CARPENTER, John III, of Hastings, Suss.

It seems likely that John was closely related to Thomas Carpenter, who had sat in the Commons three times as a parliamentary baron for Hastings, but none of the sources examined establish their precise kinship. Similarly, there is nothing to link him to the John Carpenter who together with his w. Isabel held land in South Lancing, Suss. from the 1390s to 1427 or later, or the landowner in Chinting, Seaford and elsewhere who died bef. 1441, leaving a s. Richard. The latter’s wife was aunt to the lawyer Bartholomew Bolney*: CP25(1)/240/78/45, 85/28; Bolney Bk. (Suss. Rec. Soc. lxiii), 37, 39, 43. A further difficulty is that there were two men of this name living in Hastings in this period. John Carpenter ‘junior’ of Hastings completed his apprenticeship to the London fishmonger John Lavender before June 1437, when he obtained a royal pardon describing him as ‘fishmonger of London’. C67/38, m. 19. How much of his trade was conducted in the capital and how much in his home town is uncertain, although it seems likely that the fishing fleet based at Hastings provided the catches which he sold in London. He was probably the man of Hastings referred to in an undated petition (perhaps of the mid to late 1440s) addressed to the chancellor by three merchants of La Rochelle and another of Paris. The merchants had charged the Michell at La Rochelle with a valuable cargo of wine and iron, but the vessel was seized off the Isle of Wight by Carpenter and others in a ‘grete shippe’ equipped by two men from Canterbury, and taken to Portsmouth, where the cargo was transferred to another vessel and then sold in Middleburgh. C1/16/358.

As a baron of Hastings, John Carpenter claimed exemption from parliamentary taxation on his moveable goods outside the liberty at Ore and Wilting in the years between 1441 and 1451, on one occasion, in 1446, being designated ‘senior’. E179/228/118; 229/138, 154. It is likely that it was the MP who acquired a messuage and some 40 acres of land in Wartling, a few miles away, in 1444. CP25(1)/241/89/15. Besides representing Hastings in the Parliament assembled on 25 Jan. 1442, Carpenter was sent by his fellow Portsmen as a delegate to seven Brodhulls, starting on 10 Apr. that same year, when, at a meeting called just two weeks after the dissolution of his Parliament, he was no doubt expected to report to the assembled delegates what had taken place at Westminster. White and Black Bks. 15, 17, 19, 23, 24, 26. At the Brodhull of July 1444 it was decided that the bailiff sent from Hastings to the autumn herring fair at Yarmouth should be either Carpenter or John Gray*; which of the two actually officiated at the fair that year is not recorded. Ibid. 18. Hastings’s bailiff to Yarmouth in the autumn of 1447 was John Carpenter ‘junior’, and the records of New Romney for 1448-9 record a payment made to John Carpenter of Hastings for a suit at Yarmouth made on behalf of the Cinque Ports. Ibid. 23; HMC 5th Rep. 542. At the Brodhull of 23 July 1448, which one or other of the two John Carpenters attended, it was decided that a special meeting of the assembly should be held at Romney on 10 Sept., attended by all the Ports’ mayors and bailiffs, together with Carpenter ‘junior’ or John Cobbey* of Hastings, to determine disputes between Sandwich and Nicholas Aydlabye of Dover. However, in the event it was Cobbey rather than Carpenter who was present. White and Black Bks. 24. Carpenter himself was involved in a lawsuit against John Paston of Sandwich, and in April 1449 the latter was accorded a right of action against him for a ‘wronge vexacion’ in London. In July, when Carpenter was present at the Brodhull for the last time, it was decided that both parties should attend the next assembly, and the ‘act already made’ should ‘stond in respyte’. Ibid. 25-26.