HORE, John

The identity of Hore’s first father-in-law, Robert Tulyet, has emerged since the writing of the previous biography. The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 416-17. Robert was the son of Richard Tulyet, who was several times mayor of Cambridge and died in about 1349. Richard had acquired a moiety of the manor of Great Childerley, and it was through his marriage to Joan Tulyet that Hore came into possession of his estate in that parish and, perhaps, to settle in Cambridgeshire in the first place. VCH Cambs. ix. 42. Given his obscure background, Hore was fortunate to secure her hand, for which he would appear to have faced competition. In late April 1393, a month after Robert Tulyet’s death, the Crown issued a commission to the sheriff of Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire and others, ordering them to find and secure the person of Joan, a minor and the daughter of a tenant-in-chief, whom ‘certain evil disposed persons’ had ‘removed’. Yet she was Hore’s wife by the following 30 June, when the escheator in Cambridgeshire held an inquisition for her late father’s estates in that county. CPR, 1391-6, p. 293; CIPM, xvii. 278. Whether the annuity from Great Childerley that the couple awarded the Chancery clerk, Nicholas Hemingford, in September 1393 was a reward for in some way helping them to marry or take possession of the Tulyet property there (or both) is impossible to say.

A year after the dissolution of his second Parliament, Hore took legal action in the Exchequer, suing the outgoing sheriff of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire, Robert Scott*, for his wages as an MP. In response, Scott claimed that in December 1416 he had directed Thomas Charlwalton*, then bailiff of Toseland Hundred in Huntingdonshire, to pay Hore, an expedient intended to allow Charwalton to discharge some of the debts he happened to owe Scott. The parties agreed to put their differences before a jury, which had yet to sit when, in Hilary term 1419, Scott failed to reappear in the Exchequer on a given day and lost the case by default. E13/133, rot. 11.

Ironically, Hore faced similar demands relating to his own term as sheriff of Cambridge and Huntingdonshire. In October 1426, Sir William Asenhill*, one of the knights of the shire for Cambridgeshire in the Parliament of that year, sued him in the Exchequer for the wages due to him for attending that assembly. Although the Parliament sat for 65 days, Asenhill claimed for 70 (£14 4s.); no doubt he had spent the other five travelling to and from its venue of Leicester. He won his case, meaning that Hore had to pay him the sum claimed plus damages. E13/137, rot. 3. Shortly after concluding his term as sheriff, Hore faced further litigation in the Exchequer over parliamentary wages. This time the plaintiff was Sir Nicholas Styuecle*, who represented Huntingdonshire on at least a dozen occasions during his long career as an MP. Styuecle’s suits concerned his wages as a knight of the shire in the Parliaments of 1423 and 1426. With regard to that of 1423, Styuecle had initially sued Sir Walter de la Pole*, the sheriff of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire in 1423-4. In spite of winning his case, he had failed to recover either his wages or damages, prompting him to bring a fresh suit against one of de la Pole’s successors. By means of a separate bill, Styuecle sued Hore for failing to pay him his wages as a knight of the shire in 1426. The outcomes of both suits are unknown. E13/136, rot. 19; 137, rots. 16d, 18.