CASSY, John

The Cassys owed their standing in Gloucestershire to John’s grandfather and namesake, a successful lawyer from Worcestershire.5 N. Saul, Knights and Esquires, 230. A member of the Inner Temple, the elder John received the call to the coif in 1388 and became chief baron of the Exchequer in the following year. Knighted in about 1397, he received letters of reappointment as chief baron at the accession of Henry IV, but he died a few months later in the spring of 1400.6 Order of Serjts. at Law (Selden Soc. supp. ser. v), 72n, 159, 256, 503; Judges of Eng. comp. Sainty (Selden Soc. supp. ser. x), 93. He was buried in the church at Deerhurst, the parish near Tewkesbury where he had purchased an estate and settled. Sir John Cassy’s heir was his eldest son William, John’s father. A very obscure figure, William may not have survived the chief baron by many years since he disappears from view after July 1406.7 Trans. Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc. lxxiv. 132-3; VCH Glos. viii. 39; CCR, 1402-5, pp. 509-10; CAD, i. C407, C1089.

Perhaps a minor when William died, John succeeded to his grandfather’s estate at Deerhurst and to another of Sir John’s purchases, the manor of Stratton just outside Cirencester. He also came into possession of properties elsewhere in Gloucestershire, including a manor in Withington and Shipton Oliffe previously held by Nicholas Cassy, perhaps a younger son of the chief baron. The manor came to John in 1436, by conveyance from Nicholas’s widow, Blanche, and her then husband, Walter Percival, whom he undertook should have a rent of ten marks p.a. in return.8 VCH Glos. viii. 39; ix. 261; CAD, i. C1089; CCR, 1435-41, pp. 100-1. A lawsuit that Percival brought against John in the following decade probably arose from a disagreement over this arrangement. Percival claimed that Cassy had entered into a bond with him at London in late 1436 but had subsequently failed to pay a sum of six marks for which the bond was a security.9 CP40/737, rot. 324. Cassy appears to have embarked on a policy of enclosure at Withington, judging by the complaints which tenants of the bishop of Worcester made about his activities in that parish some 14 years later.10 VCH Glos. ix. 270.

It is possible that Cassy followed his grandfather’s footsteps by becoming a lawyer, but there is no evidence of his activities before the 1430s.11 It is not possible to identify him with the ‘Cassy’ who clashed with Thomas Stonor I* in an obscure legal dispute (perhaps relating to a benefice in the diocese of Worcester) of 1424 or earlier: Kingsford’s Stonor Letters and Pprs. ed. Carpenter, 122-4. If a lawyer, he most likely received his training at the Inner Temple or another inn of court in London. It cannot, however, be proved that he was the John Cassy esquire ‘of Southwark’ pardoned his outlawry in 1433 for failing to respond to a suit for debt at Westminster.12 CPR, 1429-36, p. 234. The identity of the John Cassy who went to the Exchequer on behalf of the dowager duchess of Clarence in the following year is similarly uncertain,13 E403/715, m. 14. although the man involved in a conveyance of property in the City in 1438 was probably the subject of this biography since the other parties to this transaction included several gentlemen from Gloucestershire.14 CCR, 1435-41, p. 240.

Whatever any links he may have had with London, it was as a resident of Gloucestershire that Cassy swore to keep the peace in 1434,15 CPR, 1429-36, p. 372. stood surety for Guy Whittington* and Geoffrey Holford in November 1436,16 CFR, xvi. 305. and entered the Commons in 1437. Cassy gained election to his first Parliament before he had begun to serve in the administration of the county, and his initial ad hoc commission related to a subsidy that assembly had granted to the Crown. There was however a sizeable time gap between this commission and his appointment in 1446 as escheator of Herefordshire, an office that he combined with that of an MP during the short Parliament of the following year. He completed another term as escheator, this time in Gloucestershire, a few months before he was elected to his last Parliament and he became a j.p. in the mid 1450s.

