LAMPET, Ralph, of Stody and Great Yarmouth, Norf.

A man of obscure background, Lampet was perhaps a relative of William Lampet of Brightwell, Suffolk. There is no evidence to support the assertion of HP Biogs. ed. Wedgwood and Holt, 524, that Ralph came from Lincs. William served as a receiver for Margaret Brotherton (d.1399), duchess of Norf. Subsequently associated with the Lords Scales, he was active in Suff. during the first two decades of the 15th century. He was the cousin and heir of Thomas Lampet of Essex: CCR, 1399-1402, pp. 50, 93, 306, 568; 1402-5, pp. 372, 472; 1405-9, pp. 390, 503; 1409-13, p. 194; CFR, xii. 115, 215; xiii. 63; CIPM, xviii. 859; CPL, v. 624; CPR, 1416-22, p. 351. Included in a list of those required to swear to keep the peace in the neighbouring county of Norfolk in 1434, CPR, 1429-36, p. 404. he was not admitted to the freedom of Great Yarmouth until late in the same decade. Usually styled ‘esquire’, it is possible that he had received a legal training, since he and the lawyers, Reynold Rous* and John Tasburgh, were among who arbitrated in a dispute between members of the Garneys family in January 1437. CCR, 1435-41, p. 109, 111. At this date Lampet was living at Stody in north Norfolk, being described as such when he and John Heydon* had entered a recognizance to the Crown the previous July. They were acting on behalf of Edmund Wynter, by then probably already Lampet’s father-in-law, to ensure that he appeared in Chancery to answer Joan Mariot in a dispute over the manor of East Beckham. CCR, 1435-41, p. 64. Lampet also acted for Wynter after his father-in-law’s death, since Edmund appointed him one of his executors in his will of 1448. Associated with Lampet in this role was his wife (to whom Wynter bequeathed ‘a book of King Richard and other knights’) and the testator’s son John Wynter. Norf. RO, Norwich consist. ct., Reg. Wylbey, f. 147.

While there is no evidence that Lampet had inherited property at Stody, he did come to acquire an interest in the manor there, settled on him and his wife Margaret for their lives in survivorship in 1441, with remainder to the heirs of the body of John Braunche. A younger son of a knight of the same name, Braunche had succeeded to the manor after his mother, Katherine, had assigned it to him in her will of 1420. The circumstances in which it passed to the Lampets are unknown (although it is possible that Margaret Lampet was John Braunche’s widow) and it had returned to the Braunches, in the person of Robert Braunche, by 1471. Ibid. Reg. Hyrnyng, f. 64; CP25(1)/168/189/171; Blomefield, 440-2. Not realising that Margaret was a Wynter, Blomefield suggested that she was John Braunche’s daughter. Elsewhere in Norfolk, Lampet possessed lands at Reedham, a few miles south-west of Great Yarmouth. He later sold these to John Berney of Reedham but he was still seeking full payment of the purchase price after Berney’s death in 1460. Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 552-3.

Notwithstanding his East Anglian origins and lands, Lampet must have spent a considerable amount of time outside the region, particularly in the earlier part of his career. By the autumn of 1436 he was serving under the earl of Huntingdon as lieutenant constable at the Tower of London. In November that year he received a commission in his capacity as Holand’s deputy to inquire into boats permanently anchored on the Thames between London Bridge and Gravesend with fixed nets and other tackle, obstructing navigation and destroying the supply of fish. Again, it was as lieutenant that he featured in a bill filed in Chancery at some stage in the same decade by Robert Walcote, a shearman from London. Walcote claimed that Richard Launde, esquire, had forcibly disseised him of the manor of ‘Neubury’ in Holland, Lincolnshire, in 1420. He also alleged that Launde had retained men to murder him because he risked forfeiting a fine of £1,000 to the Crown if the shearman won a suit he had brought against him. Walcote added that afterwards Launde and Lampet had imprisoned him in the Tower: he had managed to secure a writ for his release, but was obliged to enter a bond for £100 to Ralph, apparently to ensure that he would not sue him for his imprisonment. He added that one of Launde’s servants had tried to kill him after his release, meaning that he was now afraid to continue his legal action against Launde and that the King stood to lose a substantial fine. In conclusion, he requested that two lawyers, including the serjeant-at-law, Thomas Fulthorpe, should act on his behalf in the courts and asked for the cancellation of the obligation Lampet had taken from him. C1/11/231. The position at the Tower was not Lampet’s only link with Huntingdon, since the earl was also admiral of England and, some time after his appointment as such in October 1435, he likewise made Ralph his lieutenant in that office. Furthermore, during the same decade Lampet was an annuitant of the earl’s second wife, Beatrice. M.M.N. Stansfield, ‘Holland Fam.’ (Oxf. Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1987), 277. Holand was still admiral when he died in 1447, but a royal pardon Ralph had obtained in July the previous year shows that he had relinquished his position as lieutenant admiral by that date. C67/39, m. 21.

