HORTON, Richard

The representation of Wootton Basset was dominated by lawyers and royal household servants, and there is thus every reason to identify its MP in the Parliament of 1449 (Nov.) with a lawyer who trained at the Inner Temple and maintained a small practice from the mid 1440s until his murder in 1461. Horton was from a Buckinghamshire family of sub-gentry status, settled at Chicheley near Newport Pagnell. His paternal inheritance was very modest, consisting of a messuage, 100 acres of land, four acres of meadow and 20 acres of pasture there, which, according to a Chancery petition, he first leased from his father at an annual rent of 26s. 8d. and then sublet at one of 40s.3 C1/31/220.

From such modest beginnings Horton had established himself as a minor local lawyer by the early 1440s. On 21 Oct. 1442 his neighbour, Richard Davy of Linford, a Chancery clerk, retained him at a generous annual fee of five marks to levy his rents and debts; and in Hilary term 1445 he represented another neighbour, Robert Nevill, an esquire of Gayhurst, in the court of common pleas. Less happily, in Trinity term 1443 he was indicted for taking nine horses from another lawyer, Thomas Hoo II* of Middle Temple, at Enfield in Middlesex, but he was acquitted in the following term.4 CP40/744, rot. 114d; 736, rot. 136d; KB27/729, rex rot. 7d. Thereafter Horton appears fitfully in the records, discharging the tasks that routinely came the way of those on the lower foothills of the legal profession. In 1448, for example, he acted for a London saddler in the resettlement of a manor in Surrey; in 1454, described as ‘of Inner Temple, gentleman’, he stood surety for the payment of a fine by a widow who had made a false appeal; and in 1456 he was receiving writs in the court of common pleas on behalf of the sheriff of Huntingdonshire.5 CPR, 1446-52, pp. 184-5, 255; KB27/773, fines rot.; C244/78/30; CP40/782, rot. 139. His routine presence in Westminster and London is further implied by his marriage in the early 1450s to the widow of a London brewer.6 CP40/780, rot. 316. Her first husband died between Sept. 1453, when he made a will naming his wife as his executrix, and the following 4 Dec. when she entered into bonds as a woman sole: Guildhall Lib. London, commissary ct. wills, 9171/5, f. 129v; CP40/826, rot. 120.

Although Horton’s practice was seemingly a modest one, he had influence enough to secure, early in his career, an election to Parliament in company with another lawyer, John Daunte*. Further, the identity of the trustees to whom he conveyed his goods in July 1456 suggests that he was a man of some consequence. They were an impressive group, headed by Edmund, Lord Grey of Ruthin, and (Sir) John Wenlock*, and two lawyers more important than himself – the King’s attorney-general, William Nottingham II*, and Nicholas Hervy*. Also suggestive of a lawyer on the rise is the number of debt suits he had pending in Trinity term 1459. He claimed a total of over £100 against defendants including no less a man than Richard Neville, earl of Salisbury, who allegedly owed him £11 16s.7 C219/15/7; CCR, 1454-61, p. 143; CP40/794, rots. 176, 297.

The potential of which these are signs was not to be realized, for Horton’s career was to be brought to an abrupt and premature end. Before disaster befell him, on 10 July 1460 he made a will. Its terms do not suggest that his legal practice had then yet brought him any significant wealth. His largest cash bequests were those of £20 to his wife, who was to be his sole executrix, and ten marks to his daughter, Alice, who, curiously, was not to inherit his lands in Chicheley. They were to pass into the hands of his widow for her life before being sold for charitable uses.8 PCC 23 Stokton (PROB11/4, f. 175v). Perhaps Horton was prompted to draw up this will by ill health, but death was to come to him in another way. There are two accounts of that death. According to an appeal brought by his widow in Trinity term 1462, 16 men and one woman, mostly tradesmen of Peterborough but including Richard Skirmote, styled ‘gentleman’, had brutally murdered her husband at Rockingham in Northamptonshire at 8 a.m. on 1 June 1461, inflicting terrible injuries upon him, including decapitation.9 KB27/805, rot. 55. In a petition to the chancellor she provided a more detailed account which contradicted the first. Here the murder is said to have taken place a month later at Peterborough, some 20 miles to the east of Rockingham, and to have been perpetrated by unnamed rioters ‘in moost euell and vengable wyse’. They then despoiled their victim of goods, evidences and obligations worth £300 before turning their attention to his widow. She claimed that, after the murder, she had been taken ‘in moost dredfull wyse’, imprisoned for more than seven weeks, and intimidated into making a release of actions to the murderers. She was probably exaggerating the severity of her treatment, for, on her own testimony, she managed to secure agreement that the release be laid in the hands of Henry Fenne, servitor in Edward IV’s household, as an indifferent person, pending restoration of her goods and the posting of bonds by the murderers that they would leave her in peace. This, she claimed, they had not done. Indeed, when she came to Peterborough, and ‘in gentill wyse’ required the miscreants to perform their bargain, she had to flee for fear of her life. She thus now asked the chancellor to order Fenne to deliver the release to her.10 C1/27/418.

