BAYNARD, Richard

To add to the earlier biography, The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 150-2. it should be pointed out that further evidence of Baynard’s dealings with his feoffee and associate, Walter Gawtron*, a London draper like his own stepfather, John Hende, suggests that they did not always enjoy a good relationship. Gawtron sued the MP at Westminster in 1402, claiming that Baynard had refused to return a bond entrusted to him at Colchester for safe-keeping. In defence, Baynard pleaded that he was supposed to return the bond – the purpose of which is unknown – only upon certain conditions. Yet it is possible that the lawsuit was in fact collusive, intended to obtain the official sanction of the court for such a transfer, and does not represent a falling out between the parties. CP40/567, rot. 240d. Whatever the case, there was no lack of co-operation between Baynard and the draper in subsequent years. In 1405, for example, the two men received a bond in statute staple from William Kempston, a merchant from Hadleigh in Suffolk, as a security that he would pay them £4, an undertaking that in the event he would fail to meet. C131/55/17.

Early in Henry V’s reign, Baynard took the precaution of purchasing a royal pardon, dated 24 Nov. 1413. He received another such pardon on 5 Apr. 1416. C67/36, m. 7; 37, m. 6. Between those two dates, in March 1415, the MP joined Walter Gawtron and two other London clothiers in receiving a conveyance of the manor of West Dean, Sussex, from Sir Gerard Braybrooke†, a landowner with interests at Danbury in Essex. The knight was a servant of Joan de Bohun, countess of Hereford, with whose circle Baynard had friendly associations. In turn, Joan was the aunt of Thomas Fitzalan, earl of Arundel, lord of the honour of Arundel of which West Dean was part, and after the earl died in October 1415, having fallen sick at the siege of Harfleur, she named Braybrooke among the trustees of her portion of the Fitzalan estates. The purpose of the conveyance is unclear although it may have arisen from a mortgage afforded to the earl by one of the Londoners. It was certainly not a permanent alienation, since West Dean remained a part of the Fitzalan estates until the mid sixteenth century. E Suss. RO, Dobell and Lane mss, SAS-M/1/402a, 403; The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 347; VCH Suss. iv. 97; v (1), 2-3.

In December the following year, Baynard and others bound themselves in £300 to the corporation of London, to guarantee that his stepfather John Hende would fulfil his obligations as guardian of an orphan from the City. Corp. London RO, jnl. 1, f. 5v. He had further dealings with the corporation in February 1423, when it arranged for a quarrel between two members of the Cambridgeshire gentry, Ralph Bateman and Nicholas Caldecote*, to go to arbitration and he was one of those chosen to act as an arbitrator on Caldecote’s behalf. Ibid. jnl. 2, f. 3v; Cal. P. and M. London, 1413-37, p. 149. Early in Henry VI’s reign, Baynard had further dealings with Sir Gerard Braybrooke. In late 1423, he and the knight, along with their mutual friend, Robert Darcy I*, and Reynold Kentwood, dean of St. Paul’s, took five bonds in statute staple, each for £50, from another of Braybrooke’s friends, Reynold, Lord Grey of Ruthin, and others. Possibly the bonds were securities for debts that the peer had contracted with the knight. C241/219/17, 42; 221/21; 223/12, 13.

In early 1425 Baynard was involved in the settlement of several manors in Essex and Suffolk on Sir Richard Waldegrave and his wife, a transaction providing further evidence of his association with the countess of Hereford’s circle, of which Waldegrave’s late father, another Sir Richard Waldegrave†, had been part. CP25(1)/291/65/33; The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 736-7. Later in the same year, Baynard and several co-plaintiffs, among them his close friend, John Tyrell*, and Thomas Porter* of Warwickshire, sued one John Trethenen for breaking into their house in the London parish of St. Clement’s, Eastcheap, but it is impossible to ascertain to whom the property actually belonged. CP40/659, rot. 574d.

In his later years Baynard was involved in a long-running quarrel over the Brokholes inheritance, comprising lands in Hertfordshire, Essex and Warwickshire. In 1419 Ellen, widow of Sir Geoffrey Brokholes, died leaving as her heirs her daughter Joan and grandson John. The trouble began following the death of John, the young son of Joan’s late sister Margery by her husband John Sumpter* of Colchester, in the following year. Joan, who at Michaelmas 1420 married her third husband Robert Arneburgh (uncle of Reynold*), asserted that the boy had left no heirs and claimed the whole Brokholes inheritance for herself. Sumpter pointed out that Margery had also borne him two daughters, but Joan alleged that they were his illegitimate offspring by another woman. Things began to move Sumpter’s way in October 1426, when finally there was an inquisition post mortem for young John in Essex. The jurors confirmed that the two girls, Christine and Ellen, were indeed the rightful heirs to half the Brokholes estate. The Arneburghs refused to accept the finding and there followed years of bitter squabbling. Like other Essex gentry associates of Joan Beauchamp, Lady Abergavenney, Baynard took Sumpter’s side, so earning the Arneburghs’ bitter enmity. Some years after his death, a document recorded their version of events. It alleged that ‘Baynard of Essex’ was ‘oon of the grettest mayntenour[s]’ of Sumpter’s ‘partie’ and had ‘labvored’ the inquisition jury to secure a finding favourable to the girls. It also records the deaths of several of the Arneburghs’ enemies, Baynard among them, with vituperative satisfaction, asserting that God had punished them for their roles in the dispute. According to this account, Baynard suddenly ‘felle downe and dyed with owte howsill and shrifte [that is, without having received the sacrament and absolution]’ while out hunting with Lady Abergavenny, and that ever since his death his restless ghost had wandered around the countryside causing ‘moche harme’. It is impossible to tell whether Baynard really met his end on the hunting field. C. Carpenter, Armburgh Pprs. 4-6, 8, 16, 62, 193.