DODING, John

A lawyer and ‘gentleman’ who met a gruesome end, Doding appears originally to have come from Worcester. Possibly the son of Thomas Doding of that city, he was described as ‘of Gloucester, late of Worcester and London’ in a royal pardon he obtained while attending the Parliament of 1455.7 HP Biogs. ed. Wedgwood and Holt, 277; C67/41, m. 18. A John Doding was named as a tax collector in Worcester in 1431 but it is likely that he was a namesake of the MP, since he is described as a ‘dyer’ in the letters appointing him and his fellow collectors: CFR, xvi. 69. By then he was an officer of the duchy of Lancaster and a former under sheriff of Gloucestershire, where he began serving as a coroner soon after leaving the Commons. He also acted as an attorney in the central common law courts at Westminster, where he appeared for John Forthey* in 1454, for Sir Edmund Hungerford* in 1455, for the abbot of Gloucester in 1456, the abbot of Tewkesbury in 1457 and the abbot of Winchcombe in 1460.8 KB27/774, rot. 54d; 755, att. rot. 2; 786, rot. 96d; CP40/780, rot. 451; 799, rot. 506d.

In Gloucester itself, Doding resided in a house near the east gate,9 Glos. Archs., Gloucester bor. recs. GBR, J5/2. and elsewhere in the town he held a curtilage in Southgate Street and six stables in Travel Lane.10 Gloucester Rental 1455 ed. Cole, 14, 16. In the late 1450s, he and his wife, Alice, were among those to whom John Lymeryk of Brimpsfield conveyed all his lands in Gloucester and its suburbs, although for what purpose is not clear.11 Gloucester Corporation Recs. 404, 406-7. The grantees also included another, much more eminent Gloucester lawyer, William Nottingham II*, the King’s attorney-general. One of Nottingham’s feoffees, Doding was subsequently associated with him in similar transactions, both inside and outside the town.12 VCH Glos. iv. 433; CP25(1)/79/92/142; 79/93/5; CCR, 1461-8, pp. 180-1. In February 1458, the Crown commissioned him alone to superintend repairs to Gloucester castle,13 CPR, 1452-61, p. 415. but he appears not to have held any borough office before becoming one of the bailiffs of the town in the autumn of 1463.

As it happened, Doding never completed his term as bailiff, for he met a violent death within a month of taking up office. On 27 Oct. 1463, a mob of angry Gloucestershire peasantry forced their way into Gloucester in pursuit of him, forcing him to seek refuge in the infirmary at Gloucester abbey. His bid to escape was in vain, since his pursuers tracked him down, hauled him out of hiding and assaulted him, before dragging him, wounded and bleeding, to the high cross in the centre of the town. There they hacked him to death and cut off his head, which they hung over the west gate. Just a few days later, the mob returned to Gloucester intending to mete out the same treatment to numerous other burgesses, but they failed do so, presumably because their intended targets had fled.14 Rhodes, 39; Kingsford, 356.

Perhaps Doding had made himself unpopular through his activities as a lawyer and office-holder in the wider county of Gloucestershire,15 Where he was still clerk of the peace when he obtained his second known royal pardon, dated 15 Feb. 1462: C67/45, m. 35. Apparently unaware that Doding was a lawyer and held office in the county, R.A. Holt, ‘Gloucester’ (Birmingham Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1987), 276, suggests that he might have caused resentment among the peasantry in the pursuit of commerce rather than as an office-holder. although the peasantry’s attempts likewise to kill his fellow burgesses suggest that economic tensions between the townsmen and the inhabitants of the surrounding countryside could have played a part in the trouble. Soon afterwards, the earl of Warwick arrived and managed to pacify the rioters, although he was unable to take any firmer action against them. At the beginning of 1464, there were further outbreaks of disorder in Gloucestershire, most notably immediately to the south of Gloucester as well as at Tetbury and on the edge of the Forest of Dean, and these troubles were serious enough to prompt the personal intervention of the King. At this stage in his reign, Edward IV spent a considerable amount of time riding about the country suppressing such disturbances and, as a result, he was absent when Parliament briefly convened at York on 20 Feb. that year. The assembled Lords and Commons heard that he could not attend because of the need to deal with the disorders in Gloucestershire and elsewhere in the kingdom. Upon arriving in the county, the King presided over sessions of oyer and terminer at Gloucester. The sessions, which opened on 8 Feb., finished in a matter of days and, soon afterwards, he was on his way to East Anglia to deal with trouble there. Of those indicted, tried and sentenced at Gloucester, at least two went to the scaffold and their heads, like that of the unfortunate Doding, were set upon the town’s gates. The brief annals compiled by a monk at Gloucester abbey would suggest that the oyer and terminer commission was a response to the events of the previous autumn. Yet the actual indictments do not mention Doding and relate to much more recent trouble, namely an attempt to organize a rebellion against the Yorkist Crown. As far as the authorities were concerned, those dealt with were ‘traytors’ and ‘rebels’, and the two condemned men suffered the fate of those found guilty of high treason, for they were hung (from the ‘Culverbrygge’ in the town), drawn and quartered.16 Rhodes, 39; Kingsford, 356; Holt, 275-6; Paston Letters ed. Davis, i. 203; ii. 294; J.G. Bellamy, ‘Justice under the Yorkist Kings’, American Jnl. of Legal Hist. ix. 136-7; PROME, xiii. 98-99; R.C. Hoare, Modern Wilts. (Salisbury), 159; KB9/33/49-51; C.D. Ross, Edw. IV, 57-58. Bellamy, who mistakenly states that the sessions began on 7 Feb., suggests that a bitter dispute between the prior of Llanthony, John Shoyer, supported by the men of Glos., and the ex-prior, John Heyward, supported by the townsmen, lay at the root of the trouble with which the King was dealing.

Doding died intestate and his widow and the clerk, John Sampson, took on the administration of his estate. By 1465, she and Sampson faced litigation in the court of common pleas at Westminster, where William Nottingham and William Hampton† of London had begun a suit against them for a debt of £20 that Doding had allegedly owed them.17 CP40/815, rot. 53d. Whether or not in settlement of this claim, Nottingham acquired the ‘place þt Doding Dwellyd Inn’, the MP’s house near the east gate, at some point in Edward IV’s reign.18 Gloucester bor. recs. GBR, J5/2. In 1484, Doding’s daughter and heir Anne and her husband John Purlewyn reached an agreement with William Mydwynter, who had quarrelled with them over a messuage and gardens in Northleach, Gloucestershire.19 CP40/888, rot. 21d. There is no evidence that the John Doding of Gloucestershire who died in 1517 or early 1518 was her relative. This John, who owned property at Thornbury, gave directions for the founding of a chantry at Marshfield in his will, which does not mention Gloucester or the late MP.20 PCC 4 Ayloffe (PROB11/19, f. 32v).