BARON, John I

This MP poses many problems of identification, since there were several fifteenth-century John Barons of Colchester. One of them was the son of Stephen Baron, a bailiff of the borough in 1388-9, but he cannot have been the parliamentarian because he died in the early 1420s.3 Colchester ct. roll 1422-3, D/B 5 Cr43, m. 22d; VCH Essex, ix. 376. At least three others, a weaver from Great Tey, Essex, a man from Liss in Hampshire and a third from Terling, Essex, were immigrants who became freemen in 1424, 1435 and 1457 respectively.4 Colchester ct. rolls, D/B 5 Cr45, m. 3d; 52, m. 21; 68, m. 4d. Besides the weaver, there were two other John Barons of Colchester identified by their occupations, a fuller active in the 1420s and 1430s,5 Ibid., D/B 5 Cr49, m. 21d; 55, m. 15; C1/10/294. and a merchant. Merchants dominated the town’s oligarchy, so it is more likely than not that it was the merchant who represented the borough in the Commons of 1459 and served in the offices listed in the cursus above. Probably another immigrant,6 R. Britnell, Growth and Decline in Colchester, 224n, 226n. he may have come from one of the Coggeshall parishes a few miles west of Colchester, since his wife Denise was from Coggeshall and a John Baron of Coggeshall (most likely a namesake) had business in Colchester in the 1420s. A resident of St. Leonard’s parish,7 Colchester ct. roll 1466-7, D/B 5 Cr73, m. 8d. he was a vintner as well as a general merchant. His commercial interests were not restricted to Colchester, for he had business dealings with Londoners.8 CP40/746, rot. 334; 759, rot. 265d; Colchester ct. rolls, D/B 5 Cr52-55, 60-68, 71, 72. Baron obtained a year’s lease in September 1443 of the customs and other charges levied on goods passing through Colchester’s port at New Hythe, agreeing in return to pay the borough a rent of £52.9 Colchester ct. rolls, D/B 5 Cr45, m. 38d; 50, m. 36; 59, m. 1. He owned property at New Hythe, and in the mid 1450s he was among a group of men in possession of a house, garden and other holdings which a former associate, Thomas Oskyn*, had once owned there.10 Ibid., D/B 5 Cr55, m. 28d; 57, mm. 19, 29; 59, m. 16; 60, m. 2; 66, m. 12d. Baron was dead by November 1466 when his executor, John Wright*, sued Thomas Hegge of Colchester over a debt of ten marks.11 Ibid., D/B 5 Cr73, m. 8d. Four years later Joan Baron, widow of John Baron, was a plaintiff in the borough ct. Previously married to Thomas Fuller, she might have been the merchant’s second wife: ibid., D/B 5 Cr66, m. 14d; 74, m. 7. This means that he cannot have been the John Baron, one of the surveyors of Colchester, who arbitrated in a quarrel between two burgesses at the end of that year.12 Ibid., D/B 5 Cr73, mm. 8d, 14d. The arbitrator may have been the mercer who won a suit in the borough ct. in 1470 but it is not clear whether he was also the John Baron who, with his wife Alice, took part in a conveyance of property at New Hythe in 1482: ibid., D/B 5 Cr74, m. 8; 79, m. 39.