MATE, Simon

More may be added to the earlier biography. The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 701.

Mate was a feoffee for Ellen Brokholes, the mother-in-law of John Sumpter*, his fellow burgess in the Parliament of 1423. As such, he became involved in the long and bitter property dispute between Sumpter and Robert Arneburgh, who had married Sumpter’s sister-in-law, the other of Ellen’s two daughters by the Essex knight Sir Geoffrey Brokholes. It was a keenly contested quarrel because Ellen’s offspring and their issue were the heirs to the estates that she and Sir Geoffrey had held in Essex, Hertfordshire and Warwickshire. In the late 1420s, probably while bailiff, Mate received a letter from Arneburgh, who complained about the arrest at Colchester of his relative, the priest Ralph Beauchamp. The ‘burning of houses’ was the stated cause of the arrest, but it is likely to have been connected with the dispute. In a partisan account of the quarrel drawn up after Mate’s death it was asserted that he and two fellow burgesses, William Nottingham I* and Thomas Godstone*, had used the borough’s seal to authenticate a document supporting Sumpter. The account adds that God had shortened their lives to punish them for ‘theyre vntrue labour’ on Sumpter’s behalf. C. Carpenter, Armburgh Pprs. 9, 42, 62-63, 93-94, 194.

The previous biography wrongly states that Mate died in 1449, for he was already dead when his widow Eleanor brought a deed into the borough court for enrolment on 1 July 1445. D/B 5 Cr60, m. 28d. This shows that she and John Beche (the MP of that name or a namesake) had conveyed a ‘capital tenement’ at St. John’s Green in Colchester to William Smyth (one of her late husband’s executors) and John Horndon. It also records that at least five years earlier Mate had conveyed all his lands in the town – along with the reversion of the tenement at St. John’s Green after the death of Alice, widow of William Mate – to the lawyer Thomas Rolf and other feoffees. Ibid. Mate’s conveyance must have occurred before Rolf’s death on 31 July 1440: CIPM, xxv. 383. At the time of his death, Mate had a daughter and heir, Joan, who had married John Bateman of Colchester, but Eleanor (probably considerably younger than he) would bear him another, posthumous and short-lived daughter. Colchester Oath Bk. 116; C1/17/89. Formerly preserved in the (now missing) borough court roll of 1449-50, Mate’s will is now lost, Colchester Oath Bk, 118. although a Chancery bill of no later than 1456 reveals that his other executors were his widow, Eleanor, and John Aleyn. The plaintiff was Aleyn, who stated that Mate had devised various lands and tenements (of unspecified location) to his widow to hold for life, with remainder to his issue by her. After his death, however, she had mortgaged them to one William Barker for £29, even though they were worth no less than £200. According to Aleyn, she had entered into the mortgage to raise money for her expenses as executor, but his bill does not indicate if he had tried to stop such an ill-advised arrangement. Whether or not he had fallen out with his co-executor, Aleyn directed the bill against Barker rather than Eleanor. He claimed that Barker had forged deeds showing that the mortgaged properties were his, and that afterwards he had sold them for £100, so disinheriting the MP’s posthumous daughter, now also dead, and preventing the performance of his will. C1/17/89. The bill presents just one side of the dispute, for there is no answer from Barker extant. He might well have countered that Eleanor had failed to redeem the mortgage, so allowing him to take outright possession of the properties and then to sell them. Whatever the true value of these holdings and the validity of Aleyn’s other claims, the bill at least indicates that the MP had died as a real property owner of some substance.