HICKES, Henry (d.1455), of Rolvenden and Rochester, Kent.

The son of John Hickes, a butcher from Rolvenden, Henry trained to be a lawyer, and by the beginning of 1422 was active as an attorney in the court of common pleas. CP40/644, rots. 143, 206. Together with his brother John, as fellow executors of their father’s will, he was then engaged in litigation against John senior’s debtors, but which of the two brothers was the elder, and their father’s principal heir, is not stated. CP40/644, rot. 65d. Although the fees he earned in the law courts provided him with an independent income, Henry’s fortunes may initially have been more dependent upon his marriage. This took place at an unknown date after November 1420. His wife, Elizabeth, was the widow of a Rochester man, Peter Catte, and disputes over her late husband’s property almost certainly lay behind the heated confrontations between Hickes and other citizens of Rochester, which erupted in the autumn of 1422. They may also have played a part in his only election to Parliament, which occurred at the same time. On 24 Nov., while the Parliament was in session, Hickes, described as ‘of Rolvenden, gentleman’, came to the court of common pleas to offer sureties to keep the peace and do no harm to Thomas Chertsey† (the ostler who had represented the city in Parliament in Henry IV’s reign); while Chertsey similarly undertook not to assault our MP. The two men, both entering bonds in 40 marks, each produced four mainpernors, all severally bound in 20 marks. It is worthy of note that while Chertsey’s bailsmen all came from Rochester, and included John Potager*, Thomas White and William Goldhord, Hickes’s were drawn from some distance away – Essex, Sussex and London – suggesting that as yet he had not been fully integrated into the civic community. CP40/647, rot. 9. Elizabeth’s former husband, Catte, who had been engaged in suits against Chertsey, alleging detinue of chattels, died intestate, and she had been granted administration of his goods. In the same law term Hickes represented her in the law courts with regard to eight ‘tymbre de Poleyngrey’ [furs], which had belonged to the deceased and had now deteriorated, and the couple brought a plea of trespass against White in the King’s bench. The disputes rumbled on for several years. On the following 5 Feb. 1423, White and Goldhord were bound over in the King’s bench to keep the peace towards Hickes, with Chertsey and Potager standing as their sureties. CP40/644, rot. 90 (it is unclear whether Catte was still alive at that date); 647, rot. 188d; KB27/646, rot. 32d; 647, rex rot. 15.

While these quarrels focused in part on Elizabeth’s dower in Rochester, from her marriage to Catte, they also related to her inheritance from the Northwode estates. When White was brought to King’s bench in Easter term 1423 the specific charge laid against him was that in early October 1421 he had stolen two title deeds belonging to her. One was a charter of her grandfather, John, 3rd Lord Northwode, granting his son William (Elizabeth’s father) the manor of Bredhurst, Kent, and the other being a grant to William by his older brother, Sir Roger Northwode, of the same. KB27/648, rot. 79; CP40/651, rot. 323; 657, rot. 2. Elizabeth and her sister Eleanor, who had married John Adam* of New Romney, had become coheirs to their father’s estates following the childless death of their brother in 1416, but their title was challenged by the nearest male heir, their young cousin John Northwode (b.c.1405), the son of their uncle James, CIPM, xx. 557-8; CP, ix. 757-9. and from as soon as he married Hickes was drawn into suits in the courts in defence of the interests of the two women. In Michaelmas term 1422 (while his Parliament was in session) he and Adam accused John and Thomas Northwode of cutting down their trees at Bredhurst, and in 1425 they and their wives accused Thomas Frank of Thornham of breaking into their closes at Thornham and Stoghbury and stealing wood and underwood worth £30. CP40/647, rot. 180; 658, rot. 459. In 1429 the two couples conveyed some 600 acres of land in the same two places, along with the manor of ‘Bingebury’ to a group of men including John Darrell*, the steward of the archbishop of Canterbury, although whether Darell and the rest were their feoffees or this was a sale remains uncertain. CP25(1)/114/304/255. By 1437 the Northwodes had found an ally in Sir Roger Chamberlain*, who allegedly joined them in breaking into the closes at Bredhurst and Gillingham belonging to the wives of Adam and Hickes, and stealing chattels worth £40. Two years later the two men brought further charges against Sir Roger and his associates, and after Adam died in 1440 the suits continued with Hickes teaming up with his sister-in-law’s new husband, John Colkirk. CP40/705, rot. 204; CP40/713, rot. 236; 723, rot. 591; 724, rot. 114; 738, rot. 453d. By contrast, his wife’s title to a moiety of the manor of Harrietsham seems to have been no longer subject to challenge. The post mortem held after the death of her brother in 1416 had found that the manor was entailed in the male line, but the sisters and their husbands (Catte and Adam) had successfully proved in Chancery that this was not the case, CCR, 1419-22, pp. 22-23, 71-72. and a pardon granted to Hickes and his wife in May 1437 referred to them as tenants of a moiety of the manor, held in Elizabeth’s right. C67/38, m. 25.

