This wealthy and influential London merchant, who rose to occupy a place in national as well as civic affairs, may well have come originally from the village of Brampton in Huntingdonshire. The bequest which he made to the local parish church in his will suggests this, although he is known to have settled in the capital by 1364, when he and another fishmonger lent £26 at a high rate of interest to Henry Cambridge. The latter subsequently sued his two creditors for the return of a recognizance in £88 which they had taken from him as security, and in November 1382 finally won his case. Notwithstanding his activities as a usurer, Brampton had become a churchwarden of St. Michael’s, Crooked Lane, before October 1369, the date of a reference to his involvement in property disputes concerning the church. In July 1375 Thomas Keys appointed him to act as his attorney in the husting court of London, and in the following year he again advanced substantial sums of money, this time to Richard Kent, a fishmonger who experienced some difficulty in repaying his debts.
It is now impossible to establish how great a profit Brampton derived from financial speculation and commerce, although he was obviously very rich indeed. Evidence of his litigation for the recovery of debts and his attempts to enforce the terms of recognizances is somewhat fragmentary, but none the less shows the scale of his various enterprises. Between November 1379 and November 1394 he began at least 11 lawsuits in the court of common pleas against persistent debtors who together owed him over £410.
Although a fishmonger by trade, Brampton had many other commercial interests, the most lucrative being the export of raw wool. His five years in office as warden of the Middleburg Staple gave him all the connexions and opportunities necessary to make profits, but it was during his term as mayor of the Westminster Staple that he began shipping wool out of England in large quantities. Over the period March 1397 to June 1398, for example, he obtained royal licences to export 122 sarplers of wool to Calais; and during the second week of March 1400 alone he dispatched a further 12 sarplers from the port of London. In July 1391 and March 1401 we find him bringing finished cloth into the capital; and in February 1397 he was given permission to lade a ship there with Gascon wine for sale at Calais.
A significant part of Brampton’s cash profits was invested in property on both banks of the Thames. At some point before February 1378 he purchased land in St. Olave’s parish, Southwark, from another fishmonger named John Little, and shortly afterwards he bought two shops in the neighbouring parish of St. Gregory. Large quantities of fish caught along the south coast were brought into the City through Southwark, and Brampton was naturally anxious to acquire business premises to the south of London Bridge. His appointment as bailiff of Southwark (from which post he was summarily dismissed in 1382 for illegally trying to corner the market in fish) gave him an early incentive to consolidate his interests in the borough. As late as 1400, he was still building up his resources, and took on the lease of three messuages and eight more shops there at an annual rent of 26s.8d. from John Seymour, who also sold him the reversion of the property.
John Lovekyn
†, he acquired a tenement and wharf in Thames Street, which was confirmed to him in August 1395, some time after the sale itself. The brewery and Thames Street properties were together said to be worth £5 a year in 1412, but were commercially of far greater value.
Being a man of substance with a reputation for financial expertise, Brampton found himself much in demand as a feoffee. He performed this service for a number of people, including John Northwold, the mercer, and John Lagage, whose daughter, Elizabeth, began a suit against him in Chancery for failing to carry out the terms of her father’s various enfeoffments.
For almost 40 years Brampton played a full and active part in public life. His role was modest enough at first: in March 1378 and again in April 1380 he was one of the London fishmongers appointed by the mayor to prevent the destruction of small fry in the Thames. More significantly, he was chosen at this time to serve on a committee of the common council for the supervision of the City’s liberties, and in January 1379 he contributed the relatively large sum of five marks towards the gift raised by the civic authorities for placating the great noblemen who had quarrelled with them. His career suffered a temporary setback during the mayoralty of
John of Northampton
†, whose radical programme of reform was directed against the victualling companies in general and the Fishmongers in particular. Brampton’s removal from office as bailiff of Southwark on the ground that he had exploited his position to gain control of the capital’s fish supplies must be seen in the general context of Northampton’s campaign to undermine the Fishmongers’ monopoly of the London market and free the trade from their control. This is not to deny that Brampton may have acted unscrupulously in Southwark, although the decision, adopted generally by the common council, that no bailiff could in future be a fishmonger, together with the harsh controls subsequently imposed for the regulation of the Fishmongers’ Mystery, were all part of a sustained attack by Northampton. Some three months after the latter’s fall from power in October 1383, Brampton had sufficiently recovered from his disgrace to be elected governor of the Middleburg Staple. His appointment may have owed something to the intervention of Northampton’s great rival,
Sir Nicholas Brembre
†, who was then enjoying a brief resurgence of political influence as mayor of London. Such a potentially dangerous connexion with one of Richard II’s unpopular friends and leading creditors could well explain why orders were issued on 22 Feb. 1388 for Brampton’s arrest and appearance before the royal council. Sentence of death had been passed on Brembre by the Merciless Parliament two days before, and it is interesting to note that two other victims of the Lords Appellant, Robert de Vere, duke of Ireland, and Michael de la Pole, earl of Suffolk, would have been interrogated with Brampton had they not already escaped abroad. Although his fate may at first have hung in the balance, Brampton was not long under suspicion, and in September 1388 he was actually sent on an embassy to treat with Albert of Bavaria, count of Holland. He also remained in office as governor of the Middleburg Staple until its final transfer to Calais in the following year.
On his return to London, Brampton busied himself with civic affairs. Throughout the 1390s he was frequently enlisted to audit accounts presented to the city chamberlain, and he often acted as an arbitrator or expert witness in disputes between his fellow merchants.
Brampton’s long and wide-ranging experience of trade and commerce admirably qualified him for membership of Henry IV’s council on which he served (as one of the three Londoners thus honoured) from November 1399 to July 1400. Deteriorating relations between England and the merchants of the Hanse led Henry to despatch an embassy to Prussia in the spring of 1405, with Brampton among the ‘right notable men’ chosen to debate with the High Master the difficult question of compensation for English merchants. Envoys sent to Prussia two years later claimed that Brampton’s ship went down with all hands in the North Sea on his return journey in October 1405, and used the loss of his diplomatic papers as a pretext for demanding a higher rate of damages. They were clearly guilty of deception, for on 5 July 1406 Brampton was assigned (but not paid) expenses of £167 to cover an absence abroad on royal business of almost 11 months, ending in the previous March. Moreover, on 14 Nov. of that year he received a further commission to negotiate a commercial treaty with the Knights of the Teutonic Order, although, as the addition of two codicils to his will shows, he was by then already near to death.