More may be added to the earlier biography.
It is likely that Scott married his first wife before 1392. On 1 Feb. that year, when he entered into a bond in statute staple at Westminster with John Hilton, parson of Haverhill, Suffolk, he did so as ‘of Conington’, Cambridgeshire, where Eleanor appears to have possessed some sort of title to a local manor. The bond was a security that he would pay the cleric no less than 500 marks as soon as the following day but the reason for it is unrecorded. He failed to honour his undertaking, prompting Hilton’s executors to begin proceedings against him five years later.
In the autumn of 1415 Scott found it necessary to purchase a royal pardon, which was issued to him on 12 Oct. that year.
In late April 1423, shortly before his final term as sheriff of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire expired, Scott reappeared in the Exchequer to acknowledge that he himself owed 100s. to Master Richard Holme, clerk, and Robert Cawode. The creditors were probably the warden of King’s Hall, Cambridge, and the Exchequer official of those names respectively, but how the debt arose is unexplained.
Yet another lawsuit at Westminster in which Scott was the defendant provides further evidence of his connexion with John Holand, earl of Huntingdon. It was brought by John Roxton, prior of the Dominican friary at Dunstable, who in pleadings of Michaelmas term 1426 sought redress from the MP and William Brigges of London, for forcibly seizing his livestock at ‘Ruxox’, Bedfordshire, on the previous 19 Aug. They responded by asserting that the livestock were not of the value claimed, that they had acted in their capacity as the earl’s servants and that, in any case, Roxton was a villein of Huntingdon’s manor of Stevington in the same county. In the following Hilary term, the earl’s attorney appeared at Westminster to support the defendants’ claim that the prior was a villein; yet when the case was tried at the Bedford assizes in February 1427, the jury found for Roxton, declaring that he was of free birth.
In the following June, Scott and two associates, John Oliver, an esquire from Hertfordshire, and a tailor from London, Thomas Thurlwyn, entered into a bond in statute staple with another Londoner, the goldsmith John Collee the elder, at Westminster. By means of this security they undertook to pay Collee £100 at Michaelmas 1427, a commitment they failed to meet, leading to proceedings against them in 1428.
It may well be, as the previous biography speculated, that Scott sold some of his property in London in 1416 to fund the purchase of Tempsford, his manor in Bedfordshire. When his estates in that county were assessed for taxation two decades later, they were valued at £7 p.a.
The previous biography ascribed Scott’s appointment as lieutenant constable to the patronage of the earl of Huntingdon, whom the King had made constable for life in August 1420. In reality, Scott was himself a royal appointee, taking up office while Huntingdon was a prisoner in France. He replaced William Yerde* whom the Crown had dismissed for allowing prisoners to escape. Huntingdon did not return to England until late 1425 or early 1426, and it was as the lieutenant of the then constable, Richard Wydeville*, that Scott was briefly involved in the politically charged controversy over one of the prisoners in the Tower, Friar John Randolph, in the spring of 1425.
In referring to the marriage of Scott’s son and namesake to his stepdaughter, Navarina, the earlier biography mistakenly stated that the bride was the only surviving child of the MP’s second wife, Joan, by her previous husband, John Venour.
In fact, Navarina had two sisters, Margery and Alice. Married to Peter Paule* (like Scott a follower of the earl of Huntingdon), Alice survived well into Edward IV’s reign. The siblings jointly inherited the Venour manor of ‘Kingswood Bury’ in Clothall, Hertfordshire, although Alice and Paule acquired the shares of Margery and Navarina in 1422 and 1433 respectively.