BALDRY, William

An Ipswich burgess with a particularly wide-ranging career, Baldry attained his greatest prominence following the accession of Edward IV. His origins are obscure but a case heard in the court of common pleas at Westminster suggests that he was a native of Norfolk and of humble background. Baldry was the plaintiff in this suit, which he brought against three high-born defendants in 1455: John Mowbray, 3rd duke of Norfolk; Mowbray’s stepfather, John, Viscount Beaumont, and the duke’s mother, Katherine, at that date the wife of Beaumont. In pleadings of Michaelmas term that year he claimed they (in reality, no doubt, their servants) had forcibly broken into his close at Lopham in south Norfolk the previous July and cut down his crops. For their part, they declared that the site of the alleged trespass was three acres of land and meadow that his late mother, Katherine Baldry, had held as a tenant on the Mowbray manor at Lopham, a property the viscountess held in dower by virtue of her marriage to the 2nd duke of Norfolk. Furthermore, the plaintiff possessed no right to the holding since his illegitimacy had disqualified him from succeeding to his late mother’s tenancy. After Baldry responded to this plea by asserting that he was in fact legitimate, the court referred the matter to the bishop of Norwich. The bishop held an inquiry on 9 Feb. 1456, which found that Baldry was indeed a bastard.8 CP40/779, rot. 440. Yet his illegitimacy did not preclude a successful career stretching well beyond Ipswich. His interests elsewhere, particularly the links he developed with London, probably explain why he was not more involved in the administration of the borough.

A deed of October 1445, relating to a conveyance of property in the town in which he was one of the parties provides the earliest known reference to Baldry.9 Stowe Ch. 399. In the following April the town authorities granted him the lease of a plot of land in the parish of St. Mary at the Quay for a rent of 2d. p.a.10 Ipswich Bor. Archs. (Suff. Rec. Soc. xliii), 301. Baldry’s business affairs were in complete contrast to such small-scale property interests, for he was a wealthy merchant. In the late 1440s or early 1450 he and other English merchants went to Prussia where they chartered a Dutch ship to carry merchandise back to England. Unfortunately for them, French and Breton ships intercepted the vessel on its journey home. It escaped these enemies, only subsequently to land – or run aground – somewhere near Spurn Head in the East Riding of Yorkshire, where it fell into the hands of the local inhabitants. Perhaps in response to a petition from Baldry and his fellows, the King commissioned Sir John Melton* and others in August 1450 to secure the vessel and its cargo while the question of ownership was decided.11 CPR, 1446-52, p. 389. On one occasion, either in the later 1440s or the first half of the 1450s, a fellow burgess from Ipswich, John Caldwell*, sued Baldry in the Chancery. Caldwell claimed that he had made William his factor and delivered four packs of woollen cloth worth £200 to him to trade for other merchandise in Prussia, but that Baldry had afterwards failed to hand over the goods he had brought home.12 C1/16/427. Baldry was also the subject of a similar complaint that another merchant, Robert Leyre of London, brought against him in the court of common pleas. When his suit reached pleadings in Michaelmas term 1454, Leyre asserted that he had entrusted £30 worth of grain to Baldry in London for safe-keeping in May the previous year, only for the latter to refuse to return it when requested. The matter was referred to a jury, although a trial had yet to occur a year later. The records of this case show that Baldry was already connected with the City in this period, for they refer to him as ‘lately’ of both Ipswich and London.13 CP40/775, rot. 565; 779, rot. 306d. Prussia was not Baldry’s only foreign market, for he was among those who received a licence to export goods to Spain from the Crown in November 1457, and he received another such licence to trade abroad the following year.14 DKR, xlviii. 424, 431.

