KEMP, John, of ?Robertsbridge, Suss.

It may be surmised that John was related to the Kemps of Wye near Ashford in Kent, the family from which emerged his distinguished namesake John Kemp (c.1380-1454), the cardinal-archbishop, and the latter’s nephew Thomas, the bishop of London from 1448 until his death in 1489. Oxf. DNB, ‘Kemp, John’; CIPM Hen. VII, i. 380. If so, he may have been the John Kemp associated in 1400 with Thomas Kemp (the bishop’s father) and their kinsman William Scott I* of Brabourne in a final concord regarding land in Lamberhurst, straddling the border of Kent and Sussex. CP25(1)/290/59/12. In the previous year a man of this name had been pardoned his outlawry for failing to appear in court to answer Sir William Etchingham regarding a trespass in Sussex. CPR, 1396-9, p. 397. Together with Roger Rye†, a prominent servant of Archbishop Chichele of Canterbury, a John Kemp, probably also engaged in the archbishop’s service, petitioned the chancellor during the final years of Henry V’s reign claiming to have been illegally dispossessed of 300 acres of land in the vills of Lydd, Romney and elsewhere in southern Kent. C1/5/184. Yet there was more than one John Kemp active in this period, as is made clear by the description ‘senior’ attached to the John who together with William Sulliman of Kent entered into a bond with William Haute* for £40, in 1420, Harl. Ch. 78 I 21. A John Kemp, who had land in the parishes of Kennington and Ashford in Kent, left a wid. named Denise and two sons (Thomas and Richard) when he died in 1448/9: C1/33/220. and there is nothing in the records to link any of them with the Sussex borough of New Shoreham.

One possibility is that the MP was the man who lived at Robertsbridge, to the north of Battle, and established trading contacts in London and further north. In 1416 he and John Marshall of St. Neots in Huntingdonshire were bound in a statute staple at Westminster in the sum of £32 to the London grocer John Sutton. As a consequence of their failure to pay on the appointed day, orders went out for their arrest and Marshall was imprisoned by the sheriff of Huntingdonshire, although Kemp could not be found in Sussex. Later, in 1428, he relinquished any title he had to Marshall’s property in St. Neots. C131/59/19; CCR, 1422-9, p. 389. It was probably he of Robertsbridge, sometimes called ‘gentleman’ who was party to a fine relating to land in Dallington in east Sussex in 1425, CP25(1)/240/85/17; CCR, 1422-9, p. 389. and who together with his wife Joan appeared in the court of common pleas in Hilary term 1432 to bring a suit of trespass against a husbandman from Oving. KB27/683, rot. 12.

New Shoreham’s poor economic circumstances encouraged the inhabitants to look to outsiders to represent them in Parliament, but even so it was rare for them to return royal servants. A suggestion that John Kemp may have been one such rests on the coincidence of the employment of a namesake by the Crown at the time of the elections to the Parliament of 1437. In July 1426 that John Kemp, a yeoman of the chamber of Henry IV’s widow, Joan of Navarre, was sent to the abbot of Winchcombe to receive a corrody at the abbey, and by the queen’s grant he subsequently held the post of keeper and porter of the south gate in the park of Havering atte Bower in Essex. This he was occupying when Parliament was summoned to meet on 21 Jan. 1437, and six months later, in July, after the dissolution and the queen’s death, he was re-granted the post by the King, who a year later gave it to him for life. Briefly, from 8 Mar. 1439 until his death, he shared it with John Boys. CCR, 1422-9, p. 275; CPR, 1436-41, pp. 75, 193, 250; 1452-61, p. 40; E159/226, brevia Mich. rot. 6. But that was only a matter of weeks: Kemp made his will on 24 Mar. and died before 24 Apr. He wished to be buried in the cemetery of Holy Trinity priory in London, and referred to his son William and daughter Isabel, to whom he left robes and jewelery, and to another ‘son’ (perhaps stepson or son-in-law) Nicholas Everard, who was named among his executors, with his widow Maud. Guildhall Lib. London, commissary ct. wills, 9171/4, f. 12v. Yet whether the Robertsbridge man, the servant of Queen Joan, or some other John Kemp, the MP for Shoreham remains obscure.