More may be added to the earlier biography.
Following his second marriage, Howard made Tendring Hall in Stoke Nayland his main residence. Almost certainly it was he who carried out major improvements to the manor-house (or even rebuilt it) since there is no evidence that his even wealthier grandson and namesake undertook any substantial building projects there.
There survives a draft of a petition addressed to Richard II, now in two incomplete pieces, to which Howard put his name shortly after his first Parliament. The purpose of the petition, of which his co-petitioners were the archbishop of Canterbury, the bishop of London, the abbots of Waltham Holy Cross, Colchester, St. Osyth and Walden, the earl of Oxford and Sir William Coggeshall*, was to seek a pardon for the spiritual and temporal ‘gentry’ and commons of Essex. Presumably, it was an application for inclusion in the general pardon granted by the King just before the Parliament ended.
In October 1403, a little over a fortnight before he had completed his term as sheriff of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire, Howard was sued in the Exchequer by Thomas Priour† and Thomas Waweton. The pair had sat as knights of the shire in the Parliament of 1402, for Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire respectively, and the suits related to his alleged failure to pay them their parliamentary wages, amounting to £12 in each case. In his bill, Waweton declared that he had delivered a writ of expenses to Howard’s under sheriff, William Aleyn, at Huntingdon in late December 1402, but Howard asserted that he had in due course paid the wages in full. Priour’s bill referred to a like writ that he had delivered to Aleyn at Cambridge, again in late December 1402. Howard replied that he had paid Priour £8 of his wages immediately while the £4 remaining was chargeable on the bishop of Ely’s liberty of the Isle of Ely, which traditionally paid a third part of the wages of the knights of the shire for Cambridgeshire. He had accordingly sent a writ to the bailiff of the liberty but that official had failed to respond. Both suits were referred to juries but only Priour’s is known to have produced a verdict, by which Howard was directed to pay the plaintiff the £4 demanded and damages of 20s.
Howard was in fact steward of the liberty of the great abbey of Bury St. Edmunds for longer than previously realised. Referred to as such in a royal pardon that he received at the beginning of 1416,
Probably it was in the same decade that Howard clashed with John Holand over estates in Stoke Nayland and Cornard in Suffolk of which Holand, who claimed them as his inheritance, accused Howard of wrongfully disseising him. Holand laid the matter before the chancellor but his bill is the only surviving evidence of this Chancery suit, the outcome of which is unknown.
Another quarrel, that between Howard and Sir Thomas Kerdiston* which so alarmed the authorities in 1420, was almost certainly part of an ongoing dispute over land. Although there was no violence that year, the two knights were still at odds in the middle of the same decade. By 1424 Kerdiston was suing Howard, his second wife Alice and several of their associates, including Sir William Wolf* and Howard’s fellow knight of the shire in the Parliament of September 1397, Robert Tey†, in the court of King’s bench, for trespassing on his property at Bulcamp and Henham in Suffolk. Descended from an illegitimate daughter of Sir Thomas’s great-grandfather William, Lord Kerdiston, Alice may have sought part of the Kerdiston estate. Given her ancestor’s illegitimacy, any such claim was probably frivolous although it is possible that Lord Kerdiston had provided for his bastard offspring with land. A jury found the Howards and Tey guilty in early 1426; whereupon Kerdiston declared that he did not wish to pursue his suit against the other defendants. The court awarded him damages of £40, a sum handed over to his attorneys the following month. This was not the end of the affair because the Howards and Tey challenged the jury’s verdict, an appeal that was still pending when both Alice and Tey died in the autumn of 1426.
In his later years Howard was an executor of (Sir) John Shardelowe* and participated in yet another land dispute. Formerly a knight of the shire for Suffolk in the Parliament of 1423, Shardelowe had died in office as sheriff of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire on 10 Sept. 1432. A week later, the Crown issued letters to Howard and Shardelowe’s other executor, Robert Crane, ordering them to deliver the records pertaining to that office to the new sheriff of those counties, John Clopton.
As for the dispute, Howard’s involvement was as a trustee rather than on his own account. During the mid 1430s or thereabouts, he sued William St. Cler in the Chancery, claiming that St. Cler had hoodwinked him into making a wrongful conveyance. In his bill Howard stated that he was a feoffee to the use of the last will of the defendant’s late father, John St. Cler, who had left directions for William to succeed to various estates in Essex in tail. After the testator’s death, Howard had transferred his interest in these lands to William in the presence of the abbot of St. Osyth, although allegedly without realising that he was sealing a conveyance in fee rather than in tail. Howard accused William of having tricked him into breaching John St. Cler’s intended entail, although unfortunately his bill does not explain how.