It may be that Cassy had his own lawless behaviour to thank for the discontinuities in his office-holding career, for he was in trouble with the authorities in 1443 and again in the 1450s. In late July 1443 he quarrelled violently with John de Aune, one of the coroners for Gloucestershire, at the Gloucester assizes, and the two men came to blows outside the town’s guildhall where the assizes were taking place. A jury immediately indicted Cassy before the assize judges, William Westbury and William Yelverton*, presenting that he had launched a violent assault on de Aune, nearly severing the coroner’s right arm with his knife. The jurors also indicted Thomas Toky ‘gentleman’ and three others of Cassy’s servants for assisting their master. Cassy was subsequently arrested and sent to the Marshalsea prison in London, and de Aune took action of his own against him by means of a bill sued in the court of King’s bench on the following 6 Nov. His plea differed slightly from the more lurid indictment, for he simply stated that Cassy had attacked and wounded him with a sword and stick, so that he ‘despaired of his life’. Brought into court to answer the bill, Cassy pleaded that he was guilty of no more than striking back in self-defence after de Aune had attacked him. Two days later, Cassy was brought back to King’s bench for further proceedings relating to the indictment. On this occasion he was able to secure bail through the ‘special grace’ of the King, with two sureties, William Browning I* and Nicholas Poyntz*, undertaking that he would reappear on the following 11 Nov. In the event, he must somehow have further upset the authorities, for on the day in question Poyntz came into court to explain that he had been rearrested and sent to the Tower of London by order of the Council. When Cassy finally reappeared in King’s bench 17 days later he was fined £40 and his servants a total of £25. At that point de Aune’s suit was still pending but, through the mediation of his ‘friends’, he subsequently reached an out of court settlement with his opponent, whom he paid the substantial sum of £80 in compensation. Finally, in November 1445 he secured letters patent by which the Crown pardoned him, his associates and sureties of all charges and financial penalties arising from the indictment.17 KB27/730, rot. 51d, fines rot. 2, rex rot. 31; CPR, 1441-6, p. 406; E159/222, brevia Easter rot. 6.

As for his subsequent brush with the authorities, in the latter part of 1454 and again in the spring of 1455 Cassy was obliged to provide securities that he would keep the peace towards the clerk Richard Tame, probably the parson of Meysey Hampton, Gloucestershire, of that name. Should he fail in this undertaking, he stood to forfeit £300 and half a dozen mainpernors, headed by Thomas Throckmorton*, lesser sums. In the event, the securities were remitted with Tame’s agreement in the autumn of 1455, when both he and Cassy appeared in person in the court of common pleas.18 CP40/775, rot. 511d; C1/22/186. In the meantime the government instituted a commission of inquiry, dated 22 Feb. 1455, into all concealments, misprisions, extortions and deceptions Cassy had committed in Gloucestershire, although it is not known whether there was a connexion between these misdeeds and his dispute with Tame.19 CPR, 1446-52, p. 223.

In spite of his imprisonment in the Tower, Cassy may have enjoyed a degree of protective ‘good lordship’ during his quarrel with de Aune, since by 1443 he was a retainer of John Talbot, Lord Talbot and 1st earl of Shrewsbury. A few years later, he supported the earl in the well known feud between the Talbot and Berkeley families, in which Shrewsbury’s second wife Margaret Beauchamp claimed a share of the Berkeley estates as her inheritance.20 A.J. Pollard, ‘The Talbots’ (Bristol Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1968), 237, 244, 419; J. Smyth, Lives of the Berkeleys ed. Maclean, ii. 135; Trans. Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc. lxxiv. 135; CCR, 1441-7, p. 151. Cassy also enjoyed a connexion with Margaret’s distant kinsman, John Beauchamp, Lord Powick, with whom he was a co-defendant in a couple of common pleas lawsuits brought by (Sir) Edmund Ingoldisthorpe* in 1454. Ingoldisthorpe sued them for their failure to pay him 200 marks, in 50 mark instalments, possibly in connexion with his recent surrender of three Worcestershire manors to Powick, a transaction that Cassy had witnessed.21 CP40/775, rots. 593d, 597d; CCR, 1447-54, p. 445. Whatever the exact circumstances, it is almost certain that Cassy’s involvement was on Powick’s account, since either he or his son and namesake was a feoffee for the peer over a decade later.22 Notts. Archs., Foljambe of Osberton mss, DD/FJ/4/27/8.

