DAUNTSEY, John

Dauntsey came from a junior branch of a prominent Wiltshire family which, by the fifteenth century, had acquired the manor of Dauntsey near Salisbury as well as numerous other properties in the county. Sir John Dauntsey† (d.1391), a notable soldier at sea and on foreign campaigns, had represented the county in Parliament on at least six occasions.4 The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 758-9. The death without issue of his grandson Sir Walter Dauntsey in 1420 left as the heir to the estates Sir Walter’s sister, Joan, widow of Sir Maurice Russell†, who took them to two further husbands, Sir John Stradling (d.1435) and John Dewall*, and on her death in 1455 they passed to the Stradlings.5 J. Aubrey, Wilts. Collns. ed. Jackson, 216-17; CFR, xix. 168. Our MP’s branch of the family may have split off from the main line several generations earlier. It is known that his father was called William, probably the man of this name who was among the gentry of Wiltshire required to take the general oath against law-breakers in 1434. Another of those so sworn was a more prominent Dauntsey, Joan Stradling’s uncle Edmund (d.c.1439), who lived at Laverstock. Edmund had been distrained to take up knighthood and attested the Wiltshire elections to Parliament on five occasions between 1422 and 1437.6 CPR, 1429-36, pp. 370-1; CP40/680, rot. 410d; 688, rots. 112, 204; 715, rot. 368; CIPM, xxvi. 548-9. Our MP’s father died before Michaelmas 1439, leaving a widow named Joan, and it was probably by inheritance from them that John came by his holdings in Trowbridge, for the family had been tenants of the manor there in the early fourteenth century. He had taken possession of a burgage in the town by 1447, and it was there that he made his home.7 CP40/715, rot. 358d; VCH Wilts. 130; CCR, 1447-54, p. 18. His lands in Wiltshire were accorded a value of £16 p.a. when assessed for the tax of 1450.8 E179/196/118.

Of John’s early life nothing is known, but by the 1440s he had entered royal service. In May 1441 he received letters of attorney as travelling abroad on the King’s business,9 DKR, xlviii. 346. and to judge by the size of the bill he ran up for wages he probably spent a considerable length of time with the Lancastrian forces in France. On 1 May 1444, for good service on both sides of the Channel and in recompense of the large sum of £71 6s. 8d. owed to him in wages while abroad, he was granted a tenement called ‘Heriottes Place’, a water-mill and other lands in West Harptree, as well as another tenement in Widcombe, all in Somerset. Now called ‘King’s serjeant’, he had become a member of the Household, receiving fees and robes as a yeoman of the chamber.10 CPR, 1441-6, pp. 283-4; E101/410/3; 6, f. 41; 9, f. 44. At the royal court he was befriended by one of the esquires for the King’s body, John St. Loe*, for whom two days later, on 3 May, he stood surety at the Exchequer when St. Loe acquired a lease of other lands in the same places in Somerset where his own recently-acquired properties lay. Dauntsey subsequently acted as a feoffee for St. Loe, and such was their friendship that the esquire was to leave him a bequest of £20 in his will of 1448.11 CFR, xvii. 298; Som. Feet of Fines (Som. Rec. Soc. xxii), 106; Lambeth Palace Lib., Reg. Stafford, f. 163.

By the spring of 1450 Dauntsey had been promoted as one of the yeomen of the chamber, as such being granted exemption from the Act of Resumption passed in the session of Parliament held at Leicester in respect of his royal grants of tenements in West Harptree and Widcombe.12 PROME, xii. 143. In May the following year he was further rewarded with the grant of the office of porter of Bristol castle.13 CPR, 1446-52, p. 426. This he combined with another post away from the royal court: that of a coroner in Wiltshire, which he was to occupy for at least 24 years. Clearly a well-regarded servant of the Crown, his status almost certainly played a part in his selection as an MP for the Parliament assembled in Reading in 1453, notorious for the large number of courtiers returned to the Commons. Dauntsey was elected to represent the Surrey borough of Gatton, once belonging to John Mowbray, duke of Norfolk, but which seven years earlier had been granted to the duke’s trusted retainer John Timperley I*. No link has been established between him and the duke or Timperley, and how his election came about has not been ascertained. Clearly, he was not resident in the place which returned him; a pardon granted him in the previous year, in July 1452, had expressly called him ‘of Trowbridge, gentleman’,14 C67/40, m. 6. and his activities as a coroner routinely required his presence in Wiltshire. Indeed, in breach of the statutes relating to the residence of Members and their electors, he attested the shire indenture drawn up at Wilton for the same Parliament.15 C219/16/2.

