CLERK, Walter

Whether Walter was related to John le Clerk, who had represented Southampton in eight Parliaments of the fourteenth century, does not appear from the records, although he was evidently not descended from him directly.5 C. Platt, Med. Southampton, 237-8. Our MP’s property in Southampton included two tenements on the west side of English Street which he held as a tenant of God’s House (one from 1445 to 1454, for which he paid a rent of 33s. 4d. a year, the other from 1448 until his death, for an annual offering of 1lb of cumin), and as well as this he held a garden in French Street.6 Southampton Terrier 1454 (Soton. Rec. Ser. xv), nos. 118, 160-1, 169; Cart. God’s House, ii (ibid. xx), 349, 359; Queen’s Coll. Oxf., God’s House deeds, 470. A merchant, he traded in Southampton from 1443 or earlier, shipping corn and cloth and importing considerable quantities of wine, oil and woad. In 1447-8, for instance, he exported at least 20 whole cloths, and later 300 bales of woad brought from Italy in one of his cargoes was valued at as much as £180.7 E122/141/25, f. 11; 141/29, ff. 4, 21, 26, 57v; 141/35, f. 16; 141/38, m. 3d. Sugar was a more unusual commodity for an Englishman to deal in (generally this product was monopolized by the Italians), yet a loaf of sugar weighing 4lb and costing £3 was sold by Clerk’s servant to the authorities at Southampton in 1456-7 to give as a present to ‘my master of Audley’ (John Audley*).8 Southampton City Archs., steward’s bk. SC5/1/8, f. 11.

Clerk first became involved in the affairs of the borough in January 1447, when he was among the merchants specially appointed by the mayor to appraise the goods of the recently-deceased Richard Thomas. Later in the year he was made water-bailiff,9 Southampton Inventories (Soton. Rec. Ser. xxxiv), 2. and in 1449-50 he agreed to act for Richard Ludlow, deputy to Ralph, Lord Sudeley, the chief butler, as his substitute in the port.10 C1/31/263-5. He was one of 19 burgesses who with the mayor were party to the parliamentary election indenture drawn up on 10 Feb. 1449, and likewise one of 16 who attested the return of 5 Mar. 1453.11 C219/15/6, 16/2. Following his own election two years later he seems to have attended all three of the sessions of the Parliament of 1455-6 assiduously, for he claimed wages for 119 days, covering the 114 days the Parliament and time spent journeying to and from Westminster. Even so, he only received £5 19s. of the £11 18s. due to him (at the rate of 2s. a day), and that not until he himself became mayor some 18 months after the dissolution, ‘takyng but half wages accordyng to his promys’.12 Steward’s bk. SC5/1/9, f. 34. While the Parliament was in recess, in August 1455, he was named by his kinsman John Fleming*, the recorder of Southampton, as an executor of his will. A month later his fellow burgesses chose him as sheriff. In May 1456, shortly after the Commons were dismissed, he stood surety at the Exchequer for Robert Ingoldesby and John Morell, committed the farm of alnage in Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire.13 PCC 7 Stokton (PROB11/4, f. 51); CFR, xix. 143.

That same year Clerk contracted with (Sir) Gervase Clifton*, the treasurer of Calais, to supply the garrison with victuals, but on 15 Nov. 1456 his letters of protection were revoked as he was tarrying at Westminster (perhaps fulfilling his final duties as sheriff), and had failed to carry out his commitments.14 CPR, 1452-61, p. 330. In September 1457 Clerk was reimbursed 31s. 8d. by the authorities at Southampton for various sums he had paid out in the Exchequer on the commonalty’s behalf, including 4d. for the entry in the rolls of his oath as mayor, a post he then filled for two consecutive terms.15 Steward’s bk. SC5/1/8, f. 11v. This was a period of unrest in the country generally, and ill-feeling was running especially high against foreign merchants trading in England. In Southampton, where relations with the Italians had traditionally been quite cordial, Clerk, as mayor, had to cope with a delicate situation. On 20 Sept. 1458 he wrote to Bishop Waynflete, the chancellor, explaining his difficulties in complying with a warrant under the privy seal ordering him to arrest a Genoese carrack moored in Southampton Water. Although he had arrested the purser, the mariners were intending to weigh anchor and set sail, wind and weather permitting, in defiance of the royal command. Without putting his life in jeopardy he could not remove the pilot and ship’s gear. In another letter, written home from London on 2 Nov., he reported that certain of the Genoese held prisoner in reprisal for attacks on English ships off Malta had had legal counsel, both serjeants and apprentices-at-law, assigned to them, but ‘the lordis be wroth wt them as hit ys seide’. This second letter was concerned primarily with the parlous state of Southampton’s finances, and was addressed to the auditors, exhorting them to finalize the accounts of the bailiffs and brokers. The sheriffs of the years 1456-8 were seriously in arrears on their accounts at the Exchequer. Indeed, for the second of these years ‘there ys yet no peny paide but the bare fees’, although Clerk believed that they would be brought ‘oute of thraldom’ at once if ‘ye wol wt goode herte and wille undevided and wtoute eny Ambiguyte every man hertili and diligentli putte his hande’. These exhortations notwithstanding, the steward’s books show that Clerk himself had taken £10 from the funds for his ‘duete’ at the beginning of his second mayoralty, allegedly according to ‘old usage and custom’, although such an item does not appear in other mayoral terms.16 Ibid. SC5/9, f. 34; Letters of 15th and 16th Cents. (Soton. Rec. Soc. 1921), 16-19; Italian Merchants in Southampton (Soton. Rec. Ser. i), 174-5.

