CALDECOTE, Nicholas

More information can be added to the previous biography of Caldicote.3 The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 464-5. As assumed there, it is probable (although not quite certain) that the Cambs. MP is to be distinguished from the Rutland j.p. of 1399-1407 and 1422-34, even though both men were lawyers. The Rutland man lived at Ridlington and was closely connected with the Beaufo family, acting as executor for Sir John Beaufo†: CP40/656, rot. 345. None of the evidence of the MP’s landholding refers to Rutland or a connexion with the Beaufos, but the best evidence to distinguish them comes from the records of attestations. The Rutland Nicholas attested ten elections there from 1413 to 1432, including those of 1421 (Dec.), 1423, 1425, 1429 and 1432 when his Cambridgeshire namesake attested in Cambs. If they were the same man such an overlap looks very unlikely. Further, it seems that the Rutland man died soon after his last visit to an election in Rutland: he is omitted from the Rutland bench of 5 Feb. 1434 and a William Caldecote appears as a Rutland attestor in 1435. It looks like this William was his son and the MP appears not to have had a son of that name.

While that biography found no evidence of his residing in Cambridgeshire prior to 1403, he had formed a link with William Fulbourn† of that county, a fellow lawyer, before that date. In Easter term 1402, he appeared in the court of common pleas at Westminster as Fulbourn’s attorney, in a suit over a debt that the latter had allegedly contracted in London. Caldecote was again an attorney in the same court in Michaelmas term 1403, this time on behalf of John Grace and Margaret his wife, co-plaintiffs in a suit emanating from Cambridgeshire.4 CP40/565, rot. 369; 571, rot. 279.

The amended cursus above includes two offices not noticed previously, those of under sheriff of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire in 1406-7 and of bailiff in the same two counties for the priory of Ely in the later 1420s. Caldecote was under sheriff during the shrievalty of Sir John Bernak, who held estates spread across several counties in East Anglia and eastern England,5 CIPM, xix. 700-7. and was possibly one of his earlier patrons. Caldecote obtained a royal pardon in Henry V’s reign, dated 1 Oct. 1415.6 C67/37, m. 21.

The commissioners of oyer and terminer appointed in November 1423 to investigate the alleged assault on Caldecote by the Batemans also received instructions to look into the related matter of a murder that John and Richard Bateman, Ralph’s brothers, had committed a year earlier at Meldreth. The victim, John Broun, a dyer and franklin from Barrington, had witnessed the quitclaim of Harlton to Caldecote and it appears that he had become involved in the Caldecote-Bateman dispute as an associate of the MP. There is no evidence that the oyer and terminer commission ever sat, and when the matter came before the court of King’s Bench only Ralph Bateman, charged as an accessory to the crime, appeared. Before the supposed assault, Caldecote had sued out several writs of trespass against the Batemans, none of which had proceeded beyond the calling of exigents. As a lawyer, he was perfectly capable of seeing them through to a conclusion, and it is probable that he had used the law courts to pressurize his opponents. There were no indictments for Broun’s murder until February 1423, so it is clear that pursuing the property dispute, rather than securing justice for the unfortunate dyer, had been his main concern. Earlier the same month he and Ralph Bateman had exchanged bonds of £100 as a preliminary to arbitration, but to no avail, since the alleged assault against him had occurred later that year. Caldecote’s connexions put him in a strong position vis-à-vis the Bateman brothers, elderly and not very wealthy men, who were members of a minor and struggling gentry family. In murdering Broun, a man subordinate to them in status, they possibly intended to demonstrate to the MP the seriousness of their intent to defend Harlton. In the end, Ralph Bateman managed to thwart Caldecote by finding an alternative purchaser for the manor, Alexander Child, a London draper who would appear to have secured ownership of it by 1428.7 P. Maddern, Violence and Social Order, 146-53; Corp. London RO, jnl. 2, f. 3v (Cal. P. and M. London, 1413-37, p. 149). The four arbitrators were Henry Shelford and Nicholas Dixon, clerks, Robert Cavendish and Richard Baynard* the former Speaker.

Among those for whom Caldecote was a feoffee was William Winslow. At some stage before embarking for France with Henry V in 1415, Winslow conveyed the manor of Thriplow, Cambridgeshire, to the MP and others, headed by Sir Walter de la Pole* and William Allington I* to hold to the use of his last will. Winslow died at the siege of Harfleur and, in the late 1420s or early 1430s, long after his death, his widow sued Caldecote in the Chancery, claiming that he had refused to release his title in the manor to her.8 C1/7/49.

Caldecote’s summons for knighthood in 1439 is further evidence of the substance that he attained as a landowner. Having declined the honour, at the beginning of 1440 he sued Gilbert Hore* in the Exchequer. He alleged that Hore, sheriff of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire in 1438-9, had failed to inform him of a day given him to appear in that court in relation to the summons, meaning that he had to pay a fine for non-appearance, over and above that levied on him for refusing to accept a knighthood.9 E13/141, rot. 24.

It was through his association with John, Lord Tiptoft†, that Caldecote became embroiled in an episode apparently linked with that peer’s feud with Sir James Butler, heir to the earldom of Ormond. On 22 Feb. 1441, a jury indicted Henry Brokesby, a tenant of Butler’s manor of Fulbourn, Cambridgeshire, for the murder of one John Paxton at Hilton in Huntingdonshire in March the previous year. Brokesby immediately claimed that the indictment had arisen from a conspiracy at Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, among Tipftoft and his associates, including Caldecote. Duly acquitted before a special commission of gaol delivery on 6 Apr. 1441, Brokesby subsequently sued his opponents in the common pleas. Shortly after Tiptoft’s death in January 1443, he won damages totalling 1,300 marks but he was still awaiting judgement six years later. By then, of course, Caldecote, named as an accessory rather than a defendant, was also no longer alive, having survived Tiptoft by just a few months.10 CP40/727, rot. 600; Year Bks. Hil. 21 Hen. VI (Reports del Cases en Ley, 1679), pl. 12; Mich. 22 Hen. VI (ibid.), pl. 5.