As far as the evidence goes, Lampet’s links with Holand predated his association with Great Yarmouth, which may have begun when the Crown appointed him a customs collector there in January 1439. In June 1441, the King granted a special reward to him and his fellow collector of customs, Edmund Clere*, in return for their diligence and for the expenses they had incurred in exercising the office: E403/701, m. 5. In the following May, the Crown commissioned him and others to impound all ships of 30 tons and above found in the port of Yarmouth, and to send to Plymouth as many vessels as were necessary to transport the expedition of the earl of Huntingdon, recently appointed lieutenant of Gascony, to that duchy. Lampet had yet to become a freeman of Great Yarmouth at that date, for he did not gain admission as one of its burgesses until the accounting year 1439-40. Norf. Official Lists, 4. The borough usually allowed new burgesses to pay the customary admission fee of two marks in instalments: it gave him until September 1440 to produce the full amount although he had yet to pay any part of the fee two years later. Ct. rolls, 1439-40, 1440-1, 1442-3, Y/C 4/148, m. 21d; 149, m. 18d; 150, m. 1. Upon becoming a burgess, he obtained a garden by Yarmouth’s market gates, for which he paid an annual rent of 6s. 8d., to the borough. H. Manship, Hist. Gt. Yarmouth ed. Palmer, 42. He may have settled in that part of the town known as the Foreland, where at Michaelmas 1441 he obtained a lease, for 20s. p.a., of a tenement the authorities had farmed out previously to a fellow burgess, John Fastolf*. Lampet made an uncertain start as a burgess. Apart from his tardiness in paying his admission fee, he quickly fell into arrears of rent for his tenement and in June 1441 a borough court heard that he had wounded another man with his dagger. Ct. rolls Y/C 4/148, m. 20; 150, m. 1. What is more, soon after he had gained the freedom the borough authorities amerced him for not repairing a quay he held at Yarmouth, as they would do on several other occasions over the next two decades. Ibid. 1440-1, 1446-7, 1447-8, 1455-6, 1457-8, 1460-1, Y/C 4/149, m. 19d; 153, m. 16; 154, m. 17; 162, m. 15; 163, m. 13d; 165, m. 8. Yet, in spite of these shortcomings, he began the first of his four terms as a bailiff of the borough as early as 1444.

Lampet was already active as a merchant before gaining the freedom of Yarmouth, since he and others, including Thomas Beklyswode of London, had petitioned the King in 1438, to protest that a riotous mob had stolen wheat worth 104 marks from them at Ipswich, prompting the Crown to appoint a powerful special commission of oyer and terminer, headed by the earl of Suffolk, to investigate. In the following year he stood surety for a couple of fellow traders in grain from Acle, Norfolk, whom the Crown licensed to buy wheat and barley in that county and to ship it to London. CPR, 1436-41, pp. 199, 236. Given that he possessed a quay, Lampet may have been a shipowner, although a customs account for 1447-8 shows that he paid customs and subsidy charges for goods carried on ships belonging to others, including foreign vessels, in that period. E122/194/9, mm. 3, 3d, 5d. These goods included cloth and Lampet appears to have had a long-term interest in the cloth trade, including dealings with London clothiers. CP40/788, rot. 60d; 838, rot. 135d. As for other commodities, Lampet joined John Pynne* in exporting a cargo of fish, wood and other merchandise on a vessel from Kampen in Germany in August 1448. He also dealt in grain, shipping 50 quarters of barley out of Yarmouth in June 1450. E122/151/69, m. 1; 194/9, m. 5d. He must have traded with the Low Countries, since some of the vessels carrying his cargoes came from the Netherlands, and during the 1440s he brought a number of suits for debt in the borough court against various Dutch merchants. Later, in 1461, he was among those whom the borough court amerced for permitting grain and other merchandise to pass ‘illicitly’ through the port of Yarmouth. The following year saw Lampet sue Robert Pynne*, son of his business associate, for trespass in the same court, which ordered the seizure of Pynne’s ship and its cargo of coal as a result. Ct. rolls Y/C 4/150, m. 8d; 153, mm. 9d, 11d; 165, m. 8; 166, m. 7.

