FORSTER, Richard II

One of at least three sons, Forster originated from Stanton Drew in north Somerset, where his younger brother Stephen was baptized. The latter pursued a successful career in London, while Thomas, the other brother, continued to reside in their home parish.7 PCC 15 Stokton (PROB11/4, ff. 112-13). Richard Forster himself always remained strongly linked with his native Somerset, and contemporaries still sometimes referred to him ‘of Publow’, a neighbouring parish of Stanton Drew, even after he had begun his career at Bristol.8 CPR, 1422-9, p. 452; 1429-36, p. 80; CCR, 1429-35, p. 162. At Stanton Drew, he and his wife Joan were tenants for life of a moiety of a messuage known as ‘Milleplace’, along with corn and fulling mills, a meadow and ten acres of land. They held these properties of fellow Bristolians, first the Clerk family and later the lawyer Richard Chokke, who acquired the Clerk estates there in 1449.9 CCR, 1447-54, pp. 199, 242-3, 436-7. Elsewhere in Somerset, the couple and their eldest son, another Richard Forster, obtained holdings in East Harptree, a parish situated between Bristol and Wells, from Philip Hampton and Alice his wife in 1431. This was not an outright alienation by the Hamptons, for the conveyance in question was to the Forsters for their lives, after which these lands were to revert to the grantors and to Alice’s heirs.10 Som. Feet of Fines, ii (Som. Rec. Soc. xxii), 79.

Forster also acquired interests in neighbouring Gloucestershire and, further afield, in Buckinghamshire. In April 1427 John Stafford, bishop of Bath and Wells, granted to him, his wife Joan and their sons, Richard and John, a messuage and lands at Serridge and Henfield within his manor of Pucklechurch in Gloucestershire, to hold for their lives for a rent of 40s. p.a. The grant, along with letters of acknowledgement from the dean and chapter of Wells and the prior and convent at Bath, was entered on the patent rolls in the following November.11 CPR, 1422-9, p. 452. Two years later, the bishop assigned another messuage and lands in Pucklechurch to the Forsters, to hold at an annual rent of 31s. 4d., a grant which, along with further letters from the cathedrals of Bath and Wells, was likewise enrolled, as was the confirmation that the bishop made of both grants in 1435.12 CPR, 1422-9, pp. 80, 599-600. Relatively short lived, Forster’s interests in Buckinghamshire appear to have arisen from a mortgage. In 1437 Isabel, widow of the lawyer John Barton I*, conveyed a manor at Padbury in that county to him and his feoffees in return for 600 marks, with the option of redeeming the property for 700 marks within the next three years. Soon afterwards, this arrangement was the subject of a dispute between the two parties, prompting Isabel to sue Forster in the Chancery. In her bill, she alleged that she had received only 300 marks from Forster, who had taken silver plate worth that amount from her as a pledge. Afterwards she and Forster had come to a new arrangement, by which he had agreed to return the manor and plate to her if she repaid the 300 marks and an additional sum of £40 by a given day. Her complaint was that Forster, having later refused to accept her offer to repay these sums within the time limit, was unjustly retaining the property and plate. The outcome of Isabel’s Chancery suit is unknown, although subsequent conveyances indicate that the parties must have reached an accommodation, for Forster surrendered his claim to the manor. In November 1439 he transferred it to Robert Danvers* and others, who in the following month granted Isabel an annuity of 28 marks from the property and then conveyed it to the Crown in January 1442. Three months later, it was among various estates that the King granted to All Souls, Oxford, the royal foundation to which Isabel left other manors previously held by her late husband.13 The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 142; C1/39/70; VCH Bucks. iv. 212.

At Bristol, Forster resided in Temple parish, although he also held property in other parts of the town. Perhaps his most significant acquisition there was that of holdings previously belonging to a fellow burgess, Thomas Blount†. Before he died in 1441, Blount sold the reversion of his dwelling house with shops and gardens in Temple Street, tenements in the same street and Tucker Street and a plot of land with a drying room in St. Thomas Street to Forster for £200. The reversion was to vest after the deaths of Blount and his second wife Margaret, although how long she survived her husband is unknown. Forster already owned shops in Temple Street when Blount made his will, which reveals that they lay next to the testator’s house.14 CP40/760, rot. 293; Gt. Red Bk. of Bristol, ii. 212-13; Bristol Wills, 122, 127, 130. Over the years Forster was also involved in conveyances of real property in Bristol and elsewhere in south-west England as a feoffee and witness on behalf of others, among them the prominent Bristolian lawyer Sir John Juyn.15 Recs. All Saints Bristol, iii. 400, 401, 413; Bristol RO, St. Thomas the Martyr parish recs., P/St.T/D/134-6; The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 258; CCR, 1419-22, p. 111; 1429-35, p. 162; 1441-7, p. 115; Cat. Med. Muns. Berkeley Castle ed. Wells-Furby (Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc.), ii. 844; Bristol RO, Christchurch deeds, 26166/59.

