Described as a London draper, Gawtron’s father appears to have established a number of connexions in the county of Middlesex. He was probably the John Gawtron who was twice made a tax collector there during the 1370s; his wife, Agnes, came from Uxbridge; and he himself was buried in the parish church of Hillingdon.
The draper’s involvement in a number of mercantile disputes reveals the extent of his commercial dealings. In January 1405 he and two other Londoners were summoned to appear before the royal council: the nature of the inquiry is not stated, but it probably arose out of a complaint made by James Roscob, the master of a Prussian ship which had been captured at sea ‘by divers men, hired soldiers, in divers ships’. Two of these vessels, La Elene and La Margaret, had been partly fitted out by Gawtron, who was required to pay his share of the £125 awarded to Roscob as compensation. The English merchants, one month later, obtained a release from all further actions pertaining to the lost cargo (but not the ship), and a royal commission was set up to recover their expenses from the sailors. At some point during the next seven years Robert Thorley, esquire, brought a maritime action against Gawtron and three other citizens in the court of admiralty. This case, which concerned the freighting of one of his vessels, was pending in August 1412, but the outcome remains unknown.
Gawtron began to play an active part in civic life shortly after his marriage to the wealthy heiress and widow, Joan King. His emergence as a public figure was almost certainly hastened by this extremely lucrative match, which not only gave him custody of the late Walter King’s four children and their patrimony, but also enabled him to acquire part of the extensive London properties built up by Joan’s father, the draper, John Walcote. Gawtron purchased the reversion of rents and tenements in six city parishes from Walcote’s executors in January 1412. We do not know if the compilers of the lay subsidy return made for London later in that year included these new accessions in their assessment of his annual landed income (which then stood at £14), but they were certainly in his hands by April 1423.
The draper died between 1 Mar. and 23 May 1433. He was survived by his second wife, Alice, the widow and executrix of the London vintner, Geoffrey Dalling, and William, the child of his first marriage. Alice, who had already been involved in litigation with Dalling’s creditors, began a lawsuit in the husting court of London for the recovery of her dower, which she claimed had been wrongfully withheld by her stepson; and she continued to seek redress after his death in the spring of 1435. Since William left no children, his inheritance passed to John Marshal, one of Gawtron’s cousins.