The late 1450s witnessed escalating feuds among the burgesses of Southampton. One such, initially arising during the mayoralty of Nicholas Holmehegge* in 1454-5, involved a quarrel with John Chapman of Shaftesbury, yeoman-porter to the duke of Somerset, over wrongs allegedly done him by the mayor and other town officers, which was not settled until Clerk’s mayoralty in November 1457. The steward then paid Chapman 33s. 4d. to put an end to the matter, and Chapman made a quitclaim to Holmehegge, Clerk and others, including John William*, ceasing his legal actions against them.17 Steward’s bk. SC5/1/9, ff. 32v, 33. Much more serious were the disputes which divided the burgesses into political factions, with Clerk and his friends ranged against the highly litigious John Payn I* and his followers. It may be that Clerk’s stance regarding the Italian merchants proved too lenient for Payn, who by this stage was becoming increasingly aggressive towards foreigners, but their initial differences seem to have arisen from a personal quarrel in January 1456, when Clerk and William (respectively sheriff and mayor of Southampton) were up at Westminster for the third session of the Parliament of 1455. Payn was later to allege in the King’s bench that Clerk, together with John Ingoldesby, the recorder of Southampton, and John Hall II* (the prominent Salisbury merchant who had married Clerk’s sister-in-law) breached the statute of 8 Henry VI c.10 by bringing a false indictment before the j.p.s in Middlesex. This stated that Payn, abetted by his ‘servant’ Robert Basset* of London and Gabriel Fleming,18 Gabriel was s. and h. of John, the former recorder, and Clerk’s co-executor of the latter’s will. Perhaps the two men, who were related, had quarelled over its administration. had assembled with many malefactors on 20 Jan. and broken the peace at Hillingdon, where they had assaulted Clerk. Payn further alleged that at Westminster on 27 Jan. Clerk himself had attacked and wrongfully imprisoned Basset. Clerk, Ingoldesby and other of their associates, including William Rastryk, were also charged with maintenance in a suit between Payn and John William at Westminster on 22 Oct. following. Significantly, during Clerk’s first mayoralty, by then in progress, he authorized the steward of Southampton to send a pipe of wine costing £3 6s. 8d. to (Sir) John Fortescue* the chief justice, ‘that he shuld be frendly and favorable to the toun’. Clerk took out a royal pardon on 20 Jan. 1458, no doubt to protect himself from prosecution. Later, together with Hall and Richard Gryme (who succeeded him as mayor), he once more had Payn indicted before the j.p.s in Middlesex, this time for having in July 1458, together with Basset and Fleming, assaulted Rastryk at Westminster, causing a riot in breach of the peace. Furthermore, as a parishioner of Holy Rood, Southampton, he also sued several of Payn’s associates, including his son, John Payn junior, on a plea of contempt and trespass against the statutes regarding maintenance. All this while Clerk’s quarrel with Fleming had continued to be vitriolic, and he was regularly bound over to keep the peace towards him in the King’s bench, notably at Easter 1456, Michaelmas 1458 and Michaelmas 1459. One of Fleming’s allegations was that a number of Clerk’s friends, including Gryme the mayor, had illegally maintained Clerk in a suit between them in the Exchequer court. By this time too Payn’s faction was retaliating further with actions in the same court against Clerk for bringing malicious indictments of persons in one county who were dwelling in another.19 KB27/780, rots. 84d, 86, rex rot. 22; 790, rot. 3d, rex rot. 53d; 794, rots. 67, 67d, rex rots. 4d, 6; 797, rots. 9, 23d; C67/42, m. 45; steward’s bk. SC5/1/9, f. 34.

