FOWLER, John, of Fowelscombe and Langford Barton in Ugborough, Devon.

Possessed of a common name, Fowler is impossible to identify with certainty. If an outsider to Wiltshire, he may well have owed his seat in the Commons to royal patronage, since in the first few decades of the fifteenth century the King’s household included one or more John Fowlers. Early in Henry IV’s reign a minor royal servant of that name was a purveyor for the Household and clerk to successive chief butlers of England, John Payn† and Thomas Chaucer*. Also styled a ‘King’s serjeant’, in October 1401 he received a grant from the Crown of daily wages of 7½ d. and an annual sum of 100s. CPR, 1399-1401, pp. 19, 73, 480, 499; 1401-5, pp. 11, 62, 154, 280, 317, 461; 1405-8, p. 88; CCR, 1399-1402, p. 454. It is not however clear if he was the John Fowler who served as clerk of Queen Joan’s closet in the later years of the same reign. CPR, 1408-13, pp. 103, 197, 234; 1413-16, p. 69; 1422-9, p. 34; E159/200, brevia Mich. rots. 15, 200, Trin. rot. 14d. At the end of 1408, the queen’s servant received the grant of an annuity, again of 100s. p.a., which he was to enjoy for the rest of his life, or until the King and Joan provided him with an appropriate ecclesiastical benefice. It is a moot point whether the share of a corrody found for him at Mulcheney abbey, Somerset, in 1411 represented such a benefice, although he would appear to have remained in minor orders. CPR, 1408-13, p. 103; CCR, 1409-13, p. 197. Initially he held the corrody jointly with Thomas Elys and from 1434 with the yeoman of the King’s robes, John Penycoke*. CCR, 1409-13, p. 197; 1429-35, p, 314. The clerk of the closet was also associated with John Ayscowe, a serjeant of the King’s cellar, and he and Ayscowe received a grant in survivorship of £10 p.a. from the customs of Chichester in 1410. They were still receiving the annuity just after the accession of Henry VI, when Fowler was no longer serving in the by now dowager queen’s closet. CPR, 1408-13, p. 234; E159/200, brevia Mich. rots. 15, 200, Trin. rot. 14d. Another John Fowler was a deputy of the chamberlain of the Exchequer, John Ikelyngton, in Henry V’s reign. PRO List ‘Exchequer Officers’, 168. As with the already mentioned household man or men, it is impossible to prove that he was the MP, and the same holds true for the John Fowler who was an esquire of the Household in the early 1440s. E101/409/9, f. 36d.