So active was Chippenham in the 1420s, as the earlier biography shows,The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 568. that one must suppose that his sudden disappearance from the records betokens premature death. The remarkable administrative career of his son John, a mercer assessed at £5 in the subsidy returns of 1451, did not begin until that year, and he was thus probably a minor when his father died. E179/117/64; KB27/766, rot. 2d.