Another lord with whom Cassy had links was Richard, duke of York, for whom he was a steward in Gloucestershire for the college which York’s uncle and predecessor as duke, Edward of Langley, had founded at Fotheringhay. He was certainly steward by 1457, although in 1453 he had jointly stood surety with some of York’s leading retainers on behalf of Thomas Herbert†.23 CCR, 1447-54, p. 426. It is also worth noting that one of his own sureties during his troubles of 1443, William Browning, was a prominent follower of the duke. In the following year, however, Cassy had acted against the interests of York, if possibly only inadvertently. A witness and feoffee for the Pauncefoot family, in the autumn of 1444 he had helped Sir John Pauncefoot† to make a settlement of Crickhowell, the knight’s castle and lordship in Brecon. The settlement had proved highly controversial, providing as it did for the lordship to pass immediately to the King in case of a failure of Pauncefoot heirs, so ignoring the rights of York, its feudal overlord. Furiously accusing the Pauncefoots of conspiring to disinherit him, York had sought redress from the Parliament of 1445. He had done so through a petition in which he had referred to several Pauncefoot feoffees but not Cassy: either this was an oversight or the duke did not believe that the MP had been complicit in the alleged fraud.24 CCR, 1441-7, p. 272; CPR, 1441-6, pp. 320-1; The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 27; SC8/85/4247; P.A. Johnson, Duke Richard of York, 13. Whatever Cassy’s involvement in this affair, his own relationship with the Pauncefoots subsequently deteriorated, for by the late 1450s he was at odds with Sir John Pauncefoot’s son and successor, Thomas*, among those appointed to the February 1455 commission charged with inquiring into his lawless behaviour in Gloucestershire.25 CCR, 1446-52, p. 223.

Whatever the outcome of the commission of inquiry of 1455, Cassy received a royal pardon from a government dominated by York and his allies in October that year, 26 C67/41, m. 21; E159/232, brevia Mich. rot. 23. thanks to their victory at the first battle of St. Albans the previous May. A couple of years later, he presided over an inquisition at Newent in his capacity as steward of that lordship for Fotheringhay College,27 KB9/287/35 and he took a bond for £16 from John Stafford and John Harwold, gentlemen from Yorkshire and Northamptonshire respectively, in late 1459. 28 C241/246/48. The circumstances of the bond are unknown, as is an intriguing case he brought in King’s bench in Michaelmas term of the same year. On 6 Nov. 1459 he appeared in person in that court to sue a bill alleging conspiracy on the part of Richard Beauchamp† (son of Lord Powick) and several associates, including Thomas Pauncefoot. He claimed that in the previous July they had plotted together in Middlesex to ensure that he would be made to answer a plaintiff in the court of the admiralty on 4 Aug. that year, rather than at common law. The plaintiff, one John Clerk, claimed that Cassy had taken valuables worth £4 from him (a gold cross and several precious stones), an accusation that the latter did not attempt to refute in King’s bench, his purpose being to assert that the admiralty had no jurisdiction in the case, since it concerned events that had occurred at Stratford-le-Bow, Middlesex, rather than on the high seas. Beauchamp and his co-defendants had yet to answer Cassy’s suit when Henry VI was toppled from his throne.29 KB27/794, rot. 36. Whatever the circumstances of this dispute, it appears to represent a hiatus rather than a permanent rift between the Cassys and the Beauchamps of Powick, since either the MP or his son and namesake was associated with Richard Beauchamp, by then Lord Powick, in 1476, apparently in the capacity of Richard’s feoffee.30 CPR, 1476-85, p. 44.

In the meantime, and in spite of his links with the duke of York, the Lancastrian government placed Cassy on an anti-Yorkist commission of array but it is impossible to tell whether the MP actually acted upon this appointment. Given that nothing more is heard of Cassy, whether as an office-holder or in a private capacity, for some years after 1461, it is conceivable that he died in the early 1460s and that the cursus honorum above conflates two John Cassys. In other words, it was his son and namesake who held the offices postdating 1461. Alternatively, he was blessed with longevity and lived to a very advanced age. Whatever the case, the lack of certainty necessitates including the activities of the John Cassy who held various offices at a county level between the late 1460s and early 1480s within the scope of this biography.

Having attested the return of the knights of the shire for Gloucestershire to the Parliament of 1467, this John became a member of the county’s commission of the peace in February 1468 and received a royal pardon referring to him as ‘late of London’ as well as ‘of Whitefield’ in the following July.31 C67/46, m. 29. In September 1469 he leased out a house or small manor at Tredington (possibly a recent acquisition) to Richard Jeynkyns and his wife, agreeing that the couple might hold it for the rest of their lives at a rent of five marks p.a.32 VCH Glos. viii. 231; Parsons of Kemerton mss, D214/T8. A few weeks after making the lease, he began a term as sheriff of Gloucestershire. The last few weeks of his shrievalty coincided with the Readeption of Henry VI. During the Readeption he was dismissed from the commission of the peace but it is hard to tell whether this was for political reasons. In any case, he did not serve continuously as a j.p. following his reappointment to the bench by the government of the restored Edward IV in June 1471.