Whether Millicent gained any redress from the chancellor is not known, but her appeal made some progress. Presumably she brought it after her unhappy negotiations with the alleged murderers. In Trinity term 1462 six of them, including Skyrmore, appeared to answer and a jury was called (although it is not known to have appeared); the other 11 were outlawed or waivered in the Northamptonshire county court on the following 28 Oct. While the appeal was pending, Millicent brought a bill against three of those she had appealed claiming that on 2 May 1463 they had assaulted her and imprisoned her for two hours at Westminster.11 KB27/809, rot. 29. Thereafter, however, a compromise appears to have been reached. In 1465 one of those accused, Henry Palmer, secured a writ of error on his outlawry on the grounds that, when outlawed, he had been a prisoner in the King’s prison at Peterborough; and in 1468 Millicent finally abandoned her appeal at the small cost of a fine to the Crown of 6s. 8d.12 KB27/805, rot. 55; 817, rot. 110d; 830, fines rot. 2. One can only speculate as to the reasons for Horton’s murder, or whether it was the brutal assassination described in the appeal. Given his office as the abbot of Peterborough’s bailiff, it may be that he was killed as the representative of an unpopular abbey, for there is no evidence to suggest a personal quarrel. His own attachment to the abbey is evident in his will for he left 20d. to each of its monks to hold his soul in remembrance.13 PCC 23 Stokton.

Persecution at the hands of those she accused of her husband’s death was not the only problem Millicent faced in her widowhood. She appears to have had a separate quarrel with another group of Peterborough tradesmen: in Hilary term 1465 she sued 25 of them, together with nine of their wives, for assaulting and imprisoning her at Olney, near Chicheley, and depriving her of goods worth £20.14 CP40/814, rot. 440. More significantly, she also found difficulty in establishing her rights in Horton’s lands. In an action in Chancery, she correctly claimed that he had conveyed his lands in Chicheley to his cousin, another Richard Horton, and others, to hold to her use for term of her life and, on her death, to sell them. Two of these feoffees, however, both called John Clerk, counterclaimed that they held the lands at our MP’s lease.15 C1/31/220-2, 238-42. The existence of this potential rival interest probably explains why, on 5 Oct. 1465, shortly before the matter came before the chancellor, she quitclaimed her interest in the lands to Hervy, a prominent lawyer and one of her late husband’s trustees. A year later, on 20 Oct. 1466, the same day as the Clerks were summoned to answer her petition in Chancery, she sought greater security by conveying her own goods to Hervy.16 CCR, 1461-8, pp. 380, 465.

Such security was perhaps the more necessary because the Clerks were not her only rivals. In the summer of 1467 one of her late husband’s kinsmen, Thomas Horton, brought an assize of novel disseisin against her for a tenement in Chicheley; she responded, with her characteristic robustness, by suing Roger Salisbury, an important man in Northamptonshire, and other lesser men for illegally maintaining Thomas in this action. A later conveyance probably marks the resolution of these disputes and perhaps the vindication of her right: on 9 Feb. 1469 she made a further quitclaim of our MP’s lands in Chicheley to Richard Quatermayns* and others, probably as the feoffees of a purchaser.17 CCR, 1468-76, 170; CP40/826, rot. 264d; 828, rot. 128.

One of Millicent’s last appearances in the records is, appropriately, in the context of a further dispute, one which, if another narrative lain before the chancellor is to be credited, show her in an unfavourable light. On 4 Sept. 1471, or so it was claimed, she and a London saddler, Thomas George, put themselves to the award of two London tailors, William Persons and Thomas Walcote, who awarded that George should give her £3 for all arrears of debts. None the less, she sued George’s executors for debt in Buckinghamshire, and then, after the defendants had shown that her claim had no merit, she sued them in the London sheriffs’ court with the intention of winning a false verdict. The debt claimed in the latter action lay on a bond to her late husband dated in the London parish of St. Giles Cripplegate, where she and her friends resided and were ‘bigge and myghty’, and a jury were thus said to be ready to pass for her. This claim may be simply another instance of a fiction designed to bring a dispute within the chancellor’s jurisdiction, yet it is possible that Millicent was not the helpless widow she portrayed herself as in other actions.18 C1/32/132. George had been an associate of Horton: CP40/755, rot. 302; 799, rot. 249d. She was certainly a remarkably active litigant. As late as January 1475 she was pursuing an action for chattels worth £20 against the Somerset knight, Sir Nicholas St. Loe. Her troubled widowhood probably came to an end soon afterwards.19 CP40/853, rot. 3.