These lawsuits were still not resolved by September 1460, and evidently then played their part in provoking the disruption of the mayoral election at the guildhall in Southampton. Payn’s faction, supported by an armed mob, imposed their own candidate on the assembly, defeating those nominated by Gryme as the outgoing mayor. Clerk’s exclusion from power in Southampton was no doubt behind his decision to seek election to the Parliament summoned for 7 Oct. Clearly, his candidacy would not have been supported in a Southampton riven with disputes and now under the control of his enemies, although why he chose to stand for Chippenham in Wiltshire, a borough with which he had no known connexion, is less easy to explain. It may be, however, that his wife’s brother-in-law Hall, now returned for Salisbury, helped him to succeed at the hustings. Hall had his own reasons for seeking election to this particular Parliament, meeting in the aftermath of the Yorkist victory at Northampton, not least to clear his name on charges of treason. Both he and Clerk no doubt hoped that the privileges enjoyed by Members of the Commons would protect them, at least for a while, from further prosecution in the central courts. Process of Payn’s many suits against the two of them and Ingoldesby was continuing, and at the same time Payn was suing Clerk alone in the court of common pleas for a debt of £20. As a consequence, when Clerk arrived at Westminster to attend the Parliament as burgess for Chippenham he was arrested, imprisoned in the Counter and from thence removed to the Exchequer and committed to the Fleet, not only to answer for the £40 in which he was condemned to pay the Crown as a fine, but also for the 20 marks which he had been adjudged to pay Robert Basset in an action of trespass, and for the £20 due to Payn in an action of maintenance. He was outlawed for failing to answer Payn’s suit. This prompted ‘grete delaye’ at the start of business in the Parliament, as the Commons protested that they had always been entitled to ‘free commyng, goyng and . . . abidyng’, and that Clerk’s imprisonment was injurious to their ‘libertees and fredomes’. They requested his immediate release so he might attend Parliament daily ‘as his dute is to doo’. The Commons’ petition, having been ‘lecta, audita et plenius intellecta’, was granted by the King, saving always the rights of himself, Payn and Basset to have due justice after Parliament was dissolved.20 KB27/798, rot. 18d; CP40/799, rot. 18d; PROME, xii. 515-16.

Accordingly, after the Parliament ended and Edward IV replaced Henry VI Payn and Fleming resumed their actions against Clerk in the King’s bench. In July 1461 Clerk entered a recognizance at the staple of Westminster as bound to Payn in 50 marks, and as a consequence of his failure to pay on the appointed day a writ went out for his arrest a year later. He was committed to the Marshalsea prison, and only managed to obtain release at Easter 1463 after his wife Ellen persuaded Hall to pay 40 marks still due to Payn, and offer substantial sureties.21 KB27/799, rot. 22; 808, rot. 37; C1/50/183; C131/237/21. For the rest of his life Clerk was dogged by debts and lawsuits. He ceased to be involved in the government of Southampton or to have any influence there, especially as Payn’s faction remained in power. Although he obtained two more royal pardons,22 C67/45, mm. 16, 32. his misfortunes continued even after Payn left Southampton for good. In 1467 he petitioned the chancellor regarding an obligation in £100 in which he had been bound to Richard Ludlow, the deputy butler of 1449-50. He said he had entered the bond on the verbal condition that it would be cancelled if Ludlow suffered no trouble nor hurt by reason of his occupying the office, but that Ludlow had nevertheless sued for execution of the bond in another county, Berkshire. Ludlow responded that Clerk’s accounts showed arrears of £61 12s., and demanded costs and damages for wrongful vexation. A measure of Clerk’s fall is that a court in Southampton found against him.23 C1/31/263-5, 33/339.

Some seven years after Clerk’s death, which occurred at an unknown date in the 12 months from March 1472,24 Cart. God’s House. 359. his widow (his second wife, Elizabeth) petitoned the chancellor regarding two messuages in Southampton of which, she said, her late husband had enfeoffed (Sir) Thomas Uvedale* and others including John Hall and Walter Fettiplace† to hold to his use, and by his will had assigned to her and her heirs in fee. The surviving feoffees refused to transfer ownership, with Fettiplace responding that so far as he understood the arrangement, he had been enfeoffed to the use of Clerk and his former wife, Ellen, for term of their lives, then to the use of Clerk’s son John and his heirs. He suggested that John be summoned to the court so that he and his stepmother might ‘enterplede’. Hall in his turn testified that originally enfeoffments of the property had been made to ensure repayment to him of the 40 marks he had spent to get Clerk out of prison, and that after he had been repaid the feoffees were to hold to the use of Clerk and his son. He stated that after Clerk died John agreed that Hall might keep the property until he had recouped his money, to which was added a further £9 lent to the young man. Hall still had not been satisfied.25 C1/50/182-4. Elizabeth’s troubles were compounded by the theft of silver plate valued at £21 from her house, although this may have been recovered following the indictment of a local apothecary for the offence.26 KB9/339/47.