Besides pursuing his own mercantile interests, Lampet was an agent or factor for others in East Anglia and elsewhere. The most important of these clients was Alice de la Pole, marchioness (afterwards duchess) of Suffolk, for whom he shipped wool from Yarmouth during the second half of the 1440s. E122/194/9, mm. 2, 3, 6. In 1453-4 Alice’s receiver-general paid £8 to Alice Lampet, prioress of Redlingfield since 1427 (Egerton Roll, 8779; VCH Suff. ii. 85), but it is not known if the latter Alice was related to the MP. Lampet also served as a receiver for the canon lawyer and pluralist, William Hoper, whose many livings included the rectory of Rollesby near Great Yarmouth. In June 1455 the recently deceased Hoper’s executors sued one of his trustees for wrongfully making a release to Lampet of part of a sum of £20 in which the latter had bound himself to the testator. The executors also sued Lampet himself in the court of common pleas. In pleadings of Easter term 1456, they alleged that Ralph had failed properly to account with Hoper for 6s. 8d. in ‘merchandise and profits’ during his receivership, which had run from Michaelmas 1453 until the following 1 May. Lampet responded by obtaining permission to treat with his opponents out of court. This was the first of a series of such licences that he acquired over the next few years and the plea rolls do not record a conclusion to the dispute. C1/25/27; Biog. Reg. Univ. Oxf. ed. Emden, ii. 958-9; CP40/782, rot. 410.

The brief spell that Lampet spent as Hoper’s receiver coincided with his only known Parliament. Presumably he and his fellow MP, John Lowys II*, were involved in securing the total exemption of Great Yarmouth from the subsidies that the Commons granted to the King. Just before the Parliament dissolved, however, their borough and the city of Norwich were called upon to contribute a joint loan of £100 to the Crown. PROME, xii. 231, 248, 267. During the elections to that assembly, Lampet had attested the return of Norfolk’s knights of the shire, as he had done when that county’s MPs were elected to the first Parliament of 1449. The only parliamentary election for the borough in which he is known to have taken part was that of 1455, which occurred during this third term as bailiff.

Just over half a year after the expiry of that term, Lampet joined John Heydon, Reynold Rous and other members of the de la Pole affinity in conveying lands near Bishop’s Lynn to Thomas, Lord Scales. Harvard Univ. Law School Lib., English deeds, 453. Scales had provided support and protection to the affinity following the downfall and death of William de la Pole, in 1449-50. Notwithstanding this apparent connexion with the de la Pole interest, Lampet was also an agent for Sir John Fastolf, one of its leading East Anglian opponents by the mid fifteenth century and a substantial shipowner as well as a landowner. Lampet’s association with him probably stretched back a number of years, since he was one of the executors of the knight’s cousin and councillor, John Fastolf of Yarmouth (d.1445), the previous lessee of the MP’s tenement in the Foreland. Reg. Wylbey, f. 64. In March 1450 Sir John wrote to three of his servants, seeking information about what ‘Lampet has done in my matter, and if you find him friendly’. He added that two of his ships had arrived safely (presumably at Great Yarmouth), but whether this news had any connexion with the ‘matter’ referred to is unclear. In another letter written two months later, Sir John referred to Ralph as one of his ‘frendz’, although he would sue Lampet in the borough court for a debt of £40 soon afterwards. In February 1456, Lampet acted as a messenger for Fastolf, taking charge of many letters and papers that the knight’s servant, John Bocking, entrusted to him to deliver to his master. These included documents relating to the goods and jewels of the late John, duke of Bedford, of whom Fastolf was an executor. Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 136; ibid. ed. Davis, Beadle and Richmond, iii. 81, 84, 161; ct. roll, 1449-50, Y/C 4/156, m. 21d.

Later, Lampet was involved in the disputes over Sir John Fastolf’s will. Following the knight’s death on 5 Nov. 1459, John Paston* produced a document, dated the previous 3 Nov. and purportedly Fastolf’s nuncupative will. It recorded that at about harvest time 1457 Sir John had declared Paston (his ‘best frende and helper’) the heir to his Norfolk estate, and had ordered Lampet and the prior of Yarmouth, among those present at Caister when this declaration was made, to record it. One of the jurors when the inquisition post mortem into Fastolf’s Norfolk lands was held at Acle in October 1460, Ralph upheld Paston’s cause over the next few years, and in March 1463 he testified formally that Fastolf had indeed made such a declaration. It is not known whether he sincerely believed that Paston had a just claim to the Fastolf lands; Paston’s opponents claimed that he had bought Lampet’s support with bribes. Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, iii. 162; iv. 102, 237; Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 220, 542-3.