A royal pardon issued to Baldry in the following January referred to him as ‘of Ipswich, merchant, and London, draper’.15 C67/42, m. 1. It is possible that relatives residing in the City or connexions with its drapers helped him to establish himself there, but it is not clear whether he was ever actually formally admitted into the Drapers’ Company.16 Baldry is listed in P. Boyd, Roll of Drapers’ Co. 10, but there is no proof of any formal admission of him to its ranks. Before the mid 1460s, however, he was perhaps still more associated with Ipswich than London, given that it was for the borough that he was elected to the successive Parliaments of 1460 and 1461. The accession of Edward IV marked a watershed for Baldry, who was quick to show loyalty to the new King. He may have owed his links with the Yorkist regime to the influence of (Sir) John Howard*, a prominent supporter of Edward in East Anglia who employed Richard Felawe*, the other MP for Ipswich in 1460 and 1461, as a factor. It is also possible that Baldry’s loyalties already lay with the Yorkists, who dominated the government during the first of these assemblies, which met before Edward IV seized the throne. Whether or not Howard helped to forge those loyalties, the chances are that Baldry, in common with other Ipswich burgesses, had business dealings with him. Howard’s household books record that ‘Baldry’ owed him £30 in 1464, and that he received 16s. 8d. from ‘Baldery’ 17 years later.17 Howard Household Bks. ed. Crawford, i. 185; ii. 43.

During the early years of Edward’s reign Baldry was much engaged on naval affairs on the Crown’s behalf. In May 1461 he and other Ipswich burgesses received a commission during pleasure to supply foodstuffs to the royal fleet. Subsequently, he supplied wheat, malt, oxen, mutton, fish and other foodstuffs to the King’s ships at Ipswich and Sandwich, and to vessels at sea under the command of the earl of Kent.18 CPR, 1461-7, p. 13; E404/72/1/53; E405/40, mm. 4d, 5, 5d; E403/825, mm. 8, 12; 827A, m. 10; 829, mm. 1, 7. In July 1461 the Crown ordered the Exchequer to reimburse Baldry and Philip Harneys, master of the King’s ordnance, for some £170 they had spent on supplies for another royal ship, the 620 sheaves of arrows and a large quantity of gunpowder, as well as more mundane items like the pots and dishes those on board required.19 E404/72/1/17. Another warrant of 20 Oct. that year ordered the delivery of similar supplies to Baldry for the use of the Margarete of Ipswich.20 E404/72/1/53. By then Baldry was the clerk of the Margarete, a vessel he would have known well. At one stage, he was its part-owner, but he had sold or otherwise relinquished his interest in it to the King by mid 1462.21 CPR, 1461-7, p. 229. On the same 20 Oct., the Exchequer issued £20 to Baldry to buy canon for the Margarete, and a further £82 16s. to him and Harneys to acquire gunpowder for another ship, the Margarete of Orwell. In the following month, Baldry received yet more money from the Crown, this time to enable him to purchase tar, pitch and 200 cannon balls for the Ipswich Margarete.22 E403/824, mm. 2, 3. Later, in July 1462, the Exchequer received orders to pay him, John Ingoldesby (shortly to become a baron of the Exchequer) and Geoffrey Kent no less than £2,000, to use on supplying the King’s ships and paying the personnel on board them.23 E404/72/2/32. Apart from his official duties, Baldry supported the Yorkist Crown with loans and supplied it with wine. He lent Edward IV as much as £200 in March 1466, as well as further sums of £50 and £40 later in the same decade,24 E403/842, m. 13; E405/51, mm. 1d, 2. and he received over £5 from the Exchequer in the spring of 1473, in payment for wine he had provided the King.25 E405/56, m. 4.

