FULNETBY, Richard, of Grimsby, Lincs.

Richard was a scion of the middling gentry family living at Fulnetby, some eight miles north-east of Lincoln. The head of the family, John, was assessed at as much as £60 p.a. in 1436: E179/136/198. For his biography: Lincs. Archit. and Arch. Soc. iii. 62. No Richard appears in the standard ped.: Lincs. Peds. ed. Maddison, 378. His early appearances in the records show that he was a lawyer. In 1424 he acted as attorney for one of the leading Lincolnshire gentry, Sir Richard Hansard*, in the Exchequer of pleas, and in Easter term 1426 he represented Joan, widow of Thomas Holand, earl of Kent, in the court of common pleas. E5/474; CP40/661, rot. 8d. Throughout his career he was to combine such modest legal duties with a prominent role in the affairs of the borough of Grimsby. His interests there came through his marriage to the widow of a merchant of that port, William Pye. They were married by Trinity term 1426, when they sued a Grimsby shipman for a debt of £5. No doubt she brought our MP property in the borough, but this is documented only in a single reference: in 1434 Fulnetby held, in her right, certain fishgarths in the river Humber. CP40/662, rot. 85d; 666, rot. 348; E. Gillett, Grimsby, 36.

After his marriage, Fulnetby very quickly established himself among the leading townsmen. He was returned to represent Grimsby in the Parliament of 1427, perhaps because as a lawyer with a modest practice in the central courts he was prepared to serve without wages. C219/13/5. In attesting the county election to the same assembly he was in technical breach of the electoral statutes. Yet his interest in borough affairs extended further than this implies: in October 1429 he was one of the jury of burgesses who elected the borough officers and two years later he was himself chosen as bailiff. Grimsby ct. rolls 1/100/5/13c; 1/101, 10 Hen. VI. Shortly before becoming bailiff he had acted as a mainpernor for another Grimsby lawyer, John Langholm I*, at the Grimsby election to the Parliament of 1431, and as bailiff he was responsible for the conduct of the election to the next Parliament to which he himself was returned. C219/14/2, 3. His next electoral adventure was less successful: on 21 Sept. 1434 he was one of the five candidates for the mayoralty, coming second with 11 votes against the 14 cast for John Empringham. He did not, however, have to wait long to obtain the principal office in his adopted town, securing it in 1439. Three years later, while serving as one of the mayor’s councillors, he was returned to Parliament for a third time. Grimsby ct. rolls 1/101, 13, 20 Hen. VI; HMC 14th Rep. VIII, 289.

To add to his work as a lawyer, Fulnetby may also have had trading and shipping interests. On 11 Jan. 1432 he and nine other burgesses, including John del See*, bound themselves to abide the award of Langholm and Robert Auncell* regarding two ships of Bishop’s Lynn which they had retaken from their French captors. Grimsby ct. rolls 1/101, 10 Hen. VI; Gillett, 48-49. Yet, aside for his role he took in the borough’s administrative affairs from late 1420s to the early 1440s, it is as a minor lawyer that he most frequently appears in the records. He continued to act occasionally as an attorney in the court of common pleas into the 1450s: in 1450 he acted for Langholm and in the following year for one of the leading townsmen, Hugh Edon*. CP40/759, rot. 241d; 762, rot. 338.

Fulnetby’s career was probably a modestly profitable one, but there is no direct record of his acquisitions of property. It seems, however, that he bought land at Grainthorpe, about ten miles to the south of Grimsby. In 1445 he sued two men of Louth for taking his goods worth ten marks from Grainthorpe and nearby Somercotes, and when he was appointed as a tax collector in the following year he was described as resident at ‘Garmethorpbroke’ in Grainthorpe. KB27/736, rot. 59; CFR, xviii. 39.

Late in his life Fulnetby fell into conflict with the Grimsby authorities. In November 1454 he was presented by the borough chamberlains for assault, and although in the following month a local jury found him not guilty worse was to follow. In a judgement rendered in the borough court in April 1455 he was fined five marks for defying a mayoral proclamation against the carrying of arms, and was sentenced to 40 days’ imprisonment for slandering the mayor, Edon, for whom he had earlier acted as attorney. Grimsby ct. rolls. 1/101, 33 Hen. VI.

This is the last certain reference to Fulnetby, but later uncertain ones are of more potential interest than all else that is known of him. In March 1460 a namesake, described as ‘King’s serjeant’, was granted by the Crown the office of bailiff of Richard Neville, earl of Salisbury’s forfeited soke of Caister, near Grimsby. This Richard went on to fight for the Lancastrians at the battles of Wakefield and Towton. Described as ‘of Fulnetby, gentleman’, he was attainted in the first Parliament of Edward IV’s reign, and in Easter term 1462, as ‘once of Fulnetby, esquire’, he was among those appealed by Alice, countess of Salisbury, as one of the principals in the murder of her husband in the aftermath of Wakefield. CPR, 1452-61, p. 576; PROME, xiii. 42-44, 51; KB27/804, rot. 65. There is something more than a little incongruous about a minor local lawyer finding a place in the royal household in his later years and then taking up arms. It is much more likely that the attainted man was a representative of the main branch of the family. Our MP himself was probably dead by 1460.