STOURTON, John I

The earlier biography of this ‘beloved brother’ of the Speaker William Stourton and supportive uncle of the future Lord Stourton, revealed him to have been a man dedicated to public service, of proven probity, and of firm religious orthodoxy who devoted his considerable energies to the support of the Church.5 The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 490-2. Fresh information about him does nothing to dispel this view.

Another wife has been added to the three previously recorded, for in April 1411 Stourton settled on this wife, Thomasina, the manor and advowson of Pendomer, which he had purchased four years earlier.6 Helyar mss, DD\WHh/960-1. However, as Thomasina is not mentioned again, it seems likely that she died not long afterwards. Stourton and Chief Justice Sir William Hankford encountered difficulties with regard to their custodianship of the estates belonging to the main line of the Stourton family during the minority of the MP’s nephew John II. A number of men with three chaplains at their head allegedly made an illegal entry on some of the Stourton lands at Frome in May 1415, and took away ten carts and a quantity of timber, including five oaks, so that Stourton and Hankford were obliged to bring an action against them in the court of the Exchequer four years later.7 E13/134, rot. 16.

As a conscientious member of the Somerset bench, to which he was regularly named as one of the quorum, Stourton attended sessions more often than any of his fellow justices.8 E101/586/10, m. 2; 32, m. 1. More information, too, has been found about his long service to successive bishops of Bath and Wells: Nicholas Bubwith and John Stafford. The former appointed him bailiff of the liberties of the bishopric and attorney in all pleas touching the same, and it may have been for this reason (and his executorship of Bubwith’s will) that the Crown appointed him guardian of the temporalities in 1424. The new bishop, Stafford (who was chancellor of England when Stourton sat in his last Parliament), appointed him steward of the estates and keeper of the parks of the bishopric, posts he certainly occupied for the last two years of his life. At the same time he was in receipt of a pension charged on the south-western estates of Syon abbey, worth 25s. 8d. a year.9 SC6/1103/3, rot. 5. While he was guardian of the temporalities of Bath and Wells, Stourton had made a loan to the Crown of 600 marks from the revenues of the bishopric. The loan of £100 he made in January 1429 appears to have come from his own resources. If so, it provides some indication of his personal wealth.10 E401/720, m. 15.

Among Stourton’s closest associates not mentioned previously was William Bochell*, the sometime MP for Melcombe Regis, who acted on his behalf as a feoffee, mainpernor and ultimately executor. The two men sat together in the Parliament of 1429 (both being returned by Stourton’s nephew John Stourton II as sheriff of Somerset and Dorset). While that Parliament was in progress, in November 1429, Stourton was engaged in two suits in Chancery. The first related to four messuages in Taunton which some 30 years earlier Robert Bathe† had conveyed to a group of trustees for the support of a chantry chaplain in the local parish church of St. Mary Magdalen. Since no licence to alienate had been obtained, the messuages had been taken into the Crown’s possession and committed to Stourton and Sir Thomas Brooke* in 1427: the trustees now challenged their title. The other concerned the Somerset manors of Ninehead Flory and Withiel Flory, and involved Stourton as an associate of Sir Giles Daubeney* and Ralph Bush*, his fellow Members of the Commons (Daubeney sitting as his fellow knight for Somerset, Bush as MP for Dorset).11 E159/206, brevia Mich. rots. 33, 39.