COTES, John

The Cotes family had been established at Hunningham from the reign of Henry III, at about that time changing their name from Monteferrard. Despite holding land in two counties – they also held the manor of Cotes Dayville in Leicestershire – they numbered only among the lesser gentry.2 VCH Warws. vi. 118; J. Nichols, Leics. iv (1), 212; CIPM, vii. 294. The most notable member of the family before our MP was Roger Cotes, steward of John de Warenne, earl of Surrey, in the reign of Edw. II: W. Dugdale, Warws. i. 359. John Cotes’s father, William, was a poll tax collector in Warwickshire in 1381, but little else is recorded of his activities and he probably died comparatively young.3 CFR, ix. 237, 245. He certainly died young enough for his widow to have a family by a second husband, Edward Metley.4 She had married Metley by 1 May 1386: CPR, 1385-9, p. 329. On 24 Apr. 1404 our MP, probably soon after coming of age, entered into a strangely disadvantageous arrangement with this couple. He confirmed the settlement made by his father’s last surviving feoffee, Ralph, vicar of Harbury. The vicar had granted John’s mother a life estate in not only her own inheritance but also the bulk of the Cotes lands, and had additionally conceded to Metley a life interest in her land at Napton-on-the-Hill, not far from Hunningham. Our MP’s confirmation of these grants effectively excluded him from most of his patrimony.5 CP40/576, cart. rot. 1. It is difficult to distinguish between the lands his mother held in her own right and those she had in jointure from his father: C. Carpenter, Locality and Polity, 127n.; Jurkowski, 258. It is hard to imagine that he made this surrender happily, but there is no evidence that he had any resentment towards his stepfather. Indeed, in June 1401 he had been implicated along with him and his mother in an obscure but violent episode, the murder of William, son and heir of the Derbyshire knight, Sir John Kniveton of Bradley, who had himself been murdered only a few days before.6 KB9/191/32a; Jurkowski, 255-61. None the less, even if he then felt little resentment about his mother’s interest in his inheritance, he cannot have foreseen how damaging it would be to his material prospects. She was blessed with remarkable longevity, and this explains why he played very little part in local affairs in the first part of his career. After he confirmed her interest in his lands in 1404, nothing further is known of him until he appears, described as ‘of Hunningham’, on a list of 13 Warwickshire landholders considered best able to perform military service, drawn up in response to a royal writ dated 29 Dec. 1419.7 E28/97/32B.

Yet despite these unpromising circumstances, Cotes succeeded in making a career for himself. He won an annuity from the leading Warwickshire magnate, Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, appearing in the earl’s surviving receiver-general’s account for 1420-1.8 SC6/1303/12, m. 2. This attachment may have assisted him in making a profitable marriage. On 22 Oct. 1425 he secured a royal licence, on payment of £5, to marry the widow of an Oxfordshire tenant-in-chief. She held in dower the manor of Albury near Thame with parcels of land in nearby vills. This was a valuable holding: on 6 Feb. 1429 the couple demised them to her son, Thomas Baldington, at an annual rent of £20 13s. 4d.9 CPR, 1422-9, p. 321; CIPM, xxiv. 621; xxv. 559. Since our MP appears to have left a son and heir, Thomas, and Joan had a son as early as 1403, it is likely that she was his 2nd wife and not the mother of his heir: CIPM, xxii. 528. Cotes’s income may have been further supplemented by his mother, who, after the death of Metley (which had occurred before May 1426), seems to have surrendered some of the family patrimony to him. This would explain why he made his public career in Warwickshire rather than Oxfordshire, and perhaps also why he brought actions concerning property at Hunningham. In Easter term 1428 he appeared in person in the court of common pleas to sue John, master of the hospital of St. John of Warwick, for ten acres of meadow there, given to the hospital in free alms by his ancestors, Silvester de Monteferrard and Richard Corbyzun, and allegedly alienated by the master against the form of the gifts.10 CP40/669, rot. 132. The matter was still pending in 1435: CP40/693, rot. 325d. That he held some of his patrimony even in his mother’s lifetime is implied by the subsidy returns of 1436: he was assessed at a respectable income of £26 p.a.11 His mother was assessed at £30, some of which must have been derived from her own inheritance: E179/192/59.

Cotes was active in the county’s affairs from the mid 1420s. On 19 July 1426 he sat on an important jury which awarded damages to John Catesby*, the husband of his mother’s maternal half-sister, in an assize of novel disseisin brought by Catesby against Sir William Mountfort*; and in 1429 he was named to the unwelcome office of a tax collector, perhaps because Mountfort was one of the MPs responsible for making the nomination.12 JUST1/978/5; CFR, xv. 294. Thereafter he assumed a more prominent role. He attested the elections of 1431 and 1432 before himself being returned, in company with his half-brother, Nicholas Metley* (a prominent lawyer), at the hustings held on 22 June 1433.13 C219/14/2-4. In 1435 he was named as a feoffee by Robert Arderne* along with many leading local figures, headed by the earl of Warwick, and in early 1437 Catesby chose him and Metley as feoffees in an attempt to keep his lands out of royal wardship.14 C139/153/21; E40/4377, 10411. Cotes, Catesby and Nicholas Metley shared a common grandmother in Margaret, daughter of Edmund Watford.

