REDE, John II, of Hastings, Suss.

A John Rede was an attorney in the court of common pleas dealing with suits from Sussex in the mid 1420s, but the name was a common one, and there is no firm evidence to link this lawyer with the Portsman of Hastings. C40/657, rot. 74; 658, rot. 168; 661, rot. 47. As a baron of Hastings, Rede claimed exemption from taxation on his moveable goods outside the liberty at Ore and Hooe in the early 1430s, E179/225/50, 59; 226/69, 71. and he may have been the man of this name who paid rent to the leading local lawyer Bartholomew Bolney* for land near his house in Pette. Bolney Bk. (Suss. Rec. Soc. lxiii), 60. He was among the prominent townsmen of Hastings to whom John Parker I* made a ‘gift’ of his goods and chattels in May 1430, and in this he was associated with the then clerk of the Parliaments, William Prestwick. CCR, 1429-35, p. 44. Rede was chosen bailiff of Hastings in the spring of 1433, and on 1 July he and Parker were sent a writ regarding a ‘scaffa’ (skiff) from Poole in Dorset, which had recently been seized in their port. They accounted at the Exchequer for wool, neither customed nor cocketted, which they found on board and valued at nearly £15, and on 18 July they were each rewarded £2 for seizing the illegal cargo for the Crown. E122/177/28; E403/709, m. 11.

By the latter date both Rede and Parker were sitting in the Commons as barons from Hastings, in the Parliament which had assembled ten days earlier. The two sessions of the Parliament, which was eventually dissolved on 23 Dec., took Rede away from his duties as bailiff of Hastings, but while at Westminster he carried out other business on behalf of the Cinque Ports. Following his return home he attended a Brodhull on 11 Jan. 1434, at which he placed before his fellow delegates from the Ports a copy of the ‘allowances’ for Kent recorded in the ‘great roll’ of the Exchequer of 1381-2. This showed that the men and women of the liberties of the Ports had each paid 12d. to the subsidy of 1380-1, and had therefore been exonerated from service due from the Ports in respect of £60. He was named with two other barons to go back to the Exchequer to arrange the allocation of fifteenths and tenths for the use of the Ports and their advocants, which had not been allowed for a long time. Each of the delegates was to be paid as much as £10 for his expenses. Rede next attended a Brodhull that same summer, on 26 July, when William Goldyng* presented him as Hastings’s bailiff to officiate at the autumn herring fair at Yarmouth. He and his fellow bailiffs from the Ports reported back to the Brodhull about events at the fair in the following December. Rede last attended a Brodhull as a delegate from Hastings in July 1435. White and Black Bks. 3-6.

Given that nothing is recorded about a John Rede of Hastings for the next 15 years it would be imprudent to assume that it was the former MP who on 12 June 1450 allegedly ‘with more persones evyll disposed’ seized possession of a cogship they had been told by the rebel Jack Cade had been hired to transport the ‘fals traytours’ James Fiennes*, Lord Saye and Sele, Thomas Hoo I*, Lord Hoo, and John Faukes, the clerk of the Parliaments, to safety across the Channel. That John Rede was indicted in 1454 or 1455 in the admiralty court of the warden of the Cinque Ports, Humphrey, duke of Buckingham, on charges brought by Peter Arnold of Hastings, the owner of the vessel. SC1/51/48. He received a royal pardon on 10 Apr. 1458 ‘out of reverence for the passion of Christ’ for all felonies, trespasses, conspiracies and misprisions he had committed. CPR, 1452-61, p. 424. In June 1454 that John had taken possession of a tenement and 17 acres of land called Coumbe in Mayfield, for which he agreed to pay £20 in annual instalments of £4 each: E. Suss. RO, Add. mss, 292.