BARTON, John II

A butcher by trade, from 1420 until his death Barton rented from the guild merchant of Reading a property variously described as a tenement in the market, a garden by the guildhall, or a messuage and garden, for which he paid 5s. p.a., and a new meat-stall among the ‘foreign’ butchers, for 8d. a year. Together with another butcher he also took responsibility for the ‘Sleynghous’ in Gutter Lane (for which an annual rent of 10s. was due to the guild), doing so from 1422 to 1427.1 Berks. Arch. Jnl. lxi. 64-65; Berks. RO, Reading cofferers’ accts. R/FA/2, nos. 12-22. At Michaelmas term 1423 he was sued by one Henry Martyn in the court of common pleas for allegedly stealing goods worth £40 in the town.2 CP40/651, rot. 394d. More seriously, at an unknown date between July 1424 and March 1426, a petition was sent to the chancellor by two men from Henley, complaining that although proclamation had been made by the j.p.s for Berkshire that strangers might trade freely in victuals in Reading, when they tried to do so Barton and three other local butchers had seized their merchandise and threatened to beat and kill them.3 C1/6/186. While, if the allegations were true, Barton was overly aggressive, he may have been acting in an official capacity to protect the interests of his fellow members of the guild merchant.4 But he was not mayor in 1424-5, as given in C. Coates, Hist. Reading, app. xiv, for the mayoralty was then occupied by Robert Godwyn: cofferers’ accts. R/FA/2, no. 14; C219/13/3.

Barton attested three parliamentary elections at Reading,5 C219/12/4, 5, 14/4. and in the meantime he himself was returned to the Parliament summoned to Leicester in 1426. His two appointments to collect taxes in Berkshire most likely involved service in Reading itself, as happened in 1428 when he conducted an inquiry there regarding subsidies.6 Feudal Aids, i. 71. In April 1432 he was named on the council of 24 selected by the burgesses to conduct negotiations with the abbot of Reading regarding their liberties, matters which may well have included their controversial erection of a slaughter-house for butchers living outside the town.7 Reading Recs. ed. Guilding, i. 1; Coates, 53-54. Barton is not recorded after his appointment as a tax collector in February 1434, and that same year a bequest of 6s. 8d. was made in his name to the parish church of St. Laurence.8 C. Kerry, Hist. St. Laurence, 185. In 1435-6 property in Reading which he had leased from the Stonor family for 24s. p.a. was in the tenure of Thomas Lavyngton*.9 SC6/1122/19.