POPHAM, Sir Stephen

As noted in the earlier biography, The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 116-17. Stephen crossed the Channel to Normandy in 1415 in the retinue of Edward, duke of York, and may have fought and been knighted at Agincourt, where his commander was killed. It was not noted there, however, that as Sir Stephen he also joined Henry V’s expeditionary army of the summer of 1417, leading a company of five men-at-arms and ten archers in the force recruited by Humphrey, duke of Gloucester. E101/51/2. Although the record of his subsequent military service in France was to be eclipsed by that of his more famous cousin Sir John Popham*, his part in the relief of Calais in 1436 and his command of the naval force of 2,260 men ordered to put to sea for the defence of the realm by authority of the Parliament of 1442 (of which he was a Member) should not be under-valued.

Popham took on the responsibilities of a feoffee of the Sussex lordship and manor of Midhurst on behalf of his father-in-law Sir John Bohun, and in April 1432 he and Walter Veer* mediated between Sir John and the burgesses of Midhurst to bring to an end their long-running disputes over market tolls and the profits of the local courts. W. Suss. RO, Cowdray mss, 4734/5; Add. mss, 20801.

Popham had inherited estates in Hampshire, Wiltshire and Dorset worth about £150 p.a., which for the most part were to pass after his death in November 1444 to his four daughters. According to a deposition made not long afterwards in Chancery by the lawyer Thomas Haydock* (Sir Stephen’s fellow knight of the shire for Hampshire in the Parliament of 1442), when Sir Stephen had been about to embark to assist in raising the seige of Calais he had made various deeds of enfeoffment, whereby he placed his estates in the possession of (Sir) John Lisle II*, William Brocas* and Haydock himself, instructing them to perform his will. This will he declared later, in 1442 when preparing to go to sea ‘for the sauf gard ther of accordyng to an acte made in the last parlement’. Haydock’s concern was for the interests of his late colleague’s heirs ‘that ben full yong et tendir of age’. Indeed, the three youngest of Popham’s daughters were still minors: Margery aged ten, Elizabeth six and Alice just 18 months. Only his eldest daughter, another Elizabeth (aged 18), was already married. She had been contracted to wed John Wadham, son of William Wadham (the sheriff of Devon in 1441-2) and grandson of the judge Sir John Wadham† (d.1412). According to the testimony of (Sir) John Stourton II*, who had been present at the ‘tretee’ for the marriage in the presence of Wadham’s father and grandmother and learned counsel including (Sir) John Hody* (which dates this to before the end of 1441), the couple and Elizabeth’s issue were to receive the Wiltshire manor of Fisherton Anger. Although the Wadhams brought a bill in Chancery against Elizabeth’s stepmother Beatrice and her father’s feoffees requiring them to release the manor, it remained in the hands of the latter until about 1456. C139/121/18; C1/74/64-66; VCH Wilts. vi. 29, 185. The wardship and marriages of Elizabeth’s half-sisters were granted in December 1446 to Sir John Lisle, perhaps after the death of their mother. It was probably he who arranged the matches of Margery, Elizabeth and Alice respectively to Thomas Hampden, John Barantyn† (d.1474) and Humphrey Forster. Early in the fifteenth century part of the MP’s patrimony at West Dean in Hampshire and East Grimstead in Wiltshire had been settled by his father Henry on his wife Margaret (Sir Stephen’s stepmother) and then in tail-male, so that on Margaret’s death in 1448 it fell to Sir Stephen’s cousin Sir John. Only on the latter’s childless death in 1463 was this part of the ancestral Popham lands returned to the main line of the family – then to be divided like the rest between four of Sir Stephen’s descendants. CFR, xviii. 93-95; C139/131/21; C140/9/7; 56/39; CPR, 1476-85, pp. 21-22.