BLAKPOLL, John

A draper by trade, although sometimes known as a ‘yeoman’, Blakpoll is likely to have had commercial dealings with London. Many of his fellow burgesses possessed links with the City, and he himself acted as a trustee for a draper from the City in the mid 1440s.4 CCR, 1447-54, p. 414; CP40/779, rot. 143; C67/45, m. 24; The Commons 1386-1421, i. 278.

By the late 1420s, Blakpoll featured in the court rolls of Bassetsbury, the manor that encompassed most of the borough of Chipping Wycombe, which record that he incurred amercements for keeping a ruinous tenement and committing other minor misdemeanours. At this date Bassetsbury was part of the dower estates of Henry V’s widow, Queen Katherine, but it reverted to the duchy of Lancaster after her death in January 1437. By Michaelmas 1438 Blakpoll had become its bailiff, an office which he held for many years, and for which he received an annual stipend of 40s.5 St. George’s Chapel, XV/15/1, mm. 25, 26, 29; DL29/653/10565, mm. 17-17d. He also served at least two terms as mayor of Wycombe and played a role in the affairs of the wider county of Buckinghamshire. In the late summer of 1429 he had witnessed the return of John Hampden II* and Andrew Sperlyng* as the knights of the shire for Buckinghamshire to the Parliament of that year, an election controversially (and illegally) overturned by the sheriff, Sir Thomas Waweton*, in favour of Sir John Cheyne I* and Walter Strickland I*.

As a leading resident and office-holder at Wycombe, Blakpoll was regularly party to property transactions in the town.6 Centre for Bucks. Studies, CH1 T/6/2-6, 9-12, 14. His own holdings included a copyhold messuage and virgate of land at Dawes Hill and other lands at Upper and Lower Kingsmead. Having acquired an interest in the Dawes Hill properties in the mid 1420s, he obtained a new lease of them in the spring of 1437, to hold for life at an annual rent of 13s. 4d. Twelve years later Blakpoll undertook to maintain a public latrine, which he had constructed beside his messuage situated near the bridge in St. Mary’s Street to replace another actually situated under the property’s roof. He and previous holders of the messuage had customarily borne the responsibility of keeping the old latrine in a good state of repair, and now he agreed that he and his successors should continue to maintain the new one at their own expense.7 Ibid. CH1 T/6/7. In April 1450, Blakpoll and his wife Joan were granted various copyhold lands at Wycombe, to hold for their lives in survivorship at a rent of 6s. 8d. p.a.,8 St. George’s Chapel, XV/15/1. and in the following October he appeared in the court at Bassetsbury, in order to transfer his copyhold lease of part of a meadow and a small plot of land to another townsman.9 DL29/653/10565, mm. 17-17d; 10577, m. 7; 10597, mm. 2, 2d, 3.

Blakpoll also acquired the farm of the rectory of All Saints, the parish church at Wycombe. The circumstances in which it came into his hands (at some stage in the late1430s or early 1440s) proved controversial, since they led to litigation in the Chancery. The plaintiff was William Heryng, who asserted that he, and not Blakpoll, should have had the rectory. Heryng claimed that he had agreed to lease it from its patron, the abbess of Godstow priory, Oxfordshire, for an annual rent of £18, but had not proceeded with this arrangement after Blakpoll had promised to secure a joint lease for them both at a lower rent of £16 p.a. In spite of his promise, Blakpoll had then visited the abbess, told her that his prospective partner was no longer interested in the property and secured a new lease for himself alone. Heryng’s bill is the only document relating to this case to have survived, and there is no way of knowing if Blakpoll really was guilty of sharp practice or whether he was obliged to give up the parsonage.10 C1/9/92. Blakpoll was caught up in another quarrel in the mid 1450s when John Butler*, lord of a manor at nearby Beaconsfield, sued him in the court of common pleas for taking his goods and chattels at Wycombe. The same court also summoned the MP in Michaelmas term 1455, although this time as a member of a jury called to Westminster to try a suit that the abbot of Walden, Essex, had brought against the vicar of Amersham.11 CP40/779, rots. 143, 215, 309d.

Early in the following decade Blakpoll was a witness in a Chancery suit initiated by his fellow burgess, John Welsbourne II*. Acting in his capacity as the executor of Margaret, widow of John Hill II*, Welsbourne brought his bill against Walter Colard* and the priest Thomas Skaryngton, alleging that they had refused to make a release of properties which Margaret 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 MP and six other witnesses, comprising ‘the saddyst and wurshypfullest men’ of the borough, supported Welsbourne’s claims, and a few weeks later the court decreed that Colard and Skaryngton should make the desired release.12 C1/27/300-1; 29/23-24. Ironically, at the beginning of the same year the Crown had ordered Blakpoll and other burgesses to arrest several residents of Wycombe, Welsbourne among them. The commission was probably politically motivated, since the government was then under Yorkist control and Welsbourne was a member of the Lancastrian Household.13 CPR, 1452-61, p. 658.

In the spring of 1462, Blakpoll obtained a royal pardon. This described him as John Blakpoll senior, to distinguish him from a younger namesake, and as bailiff of Bassetsbury.14 C67/45, m. 24. He was still alive in mid 1465,15 CP40/816, rot. 396d. but by Michaelmas 1466, John Porter had taken over as bailiff of Bassetbury, and the account of 1466-7 for that property shows that the MP was certainly dead by the end of that period. Blakpoll features in the main body of the account as one of the manor’s tenants, but in its ‘allowances’ section his widow Joan is recorded as holding several of the properties formerly in his possession.16 DL29/655/10597, mm. 2, 2d, 3. If not the MP’s son, the younger John Blakpoll, who attested Wycombe’s elections to the Parliaments of 1467 and 1478, was almost certainly a close relative, as no doubt were William Blakpoll, master of the town’s hospital of St. John the Baptist in the early 1470s, and John Blakpoll, bailiff of Bassetsbury in the early 1520s.17 VCH Bucks. i. 395; St. George’s Chapel, XV/53/59.