BISSHE, John

It is possible that the name of this MP has been wrongly transcribed on the parliamentary return, and that the representative of 1426 was John Basshe or Basche, a man who witnessed deeds at Horsham in the 1420s and 1430s, and was acting as a feoffee of land in the neighbourhood as late as 1461.1 Cat. Wiston Archs. ed. Booker, 84, 85. The elder son of another John Basshe, he fell out with his brother Richard after failing to hand over to the younger man a seven-acre field at Horsham in accordance with their father’s wishes.2 C1/10/255.

If, however, Bisshe is the correct name, then the most likely person was the John Bisshe who lived with his wife Joan in a house at Le Wyke in the parish of West Firle, several miles away from Horsham. Bisshe was party to a number of transactions with one of his neighbours, Bartholomew Bolney*, the prominent Sussex lawyer and fellow of Lincoln’s Inn, with whom he exchanged various landed holdings in the 1440s. Indeed, Bolney was his overlord with respect to two messuages and six acres of land. For a while Bisshe farmed the manor of West Firle on a seven-year lease, which was running in 1442.3 Bolney Bk. (Suss. Rec. Soc. lxiii), 39, 45, 71-72, 75. In the immediate aftermath of Cade’s rebellion, on 7 July 1450, he, Bolney and another neighbour of theirs, Thomas Gynnour*, also a lawyer, took out royal pardons to cover any offences they might have committed in those turbulent times. In the pardon granted to Bisshe he was described as a ‘yeoman’.4 CPR, 1446-52, p. 340. John Bisshe of West Firle was dead by 21 Sept. 1466, when his widow relinquished to Bolney and his wife certain lands from which she had earlier ejected them.5 Bolney Bk. 45.