, 23, 83.

In October 1477 Sulyard and Townshend were among nine leading lawyers selected to become serjeants-at-law, and they took up the coif on the following 9 June.31 CCR, 1476-85, no. 177. The office was a great honour but new serjeants were obliged to surrender all inferior legal posts and faced the prospect of riding an assize circuit during the legal vacations, often a tiring and irksome duty. They were also expected to take on an increased number of public roles. Such tasks restricted the chances of earning money in private practice, although as advocates serjeants could command the highest fees and enjoyed a monopoly of pleading in the court of common pleas.32 Ives, 74-75. In the summer of 1479 Sulyard began riding as a justice of assize on the western circuit, replacing (Sir) Thomas Urswyk II*, who had died the previous March. Four years later, he joined Sir Thomas Bryan, c.j.c.p., on the less arduous and more attractive home circuit, upon which he remained until he died. Unless death or disgrace intervened, serjeants-at-law could in due course expect promotion to the bench of one of the central courts at Westminster. Sulyard’s career, like those of most other leading lawyers, was not hampered by political upheavals. Richard III made him a justice of King’s bench in October 1484, and Henry VII, who confirmed this appointment shortly after his accession,33 CPR, 1485-94, p. 13. knighted him. Under Henry he attended the Parliaments of 1485 and 1487 as a law officer. During the second of these assemblies, he was one of those commissioned to exercise the office of steward of England at the coronation of the queen consort, Elizabeth of York. He appears also to have participated in a meeting of the Council in January 1488. On the agenda was the raising of an armed force for Calais, a matter of direct relevance to him since the Council decided that the gentry of Suffolk and other south-eastern counties should provide it.34 Sel. Cases Council Hen. VII (Selden Soc. lxxv), 16n.

Sulyard rode the home circuit for the last time during the Lent vacation of 1488. He died on the following 18 Mar., several weeks before the beginning of the Easter law term.35 CIPM Hen. VII, i. 415. He left a relatively large family, since he had married twice and both his wives had borne him children. By his first wife, Agnes, the daughter of a Hertfordshire lawyer of Yorkshire origin,36 Readings and Moots, i. (Selden Soc. lxxi), pp. l, li. he had a son and a daughter. Their marriage was short-lived, and in 1464, following Agnes’s death, he had married Anne, one of the daughters and coheirs of a fellow lawyer, by whom he had five other children. Edward, his only son by his first wife, and Andrew, his eldest by his second, also attended Lincoln’s Inn, but neither attained his eminent position within the legal profession.37 L. Inn Adm. i. 20, 23.

Sulyard died a wealthy man, having invested heavily in land. Although he had inherited manors and other holdings at Eye and elsewhere in Suffolk from his father and a moiety of a manor at High Laver, Essex, from his mother, most of his estates were of his own creation. At his death he owned five manors, the moieties of two others and a house near Fleet Street, London. He also held four other manors in the right of his wives, two at Kimpton in Hertfordshire through his first marriage and two others, ‘Waylands’ near Ipswich and Weston in Norfolk, through his second.38 CIPM Hen. VII, i. 415, 439; PCC 21 Milles. During the mid 1470s he had used the income from ‘Waylands’ to pay for the education at Ipswich’s grammar school of his son, Andrew.39 Richmond, ‘Sulyard Pprs.’ 205. Sulyard had been better placed than many to acquire land when it became available, since lawyers were likely to have a ready supply of capital and a knowledge of the land market. On occasion he had bought up land in a piecemeal fashion, spending a decade or more from the early 1460s in acquiring the various parts of the divided Suffolk manor of Wetherden from their respective owners. He had also acquired Pulham Hall, a subsidiary manor at Wetherden, the parish in which he had taken up residence. These properties, on which he had farmed large flocks of sheep, had been worth £35 p.a. in 1473 but £54 a decade later, indicating that he had made significant improvements or additions to them in the meantime. Elsewhere in Suffolk, Sulyard had purchased in 1475 the reversions of Stratford St. Mary and a moiety of ‘Spanbys’, another manor in the same parish, from Richard Stratford for £133, a transaction concluded in the presence of John (by now Lord) Howard, who had helped set up the sale. The reversions were to have vested after the deaths of Stratford and his wife, Elizabeth, but Sulyard had been able to take possession of those properties in about 1480, having agreed to pay a pension to the by then widowed Elizabeth. At the time of coming to this arrangement with Elizabeth, he had recently bought the other moiety of Spanbys from Thomas Strange of Colchester for £83.40 Ibid. 201-6. Sulyard had also acquired lands on a temporary basis. The King had granted the farm of a water mill and a plot of land at Carshalton in Surrey to him and Walter Forde, a gentleman from that county, in February 1465,41 CFR, xx. 139. and he had obtained the wardship of Robert Westbrom, heir to lands at Stowmarket and elsewhere in Suffolk, from Henry Bourgchier, earl of Essex, apparently in lieu of payment for legal work nearly 14 years later.42 CAD, vi. C6184; Ives, 306.

