HAWMAN, Laurence, of Wallingford, Berks.

Laurence may have been descended from the family which held ‘Hawmannyslonde’ in Checkendon, Oxfordshire, in the 1330s, although the property known as ‘Hawmanysgrove’ left the family’s possession before 1394, when it passed to John Rede† and his wife. Boarstall Cart. 28, 31-32. He himself lived just a few miles away in Wallingford, and was appointed to collect in Berkshire the fifteenth and tenth voted in the Parliament of December 1421. Writs to collect the second moiety of the tax, due at Martinmas (11 Nov.) 1422, were issued on 1 Oct., and Henry VI’s first Parliament, to which Hawman was elected, met on 9 Nov. During the session, on 26 Nov., Hawman was among the Berkshire collectors who rendered their account at the Exchequer. E401/703, m. 6. Meanwhile, on 15 Oct., he had witnessed a deed by which the rector of St. Peter’s, Wallingford, and William Clowd† had conveyed a tenement and garden next to a messuage called ‘Anastysplace’ in the town to Sir Hugh Wolf. Parliament was still sitting when, on 1 Dec., Wolf transferred the messuage itself to five feoffees, including Hawman, and the latter was afterwards also enfeoffed of the tenement and garden. He was party to further transactions concerning these same properties in April 1425 and November 1426. Boarstall Cart. 272-3.

At the time of his elections to the Parliaments of 1422 and 1423 Hawman was an alderman of Wallingford, and he subsequently served at least three annual terms as mayor. During his mayoralties, on 15 Apr. 1425, 1 Oct. 1427 and St. George’s Day 1432, he conducted the parliamentary elections in the guildhall. C219/13/3, 5, 14/3. As a consequence of his office he became involved in a suit in the court of common pleas in the Easter term of 1426 (when he was once more an MP), in which John Stokes, the prior of the Benedictine house at Wallingford, sued Sir Hugh Wolf for failure to return a bond in his keeping. The prior stated that on 22 Apr. 1425 certain writings had been delivered to Wolf, whereby the prior and convent had been bound in £20 to Hawman as mayor, four named burgesses (in fact, the three aldermen and the bailiff of the liberty of Wallingford) and all the community of the borough; and the latter were bound in a like sum to the prior. Wolf was required to hold the bonds in safe custody, presumably pending arbitration between the parties, but he now refused to relinquish them. As Wolf replied that he was uncertain whether the conditions of the bonds had been fulfilled, the court ordered that Hawman and the rest be called to show why they should not be handed back. CP40/661, rot. 347.

Hawman was acquainted with other prominent members of the local gentry besides Wolf. In June 1428 he was a witness to a conveyance of land in Clapcot to Robert James* of Boarstall, and at Michaelmas following he attested a charter by which the manor of Sotwell near Wallingford was transferred from Thomas Poynings, Lord St. John, to Thomas Chaucer* and his feoffees. CCR, 1422-9, p. 446; Boarstall Cart. 265. Nevertheless, the significance of this association with the highly-influential Chaucer should not be exaggerated. As constable of Wallingford castle and resident at nearby Ewelme, Chaucer would inevitably have called on the leading townsmen to attest his local transactions. Hawman is last recorded in the Michaelmas term of 1433 when he brought a suit in the common pleas against a husbandman of Cholsey for breaking his closes at Wallingford and stealing goods worth £5. CP40/691, rot. 523. It seems likely that he died within the next five years, for he was not listed among the 44 people living in Wallingford when a formal inquest was made in June 1438 concerning the town’s declining population and parlous economic state. Alice Hawman, who was included in the list, may well have been his widow. C145/307/5.