PLUMPTRE, John (d.1471), of Nottingham.

John Plumptre’s uncle and namesake was a wealthy merchant. On his childless death in 1416 the main beneficiary of this wealth was his long-lived hospital foundation. John died between 15 Jan., when he sued out a pardon, and 5 Feb. 1416, when his will was proved: C67/37, m. 20. Nonetheless, as heir of his namesake’s elder brother, our MP had already inherited important property in the town, including (subject to the life interest of his mother) the family residence called ‘the Vouthall’ on the west side of Bridlesmith Gate, held of the mayor and community at a rent of as much as 12s. p.a. He also seems to have inherited from his father tenements in Hounds Gate, Lister Gate, Castle Gate and Wheelwright Gate (now Wheeler Gate) together with land in the meadows of the town at East Ryehill. Thoroton, ii. 81; Nottingham Recs. ed. Stevenson, i. 312; ii. 16, 116, 358-9; Nottingham ct. roll CA 1315, rot. 4d. It is impossible to say how valuable this inheritance was, only that Plumptre was among the wealthiest of the townsmen. In the tax returns of 1435-6 his annual landed income was put at as much as £15, only a small part of which can have derived from purchases of his own, for none such are recorded in the surviving records. E179/240/266. If Plumptre did add to the family’s landed resources in the town it was probably through lease. In 1451 he was sued by the prior of Newstead for making waste in the priory’s houses in Nottingham demised to him for a term of years: CP40/762, rot. 233. Although his assessment was reduced to £10 p.a. in the subsidy returns of 1450-1, this reflected a general underassessment rather than a decline in his landed income: E179/238/78/6.

The date of the death of Plumptre’s father is uncertain. His will, which no longer survives, was made in 1408 but it was claimed ex parte in a plea pending in the borough court that he was still alive in October 1410. Nottingham ct. roll CA1308, rot. 25. He had a curious plea concerning a bar of iron pending in the borough court in Aug. 1408, but is not certainly recorded as living thereafter: Nottingham Recs. ii. 46. Thoroton, who notes some of the will’s terms, states that he died in that year: Thoroton, ii. 79, 81. However this may be, he was certainly dead by 1414 when John first appears in an active role in the records. He had been named, along with his mother Margaret, as one of the executors of his father’s will, but was not definitely of age until May 1414 when he had a plea of debt pending in the borough court. More interesting is the evidence of an early misadventure. When royal commissioners of inquiry came to Nottingham on the following 1 June, a jury of the borough indicted Robert, son of Sir Edmund Pierrepont, for a number of offences against the townsmen, including an assault on our MP. The jurors claimed that, on the previous 9 Jan., Robert had lain in ambush at Bestwood Paleys, a few miles to the north of the town, to kill Plumptre, and after attacking him had pursued him to Nottingham. Unfortunately, there is nothing to show what lay behind this alleged incident. CPR, 1422-9, p. 438; Nottingham ct. roll CA 1308, rot. 17; KB9/204/2/20.

In September 1415, when still a young man and while his wealthy uncle was still alive, Plumptre was elected as one of the town bailiffs, an office his father had held in the 1380s; and on the following 4 Dec. he witnessed his uncle’s will (in which he was bequeathed the sum of £20). It is not known when his trading interests became substantial enough to justify him taking his uncle’s place among the merchants of the Calais staple, but he was already trading in wool by 1417. In May 1420 he was sued in the borough court for the fraudulent sale of 15 sacks and 11 stones: the plaintiffs claimed damages of 40 marks on the grounds that he had deceived them by mixing inferior ‘Northeren woll’ with ‘gode Notyngham shire woll’. Borthwick Inst., Univ. of York, Abps. Reg. 18 (Bowet), f. 161d; Nottingham Recs. ii. 118-20.

From the late 1420s to the mid 1450s Plumptre, as befitting the head of one of the town’s leading families, undertook a significant administrative burden. Twice elected to Parliament in the 1430s, he served four terms as mayor between 1427 and 1455, acted as one of the town’s j.p.s. from the early 1440s, and was named to the body of seven aldermen established by the royal charter of June 1449. C219/14/2; 15/1; Nottingham Recs. ii. 222, 408, 428-9; iii. 408; KB27/254/44. Alongside these administrative activities, he maintained extensive commercial interests. As a Calais stapler from the mid 1440s if not before, he contributed to the loans made to the Crown by the staplers. On 20 Oct. 1449, together with another Nottingham merchant, Thomas Alestre*, and Stephen Marshall, he had licence to export wool from Kingston-upon-Hull free of customs for four years in repayment of a contribution of £266 8d. to the sum of £10,700 loaned by the staplers; and in 1451 he joined Alestre and Thomas Isham in paying a more modest £45 towards a further stapler loan of 3,000 marks. CPR, 1446-52, p. 315; 1452-61, pp. 209, 211-12.

