PITLESDEN, Vincent, of Bishop’s Tawton and Plymouth, Devon and Southampton, Hants.

Pitlesden’s origins are obscure, but it is likely that he was descended from a Kentish family resident at Pettesden (or Pitlesden) in Tenterden. There was evidently some connexion, for in 1456 Pitlesden was a feoffee of lands in Tenterden: CP40/782, rot. 506. If so, he may have been a son of John Pitlesden, who in 1434 was required to take the general oath against maintenance, and a younger brother of the Lincoln’s Inn lawyer Thomas Pitlesden (d.1463), who attested the Kentish elections of 1447 and served as bailiff of Tenterden in 1448, 1449 and 1457. CPR, 1429-36, p. 389; L. Inn Adm. i. 8; CP40/743, rot. 124; Archaeologia Cantiana, xi. 376-8; xxxii. 295. It is uncertain whether it was this Vincent who in his youth had been destined for an ecclesiastical career and who received his first tonsure in Apr. 1424, but later opted for a secular life: Reg. Chichele, iv. 359. Certainly, Vincent’s sister married a Surrey gentleman, John Crowcher of Croydon, and he himself assumed custody of Crowcher’s nephew, another John, after the death of his father. C1/25/20. If Vincent did indeed originate from Kent, it may have been his marriage to Isabel, widow of the landowner John Chichester, which first brought him to the south-west. Among the dower lands which she brought him was the manor of South Tawton, and it was here that the couple initially settled. Before long, however, Vincent’s trading interests saw him move to the Channel port of Plymouth. C67/39, m. 46; E403/844, m. 2. Although sometimes described as a vintner, Pitlesden’s business interests were not restricted to the wine trade, but also encompassed other commodities, such as cloth, cotton and lead. Although at various times he procured special licences to trade with Brittany, Normandy, France, Spain and the Low Countries, E122/114/1, m. 2; DKR, xlviii. 396, 410, 441; C76/154, m. 8; C1/45/259; Port Bks. 1469-71 (Soton Rec. Soc. xxxvii), 14, 67, 74. the evidence of his litigation against commercial debtors suggests that much of his trade was concentrated on the English south coast, in the ports of Plymouth and Southampton where he would establish himself in the early 1460s. CPR, 1467-77, p. 94; CP40/780, rot. 155; 835, rot. 54; 836, rot. 95; 839, rot. 15d; 840, rot. 15d.

An important part of Vincent’s commercial interests was the shipping business itself. He owned a number of vessels, including Le Marie Fleur, Le George and the Mary Vincent which he occasionally hired out for a variety of purposes. Thus, in 1451 he provided ships for the transport of troops to France, and in December 1456 he was licensed to carry 30 pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela. CPR, 1446-52, p. 448; C81/781/11142; DKR, xlviii. 441; Foedera, ed. Rymer (Hague edn.), v (2), 65. Like other contemporary shipowners, he also occasionally engaged in acts of privateering. Thus, in 1456 royal safe conducts were granted to several prisoners he had taken who sought to raise their ransom by trade, DKR, xlviii. 408. and at Easter 1462 Pitlesden accused two Plymouth mariners and a gentleman from Plympton Erle of breaking into his house and abducting a Breton man, whom he was holding pending payment of a ransom of 125 marks. CP40/805, rot. 293d. Piratical activity was, however, a double-edged sword, and in early 1455 Le Marie Fleur, one of Pitlesden’s own carvels, was taken by French or Breton vessels, forcing him in his turn to raise a substantial ransom for the release of the 112 captured merchants and mariners. DKR, xlviii. 407, 408, 412; C81/781/11142.

The exact date of Pitlesden’s move to Plymouth is uncertain, but it had probably taken place by 1444, when he was first appointed one of the customers in that port. In subsequent years he acquired a range of properties in the borough and its hinterland, including the manor of West Stonehouse, which he leased in 1449 from the exchequer official Robert Burton for a term of 20 years at an annual rent of as much as £17 8s. 8d., and a house and garden in Plymouth itself, rented from the local esquire James Durneford. Both of these properties would later become the subject of litigation. In 1461 Burton claimed that Pitlesden had made use of the political turmoil of the preceding two years to avoid paying the rent for West Stonehouse, while in the autumn of 1471 Durneford’s son and heir complained before the justices of common pleas that Pitlesden had failed to repair the buildings of his tenement properly, causing them to fall into partial decay. At the root of the Durnefords’ quarrel with Pitlesden, however, lay more than some rotten timbers, for in July 1454 Pitlesden and a band of armed mariners had smashed their way into the Durneford manor-house at East Stonehouse, broken the valuable glass windows and damaged the stone window frames, and had despoiled the house of cloth, money and jewelry, even taking a gold ‘Bee’ from the neck of Margaret Durneford, the mistress of the house. E13/147, rot. 11d; CP40/810, rot. 40d; 845, rot. 99; KB9/277/72-73.