Soon after his accession, Edward rewarded Baldry for his support and services with grants of office away from Ipswich. The King made the first of these grants in the summer of 1461, when he assigned the position of water-bailiff of Calais to Baldry and Thomas Martyn, a vintner from London, to hold jointly for their lives in survivorship.26 C76/145, m. 1. As it happened, Martyn took out letters of protection just a few weeks later, prior to crossing the Channel as a member of the retinue of (Sir) Walter Blount*, treasurer of Calais,27 C76/145, m. 33. although for his co-bailiff (not known to have gone to Calais) the appointment was probably a sinecure. Just over a year later, however, the Crown appointed Baldry searcher of London and adjoining ports, an office he certainly exercised in person. It was a lucrative position, since he was entitled to a share of any goods he confiscated. Among his many seizures were 2,000 tennis balls and £416 5s. in silver coins which he found on a ship berthed at Woolwich.28 E122/186/3. One night in the spring of 1465 he boarded a barge moored on the Thames at Northfleet where he seized £130 worth of coins, but his zeal caused a problem for the authorities, since the money belonged to Louis XI of France. After meeting with his council, Edward IV decided to release the money to Louis’s factor rather than offend the French king over a relatively trivial matter, and to reward Baldry with £40 for his trouble.29 E122/186/2; E404/73/1/41. From time to time, while searcher Baldry faced claims from those to whom the Crown had assigned sums from the monies he had received for it. In June 1464, for example, the keeper of the wardrobe, George Darell, began proceedings against him in the Exchequer over £20 for wardrobe expenses. The case concluded two years later when Baldry acknowledged his opponent’s claim and paid him that sum along with £1 damages.30 E13/150, rot. 26; 151, rot. 94. A few months after Darell began his suit, Baldry had to reappear in the Exchequer to answer a claim of William Langley and other grooms and pages of the Household over an assignment of £26 13s. 4d.31 E13/150, rot. 60. In the same period Baldry lost another case in the Exchequer that two Londoners had brought against him for withholding goods that they had entrusted to him for safe-keeping.32 E13/150, rots. 55d, 61d. Later, in Trinity term 1473, he was subject to yet more proceedings in the same court, this time on the part of the prominent Yorkist and Knight of the Garter, Sir John Astley. The former captain of Alnwick, Astley had fallen into the hands of the Lancastrian Queen Margaret in 1462; she had sent him to France where he had endured several years of captivity before he was ransomed. To compensate his servant, Edward IV had assigned monies to Astley in 1464, including just over £95 from the issues of Baldry’s office of searcher of London, the sum the knight was now claiming in his suit. Baldry responded by seeking and obtaining licence to treat with Sir John out of court.33 E13/159, rot. 18d; Edw. IV’s French Expedition of 1475 ed. Barnard, 42.

Baldry must have spent a great deal of time in the capital after becoming searcher, and a Chancery suit that Perys Storke brought against him in the later 1460s referred to him as ‘of London’. According to Storke, in 1467 Baldry had led a party of five English ships to Bordeaux, where they had picked up a cargo of wine. Before they could depart, however, the ‘submaire’ of Bordeaux had detained the vessels over the failure to pay certain duties, whereupon Baldry had borrowed over £16 from a local merchant to secure their release. Storke was one of the sureties for this loan, which, he claimed, remained unpaid and for which the French merchant was now suing him in the city of London. Baldry responded by simply denying borrowing any money or asking Storke to stand surety on his behalf.34 C1/31/114-15.

In August 1469 and again the following January Baldry received a commission to hear the appeals of London merchants against judgements made against them in the court of the admiralty.35 CPR, 1467-77, pp. 171, 184-5. By October 1469 he was bailiff of Billingsgate, in which month the mayor and aldermen of the City ordered that in future neither he nor any of his successors in that office should take fees when grain was weighed in their bailiwick. Baldry may have been bailiff for some time, since it was noted that he had become accustomed to take such fees, although it is not known if he still held the office when the ordinance was annulled in January 1472.36 Cal. Letter Bk. London, L, 87, 95.

It was probably in his capacity as searcher that Baldry began a suit in the Exchequer against the prior of Holy Trinity, London, lately a collector of a clerical tenth in London and Middlesex, in the autumn of 1475. In his suit he sought, by virtue of a tally of late 1474, the sum of £21 8s. 5d., assigned to him in November 1474 from the monies that the prior had received as collector.37 E13/161, rot. 30. Baldry finally ceased his duties as searcher in the port of London (which he had relinquished for a couple of years in the later 1460s) in November 1479, and in the same month he was pardoned for all offences against a statute of 1442 forbidding those holding such an office to trade.38 CPR, 1476-85, p. 166.

It was in London rather than Ipswich that Baldry held his last known office, that of an assessor of a benevolence of 1481.39 It is not clear whether he was the William Baldry who, in association with William Frankelyn, received £20 from (Sir) William Stonor† in May 1480: Stonor Letters, ii (Cam. Soc. ser. 3, xxx), 169. He did not survive much beyond this date, for he was no longer alive on 21 May 1484 when Joan, his widow and executor, received a royal pardon.40 C67/51, m. 24. He was succeeded by his son and heir Thomas.