Not all of Sulyard’s attempts to add to his estate had met with success. In the early 1480s, for example, he had tried but failed to acquire the Suffolk lands of his recently-deceased uncle, William Harleston. He had been with Harleston’s widow, Philippa, soon after her husband died, intending to ‘make as wise and as crafty labor as he can’, but ended up suing her and Harleston’s feoffees in Chancery. According to him, they had refused to allow him to buy the properties, even though the childless William had promised him first option of purchase after his death. Yet it appears that he had faced competition for the Harleston lands from Philippa’s nephew, Sir William Stonor†, and there is no evidence that he was able to vindicate this claim.43 C1/35/48; Stonor Letters, i (Cam. Soc. ser. 3, xxix), 139-40; ii. 113.

In his will, dated 8 Oct. 1487 and proved on the following 11 June, Sulyard sought burial in Wetherden parish church. He ordered a marble tomb and headstone and directed that no fewer than 1,000 priests, each of whom was to receive 4d., should each sing a mass for his soul within three days of his death, a grandiose but unrealistic request. He also provided for a chantry at Wetherden, to last for 80 years, where a chaplain would pray for the souls of himself and his wife, Anne, of his parents, and of several members of the Goode family, apparently his relatives. In lieu of unpaid tithes, Sulyard bequeathed the rector of Wetherden 20 of his best ewes and 20 marks for repairs to his church. He also set aside ten marks for a new window in Eye parish church to commemorate his parents and ancestors. As for his immediate family, he left plate and household ‘stuff’ to his wife and other items of plate to his sons Edward, Andrew and John, to Elizabeth, his daughter by his first wife, and to Anne and Alice, his two elder daughters by his second marriage. He assigned his ‘stuff’ in his inn next to the Whitefriars in London (presumably Serjeants’ Inn in Fleet Street) and all his law books to his sons, while directing that they should share his robes and furs with their sisters. By this date Elizabeth was the wife of John Garneys and Anne, though still below the age of majority, had married Roger Appleton†, an esquire from Kent. Alice was still in her mother’s care and Sulyard set aside 300 marks for her marriage, requesting that his wife and cousin, William Pykenham, archdeacon of Suffolk, should vet any prospective husband. As for his youngest daughter, another Elizabeth (under the age of two when he made his will), he left her £20 and declared that she should become a nun. (In the event, she ignored her father’s wishes and married the Wiltshire knight, Sir Edward Baynton.) After naming his wife, along with William Pykenham, John Clopton, John Cheke and Gregory Fylling as his executors, Sulyard gave directions for the disposal of his lands. In these he was perfectly fair to his son by his first marriage but unusually generous to his other sons, perhaps because he was particularly fond of his second wife. He left to Edward, who settled at High Layer in Essex, the properties he had inherited from his own parents, but it was Andrew who succeeded to the manors of Wetherden and Pulham Hall. To his third son, John, he left the manors of Spanbys and Stratford St. Mary.44 PCC 21 Milles; Richmond, ‘Sulyard Pprs.’, 209-10.

Two years after Sulyard’s death, his widow married Sir Thomas Bourgchier, a younger son of the earl of Essex, but the marriage was extremely brief, since Sir Thomas died in 1491.45 Coronation Ric. III ed. Sutton and Hammond, 315; CIPM Hen. VII, i. 682. During this short-lived match, she and Bourgchier took action in Chancery in connexion with Sulyard’s dealings with a London mercer, Thomas Fyssher. According to the Bourgchiers, Sulyard had purchased many tapestries from Fyssher whom, as he declared on his deathbed, he had paid in full. He had nevertheless neglected to obtain a formal written discharge from the mercer, a surprising oversight for a lawyer. Fyssher had afterwards gone to law alleging non-payment and the mayor and sheriffs of London had impounded a consignment of cloth that Sulyard had entrusted to another Londoner for safe-keeping. The purpose of the Bourgchiers’ suit was to call both Fyssher and the City’s authorities to answer for their actions, although with what result is unknown.46 C1/115/94. Anne, who long outlived Sulyard, chose to be buried alongside him at Wetherden in her will of 1519. She also requested that an ‘honeste preste’ should go on pilgrimage to Rome, where he was to sing masses for the souls of herself, her parents and both her husbands.47 Richmond, ‘Sulyard Pprs.’, 220-7.

In 1643 a band of puritans desecrated the tombs of Sulyard and his grandson, Sir Edward Sulyard, also buried at Wetherden. One of the iconoclasts recorded that ‘[w]e brake a hundred superstitious pictures in Sir Edward Suliarde’s Isle, and gave orders to brake down sixty more ... There were taken up nineteen superstitious inscriptions that weighed sixty-five pounds’.48 Procs. Suff. Inst. Archaelogy, xi. 371. Today, all that remains of the MP’s tomb is his tomb chest, now in poor condition, but a more lasting monument to him is the church’s spectacular south aisle and porch, which he began building in about 1484 and which were completed after his death.49 Richmond, John Hopton, 247; N. Pevsner, Buildings of Eng.: Suff. 483.