Alexander Hody was born in the early years of Henry IV’s reign, to a father of unfree status, or so a family history of the late fifteenth century would have it. According to this tradition, he and his elder brother, as well as their father, Thomas, owed their freedom to the good offices of Thomas’s brother John, who, having received his basic education from a chantry priest at Woolavington, went to Oxford and rose to become chancellor of Wells cathedral. This advancement in the Church allowed John to strike a bargain with his relatives’ master, Lord Audley, and buy their freedom.
As a younger son, Alexander had only limited hopes of succeeding to any of the modest family lands, so he had to seek to acquire property by other means. An advantageous marriage to Margaret, the daughter and heir of John Coker, brought him the Somerset manors of West Bower (in the parish of Bridgwater), Everley (in Durleigh), Wembdon, Moorland and Tuxwell, as well as a number of burgages in Bridgwater, holdings which at the time of his death were said to be worth more than £35 p.a.
Even so, Hody’s income from land was probably far inferior to the revenues of his professional practice. Unlike his elder brother he seems not to have sought a career in the judiciary, and although there can be little doubt that he could have followed in John’s footsteps had he so desired, he chose not to take the coif. Instead he found extensive and lucrative employment as legal counsel to a range of gentry, clergy and urban communities in the south-west. Among them were magnates of national standing, such as Thomas Courtenay, earl of Devon, and Richard, Lord Strange of Knockin, whom he served as a feoffee,
The citizens of Exeter regularly called upon Hody’s services, rewarding him with gifts of food and wine, and from 1434 paying him an annual fee of 13s. 4d. Yet, in the long run they found him rather a disappointment, as his busy practice left him only limited time to devote to their interests. Thus, the mayor John Shillingford*, in London to pursue his city’s quarrel with its cathedral chapter, reported in some dismay that ‘[t]he cause of so longe taryng yn makyng of the answers hath be for right grete bysynes þt Alisaunder Hody hath aboute his awne maters’. Nevertheless, when Hody could be found and persuaded to make time for Exeter’s affairs, he was a useful advocate, as Shillingford reported on another occasion: ‘Hody hadde the wordis of power as above; and as touchyng the menys with this condicion that oure articulis were answered’.
As the men of Bridgwater were already drawing extensively upon Hody’s services, it must have seemed only natural that he (a local man who fully complied with the statutory requirements for residency) should also represent them in Parliament. Thus, having gained early experience in 1429 as Member for Shaftesbury (a town which in five previous Parliaments of the decade had been represented by his brother John), Alexander went on to sit for Bridgwater in both 1431 and 1433. He evidently discharged his duties to the burgesses’ satisfaction, for in 1431 he was rewarded with a gift of a hood in addition to a payment of 13s. 4d. in lieu of his parliamentary wages.
From the early 1430s, the Crown also increasingly drew upon Hody’s talents. He was a frequent member of ad hoc commissions appointed in his locality, served as escheator of the double bailiwick of Somerset and Dorset in 1436-7, and in 1439 was added to the quorum of the Somerset bench, the sessions of which he subsequently attended with some regularity.
In spite of all this, it is perhaps not surprising that Hody made enemies. Thus, in April 1436, while he was transacting various legal matters at Bridgwater before William, Lord Botreaux, he and his servants were savagely attacked by the local gentlemen Robert and Thomas Dillington, Guy Bittlesgate, and their associates John Dillington and John Slaughtyrladde. The assailants failed to kill Hody as they were said to have intended, and Slaughtyrladde was captured and committed to prison by Botreaux, yet they soon rallied their armed supporters and freed the prisoner, threatening the town constable and bailiffs. On Hody’s complaint, in June special commissioners were appointed to investigate, and Robert Dillington paid a fine, while Slaughtyrladde was placed in the Marshalsea to await trial.
Questions over Hody’s own character are raised by the part he played in the murder of Edward Cullyford*, the Somerset county coroner and under sheriff, in 1446, this in despite of their long acquaintance. In 1431 the two men had together represented Bridgwater in the Commons, and Cullyford leased some of Hody’s property in Bridgwater and Wembdon.