These dry details of Plumptre’s career are supplemented by the story of the difficulties he encountered when he came to the financial assistance of Sir Henry Pierrepont*. Pierrepont, the elder brother of his assailant in 1414 and one of the several knights who lived in the immediate environs of Nottingham, was heavily in debt, and among his creditors was the wealthy London merchant, John Mitchell I*. On 28 Mar. 1437 Plumptre and William Halifax*, the Nottingham MPs in the Parliament that had ended the day before, entered into a bond in the London parish of St. Magnus the Martyr guaranteeing the repayment of the considerable sum of £150 to Mitchell on Pierrepont’s behalf. No doubt they acted in this way for a financial consideration rather than out of generosity; none the less, it was a decision they later had cause to regret. Pierrepont proved unable to discharge the debt, and Plumptre found himself defending an action sued against him by the creditor’s executors. His failure to appear led to the promulgation of outlawry against him at the London hustings on 22 May 1447, and although he was able to reverse the outlawry by writ of error it was at the cost of conceding the action in the following Hilary term. KB27/746, rot. 8; 747, rot. 32. If a later petition is to be believed, Pierrepont, as he was bound in honour to do, acted to indemnify both Plumptre and Halifax of their loss. To that end, he conveyed two of his manors to feoffees on the condition that they allow the two men to take 25 marks annually from their issues until the sum of £150 together with 31 marks in damages had been discharged. Unfortunately this did not mark the end of our MP’s problems. After Pierrepont’s death in November 1452, he and Halifax complained to the chancellor that the feoffees, who included two prominent townsmen, Thomas Thurland* and the recorder, Thomas Babington II*, refused to allow them to place a charge on the manors. The feoffees replied that it was Pierrepont’s son and heir, another Henry (d.1457), who was to blame, and it seems unlikely that the two Nottingham merchants recovered what they were owed. C1/22/8; C4/4/6. The Chancery petition was presented between Nov. 1452 and Mar. 1454; in all probability towards the later date.

In the summer of 1460 Plumptre paid £2 towards the sum of over £23 the leading townsmen contributed in support of the Lancastrian cause at the battle of Northampton; and in March 1461 he paid £4 towards the ‘gift’ they made under duress to Henry Beaufort, duke of Somerset, and his servants when the Lancastrian army was in Nottingham shortly before the battle of Towton. Nottingham recs. CA7452; Trans. Thoroton Soc. xxvi. 19. These exactions were no doubt a factor in alienating the town from the house of Lancaster, but one, admittedly insubstantial, fragment of evidence implies that Plumptre’s own political sympathies remained with Lancaster throughout the civil war of 1459-61. Early in Edward IV’s reign a writ was issued for his outlawry at the suit of Walter Devereux II*, Lord Ferrers of Chartley, a prominent Yorkist lord, for offences committed in the previous reign against Devereux at Arnold, a few miles to the north of Nottingham. This was probably the reflection of no more than a routine dispute, although it is possible that our MP had taken advantage of Devereux’s difficulties after the Yorkist defeat at Ludford Bridge in October 1459 to plunder his local property. However this may be, the matter soon disappears from the records. KB27/809, rot. 7.

By this date Plumptre’s activities were diminishing through old age. For the rest of his life he made only intermittent appearances in the records. On 29 Apr. 1465 he was one of the Nottingham j.p.s who heard indictments against the servants of Henry Pierrepont†, grandson of his earlier creditor. This was an episode in the borough’s dispute with Pierrepont over the ownership of a weir in the river Trent, and two years later, on 31 July 1467, Plumptre, as an alderman, was one of those who swore an oath in the church of St. Mary in its settlement. KB9/313/4; Nottingham Recs. ii. 383. This, however, was the last recorded act of his lengthy administrative career. Later in the year he resigned his place as an alderman and was replaced by Thomas Lokton. Changes in the ranks of the aldermen have to be inferred from isolated references. Plumptre was certainly no longer an alderman by 10 Oct. 1467, when he did not number among the town’s j.p.s: Nottingham Recs. ii. 265-6.

Plumptre made his brief and uninformative will on 12 Apr. 1471, requiring burial in the church of St. Peter near ‘the Vouthall’. Since the will includes only two bequests, the largest of which was a meagre 6s. 8d. to be distributed among the poor, it is clear that he had already made more detailed arrangements for the disposition of his lands and goods. He named his younger son Thomas as his sole executor and Robert Echard, rector of East Bridgford (near Notingham), as supervisor. The will was proved on the following 10 Oct. Borthwick Inst., York registry wills, prob. reg. 4, f. 173. He was dead by the previous 6 Aug.: Nottingham Univ. Lib. Clifton mss, Cl D 798. The Plumptre family long continued to play a prominent part in the affairs of Nottingham, providing it with MPs as late as the eighteenth century. Thoroton, ii. 80-81; The Commons 1715-54, ii. 358; 1754-90, iii. 304.