URRY, Oliver

As his alias indicates, Urry was a skinner by trade.6 The occupational nature of this alias makes it impossible to tell if he was related to Nicholas Skynner, an early 15th-cent. churchwarden of the parish of St. Peter in the East, or to John Skynner, a bailiff of the town in 1432-3: Munimenta Civitatis Oxonie, 179; CCR, 1429-35, p. 237. It is unclear whether he was a native of Oxford,7 The connexion, if any, between him and the Thomas Urry who attested the return of the knights of the shire for Oxon. to the Parl. of 1410 is unknown: C219/10/5. and the evidence for his property interests in the town is scanty. During the mid 1450s, he paid St. Anne’s chantry in the parish of All Saints there a rent of 13s. 4d. p.a. for his house, probably likewise located in that parish.8 Bodl. Top. Oxon. c. 400, f. 59. He acquired the lease of a tenement in north Oxford from Osney abbey in the mid or late 1460s, for a substantial rent of £5 6s. 8d. p.a.9 Cart. Oseney Abbey, iii (Oxf. Historical Soc. xci), 247. He must have enjoyed a cordial good relationship with the abbey after becoming its tenant, since he represented the abbot in the town’s hustings court in September 1465.10 Munimenta Civitatis Oxonie, 225.

Urry made a good marriage in as much as his father-in-law, William Newman, was a ‘gentleman’ as well as a brewer. Newman leased a tenement opposite the east gate of Oxford castle from the monks of Osney abbey, a property converted into a brewery in the early 1450s. Urry’s wife Isabel possessed a contingent interest in the lease, which her father had obtained in October 1447, since the abbey had assigned the tenement to Newman and his wife and then to each of their children respectively, for their lives in survivorship. In all probability, it never came into her hands, since her three brothers took precedence over her in this arrangement.11 Cart. Oseney Abbey, ii. 378-9.

First heard of in the spring of 1435, Urry appeared in the court held by the chancellor of Oxford university on 23 May that year, to nominate Master Thomas Graunt and Roger Helyot of Oriel College as his sureties. These guarantors undertook he would not attempt to transfer a lawsuit between him and John Willyamys, a servant of the university, elsewhere, so acknowledging the chancellor’s right to hear all pleas at Oxford involving members or employees of the university. On the same day, the court also convicted Urry of having borne arms within the university’s precincts, and of refusing to surrender those weapons to its authorities.12 Registrum Cancellarii Oxoniensis, i (Oxf. Historical Soc. xciii), 14. Seven years later, one of his servants, John Felard, was brought before the chancellor’s court to answer for a fracas in the street with William Bysshop, a scholar of St. John’s Hall. Felard acknowledged having become involved in a disturbance when the investigating university authorities took a deposition from him. He declared that he and a group of friends had been playing a game of ‘swerd and bokelere’ when Bysshop, passing by, had remarked ‘Sofft and Fayre’. After he had riposted ‘Sofft and Fayre ynoghe’, he and Bysshop took up cudgels against each other and their respective supporters also joined the fight.13 Ibid., ii (Oxf. Historical Soc. xciv), 191. Normally, Urry’s dealings with the university were cordial, since most of his occasional appearances in the chancellor’s court between the late 1430s and late 1460s were as a surety and witness, on behalf of both scholars and townsmen.14 Ibid., i. 25, 265, 341, 389, 409; ii. 108, 148-50, 197-9. In 1453 the chancellor appointed him to administer the goods of the intestate John Kenge, a recently-deceased scholar, and in the same year he was one of the arbitrators to whom the court referred a dispute between William Dagvile* and John Syddnaye.15 Ibid. ii. 328.

The first office of any importance held by Urry at Oxford was that of chamberlain. A year after completing his term as such, his fellow burgesses elected him one of the town’s bailiffs but he never advanced further up the municipal hierarchy. Shortly after completing his term as bailiff, he entered the Parliament of November 1449, in which he sat alongside his father-in-law. Although the town’s returns for two previous Parliaments, those of 1439 and 1445, have not survived, it is likely that he and Newman were newcomers to the Commons. The assembly was one of the most politically charged of the reign, but for the mayor and burgesses of Oxford a petition the town submitted to it was probably their primary concern at this time. By means of the petition, the townsmen sought an exemption from a statute of 1406 restricting apprenticeships to children of 20s. freeholders. They claimed that the statute had resulted in a shortage of tradesmen in the town, which in turn was causing members of the university to leave for lack of anyone to serve them, to the obvious detriment of the local economy. After the petition went to the Lords, the King replied that he would consider the matter. This was not the first occasion that the burgesses had sought such an exemption, and evidently they were again unsuccessful since they were to submit a similar petition in 1455.16 SC8/28/1388; 132/6599; RP, v. 205, 337-8 (cf. PROME, xii. 157, 444); M. Davies, ‘Lobbying Parliament’, in Parchment and People ed. Clark (Parlty. Hist. xxiii), 146.

The fate of the petition notwithstanding, Urry’s time in Parliament marked the zenith of his public career. In common with other former bailiffs of Oxford, he went on to serve as a surveyor of nuisances in the town, but by the mid 1460s he occupied the lowly post of mayor’s serjeant or mace-bearer. As a result, he earned another alias, that of ‘Oliver Seriawnte’. One authority, on the basis that he is likely to have received a salary as mayor’s serjeant, suggests that he had accepted the office after failing in business and running into financial difficulties.17 VCH Oxon. iv. 44. He certainly had several creditors between the mid 1450s and early 1460s, including the Southampton merchant Andrew James*, the London mercer Thomas Beleter and a German merchant John Warendorp, all of whom sued him for debt in the court of common pleas. None of the debts was larger than £13 10s., but they could have been just a few among many.18 CP40/807, rots. 104, 158; CPR, 1461-7, pp. 3, 253. Yet undermining the hypothesis that indebtedness caused the otherwise puzzling decline in status as an office-holder is the expensive lease Urry obtained from Osney abbey in 1463. Whatever the reason for his appointment as mayor’s serjeant, it came late in his career at Oxford. There is no evidence that he was active there after the 1460s, and it is possible that he had moved to London by October 1469 when Richard Hernyst, a skinner from the City, was sentenced to pay £3 12s. to the attorney of ‘Oliueri skynner de London’ in the university chancellor’s court.19 Registrum Cancellarii Oxoniensis, ii. 331; HP Biogs. ed. Wedgwood and Holt, 309.