The close relationship that Forster enjoyed with Thomas Blount might suggest that the two men were business colleagues. In earlier years, Forster had also had dealings with John Burton I*, one of the foremost Bristol staplers of the first half of the fifteenth century, although he fell out with Burton in the later 1420s, suing him in the court of common pleas. When the case came to pleadings in Michaelmas term 1428, he alleged that John owed him money, a debt arising from a bond made between them at London in August 1424. By means of this security, Burton had undertaken to pay him £244 (presumably in connexion with some business dealing) at Michaelmas 1425. While acknowledging that Burton had paid £184 of this sum, Forster asserted that £40 remained outstanding. Burton responded by seeking and obtaining licence to negotiate with his opponent out of court until Hilary term 1429. In the following term, he put in a plea that Forster had formally acquitted him of the £40, but the latter claimed that this release related to the payment of £184. Although the parties agreed to a trial, Burton subsequently obtained further licence to treat with Forster out of court, and it is likely that they resolved the dispute informally.16 CP40/671, rot. 320d; 673, rot. 110d. Forster’s main business interests were in the cloth trade. He shipped a consignment of cloth to Bordeaux on a ship called the George of Bristol in the summer of 1430, and a royal pardon of 1437 referred to him as a ‘draper’ as well as a ‘merchant’.17 E122/18/22; C67/38, m. 14 (7 July). In February 1437, he received a royal licence to trade abroad with the Gracedieu of Bristol, a ship then in the port of London. With the exception of the territories of the king of Denmark, his licence permitted him to trade with any land that was then at peace with England.18 Overseas Trade (Bristol Rec. Soc. vii), 63.

As one of the most prominent Bristol merchants of his day, Forster possessed considerable status in the town, making him a natural candidate for municipal office and a seat in Parliament. His career as an office-holder at Bristol followed a generally conventional pattern. Having served a term as one of the town’s bailiffs in 1429-30, he became sheriff in 1433, began the first of two terms as constable of the staple in the following year and the first of his three as mayor in 1436. As was quite usual, during each of his periods in the mayoralty he was concurrently mayor of the local staple; more unusually, his last couple of terms as mayor of the town, served after he had sat in his sole Parliament, were consecutive. During the same latter two terms, Henry VI twice visited and stayed at Bristol, first on 31 Aug. and 1 Sept. 1447 and secondly on 1-2 Aug. 1448.19 B.P. Wolffe, Hen. VI, 366, 367. Apart from his municipal offices, Forster received several ad hoc commissions from the King, two of which arose from his Membership of the Parliament of 1445 and related to taxes granted by the Commons in that assembly. Forster also acted for the central authorities on at least one other occasion, for in late August 1442 he was among those at Bristol whom the council appointed to see to the purveyance and transport of 1,000 quarters of wheat to Bayonne. To recover the expenses they would incur, he and his associates received licence to export other merchandise free of custom or subsidy.20 PPC, v. 207.

It was following his first term as mayor of Bristol that Forster found himself facing demands from the Exchequer for various sums charged to the account for his period of office. He petitioned the Crown for relief, finally freeing himself from these demands in late 1444.21 E159/221, brevia Hil. rot. 2d. A Chancery suit that Agnes, widow of John Knyght of Bristol, brought against Forster in the spring of 1438 also questioned his conduct as mayor. She claimed that in the previous August Forster’s brother Stephen and the Bristol spicer Robert Reuley had wrongfully recovered £140 from her by means of ‘feigned’ actions of trespass heard in the town’s court. According to her, these proceedings had been doubly irregular, first because Forster, the then mayor, had sat alone rather than with the sheriff, and secondly because of unspecified technical errors in the way that they had been conducted. She had afterwards appealed to the court of King’s bench, which had directed the present mayor, Clement Bagot, and sheriff, Nicholas Freme, to send the records of the Bristol proceedings to Westminster for examination. Unfortunately for her, Bagot and Freme had allowed these records to fall into the hands of her adversaries who had replaced them with altered documents to return to King’s bench, so undermining her appeal in that court. Agnes therefore asked the chancellor to send writs of sub poena to Bagot, Freme, Richard Forster and John Bolton (the clerk of the court at Bristol when Stephen Forster and Reuley had brought their case) so that they might answer for the injustices that she had suffered, although with what result is not known.22 C1/9/157.