By then events on a wider stage were growing increasingly turbulent, as military disaster in France generated a full-blown political crisis in England. Hody was returned to all three Parliaments that met between the spring of 1449 and the summer of 1451, and although it is not known what part he played in the fractious proceedings of the three assemblies, it is likely that in the first half of 1449 he championed a petition on behalf of the community of Somerset seeking the enforcement of an act passed in 1442 (concerning the taking of goods by Welshmen).
The two years following Hody’s appointment at Taunton saw him embroiled in an acrimonious dispute with James Luttrell, the head of an ancient and wealthy Somerset family, with whom he had long-established ties. In 1432 he had stood surety at the Exchequer for Bishop Stafford and Robert Coker when they were entrusted with the custody of the Luttrell estates, during James’s minority, and 15 years later, after James came of age, he had served him as a feoffee. But since then relations had soured drastically.
While Hody was engaged in his private squabbles, the country at large had drifted into open civil war. By the autumn of 1459 attempts to reach an accommodation between the court party, increasingly dominated by Henry VI’s formidable queen and the administration’s leading critic, the duke of York, and his Neville allies, had come to nothing and the two sides were squaring up with armed might. This show of strength ended in disaster for York and his adherents at Ludford Bridge that October and after they fled overseas the queen and her supporters lost no time in summoning a Parliament to meet at Coventry on 20 Nov. Care was taken to secure the return of the regime’s staunch supporters throughout the realm, and although no returns survive from Somerset, it is highly likely that Hody, who had represented the shire regularly since the late 1430s, was one of those elected on this occasion. He was certainly present at Coventry, for he was among the group of prominent lawyers charged with drafting a bill of attainder against York and his allies. This was clearly a task for the regime’s most skilled as well as least scrupulous minds, for one of their number was later said to have admitted that ‘the parlyows writing and the myschevous inditing was ymaginid, contrivid, and utterly concludid by her most vengeable labour, &c., and her most malicyows conspiracye ayens the innocent lords, knytis, gentilis, and comonys, and alle her issu perpetuel’.
This was stated less than a year later, after the tables had turned and the Yorkist lords had returned to England and, in July 1460, roundly defeated the Lancastrian forces at Northampton. A fresh Parliament was summoned, and it was thought that the legal draftsmen of 1459 would answer for their activities. Bishop Waynflete, replaced as chancellor by the new rulers in July, lost little time in dismissing Hody as his deputy constable at Taunton, and in his place appointed a staunch supporter of the new regime, Humphrey Stafford IV* of Southwick. Having incurred the enmity of the Yorkist authorities, it is hardly surprising that Hody threw in his lot with the most intractable opponents of the settlement in the Parliament of 1460, which disinherited the prince of Wales. Perhaps in the retinue of the earl of Devon he rode north that winter, and was thus with the Lancastrian army that challenged the duke of York’s desperate sortie from Sandal castle at Wakefield on 30 Dec., and took his life. Hody distinguished himself in the fighting and was knighted on the battle field.
Within days, a Yorkist army led by York’s heir, Edward, earl of March, and the earl of Warwick arrived from the west and gained admittance to the capital, while the queen’s forces withdrew northward. On 4 Mar. Edward was proclaimed King, and lost no time in avenging his father’s death. On 6 Mar., as one of the leaders present at the scene of the duke of York’s execution, Hody was expressly exempted from the offer of a general pardon; on the 10th the sheriff of Somerset, Humphrey Stafford IV, was instructed to seize his property; and a fortnight later royal commissioners were appointed to track him down and place him in the Tower of London.
Meanwhile, in January 1462 Hody’s widow, Margaret, had been granted licence to marry Sir Reynold Stourton (a younger son of John Stourton II*, Lord Stourton) in the chapel of her manor house at West Bower, on the somewhat spurious grounds that the parish church was nearly two miles distant.