There is no suggestion that either the government or the merchants of Plymouth took a particularly serious view of such activity, for throughout the 1450s Pitlesden received a string of appointments as a customs official and royal commissioner, while his neighbours chose him as their mayor on three separate occasions during the same decade. Nevertheless, it seems that the affairs of the realm concerned him only in so far as they had an impact on his own commercial activities. Thus, the loss of Normandy, with which he had been wont to trade, galvanized him into action. In 1451 he not only made his ship Le George available for the transport of Lord Rivers’ expedition to France, but together with his fellow customer John Salter II* he also provided a loan of £30 to the government, and in 1452 he served on a royal commission to gather ships and mariners for an expedition in defence of Aquitaine. It was, however, only after Gascony in turn was lost, and while Pitlesden was serving in his second mayoralty, that he was decisively drawn from merely local concerns into national affairs. Four days after the brief, if bloody, engagement in the streets of St. Albans on 22 May 1455 writs for a Parliament were issued, and the sheriff’s precept ordering the election of burgesses to represent Plymouth cannot have arrived long after the news of the battle. Moreover, the men of the south-west had concerns of their own, for the preceding months had seen the enduring quarrel between Thomas Courtenay, earl of Devon, and his rival William, Lord Bonville*, fought out in a series of raids on the property of their supporters. In this volatile atmosphere, many of the region’s boroughs found difficulty in finding men prepared to undertake the dangerous journey to Westminster, and Plymouth was evidently no exception, for Pitlesden had to take recourse to returning himself alongside the Kentish lawyer Richard Page*.

During Parliament’s summer prorogation, Pitlesden’s mayoralty came to an end, but he had only little respite, for a week before the Commons reassembled he was appointed escheator of Devon and Cornwall, an important office which he may have owed as much to a connexion with the newly appointed treasurer, Henry, Viscount Bourgchier, as to his loyal service as a customer. CP40/782, rot. 506. Bourgchier’s dismissal at the end of the duke of York’s protectorate the following year had no immediate implications for Pitlesden, who continued in his customer’s post, even when three years later the Yorkists were routed at Ludford Bridge and the duke and his allies were forced to flee the realm. In the summer of 1460 they returned, defeated the royal forces at Northampton, and assumed power. Bourgchier’s reappointment to the treasurership opened a new phase in Pitlesden’s career. As a trusted ally, he was too valuable to the new administration to remain in the provincial backwater of Plymouth, however important the customs district might be in terms of the Cornish tin trade through its ports. Thus, on 1 Aug. 1460 he was moved to the more central port of Southampton, where in turn he became a customer, and he repaid the trust placed in him by providing the new administration with two substantial loans of 100 marks each in September and October respectively. E401/872, m. 21; 873, m. 5; E403/820, mm. 2, 4.

After Edward IV’s accession in the spring of 1461 further appointments followed. In July Pitlesden was made controller of customs at Southampton, and simultaneously appointed deputy butler in that port. More important was his nomination two weeks earlier as receiver of the revenues of the forfeited estates of the earl of Wiltshire, to which were added in December those of the earl of Devon. E403/823, m. 6; CPR, 1461-7, p. 12, 94, 129. Pitlesden’s service to Edward IV’s government continued throughout the 1460s. Having been pardoned for any outstanding revenues of his two receiverships in the spring of 1463, he once more assumed control of the collection of customs at Southampton that July, and in the autumn of 1466 he was pricked sheriff of the town. CPR, 1461-7, p. 263; PSO1/23/1223. As the chief butler, John, Lord Wenlock*, came out in support of the restored Henry VI in 1470, Pitlesden remained in office as his deputy throughout the Lancastrian Readeption, but he appears not to have reached any more than a formal accommodation with the regime, for although his appointment as deputy butler was terminated after King Edward’s return in June 1471, he was around the same time supplying wine to the royal household and in August was appointed approver of the subsidy and alnage of cloth throughout Hampshire. E405/53, rot. 1; E403/844, m. 2; CFR, xxi. nos. 33, 461. Pitlesden’s commercial dealings were becoming increasingly focused in that county, and on one occasion he petitioned the chancellor, Bishop Stillington of Bath and Wells, to complain that a merchant named William Westover, who had taken unkindly to being forced by legal processes to pay the debts of his wife’s first husband for the purchase of wine and cotton, had brought a vexatious action against him in the mayor’s court at Winchester, where Westover was ‘dwellyng and gretly alied having also great favour among thofficers of þe court’. C1/45/259.

The final years of Pitlesden’s life were partly overshadowed by an acrimonious quarrel with a Genoese merchant, Giovanni Andrea de’ Vivaldi. Vivaldi had brought a cargo of woollen cloth to Bristol, where it had been seized and declared forfeit. The Italian had pleaded his safe conduct, but in spite of his protests had been placed in the town gaol. To further trouble him, so Vivaldi claimed, the mayor of Bristol had then induced Pitlesden to begin an action of trespass in the mayor’s court. When the Genoese had petitioned the chancellor for redress, Vincent had dropped this suit and begun a fresh one in the courts at Southampton. Pitlesden, for his part, claimed that on Whitsunday 1474 Vivaldi had broken into his house at Southampton and assaulted and raped his servant Rose Founten. Unfortunately, the outcome of the dispute is not known. C1/47/72, 79; KB9/341/51. The following year Pitlesden embarked on a new and lucrative venture, when he leased the weigh-house of Southampton from Richard Pole† for a term of five years. The princely rent of £58 p.a. due to Pole may be taken as an indication of the return he could expect on his investment. Yet, he was not to enjoy the fruits of his venture for long. He probably died at some point prior to June 1478, when his office of approver of the alnage was granted elsewhere. Pitlesden was survived by his second wife, Agnes, whom he appointed his executrix. Borrowing money from friends, she buried her husband and arranged for his month’s mind, but before she could otherwise set about proving or fulfilling his will, she had to face a challenge from the wealthy Thomas Gale*, who had stood surety for Pitlesden over the lease of the weigh-house. Gale claimed that the rent to Richard Pole was in arrears, occupied the building and began litigation for the outstanding payments. C1/55/208-9. The settlement of Pitlesden’s affairs continued to occupy Agnes until her own death, which occurred before 1515. C1/349/60.