It was in Wiltshire that Dauntsey was most active in the 1450s. He was regularly pricked as a juror at sessions of oyer and terminer in Salisbury, for instance at those held in July 1451 when indictments were presented concerning the murder in the previous year of Bishop Aiscough and the theft of his goods.16 KB9/133/23d; 134/1/16, 34; 134/2/102, 143, 145, 147, 149. In the late 1450s he became an associate of Sir Roger Tocotes†, who had acquired estates in the county through marriage to Lady St. Amand, the widow of Sir William Beauchamp*, and according to an action brought by the Yorkist adherent Hugh Shirley* in 1462 the two men and their followers stole his goods to the value of £40 at Leominster on 11 Oct. 1459. This can only mean that Dauntsey and Tocotes were with the Lancastrian army on its way to Ludford Bridge.17 KB27/803, rot. 49d. As a Lancastrian servant, Dauntsey could not expect to keep his position in the Household following the Yorkist victory at the battle of Northampton in July 1460, and he almost certainly lost the porter-ship of Bristol castle in the following November when the office of constable of the castle (with power to appoint a porter) was granted to the duke of York’s son Edward, earl of March. After Edward took the throne Dauntsey was deprived of the estates at West Harptree granted to him by Henry VI.18 CPR, 1452-61, p. 632; 1461-7, p. 176. During this turbulent period a local tailor opportunistically broke into Dauntsey’s house at Trowbridge on 12 Mar. 1462, and evicted him. Yet despite his exclusion from the benefits of royal patronage, Dauntsey was able to maintain a high profile in Wiltshire, and was one of the jurors who indicted the tailor at Salisbury two months later.19 KB9/135/18, 36. Besides continuing to be a coroner, he was regularly sworn as a juror at assizes of novel disseisin held in the county in the 1460s and 1470s.20 Tropenell Cart. i. 368-9; ii. 58, 60, 65, 69, 312, 314.

Difficulties with Dauntsey’s position as coroner arose in Trinity term 1466 when a jury came to be summoned in a suit brought in the court of common pleas by Richard Beauchamp, bishop of Salisbury. The defendants feared bias in the proceedings and while pleading that the sheriff of Wiltshire, Thomas de la Mare†, was a kinsman of the bishop they pointed out that Dauntsey, one of the coroners, was also related to him. As a second coroner wore the bishop’s livery, to ensure impartiality the writ to summon a jury had to be sent to the other two coroners, John Uffenham* and Robert atte Fenne*. Although Dauntsey’s kinship with Beauchamp was in fact very remote, the earlier record of his association with Tocotes and through him with the bishop’s sister-in-law, suggests that the defendants were right to have qualms.21 CP40/820, rot. 330. Subsequently, Dauntsey made appearances as a juror at inquisitions post mortem held in Wiltshire,22 C140/27/13. and at the important trials for treason conducted at Salisbury in January 1469 of Henry Courtenay and (Sir) Thomas Hungerford*.23 KB9/320/4, 6.

On occasion Dauntsey was asked to be a feoffee of estates in the locality, such as by William Berkeley†, son and heir of Sir Maurice Berkeley I* of Uley.24 CCR, 1468-76, nos. 313-14. He himself was expanding his property interests, notably by acquiring lands in Somerset in 1467, including 12 messuages and 100 acres of pasture in and around the city of Wells.25 Som. Feet of Fines, 137. His son and heir, and the only one mentioned in his will, was Walter Dauntsey, who together with him and his wife Joan held property in Trowbridge and Staverton of the duchy of Lancaster in the early 1460s.26 DL30/127/1911. Yet he may have also had a younger son, named after him. From the mid 1470s he was often called ‘senior’ to distinguish him from John ‘junior’. Both men were jurors at sessions of the peace at Salisbury in December 1475, and both gave evidence at the inquisition post mortem held at Warminster on Sir Edward Neville a year later.27 KB9/136/4, 14, 23, 31, 43, 62, 75, 78, 79; C140/58/66. It was the younger John who in the same decade began to acquire property at West Lavington, ten miles or so east of Trowbridge, where the family later established a new seat,28 Wilts. Feet of Fines (Wilts. Rec. Soc. xli), 154; VCH Wilts. vii. 200, 203, 205. and he who became engaged in a serious dispute with the lawyer Thomas Walrond* in 1478.29 CCR, 1476-85, no. 397.

Along with another Wiltshire man, John Clyveden, our MP or his younger namesake also established interests in the city of London. The two men obtained two messuages in the parish of St. Lawrence Jewry from a mercer, Thomas Brice, in settlement of a debt, but following Clyveden’s death early in 1477 a dispute arose concerning the title to his share of the property between his widow, Elizabeth, and Dauntsey. In a petition submitted to Chancery in October 1479 Elizabeth claimed that an agreement had been reached between the two men whereby, in the event of the death of one of them, the other would act as a trustee pending the fulfilment of the last wishes of the deceased; and that Clyveden had granted her and her heirs his title in the messuages. Dauntsey denied that there had been any such agreement.30 C1/66/466; PCC 29 Wattys (PROB11/6, ff. 222v-223).

In his will, made on 16 May 1483, Dauntsey asked to be buried in St. James’s church, Trowbridge, in the chapel of St. Mary known as ‘Our Lady of Gesyon’ (Our Lady of Childbirth). He named as his executor his son and heir Walter, whom he expressly instructed to recover a debt of £9 12s. from a local man and to use the money to find a priest to say daily mass for the souls of himself and his wife and parents. Walter was to have all his lands in Trowbridge, Staverton and other named places in Wiltshire; but to his daughter Mary he left just £2 in coin and a silver cup worth 20s. He died before October that year. Writs de diem clausit extremum sent to the escheator of Wiltshire, the one for John Dauntsey ‘the elder’ on 3 Oct. 1483, the other for John Dauntsey ‘late of Lavington’ on 3 Feb. following, indicate that the two Johns died in close succession.31 PCC 7 Logge; CFR, xxi. nos. 738-9. No inquisitions post mortem survive to cast light on this, but administration of the will of the younger John had been granted to his widow and son on 16 Jan.32 Hants RO, Jervoise of Herriard mss, 44M69/C/651, 789. His w. was named Margery, and son Thomas. Walter continued to hold the family lands at Trowbridge and elsewhere until his death in 1502, when they were said to be worth over £36 p.a.33 VCH Wilts. vii. 130; CIPM Hen. VII, ii. 649.