HOLLAND, Richard (d.c.1448), of Bowhill in St.Thomas by Exeter, Devon.

Holland came from a gentry family living at Bowhill in the parish of St. Thomas Cowick Street to the immediate south-west of Exeter. Nothing is known about his parentage and early upbringing, but it is clear that over the course of his life he acquired extensive property in and around his home. By the end of his life, he held some 34 individual properties for which he paid an annual rent of over £8. Blaylock, 24.

Towards the end of Henry IV’s reign Holland began to play his part in public life, at least on the local stage. Thus in 1412 he led a delegation of the parishioners of St. Thomas to Bishop Stafford of Exeter to negotiate the consecration of a new parish church to replace the old chapel on the Exe bridge which had been swept away (along with the bridge) in a recent flood. G. Oliver, Monasticon Exoniensis, 157-9; Reg. Stafford ed. Hingeston-Randolph, 73. In the following year, he is recorded attending the first of no fewer than nine parliamentary elections in the Devon county court. C219/11/1; 12/5; 13/1-3, 5; 14/1; 15/1, 2. While he did not hold crown office in the first half of his life, he was nevertheless frequently placed on local juries summoned to Exeter, notably on those empanelled to take the inquisitions post mortem of the more prominent men of the shire. The inquisitions in which Holland thus participated included those of Sir John Herle*, Philip Cary*, Thomas Carminowe* and Anne Courtenay, countess of Devon. C139/2/29; 4/31; 9/16; 22/23; 24/34; 61/45; 74/26; 88/53, 55; 104/40; 110/46; JUST3/15/10/13; KB9/205/3/32.

Early on in his career Holland – like many others – fell foul of the irascible Sir John Dynham of Nutwell, one of the leading landowners in Devon. The exact nature of their relationship is uncertain, but it evidently had a financial dimension, since in 1426 Dynham was suing Holland for an account. Litigation between the two men (who claimed various debts from each other) continued from at least 1412 until Dynham’s death in 1429. CP40/622, rot. 24; 658, rot. 90d; 658, rot. 286; 660, rots. 196, 234d, 401d; H. Kleineke, ‘Dinham Fam.’ (London Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1998), 172-3. During the same period, Holland also quarrelled with the prior of the alien priory of Cowick, William Dounebant, who from January 1419 retained him at an annual fee of 20s. Although Holland had done what was asked of him in procuring a presentation from the earl of Devon and taking various distraints on the prior’s behalf, Dounebant refused to pay him the agreed fee. In May 1429 Holland brought the matter before the staple court at Exeter. The prior was condemned by John Cutler*, then mayor of the staple, and the constables, John Trelay and William French, to pay Holland £17, and, after defaulting on a court appearance, was arrested by the mayor’s bailiff and kept imprisoned for a period of five weeks. After regaining his liberty, Dounebant complained to the chancellor that the judgement had been passed out of favour to Holland, while also accusing the sheriff of Devon, Robert Hill I* of making fraudulent returns of writs in Holland’s favour in a separate suit before the court of the Exchequer. C244/3/131; CP40/677, rot. 329; C1/7/149; E5/485; 486, no. 27.

Unquestionably, Holland enjoyed cordial relations with the men of Exeter. He was a familiar figure in the city, where he occasionally acted as an arbiter for some of the more substantial citizens, and also maintained contacts among the cathedral clergy. One of these was the cathedral treasurer, Michael Archdeacon, who in 1442 appointed him his principal executor, an onerous duty for which he was rewarded with the sum of 40s. and a flat silver dish with a cover, as well as two silver cruets. Reg. Lacy, iv (Canterbury and York Soc. lxiii), 39-41; CP40/730, rot. 182; 734, rot. 183. When Holland was admitted to the freedom of Exeter in 1429, his entry fine of £2 was pardoned by the mayor and community, and from 1432 he was in receipt of a regular annual pension of 20s. from the civic authorities. Exeter Freemen ed. Rowe and Jackson, 46; Devon RO, Exeter city recs., receivers’ accts. 11-27 Hen. VI; mayors’ ct. roll 4-5 Hen. VI, m. 7d. Similarly, on the occasion of Holland’s return to Parliament for the county of Devon in 1431 one of his sureties was a former city steward and MP, John Coscombe†. The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 665.

There were, however, also other, more powerful interests at play. As Holland’s colleague the Devon shire court returned the experienced former sheriff James Chudleigh*, a man closely linked by blood ties to the regionally dominant grouping of gentry around Sir William Bonville* and his younger associate, (Sir) Philip Courtenay* of Powderham (Chudleigh’s half-brother). Holland himself also possessed a powerful patron of his own in John Holand, earl of Huntingdon. Holland’s exact relationship with his prominent namesake is unclear, but it was a close one, which the receiver of Exeter on one occasion went so far as to describe as ‘amicitia’. Blaylock, 348. It has been suggested that the Hollands were in some way related to the earls of Huntingdon (M. Cherry, ‘Crown and Political Community, Devon’ (Univ. of Wales, Swansea, Ph.D. thesis, 1981), 227, 232), but there is no definite evidence for this.

Richard’s term in Parliament appears to have brought him to the government’s attention, and in 1432 he was commissioned to inquire into acts of piracy. This appointment did not mark the beginning of a notable career of office-holding, and although both he and his brother John were deemed important enough to be included among the men required to take the general oath against maintenance in 1434, it was not until 1438 that the Crown once more called upon his services, and in the event only on a local basis. CPR, 1429-36, p. 399; Reg. Lacy, i. 276, 278. The new inquiry with which Holland (among others) was charged concerned Cowick priory. Originally a dependency of the Norman abbey of Bec, the priory had suffered both as a consequence of the French wars and as a result of neglect by successive priors. In the light of his long-running quarrel with Prior Dounebant there is little reason to suppose that Holland harboured any great affection for the house, and it is perhaps not surprising that the commissioners’ inquiries found that the priory church, chancel, cloisters, kitchen, principal chamber, chief gateway, great gateway and bakehouse were all decaying for want of repairs. Although Henry VI assigned to the priory’s repair any money that could be shown to be owing for the dilapidations, and – following the last of the inquiries conducted by Holland and his fellow commissioners – restored the priory’s privileges, a fire on Palm Sunday 1443 delivered the final blow to the monastery, which was surrendered to the King in November 1451. Oliver, 154; CPR, 1436-41, p. 300. Henry assigned the revenues from the priory to his own foundation of Eton.

Holland may have been the man of this name who in July 1443 went to France in the retinue of John Beaufort, earl of Somerset. E101/54/5. The date of his death is uncertain, although he probably died in or shortly after 1447-8, when his pension from the city of Exeter was last paid. He left as his heir his daughter Elizabeth, who had married Peter Edgecombe of Cotehele in Calstock, Cornwall, but part of his property, including his house at Bowhill appears to have passed to his nephew, Thomas, who maintained his connexions in Exeter and represented the city in Parliament on three occasions. Vivian, Vis. Cornw. 141; Watkin, ii. 728-9. Bowhill eventually passed through Thomas’s descendants into the hands of the Carew family. N. Pevsner, Buildings of Eng.: Devon, 437.