JOYE, John, of Ipswich, Suff.

It is likely that Joye came from a family long established in Ipswich, since a namesake was living there during Edward II’s reign. CAD, ii. A3605. His relatives included other burgesses of the town, among them his brother Richard. Active by 1404, in the spring of that year he was one of many residents of Suffolk who came into possession of merchandise (beer, copper, ham and tar) from two foreign ships captured at sea by sailors from Gosford and Bawdsey on the county’s south-east coast. The masters of the ships (from Lűbeck and Kampen) and the owners of the pillaged goods, a group of Hamburg merchants, petitioned the King for compensation (claiming that the cargoes were worth £315 4s.), and, it would appear, began a Chancery suit against those who had taken them. The following August John Topclif, a royal serjeant-at-arms, was commissioned together with the sheriff of Suffolk and other gentry to investigate. The commissioners found that those in possession of the goods were refusing to make any sort of restitution to the victims of the piracy, and in February 1405 the Crown ordered the sheriff to levy what was owed to the foreigners from the recalcitrants. CIMisc. vii. 278; CPR, 1401-5, pp. 432, 435-6; CCR, 1402-5, pp. 428-30. Whether Joye, who was said to have received 19s. 6d. worth of the pillaged goods, ever complied is unknown.

Initially a baker like his brother, Joye afterwards switched to the wine trade. Still a baker in 1410, when facing a demand from the London grocer Henry Otewy for 60s., he was trading as a vintner by the beginning of Henry V’s reign and, like other leading burgesses, he kept an inn. While he imported wine, he also exported other commodities like cloth, cheese and hides, and it is possible that he was a fishmonger as well. After becoming a vintner, Joye counted among his customers Dame Alice Bryan of Acton Hall in west Suffolk. He was a guest at her table in June 1413, and in 1418-19 his wine sales to her amounted to £10 13s. 4d. Amor, 26, 94, 157, 254, 261; CP40/596, rot. 371; Household Bk. Alice de Bryene ed. Redstone, 76, 119. It is not clear whether a fishmonger of this period, John Joye of Ipswich and London, was the MP or a namesake, although Amor assumes that the fishmonger (a citizen of London and a member of the City’s Fishmongers’ Co. in 1419) and the vintner were one and the same man: CCR, 1419-22, pp. 51-52; Amor, 254. Dame Alice was not the only member of the gentry with whom Joye associated. In 1416-17, for example, he, along with the self-made East Anglian esquire, John Spencer†, and William Heylee, acquired the lease of a plot of waste ground from the bailiffs and community of Ipswich. HMC 9th Rep. pt. 1, 234. Joye was again linked with Heylee in January 1424, when they, along with William Weathereld* and the prominent Suffolk knight, Sir William Phelip†, secured another such lease, this time in the parishes of St. Peter and St. Mary at Quay. Ipswich Bor. Archs. (Suff. Rec. Soc. xliii), 23. Weathereld’s biography in The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 795, misdates the lease Jan. 1423 and mistakenly states that both plots were in St. Peter’s.

A portman of Ipswich in 1418, Joye served an initial double term as one of the bailiffs of the borough in 1420-2. During the same period of office, the Crown appointed him and John Kimberley collectors of customs and subsidies and controllers of the tronage and pesage in Ipswich and adjacent ports. Joye sat in his only known Parliament shortly before beginning a second double term as bailiff. As a representative of an important trading port, he probably took an interest in the Parliament’s grant of tunnage and poundage to the Crown, made upon condition that aliens should be hosted with Englishmen while conducting their business in the realm. PROME, x. 234-5. Joye’s second period as bailiff was not without controversy. In January 1428, some four months after they had relinquished office, he and his co-bailiff, John Caldwell*, faced litigation in the Exchequer. The plaintiff, Nicholas Stanhowe of Norwich, had won a suit for debt against Richard Dysse of Ipswich in the borough court during their term in office, and he now complained that Caldwell and Joye had permitted Dysse to go at large before he had paid off the debt, amounting to £40. In response to Stanhowe’s suit, the Crown fined the two men, the issues of whose lands became liable to financial sanction. E13/138, rot. 10; CFR, xvi. 49-50, 333-4. Later that year, Joye and Caldwell faced further legal proceedings relating to their time together as bailiffs. The plaintiff, a burgess from Bury St. Edmunds, alleged that they had unjustly confiscated a silk belt and a pair of ornate knives from him at Ipswich. CP40/671, rot. 523d. Notwithstanding such complaints, Joye began a fourth term in the office soon afterwards.

Not heard of after the early 1430s, Joye probably died within ten years after attending Parliament. Later that decade (or perhaps at the end of the next), his executors, William Gosselyn, clerk, Richard Doget and William Weathereld, filed a Chancery bill against his widow, Joan. They said that Joye had given her a life interest in all his property in Ipswich, except for a messuage earmarked for sale for charitable purposes. Yet she had disregarded his wishes by retaining the messuage for herself, thereby frustrating the performance of the will. In filing their bill, the executors sought to have her examined in Chancery, although the outcome of the suit is unrecorded. Joan herself died in 1460 or the following year. In her will she requested burial in the parish church of the Holy Trinity, Ipswich, and instructed her executor to dispose of her goods for the benefit of the souls of herself and her late husband. The will mentions no children, and it is not clear whether Peter Joye, a resident of Ipswich in the later 15th century, was the MP’s son. C1/11/429; Reg. Betyns, f. 5; HMC 9th Rep. pt. 1, 235.