MASCALL, John

In February 1415, during his first term as mayor of Southampton, Mascall sued out a pardon for himself and the commonalty from Henry V, but for what purpose is not revealed. C67/37, m. 55. Preparations were already underway for the King’s great expedition to Normandy, with ships being built at Bursledon and elsewhere on Southampton Water, and Mascall was still mayor when the royal army massed to embark from Southampton and Portsmouth in late July. It was then that the ‘Southampton Plot’ to depose the King was discovered, and the conspirators tied and executed, although the role of the mayor can only have been that of a witness to momentous events.

Something of the scale of Mascall’s trading activities is revealed by a petition sent to the chancellor, Bishop Beaufort, shortly after the MP’s death. According to William Overey* and his wife, Agnes, on 13 Apr. 1418 Mascall had purchased from Agnes’s former husband, the Florentine Bartolomeo Marmora, 41 bales of woad for the substantial sum of £94 0s. 10d. When Marmora died £28 was still outstanding, and Mascall failed both to honour the debt and to instruct his executors to do so before he himself died in 1423. C1/6/19-20.