HOWARD, Sir John

More may be added to the earlier biography.4 The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 431-3.

Following his second marriage, Howard made Tendring Hall in Stoke Nayland his main residence. Almost certainly it was he who carried out major improvements to the manor-house (or even rebuilt it) since there is no evidence that his even wealthier grandson and namesake undertook any substantial building projects there.5 Howard Household Bks. ed. Crawford, pp. xviii-xix.

There survives a draft of a petition addressed to Richard II, now in two incomplete pieces, to which Howard put his name shortly after his first Parliament. The purpose of the petition, of which his co-petitioners were the archbishop of Canterbury, the bishop of London, the abbots of Waltham Holy Cross, Colchester, St. Osyth and Walden, the earl of Oxford and Sir William Coggeshall*, was to seek a pardon for the spiritual and temporal ‘gentry’ and commons of Essex. Presumably, it was an application for inclusion in the general pardon granted by the King just before the Parliament ended.6 Westminster Abbey muns. 12705, 12228.

In October 1403, a little over a fortnight before he had completed his term as sheriff of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire, Howard was sued in the Exchequer by Thomas Priour† and Thomas Waweton. The pair had sat as knights of the shire in the Parliament of 1402, for Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire respectively, and the suits related to his alleged failure to pay them their parliamentary wages, amounting to £12 in each case. In his bill, Waweton declared that he had delivered a writ of expenses to Howard’s under sheriff, William Aleyn, at Huntingdon in late December 1402, but Howard asserted that he had in due course paid the wages in full. Priour’s bill referred to a like writ that he had delivered to Aleyn at Cambridge, again in late December 1402. Howard replied that he had paid Priour £8 of his wages immediately while the £4 remaining was chargeable on the bishop of Ely’s liberty of the Isle of Ely, which traditionally paid a third part of the wages of the knights of the shire for Cambridgeshire. He had accordingly sent a writ to the bailiff of the liberty but that official had failed to respond. Both suits were referred to juries but only Priour’s is known to have produced a verdict, by which Howard was directed to pay the plaintiff the £4 demanded and damages of 20s.7 E13/120, rots. 3d, 8d. It is unclear whether Waweton was Thomas Waweton* or his fa. and namesake who may also have been an MP.

Howard was in fact steward of the liberty of the great abbey of Bury St. Edmunds for longer than previously realised. Referred to as such in a royal pardon that he received at the beginning of 1416,8 C67/37, m. 18 (6 Jan.). he was still steward when the London draper, John Bederenden*, sued him in the Exchequer in the autumn of 1419. Bederenden claimed Howard had failed properly to act on writs directed to him as steward, in relation to another suit that the draper had brought against an inhabitant of the liberty. The parties agreed to refer the matter to a jury although with what result is unrecorded.9 E13/135, rot. 3.

Probably it was in the same decade that Howard clashed with John Holand over estates in Stoke Nayland and Cornard in Suffolk of which Holand, who claimed them as his inheritance, accused Howard of wrongfully disseising him. Holand laid the matter before the chancellor but his bill is the only surviving evidence of this Chancery suit, the outcome of which is unknown.10 C1/6/283; CIPM, xx. 503. Howard was also a plaintiff in another Chancery suit, probably of the same period, in which he, Sir Simon Felbrigg, Richard Baynard* and Robert Clere† alleged that Thomas Coggeshall, son and heir of Thomas Coggeshall† (d.1402), and Geoffrey Colvylle of Chelmsford had forcibly dispossessed them of the manor of Sandon in Essex. Presumably, he and his co-plaintiffs were acting in the capacity of feoffees, since Sandon was part of Coggeshall’s maternal inheritance, and it is possible that Coggeshall had fallen out with his widowed mother, Margaret (d.1419), over the manor, of which he was to die seised in 1422.11 C1/4/188.

Another quarrel, that between Howard and Sir Thomas Kerdiston* which so alarmed the authorities in 1420, was almost certainly part of an ongoing dispute over land. Although there was no violence that year, the two knights were still at odds in the middle of the same decade. By 1424 Kerdiston was suing Howard, his second wife Alice and several of their associates, including Sir William Wolf* and Howard’s fellow knight of the shire in the Parliament of September 1397, Robert Tey†, in the court of King’s bench, for trespassing on his property at Bulcamp and Henham in Suffolk. Descended from an illegitimate daughter of Sir Thomas’s great-grandfather William, Lord Kerdiston, Alice may have sought part of the Kerdiston estate. Given her ancestor’s illegitimacy, any such claim was probably frivolous although it is possible that Lord Kerdiston had provided for his bastard offspring with land. A jury found the Howards and Tey guilty in early 1426; whereupon Kerdiston declared that he did not wish to pursue his suit against the other defendants. The court awarded him damages of £40, a sum handed over to his attorneys the following month. This was not the end of the affair because the Howards and Tey challenged the jury’s verdict, an appeal that was still pending when both Alice and Tey died in the autumn of 1426.12 KB27/654, rot. 105d; 655, rot. 21; 661, rot. 71.

In his later years Howard was an executor of (Sir) John Shardelowe* and participated in yet another land dispute. Formerly a knight of the shire for Suffolk in the Parliament of 1423, Shardelowe had died in office as sheriff of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire on 10 Sept. 1432. A week later, the Crown issued letters to Howard and Shardelowe’s other executor, Robert Crane, ordering them to deliver the records pertaining to that office to the new sheriff of those counties, John Clopton.13 CFR, xvi. 112. No evidence survives of any previous connexion between the MP and the considerably younger Shardelowe, but perhaps Howard was an old friend of the testator’s late father, Sir Robert Shardelowe, a man of his own generation.

As for the dispute, Howard’s involvement was as a trustee rather than on his own account. During the mid 1430s or thereabouts, he sued William St. Cler in the Chancery, claiming that St. Cler had hoodwinked him into making a wrongful conveyance. In his bill Howard stated that he was a feoffee to the use of the last will of the defendant’s late father, John St. Cler, who had left directions for William to succeed to various estates in Essex in tail. After the testator’s death, Howard had transferred his interest in these lands to William in the presence of the abbot of St. Osyth, although allegedly without realising that he was sealing a conveyance in fee rather than in tail. Howard accused William of having tricked him into breaching John St. Cler’s intended entail, although unfortunately his bill does not explain how.14 C1/11/26.