GODFREY, John, of Winchelsea, Suss.

Godfrey’s ancestors numbered among the inhabitants of the old town of Winchelsea in the thirteenth century, and members of his family long continued to flourish there and also at Lydd, where a branch settled and occupied the mayoralty many times. W.D. Cooper, Hist. Winchelsea, 163. Our MP was a merchant and shipowner. Given his well-documented connexion with the west Sussex port of Shoreham, it seems very likely that he was the John Godfrey who in 1417 was commissioned to transport 600 quarters of wheat from there initially to Eastbourne and then over to Calais to victual the English garrisons. CPR, 1416-22, p. 60. Such shipments might be of considerable value, like those he made from Sussex ports in January 1422, which were worth £74. E122/34/8. In the autumn of 1424 he used La Trinite of Shoreham to transport 200 quarters of wheat from Southampton to Bordeaux. CCR, 1422-9, p. 162. Suits for debt brought by him in the court of common pleas in the 1420s reveal commercial links with the town of Horsham and tradesmen such as John Smolyn* of Chichester and Richard Smith I* of Arundel. CP40/657, rot. 177d; 658, rot. 51; 661, rot. 355d. As ‘of Winchelsea’ he obtained royal licences to export grain in each successive year from 1434 to 1436, the last specifying the destination as Bordeaux or Bayonne. DKR, xlviii. 300, 303, 314. On the return voyages he shipped cargoes of wine, and was summoned to the Exchequer in May 1430 to answer for subsidies due on one such consignment, worth £175, which had arrived at Winchelsea from Bordeaux the previous December on his ship the Trinite of Winchelsea. Nevertheless, he escaped any penalty by successfully establishing that the wine had been unloaded the day before the subsidy granted by the Parliament of 1429 was due to take effect (6 Dec.). E159/206, recorda Easter rot. 15d. In May 1433 Godfrey sold three pipes of red wine to a man from Tenterden in Kent, only to sue him in the common pleas when he failed to pay the agreed price of £4 6s. 8d.. CP40/699, rot. 269d. Later lawsuits, brought against the prior of Michelham, a shipman from Dartmouth and wool merchants of London, were for much larger sums and provide a glimpse of the extent of Godfrey’s enterprise. CP40/715, rot. 179d; 724, rot. 183d; 740, rots. 51d, 96. Given the strong presence of men from the Cinque Ports at the annual herring fair at Yarmouth, it is not surprising to find Godfrey engaged in litigation against a number of Yarmouth merchants and mariners in the late 1440s, but his trading concerns also spread further inland, and on one occasion he alleged that the Cambridgeshire lawyer John Ansty* owed him £22 13s. 4d. CP40/753, rots. 43, 259, 374d.

Godfrey’s experience as a shipowner led to his appointment in June 1436, along with the royal customer Godard Pulham*, to conscript crews for five Winchelsea ships to put to sea to resist the King’s enemies. In fact, in partnership with Pulham, a fellow baron of Winchelsea, Godfrey owned four of the vessels concerned (La Grande Trinite, La Marie, La Jonette and La Petre) and the two colleagues had been among a group of local shipowners who used the good offices of the treasurer of England, Ralph, Lord Cromwell, in order to obtain from the King’s Council licences to fit out their vessels to safeguard the Channel over a period of four months, beginning the previous 12 Apr. Part of this service to the Crown no doubt included victualling the fortress of Le Crotoy, for Godfrey was responsible for shipping wheat there that summer. CPR, 1429-36, p. 609 (wrongly dated 1435); E28/57/26, June 14 Hen. VI; E403/723, m. 11. In July 1445 in the hundred court at Winchelsea it was ordained by assent of the community that Godfrey should formally treat with Pulham regarding the reward for the use of his ships to bring Henry VI’s queen and her entourage over from France to England. Cott. Julius BIV, f. 73.

