MAFFEY, Andrew, of Lewes, Suss.

There is a possibility that Andrew was related to John Maffey†, employed as common clerk by the Cinque Ports of Rye and New Romney in succession, who had represented the latter Port in the Parliament of November 1414. The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 666. His immediate family, known interchangeably as Maffey or Peek, came from east Sussex, and it was there, in the parish of Chiddingly, that he appears to have grown up. In a transaction of 1409 relating to land in East Grinstead he was described as ‘of Chiddingly’. KB27/672, rot. 64; CP25(1)/240/82/7. It looks as if he only moved to Lewes at about the time of his first marriage, to the widow of a spicer named John Hert. Together with his wife and Hert’s kinsman, another John†, acting as the spicer’s executors, he brought an action for debt in the common pleas in 1419 against a local chandler. CP40/635, rot. 48d. A similar action, brought by Hert and Maffey, resulted in the outlawry of a carpenter from Barcombe: CPR, 1441-6, p. 302. In December 1421 Maffey was appointed a collector of the tenth and fifteenth payable half at Candlemas and half at Martinmas in the following year. The writs for the collection of the second moiety were issued on 1 Oct. 1422, and Maffey would therefore have been expected to account at the Exchequer while the Parliament summoned to assemble on 9 Nov. was in progress. Perhaps the burgesses of Lewes elected him to the Parliament for that reason, although he clearly acquitted himself satisfactorily for he was re-elected a year later.

Maffey’s precise occupation is not recorded, but he made a living from trade, and appeared in person in the common pleas in Easter term 1425 and again a year later to sue his debtors, a butcher of Southover and a smith from Eastbourne. CP40/657, rot. 147; 661, rot. 354. A measure of his standing in the county is suggested by his presence at the shire court in Chichester for the Sussex elections held on 28 Dec. 1430, and his service on a jury at Lewes a month later giving evidence about the forfeited goods of a felon. C219/14/2; E368/203, recorda Hil. rot. 10. It is uncertain what property Maffey held at this stage of his career, although he and his wife Alice made a conveyance of a messuage and a third of an acre of land in Lindfield in the spring of 1431, CP25(1)/241/86/22. and after Alice’s death he acquired interests in Chichester. By the autumn of 1432 he had married another widow, Isabel Baron, whose former husband had been mayor of the staple and an MP for the city. Maffey assisted Isabel to pursue her late husband’s debtors in the central law courts. CP40/687, rot. 594. Isabel’s dower included property in Chichester, and in April 1440 she and Maffey received seisin from feoffees of a tenement and croft in West Street to which they had laid claim. CCR, 1435-41, pp. 378-9.

This second marriage prompted Maffey to use Chichester as a base for his trading ventures. A royal licence granted in December 1432, permitted him to ship 200 quarters of wheat from the port over to Arques for the relief of the King’s subjects in the duchy of Normandy. CCR, 1429-35, p. 202. Nevertheless, he retained his links with Lewes, and not only acted as a feoffee of property near the town on behalf of the merchant John Wryther*, but also did further service as a juror there in 1441 at the inquisition post mortem for Sir William Phelip†, Lord Bardolf. CP25(1)/241/88/23; C139/103/30. For the previous 32 years he had been a feoffee of land in West Firle. This he finally relinquished in 1448 to the lawyer Bartholomew Bolney*. Bolney Bk. (Suss. Rec. Soc. lxiii), 36-37, 74; E. Suss. RO, Firle Place mss, 269. Throughout the decade Maffey had continued to take legal action to recover sums of money owed to him, and is last recorded doing so in the autumn of 1450. CP40/738, rot. 37; 756, rots. 223, 350d; 757, rots. 24d, 85; 759, rot. 14. He died before the end of 1465. Bolney Bk. 43.