Cotes seems to have enjoyed friendly relations with his half-brother, despite their potential conflict of interest not only over the Cotes lands held by their mother but also over the descent of the property she held in her own right. On Metley’s death in November 1437, however, a conflict arose. Either a month later or in December 1438 Cotes allegedly assaulted Metley’s widow, Joan, at Humberstone in Leicestershire, the home of another lawyer, Richard Hotoft*, to whom she was already married or else was soon to marry, and feloniously stole as many as 380 sheep worth £40. On 13 Apr. 1439, he was duly indicted before the Leicestershire j.p.s, among whom was Hotoft himself, and two days later a further indictment was laid against him at the sheriff’s tourn. In the following Trinity term Hotoft and his wife pursued their advantage by suing him for the massive sum of £600. The outcome of this action has not been traced, but it is likely that the parties compromised their competing claims. Cotes’s acquittal before the justices of assize on 23 Feb. 1441 is indicative of a settlement.15 The civil action gives 9 Dec. 1437; the indictment before the j.p.s 12 Dec. 1437; and that before the sheriff, 12 Dec. 1438: KB27/713, rots. 18, 29, rex rot. 21; KB9/230B/191, 222. The fact that both indictment and civil action were delayed until 1439 supports the later date, but there is another explanation for the delay. Carpenter has suggested that Cotes was protected from indictment by the earl of Warwick and that the j.p.s were prepared to act only when the earl lay dying at Calais: Carpenter, 401-2. It is much more likely that Hotoft was responsible for the indictments, and that they came only after his marriage to Joan. The placing of the offence at Humberstone, as the civil action has it, or nearby Little Stretton, as the indictments have it, may be a fiction to allow for legal process in Leics. rather than Warws. For related litigation in the ct. of c.p.: CP40/713, rot. 302; 714, rot. 278. The reason for this quarrel is unknown. In the immediate aftermath of Metley’s death, our MP appears to have been on good terms with the widow. According to a contemporary account of a protracted dispute over the land sales which followed the lawyer’s demise, Cotes was among those ‘frendes and welwillers’ who advised her (described as ‘a stybourn and a gret-herted woman’) to make ‘hasty sale’ of specified lands to such ‘as wolde paie redy money in avoydyng forfeiteur of certenz penaltes of certens obligacions’ in which her late husband was bound.16 E163/29/11, m. 1. One can only speculate as to why relations so quickly broke down. The point at issue may have been the clause in Metley’s will which provided for the sale of lands in Bedfordshire, Berkshire and Northamptonshire to provide for the children of John Metley, his brother.17 Shakespeare Centre Archs., Baddesley Clinton mss, DR3/258. It is possible that these lands were the inheritance of Cotes’s mother – the sale was to be made by her discretion – and, if so, Cotes, as her eldest son, had every reason to object. Perhaps Hotoft, described in the account cited above, as ‘a grette doer in his countre’, was the intended purchaser, and it was this that led our MP to take action.

It was at this point that Cotes belatedly inherited his patrimony. The precise date of his mother’s death is unknown: she survived Metley for a short period at least, but she was dead by May 1443. Our MP’s appointment as escheator in November 1441 suggests that he may have come into his entire patrimony by then. As his dispute with Hotoft implies, he had greater difficulty securing Margaret’s own inheritance. Soon after her death he addressed a petition to Chancellor John Stafford, bishop of Bath and Wells, complaining that one of his late mother’s feoffees, Richard Hawkins, parson of Edith Weston in Rutland, had refused to abide her instructions to convey to him four messuages and four virgates of land in Watford in Northamptonshire.18 C1/11/155. In the late 1450s Margaret, da. and h. of Nicholas Metley, and her husband, John Hugford*, sued the same feoffee for the same lands, further evidence that it was these lands that occasioned our MP’s dispute with Metley’s widow: C1/26/533.

By this date Cotes’s best years were behind him, and he did not live long to enjoy his new affluence. He was dead by 24 Feb. 1449 when a writ of diem clausit extremum was issued in respect of his Warwickshire lands. Either it was not acted upon or no inquisition survives.19 CFR, xviii. 97. His executors were his widow and putative son, Thomas: CP40/756, rot. 19d. After his death the family, for reasons that are unclear, continued to decline. By 1500 they had sold their ancient manors of Hunningham and Cotes Dayville.20 Carpenter, 133-4; VCH Warws. vi. 118; CP40/887, cart. rot. 1d; J. Biancalana, Fee Tail and Common Recovery, 378, 386. They had also alienated an inheritance acquired through the marriage of our MP’s presumed son and heir, Thomas, to Agnes, daughter of Edmund Bibbesworth† of Bibbesworth in Hertfordshire: on the death of her nephew, Thomas Bibbesworth, in 1485, their son, John Cotes, had inherited lands in Essex, but he sold them in 1489.21 CIPM Hen. VII, i. 71-72; CCR, 1485-1500, 61; Essex Feet of Fines, iv. 90-91; Biancalana, 385-6. To replace these losses they had acquired a share of the lands of the Hugfords of Emscote, including, rather ironically, the property that had come to them through the daughter and heiress of Nicholas Metley. Even this windfall, however, they did not retain for long.22 CIPM Hen. VII, ii. 913; VCH Warws. vi. 275.