The previous biography found no evidence of Enderby’s activities immediately after his father’s death in 1405, speculating that this was because he was still pursuing his legal training.
Among Enderby’s associates was the influential Household man, John Hotoft*, with whom he sat – albeit not for the same shire – in the Parliaments of April 1414, 1419 and 1422. Hotoft appointed him one of his feoffees, in which capacity he was party to several transactions concerning the manor of Knebworth, Hertfordshire, between the early 1420s and late 1430s.
Late in Henry V’s reign, Enderby was among those Bedfordshire gentry from whom the Crown expected military service, and he may spent a period in France as a result. It is worth noting that a John Enderby served with Thomas Beaufort, duke of Exeter, at Conches in the summer of 1421 and with John Harpley at Evreux in the late autumn of 1423.
Whether or not he crossed the Channel, Enderby was certainly in England in October 1422, when he attested the return of the knights of the shire for Huntingdonshire to the first Parliament of Henry VI’s reign, even though he did not live in the county. This particular election appears to have passed off uneventfully, but the issue of non-residency proved a serious sticking point in Huntingdonshire later in the decade. At the election of the county’s knights of the shire to the Parliament of 1429, Enderby was among those who returned Robert Stonham* and William Waweton*, a relative of Sir Thomas Waweton*, but their choice was challenged by Sir Nicholas Styuecle* and 13 other local gentry. Styuecle and his fellows asserted that none of the attestors resided in the county, that they had forced the sheriff to make the return in question and that William Waweton neither lived in Huntingdonshire nor held any lands there. The attestors were indeed outsiders, since all were from Bedfordshire, save Sir William Mallory who came from Cambridgeshire. The challenge was upheld, and Styuecle and Roger Hunt* were returned at a new election held on 17 Sept., just five days before the Parliament met. After it opened, the Parliament passed the famous Act restricting the franchise in county elections to resident 40s. freeholders. It has been suggested that the election dispute was part of a wider quarrel between John Mowbray, duke of Norfolk, and John Holand, earl of Huntingdon, on the grounds that Hunt was connected with Mowbray and that Sir Thomas Waweton and Enderby were linked with Holand as well as Lord Grey. Yet this is impossible to prove; as is the hypothesis that the dispute arose from infighting at the gentry level.
There is however no doubting Enderby’s ties with both Holand and Grey. As the previous biography remarks, he was associated with Holand by 1428, while the most striking feature of his career is long and devoted attachment to Reynold, Lord Grey of Ruthin, the most important landowner in Bedfordshire. Further evidence of his retainer with Holand is the annuity of £3 6s. 8d. he received from that peer’s manor of Stevington in Bedfordshire.
It was in 1448 that Enderby recovered his place on the commission of the peace for Bedfordshire, from which the government had dismissed him for his part in the Bedford ‘riot’ of 1439, in spite of including him in the general pardon it issued soon afterwards to the Grey followers involved in those disturbances. In excluding him from the commission, it lost the services of one of the county’s hardest-working j.p.s. Following his restoration to the bench, Enderby served on the quorum and remained in office without a break until two years before his death.
On at least one occasion Enderby used his powers as a j.p. against John Enderby junior, his eldest son by his first wife. A couple of lawsuits of the early 1440s provide the first evidence of bad blood between the two men. Enderby brought both of them in the court of King’s bench. In the first, he alleged that his son, a resident of Meppershall in Bedfordshire, had broken into his close and house at Stratton in August 1441, taking away poultry, grain and various household utensils. In the second, he alleged that in the following month the younger John and John Gerveys had assaulted and imprisoned his servant Richard Munde at Nether Hoo for two days. It is likely that this second allegation was true, since the unruly younger John, in spite of providing sureties for his good behaviour, would commit an assault on Munde in the summer of 1442. It appears that the unfortunate servant was a man of torn loyalties, since the MP took legal action against him as well, for taking part in the break-in at Stratton.
In 1443 Enderby was one of a group of lawyers and gentlemen who formally acknowledged a statement which John Kirkby I* had made in their presence at Ashwell in Hertfordshire. Kirkby told them that in Henry V’s reign he had held a court at Maldon in Essex, in his capacity as steward for John Stone, then dean of the collegiate church of St. Martin le Grand in London, an institution possessing jurisdictional rights in the borough. Kirkby made his statement for the benefit of Richard Caudray, one of Stone’s successors as dean, presumably after he had encountered a challenge to those rights. Like Enderby, Caudray was a follower of the Holands. During the first half of the 1450s he was among those caught up in the well-known dispute between Henry Holand, duke of Exeter, and Ralph, Lord Cromwell, but Enderby is not known to have played any part in this quarrel.
By the early 1450s, Enderby was again at odds with his eldest son, against whom he and other members of the commission of the peace in Bedfordshire took indictments in May 1451. The jury stated that on the previous 15 Feb. the younger John had attacked William Fuller at Shillington, a few miles south of Bedford, with a ‘long daggar’ and bow and arrows and seized 22d. worth of his goods and chattels, and that on the following 12 Apr. he had broken into his father’s house at Stratton, feloniously and by night. Six days after his indictment, the younger John surrendered himself to the Marshalsea prison prior to pleading not guilty in King’s bench. Enderby also took civil action in the same court over the break-in. He appeared there in person on 26 May, to lodge a bill alleging that his son had taken away corn and 100 cartloads of timber worth no less than £240 and to make a claim for damages of £500. Escorted into court from the Marshalsea, the younger John again pleaded not guilty. On the following 16 Oct. a jury trying the civil action found against him. The court awarded his father damages, cost and expenses totalling £100, a substantial amount even if far less than those claimed. Early in the new year, young John returned to the Marshalsea, to remain there until he had paid the sum awarded to his father. He did nevertheless enjoy some good fortune, since the jury empanelled to try the criminal charges cleared him, presumably because the jurors were reluctant to find him guilty of such serious offences.
It would appear that disagreements over the by now relatively substantial Enderby estates loomed large in the quarrels between father and son. (Previously unnoticed records relating to the subsidy of 1436 are further evidence of the MP’s landed wealth: they show that his estates were valued at £100 p.a. for the purposes of that tax.)