Godfrey’s mercantile interests appear to have made him a wealthy man, so far as can be judged by his land-holdings. As a Portsman, he claimed exemption from parliamentary taxation on his moveable possessions at Ore and Sedlescombe, in east Sussex, E179/225/50, 59; 226/69, 71; 227/94; 228/131; 229/138. but he also did likewise in more westerly parts of the county, notably in the borough of Shoreham and in many places in the rape of Lewes. E179/228/131; 229/151. In Winchelsea itself he and his wife Joan had acquired a tenement in the parish of St. Thomas in 1428, and they also held some 330 acres of land and annual rents of 10s. 6d. in Guestling and Fairlight nearby, which they put into the hands of feoffees five years later. In 1434 Godfrey purchased a plot of land and the site of a mill in St. Giles’s parish, Winchelsea, and he added to his property in the town in later years. Battle Abbey mss, deeds 869, 1424, 1428, 1334; CP25(1)/241/87/2; Cooper, 39. It was probably he who owned the manor of Gensing (near Hastings) and held his first court there in 1436. Suss. Arch. Collns. xiv. 111. The full extent of his landed holdings near Winchelsea is revealed in a final concord of 1444, which shows him and his wife in possession for term of their lives of eight messuages, some 690 acres of land, and the rents mentioned above, which were to revert to Godard Pulham on their deaths. This suggests that either Godfrey or his wife was a relation of Pulham, who besides joining our MP in enterprises at sea, also accompanied him to the Commons (in 1449). CP25(1)/241/89/14. In 1445 the Godfreys sued a husbandman for breaking their closes at Guestling and taking timber worth £20: CP40/738, rot. 511d.

Godfrey had become involved in the affairs of Winchelsea at least by the spring of 1430, when he is first recorded as a jurat. He witnessed the grants made by William Skele† to a local chantry at the end of that year, and was elected mayor the following Easter. As such he was party to the settlements made in 1432 which finally completed the testamentary provisions of John Salerne† (d.1410). At the end of his second consecutive term as mayor, at Easter 1433, he was kept on in office when discord over the mayoral elections failed to produce an acceptable outcome. The internal disputes were settled in June when William Fynch* formally took over from him, a conclusion which evidently caused no ill feeling between the two men, for Fynch selected Godfrey as one of the jurats for the forthcoming official year. Cott. Julius BIV, ff. 40-41, 47v-50, 51v. Godfrey’s third full term as mayor started in 1438, and he attended the Brodhull of July that year, as a delegate from Winchelsea. White and Black. Bks. 10. Election to Parliament was a natural consequence of his long participation in the government of the Port, and he was duly sent to the Commons as a baron twice in the 1440s. He took the opportunity of his visits to Westminster to pursue his debtors in the law courts.

Godfrey was called upon by his fellow barons, William Morfote* and John Tamworth* to be a feoffee of their land in east Sussex. Battle Abbey mss, deeds 978, 980; Bolney Bk. (Suss. Rec. Soc. lxiii), 64. He is last recorded at the close of 1450, when again appointed to a royal commission, this time to arrest certain pirates and make restitution of the goods they had stolen. According to Winchelsea’s historian, Cooper, he himself was responsible for founding the chantry in St. Thomas’s church which bore his name. Cooper, 130-2. What is certain is that the chantry was later richly endowed by Godfrey’s only daughter, Malina, who married Simon Farnecombe, another local merchant. Indeed, after her husband died she, being childless, granted away all her property to this foundation and another chantry in the same church. Initially, authorized by two licences from Edward IV and another from the queen (all dated in the year from November 1477) she founded ‘John Godfrey’s chantry’ where daily prayers were to be said for John and his wife Alice, and other relations, Simon Godfrey and his wife Joan. It was to be supported from lands in Westham, Horsey, Langley and elsewhere in east Sussex worth £8 13s. 4d. p.a., which had presumably once belonged to her late father. CPR, 1476-85, pp. 57, 127; Battle Abbey mss, deeds 1064, 1072; Suss. N. and Q. vii. 225-6. The second chantry, established by licence of March 1481 and endowed with land worth ten marks a year, served as a memorial to her husband. CPR, 1476-85, pp. 249, 283; Suss. N. and Q. viii. 1-2.