MILLE, Edward, of Lenham, Kent.

Some difficulties arise in separating the details of the lives of the brothers Edmund and Edward Mille owing to the similarity of their first names, which on occasion have been wrongly transcribed or else abbreviated in such a way as to obscure which of the two was meant. For instance, in 1436 ‘Edward’ was recorded as a co-feoffee with John Uvedale* and Thomas Haydock* of various properties in Surrey and Hampshire, including a moiety of the manor of Eastleigh, by grant of Agnes Basset, but it was Richard, the son and heir of Edmund Mille, who was to make a quitclaim of his late father’s fiduciary interest in the Eastleigh moiety to Thomas Welles* in 1469. CCR, 1435-41, pp. 62-63; 1468-76, no. 192. Of course, confusion is avoided where the two brothers acted together. Both were enfeoffed of the manor of Shelve in Kent by William St. John*, after whose death in 1439 they took responsibility for collecting the revenues of the manor, probably keeping them for the benefit of St. John’s young daughter and heir (and evading feudal obligations to the earl of Northumberland). When this was recalled many years later, at the beginning of the next century, Edward was described as resident at Lenham in Kent. CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 959.

Yet this may not have been his usual place of residence in the early stages of his career, when most of his activities associated him with Sussex, where his father and brother lived (in the west of the county, at Petworth and Pulborough respectively). Early in 1441 both he and Edmund were enfeoffed of land in Middlesex by Agnes Basset’s nephew John Weston II*, who came from the same locality, CCR, 1435-41, p. 451. and in the following year they both secured seats in the Commons, Edmund as a knight of the shire for Sussex (for the second time) and his brother as burgess for Lewes. No record has been found of a connexion between Edward and the borough he represented, and it must be presumed that it was his brother’s standing in the locality and links with the lord of Lewes – John Mowbray, duke of Norfolk – that led to his election. However, he may himself have been in the duke’s service, for he received fees or an annuity from Sele priory, of which the duke was the patron. The duke’s successor sent him and other annuitants an injunction in 1462 ordering them not to ask for their fees again until the priory’s parlous financial circumstances had improved: Cat. Suss. Deeds, Magdalen Coll. ed. Macray, i. no. 147.

Edward, named as an executor of his brother’s will in February 1450, received from him a bequest of £10 together with all the moveable possessions Edmund had left in his chamber at Gray’s Inn. It seems likely that he too had received a training in the law, although he failed to attract such distinguished clients as employed his brother. Lambeth Palace Lib., Reg. Kempe, ff. 306v-7. Even so, his involvement in the affairs of Sele priory echoed Edmund’s, and by June 1453 he was farmer of the priory’s portion of tithes levied in Findon. Magdalen Coll. Oxf., Findon deeds, 28. Edward brought suits in the court of common pleas in the Hilary term of 1456 to recover debts amounting to £30 owed him by men of Sussex, CP40/780, rot. 430. although by this date he had moved more permanently to Kent. His interest in land at Lenham dated back to the early 1440s, for as ‘of Lenham, gentleman’, he was indicted in October 1450 for having broken into a close there seven years earlier, and depastured the grass with his animals. R. Virgoe, ‘Ancient Indictments in K.B.’, in Med. Kentish Soc. (Kent Rec. Ser. xviii), 242. Such alleged misdemeanors, brought into the open in the aftermath of Cade’s rebellion, had been forgotten by June 1456, when he was one of those ordered by the King’s Council to assist the royal commissioners of oyer and terminer when they arrived at Maidstone. PPC, vi. 289. In contrast to his brother’s service on the Sussex bench and on numerous ad hoc commissions in Henry VI’s reign, Edward was not singled out for such administrative duties under the Lancastrians, and what he did to earn a substantial reward from Edward IV remains a mystery. On 30 Sept. 1462 he was given a life-annuity of £10 charged on the lordships of Milton and Marden in Kent, and the King permitted this annuity to be exempted from the Acts of Resumption of 1464 and 1468. CPR, 1461-7, p. 217; PROME, xiii. 165-6, 280. Besides his annuity, other records associate him with Kent in this period, and he was party to a suit brought by the prior of Christchurch, Canterbury. C1/31/300. His sole appointment to a royal commission saw him delivering the gaol in the same city. Mille was not listed among those exempted from the working of the Act of Resumption of 1473, nor mentioned thereafter.