COTYNGHAM, Robert

A mercer and ‘chapman’, Cotyngham was active by 1420-1 when he served a term as bailiff of Wycombe. He is next heard of in September 1429, as a member of the jury at the Buckinghamshire inquisition post mortem held at Wycombe for Sir William Moleyns (son and heir of Sir Wm Moleyns†).3 CIPM, xxiii. 392. A quarter of a century after serving as bailiff, he became mayor of the borough, having in the meantime represented it in Parliament. By contrast, his father was apparently never bailiff or mayor, although John did sit for Wycombe in at least three Parliaments.

Like John, Cotyngham was a tenant of Bassetbury, the manor encompassing most of Wycombe, and from which at various times he held land at Londwater (a nearby village), Oakridge and ‘Netherpenelfeld’.4 St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, recs., ct. rolls, Wycombe and Bassetsbury,1395-1459, XV/15/1; DL29/653/10565, m. 17; 655/19597, m. 2. He also inherited a messuage at Wycombe from John, although his title to this property was far from assured. At some stage after his father’s death, he was the defendant in a Chancery suit brought by William Holt, who claimed that John had only ever held the messuage as a feoffee to the use of his own father, John Holt. Cotyngham responded by asserting that John Cotyngham had bought the messuage for £40, but there is no record of how the dispute ended. The MP was also a defendant in Chancery on at least one other occasion. In this second suit, again of uncertain date, John Pesey alleged that his late father, Thomas Pesey, had conveyed lands at West Wycombe, Hughenden and Marlow in trust to Cotyngham, who was now refusing to release his title to these properties.5 C1/16/383; 17/159; C4/2/111.

No stranger to litigation, Robert was himself a plaintiff shortly after completing his term as mayor, on this occasion in the court of common pleas at Westminster, where he sued a fellow townsman and two other men from Buckinghamshire for debts totalling £8 13s. 4d. He also took action in the same court against a yeoman from Dinton, again for debt, in the mid 1450s, winning his suit at the assizes held in Buckinghamshire in the spring of 1455. Later that year, the common pleas summoned him to Westminster, to serve as a juror in a suit that the abbot of Walden, Essex, had brought against the vicar of Amersham. In yet another suit of the same decade, Cotyngham was the defendant. The plaintiff was John Stocton, a prominent London mercer and the brother of a former burgess of Wycombe, the late William Stocton I*. John’s suit, which came to pleadings in Trinity term 1457, shows that he had employed Cotyngham as his receiver, presumably at Wycombe. He claimed that Robert owed him over £6 in arrears, arising from an account made between the parties at London four years earlier. Cotyngham denied the claim but then failed to reappear in the common pleas on a given day in February 1458. In response to this default, the court awarded Stocton his debt and damages of 20s.6 CP40/751, rot. 472d; 771, rots. 74d, 220d; 779, rots. 215, 309d; 786, rot. 122d.

Early in the following decade, Cotyngham was involved in a Chancery suit as a witness. The plaintiff, John Welsbourne II*of Wycombe, was acting in his capacity as the executor of Margaret, widow of John Hill II*, and he alleged that two of Margaret’s feoffees, Walter Colard* and the priest Thomas Skaryngton, had refused to make a release of properties in the borough which she had conveyed to them in trust. In due course the court commissioned the abbot of Thame and the judge Robert Danvers* to examine local witnesses and the examinations were held in Danvers’ presence at Wycombe on 5 Sept. 1461. The seven men examined, among them the mayor and Cotyngham, were chosen as witnesses because they were of good reputation and ‘the saddyst and wurshypfullest men’ of the borough. The testimony they gave supported Welsbourne’s claims and a few weeks later the court decreed that Colard and Skaryngton should make the desired release.7 C1/27/300-1; 29/23-24. Ironically, at the beginning of the same year the Crown had placed Cotyngham on a commission ordered to arrest Welsbourne and others of Wycombe. Quite possibly, the commission had been politically motivated since, although Henry VI was still on the throne, the Yorkists controlled the government in London at that date and Welsbourne was a member of the Lancastrian royal household.8 CPR, 1452-61, p. 658.

At the beginning of 1464, Cotyngham was again a party to a lawsuit in the common pleas, this time as the defendant. The plaintiffs, the executors of Richard Hill, a London haberdasher, alleged that he had failed to pay for goods purchased from Hill at London in the autumn of 1455. Cotyngham declined to answer their suit directly. Instead, he sought to have it overruled on a technicality, pointing out that they had referred to him as ‘of Wycombe’ in their original writ and claiming that they should have specified either Chipping Wycombe or West Wycombe. The parties agreed that a jury should decide upon the matter, although in the event the case does not appear to have reached trial.9 CP40/811, rot. 101.

Cotyngham may have died before the end of the same decade, perhaps in 1467: he attested the return of Wycombe’s MPs to Parliament in May that year, but Oakridge and Londwater were no longer in his tenure at the following Michaelmas.10 DL29/655/19597, m. 2. It is likely that John Cotyngham, a Wycombe chapman of the mid fifteenth century, was his son and that Richard Cotyngham, who attended the Wycombe election to the Parliament of 1442 and farmed land on the manor of Bassetsbury, was another close relative.11 CPR, 1452-61, p. 268; C1/27/212. The frequently inaccurate L.J. Ashford, Hist. Wycombe, 54, asserts that John was Robert’s son.