Perhaps it was through his marriage that Hickes was drawn into the affairs of Rochester bridge, of which Elizabeth’s previous husband had once been warden, Traffic and Politics, ed. Yates and Gibson, 291. although this involvement may not have begun by the time of his election to Parliament. By 1428-9 he was acting as attorney for the wardens, chasing debtors on the bridge’s manor of Little Delse, and within ten years he had been retained formally, with an annual fee of 6s. 8d., to serve as the bridge’s attorney in the courts at Westminster, a position he continued to hold until Michaelmas 1450. In 1438-9, along with other ‘friends’ of the bridge, including John Bamburgh* and William Rickhill†, he obtained a favourable verdict in an inquisition ad quod damnum relating to property in Grain, Rochester, Walshes and Little Delce. Rochester Bridge Trust, wardens’ accts. 1428-9, 1438-9, F 1/37, 41.

By this stage in his career Hickes’s talents as a lawyer were in heavy demand. He had professional contacts among the elite of Kent society: as early as 1425, for example, he had acted as attorney for John Rickhill* (William’s brother), in 1436 he was appointed by Stephen de Cosyngton as trustee of his goods, and in 1439 he stood surety for Stephen Slegge*. CP40/659, rots. 48, 184, 252; 680, rot. 284d; E159/216, recogniciones Mich. On several occasions he appeared in the court of common pleas for the prior of St. Andrew’s, Rochester, CP40/691, rots. 30, 312d; 707, rot. 518; 775, rot. 226d. besides also serving in the Westminster courts as surety for less prominent figures from Kent. For instance, around 1431 he was appointed executor of Richard Lorkyn, and 17 years later he was one of the administrators of the estate of another, Walter Ladde, thus taking on duties which also involved him in litigation. CP40/691, rot. 312d; 751, rots. 543d, 545d; CPR, 1452-61, p. 138. His standing in the local community was further reflected in the fact that he witnessed parliamentary elections in the shire court at Rochester on three occasions, and by his appointment as a tax collector in the county in 1429, 1430 and 1434. In May 1434 his name was placed on the list of men of Kent required to take the generally administered oath not to maintain law-breakers. CPR, 1429-36, p. 389. The pardon he sued out in October 1446 by referring specifically to his role as a collector of fifteenths and tenths secured for him exoneration from prosecution for failings in that office. C67/39, m. 19.

Throughout his career Hickes’s relations with his neighbours in Rochester continued to be difficult at times. In Michaelmas term 1426 he sued another of Rochester’s leading citizens, Robert Kela†, for a render of chattels worth 40s., CP40/663, rot. 234d. and the ill feeling between him and John Potager was never assuaged. In Hilary term 1438 Hickes was brought before the barons of the Exchequer to answer for a breach of the peace, requiring the forfeiture of the bond he had entered more than 16 years earlier, in 1422. His alleged offence was to have assaulted Potager’s wife, Joan, on two occasions, in March 1434 and again in Hilary 1435, and also to have caused injury to Thomas Chamberlain, the vicar of their parish church of St. Nicholas. Eventually, although a local jury acquitted him of the assault on Joan, they found him guilty of attacking the vicar. E159/214, recorda Hil. rot. 8. It has not been ascertained whether Thomas was a kinsman of Hickes’s adversary Sir Roger Chamberlain. In 1441 one James Janewe was accused of breaking into Hickes’s house on Bully Hill in the same parish, under the walls of Rochester castle (a property he rented from the wardens of Rochester bridge), and his servant, one Alice Catte (perhaps a relation of Elizabeth Hickes’s former husband), was accused of insulting him. CP40/723, rot. 591d; Rochester Bridge wardens’ accts. F 1/41.

More seriously, in September 1450 Hickes was among those indicted by a Rochester jury before the commissioners appointed to inquire into disorder in Kent in the aftermath of Cade’s rebellion. His quarrel with the vicar of St. Nicholas’s church was dredged up, with the claim that he had assaulted Chamberlain as long before as July 1429, and that over the 20 years since then he had constantly vexed him with malicious lawsuits, to the effect that the vicar had been unable to celebrate mass. It was said that Hickes only stopped harassing the vicar when, on 3 June 1447, Chamberlain granted him an annuity of 6s. 8d. and a robe worth 13s. 4d. Furthermore, in October 1448 Hickes had broken into the close of Robert Doget* and threatened one of his servants to such an extent that the man left Doget’s service. Whatever the background to these events, Hickes was eventually found not guilty. R. Virgoe, ‘Ancient Indictments in K.B.’, in Med. Kentish Soc. (Kent Rec. Ser. xviii), 222-4.

Hickes made his will on 6 Mar.1455. He left his house, with a garden, and all his goods in Rochester to his wife. On her decease these were to pass to their daughter, Juliana. No mention was made of the properties which Hickes had earlier held as part of his wife’s inheritance and these were almost certainly already in the hands of feoffees. He died before 21 Apr. the following year when probate was granted. Centre for Kentish Studies, Rochester consist. ct. wills 1453-61, DRb/PWr 2, f. 34v. After her husband’s death, Elizabeth struggled to retain possession of her Northwode lands. In 1465 she was suing Hickes’s feoffees, who included John Bamme†, over the manor of Bredhurst and lands in Boxley. CP40/818, rot. 407d. Hickes’s daughter outlived her father by some years. In her will, made in 1493, she made several bequests to St. Andrew’s cathedral church, Rochester, including a purse of gold with ‘the botons of sylver and gilt’ and a gift of 20d. to the shrine of St. William of Perth, a thirteenth-century Scottish pilgrim who had been murdered in Rochester while en route to the Holy Land. F.F. Smith, Rochester in Parl. 72-73.