At this date Lampet was possibly still engaged with (or had recently concluded) his duties as an executor of Sir John’s cousin and namesake, not an entirely smooth task. In his will John of Yarmouth had left directions for the sale of his manor of Oulton and other estates in Lothingland, Suffolk, after the death of his widow, Katherine, should that prove necessary to settle his debts and provide for his two daughters and heirs. It appears that Lampet and a fellow executor, Alexander Kyngestone of Yarmouth, had ended up trying but failing to sell the reversion of Oulton (to vest after Katherine’s death) to the lawyer William Jenney* in 1459. In the end, the attempted sale, which may have involved some sharp practice on Jenney’s part, did not occur since afterwards Katherine would sell the reversion to another lawyer, James Hobart†. Reg. Wylbey, f. 64; CCR, 1454-61, pp. 432-3 Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 268; C.F. Richmond, Paston Fam.: First Phase, 222n.

Lampet was involved in another controversy in the wake of his final term as a bailiff of Great Yarmouth. Following the expiry of that term in the autumn of 1462, a fellow burgess, John Bonde, sued him and Thomas Iryng, his co-bailiff of 1461-2, in the Chancery. Bonde said that he had entered into a security with them as bailiffs, to guarantee that Batholomew Garon would account to them for the amercements and rents within the borough that they had assigned him to collect. He added that Garon had subsequently proffered a true account to Iryng before joining the King’s forces in the north, where he died at the ‘field of York’ (presumably one of the skirmishes between recalcitrant Lancastrians and government forces which took place in the northern England in the early 1460s). The bailiffs had nevertheless claimed that the plaintiff had been Garon’s associate as collector and that he still owed £20 for his time as such. The purpose of Bonde’s bill was to have an action that Lampet and Iryng had brought against him in the borough court for the alleged debt removed to Chancery, where their actions could be scrutinized. C1/27/357; ct. roll Y/C 4/166, m. 7d.

Having relinquished the office of bailiff for the last time, Lampet devoted his energies to his own affairs. At the beginning of 1464 he brought a series of suits in the borough court against Edmund Stokeman, vicar of Upton, a parish situated a few miles north-west of Yarmouth. The court found for Lampet in one of these suits, a plea of trespass and rescue, awarding him very substantial damages of £60 and costs of 100s., but it is not known what Stokeman, by then a prisoner in the town’s jail, had done. Ct. roll, 1463-4, Y/C 4/168, mm. 3, 4. Lampet was embroiled in further litigation two years later, this time with John Ayleward, a grocer from Bury St. Edmunds, who sued him in the common pleas. In pleadings of Trinity and Michaelmas terms that year, Ayleward sought the sum of £32 from Lampet, citing a bond for that amount that the latter had entered into with him at London in 1450. Lampet responded by stating that he had given the security for safekeeping to another burgess, Thomas Hyllys, upon condition that Hyllys would deliver it to Ayleward only after the plaintiff had settled lands in Bury St. Edmunds and ‘Stotefeld’ worth 20 marks p.a. on Katherine, the daughter of Lampet’s wife, for life. Presumably Katherine was Lampet’s stepdaughter, the offspring of his second wife, Anne, by a previous marriage, and the intended settlement related to a match between her and Ayleward, or between her and a son of the plaintiff. Lampet asserted that Hyllys had delivered the bond to Ayleward even though the latter had failed to make such a settlement. CP40/820, rots. 369d, 528d. Hyllys was probably not the MP of that name, who appears to have died in 1449.

In June the following year Lampet was the defendant in another lawsuit, this time in the borough court at Yarmouth. The plaintiffs, Hamon Pulham* and John Alman, the bailiffs of Yarmouth in 1465-6, alleged that he owed them £20. Three years later, he himself sued two Dutchmen (probably merchants) in the same court, claiming they owed him £26. Ct. rolls, 1466-7, 1469-71, Y/C 4/171, m. 5d; 174, m. 4d; 175, m. 6. Lampet was embroiled in yet more litigation at the beginning of 1471, this time at Westminster. In pleadings of Hilary term that year, a London clothier, Robert Thorndon, alleged that he owed him £17 10s., a debt arising from a bond made between the parties in the City as far back as 1439. Lampet responded by seeking and obtaining licence to negotiate with his opponent out of court until the following Easter term. CP40/838, rot. 135d. Possibly the matter was not resolved in his lifetime: it would appear he died shortly afterwards, given that Robert Braunche was in possession of Stody before the end of the same year. The Yarmouth court roll for 1474-5 records that ‘the heirs of Ralph Lampet’ owed rent for the properties the MP had leased from the borough, suggesting that he was certainly dead by that accounting year. Ct. roll 1474-5, Y/C 4/179, m. 19d. A namesake, perhaps his son, was active at Yarmouth during the later 1470s and 1480s. Ct. rolls, 1476-7, 1478-9, 1481-4, 1485-6, Y/C 4/181, m. 2; 183, m. 3d; 186, m. 14d; 187, mm. 6, 11d; 188 m. 14d; 190, m. 11.