There is no evidence that Forster received any new municipal appointments after concluding his final term as mayor of Bristol in 1448, although he continued to attend meetings of the common council (as he had done since at least 1438), and he attested the election of the town’s MPs to the Parliament of 1449-50. He attended his last known council meeting in late August 1450 and drew up his will on the following 13 Oct.23 Little Red Bk. Bristol, ii. 49-51, 169; Gt. Red Bk. of Bristol, i (Bristol Rec. Soc. iv), 125, 128, 129; ii. 212-13. In the will, Forster asked to be buried in the cemetery of the church of St. Mary Redcliffe, next to the grave of an unspecified number of children who had predeceased him. In spite of his choice of burial place, his funeral was evidently to take place in his home parish of the Temple, for he awarded 20d. to the priest from that church who was to perform the ceremonies. He also directed his executors to distribute 40s. among the poor on the day of his funeral, and to find a suitable priest to sing for the souls of himself, his parents, benefactors and all the faithful departed in the Temple church for a period of four years. As for his living kindred, Forster bequeathed 20d. to each of his godsons, and provided for members of his immediate family. First, his daughter Isabel was to have the remainder of his term of years in a tenement in St. Thomas Street. She had married Walter Norton (brother of Thomas*), and her father set aside 100 marks for the couple’s children to share equally between them once they had reached a marriageable age. With regard to his lands, rents and reversions in Bristol, Somerset, Gloucestershire or elsewhere, Forster left these to his son Richard and Richard’s heirs. Should the line of the younger Richard fail, they were to pass to Isabel Norton and her children, with successive remainders in default to the testator’s brothers Thomas and Stephen Forster and their respective issue. Finally, Forster asked his wife Joan and son Richard to dispose of the residue of his estate to the benefit of his soul and named them as his executors.

The only surviving copy of the will, preserved in the records at Bristol, bears no date of probate, but Forster died within weeks of making it. He was certainly dead in the following December when his son and namesake sold property in the town’s High Street for 100 marks, for the deed recording the transaction referred to him as no longer alive.24 Recs. All Saints Bristol, iii. 401. Early in the new year, the younger Richard and his mother began suits in the common pleas against four of the late MP’s debtors, merchants from Wells in Somerset, Doddington in Gloucestershire and Salisbury and Devizes in Wiltshire.25 CP40/760, rot. 293. Bristol wills of this period frequently fail to provide a complete picture of testators’ interests and donations, for it was common for townsmen to make gifts of both real and personal property – not afterwards mentioned in their wills – during their lifetimes. In this respect Forster’s will is no exception, since it does not refer to an almshouse he established near Redcliffe gate, a foundation to which another burgess, John Gaywode, bequeathed a legacy in his own will of 1471.26 C. Burgess, ‘Wills and Pious Provision in Late Med. Bristol’, EHR, cii. 841-4, 855; Bristol Wills, 145.

It would appear that Forster’s widow did not long survive him, since the tenancy for their lives that she and her late husband had held in Stanton Drew had expired by April 1453. Forster’s son and namesake followed his father’s footsteps by serving a term as mayor of Bristol, in 1462-3, and trading as a merchant. Yet he also bore the style of ‘gentleman’ or ‘esquire’, and he was more a member of the Gloucestershire gentry than he was a burgess by the end of his life.27 CCR, 1447-53, pp. 436-7; Recs. All Saints Bristol, iii. 395; C67/53, m. 20; E122/19/6, f. 1; Bristol RO, P/St.T/D/89; Ashton Court mss, AC/D/3/23/a-c; CPR, 1467-77, p. 109. He must have owed much of this change in status to his marriage to Isabel, one of the daughters of Thomas Poyntz of Frampton Coterell in Gloucestershire. Although he was a younger son, Poyntz was a man of distinguished lineage for he was the brother of Nicholas Poyntz* of that county. Thomas Poyntz’s son and successor was Isabel’s brother, Robert, who died without issue in late 1470 or early 1471, having made a will in which he appointed her husband as one of his executors. Isabel was one of Robert’s heirs and her share of his estate included a manor at Little Sodbury where she and Forster took up residence. When the latter died in March 1480, his holdings included the lands that the bishop of Bath and Wells had granted to him and his parents in the late 1420s. According to an inquisition taken some years after his death, he had held all of these lands in fee, even though the bishop’s grant of 1427 had taken the form of a lease. His heir was his son, yet another Richard Forster, who appears to have come of age in about 1483.28 Trans. Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc. xii. 150; Ashton Court mss, AC/D/3/20, 23/a-c; PCC 1 Wattys (PROB11/6, ff. 2v-3v); Som. Archs., Baker mss, DD\BK/2/1; C67/53 m. 20; CIPM Hen. VII, i. 123. John Forster†, who sat for Bristol in the Parliament of 1489, is of uncertain parentage since it is not known when the MP’s son of that name died.29 HP Biogs. ed. Wedgwood and Holt, 345, speculates that he was Forster’s son. It certainly seems likely that the MP of 1489, who named his own son Richard, was related to the subject of this biography: PCC 9 Dogett (PROB11/9, ff. 65-66).