BALDESWELL, John

Like several other of Northampton’s MPs in this period, Baldeswell was a draper. His sparsely-documented career conformed to the pattern common among the leading townsmen in that he served as bailiff and sat in Parliament while still a young man. His service as bailiff brought him difficulties. In Michaelmas term 1417 he and his fellow bailiff, John Pirie, were sued in the Exchequer of pleas for damages of £60 by John Warwick, prior of the Carmelite friary in Coventry, and Henry Preston, both of whom claimed to have been falsely arrested and imprisoned by them. The results of these actions is not recorded. Later, when the court of King’s bench came to Northampton in Easter term 1421, the two former bailiffs found themselves punished for a lesser offence, being fined 2s. 2d. as the value of the forfeited goods of a murderer for which they had failed to account.2 E13/133, rots. 4d, 8; KB27/640, fines rot. 2.

On Baldeswell’s election to Parliament in 1423 another of the town’s drapers, William Rushden*, was among those who offered mainprise for his appearance, and in about 1427 he himself stood surety for a chaplain, wrongfully arrested by the town bailiffs, John Makesey* and John Church II*.3 C219/13/2; C1/7/34. Nothing else is known of him until he was chosen as mayor in 1441, the year after Henry Baldeswell, probably his son, had been nominated as one of the bailiffs. He was still alive in August 1453 when he joined with other former mayors in petitioning the fraternity of the guild of the Holy Trinity in Coventry on behalf of Church, a member of the guild who had become disabled.4 Recs. Holy Trinity Coventry (Dugdale Soc. xix), 47-48. Thereafter, however, his putative son, one of the town coroners from 1450 if not before, took over his place in local affairs. Henry was a mercer who seems to have had more extensive trading interests than our MP. In the early 1460s a Venetian merchant, who had taken lodging in his house, complained to the chancellor that Henry had refused to restore to him jewels and other goods worth 200 marks entrusted to his safekeeping.5 KB27/758, rex rot. 24d; C1/29/507.