John was perhaps descended from Henry le Hert, who had been assessed to pay taxes at Lewes in the 1330s.Suss. Rec. Soc. x. 229. He himself served as a juror at a coroner’s inquest held at Lewes in September 1417, and on the jury providing information to the assessors of the parliamentary tax on parishes in the town in May 1428. He witnessed a deed in Lewes in June 1432. In association with Andrew Maffey he brought an action in 1445 against a carpenter from Barcombe for recovery of a debt of ten marks.Suss. Arch. Colls. xcv. 54; Feudal Aids, v. 163; Add. Ch. 30564; CPR, 1441-6, p. 302. It may have been the same John Hert, who, as the brother-in-law of William Middleton, dean of Chichester and executor of the will of Archbishop Arundel, received from Middleton in 1424 bequests of land at Cheltenham, Glos., the sum of £10 and his bed ‘cum signo cervi’, and was asked to act as Middleton’s executor. That John acquired a messuage in Chichester in 1427. Reg. Chichele, ii. 287-8, 401; CP25(1)240/85/37.