Upon Cassy’s appointment as sheriff in November 1469 the government had granted him an allowance of £50 in his account, in anticipation of the charges and losses he might incur in the year ahead.33 E404/74/2/66. In the event, his term in the shrievalty had more serious personal consequences than he could have predicted. In the years immediately following his shrievalty, several different and in some cases powerful plaintiffs sued him in the Exchequer over his failure to satisfy them of various sums that the Crown had assigned to them from the issues of his bailiwick. In June 1471 Thomas Stratton, clerk of the King’s works, sued for £10;34 E13/157, rot. 15. in the following month the queen claimed £60 due to her as an annuity from the hundred and manor of Barton Bristol;35 Ibid. rot. 24. in November that year John Roger III* of London began a suit over £40;36 Ibid. rots. 51d, 65. in July 1472 John Peke demanded £9 2s. 6d., his wages and fees for the office of ranger in the Forest of Dean;37 E13/158, rots. 33d, 35. in the same month Richard, duke of Gloucester, sought £30 arising from an annuity of £40 the King had granted to him in 1461;38 Ibid. rot. 35d. and in the following autumn (Sir) John Howard* began action over £10.39 Ibid. rot. 51d. All of these plaintiffs, save Stratton, won their suits and the court ordered Cassy to pay the victorious claimants the sums demanded, along with their damages, costs and expenses, amounting to a combined total of nearly £160. Further suits in the Exchequer added to his woes. In 1472 John Danyell and the abbot of Hailes, Gloucestershire, sued him for wrongfully distraining their livestock while sheriff;40 Ibid. rots. 46, 58d. and in the following year Thomas Baynham, sheriff of Gloucestershire in 1471-2, won a suit against him in the same court over a bond for £10, recovering that sum and winning damages of 20s.41 Ibid. rot. 69d. Cassy’s shortcomings as sheriff were to have repercussions for two others of his successors in the shrievalty, Humphrey Forster† and (Sir) John Butler*, sheriffs in 1472-3 and 1473-4 respectively. While sheriff, Forster was ordered to distrain and sell some of Cassy’s goods and chattels, in order to raise the money due to the duke of Gloucester and Peke, but he had difficulty in finding buyers for the livestock he seized and was amerced by the Exchequer as a result. By November 1473 Peke had lost patience and he began a suit against Forster for the 100s. he was still owed. Forster ran into yet more trouble in the following January when he was sued by Thomas Baynham over the £11 which the latter had won against Cassy a year earlier.42 E13/159, rots. 13d, 28, 28d, 47d. In Trinity term 1474, the Exchequer amerced Butler for his failings in recovering what Cassy owed Sir John Howard. Whether Cassy ever satisfied all of the demands against him is open to question, for in January 1480 the clerk of the estreats delivered a summary of outstanding debts charged upon his account as sheriff, comprising no fewer than 11½ rotuli, into the Exchequer.43 E13/164, rot. 29.

These proceedings in the Exchequer represent the least of Cassy’s failings as sheriff, since during his shrievalty he had participated in the private battle that the feuding Talbots and Berkeleys fought at Nibley Green in March 1470. The long-running quarrel between two magnate families had taken a twist after the death of the first earl of Shrewsbury in 1453, for the new earl, Shrewsbury’s son by his first marriage, had sided with the Berkeleys against his stepmother, the countess Margaret. By the later fifteenth century, the Cassys were likewise associated with the Berkeleys. Cassy accompanied William, Lord Berkeley, to Nibley Green, where Margaret’s grandson, Thomas Talbot, Viscount Lisle, met his death. Following the battle, Berkeley rewarded him for his services with an annual pension of four marks. Just over a year later, the much more significant battle of Tewkesbury occurred on Cassy’s doorstep at Deerhurst. Perhaps prompted by the extremely uncertain times in which he lived, at some stage in 1471 he secured a papal indulgence for himself and his wife Elizabeth.44 Pollard, 237, 244; Cat. Med. Muns. Berkeley Castle ed. Wells-Furby (Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc.), i. 7; Glos. Archs., Blythe, Dutton and Holloway mss, D4262/F1 (not found in CPL).

During the later 1470s Cassy married his daughter Margaret to one Richard Barnby, but following their marriage they sued him in the Chancery for failing to pay them Margaret’s marriage portion of 100 marks. Their bill is of particular interest because it identifies William Nottingham II*, appointed chief baron of the Exchequer in April 1479, as another of Cassy’s sons-in-law. According to the bill, Nottingham had acted to advance the match by agreeing to forgo 100 marks of a debt of £100 that Cassy owed him, providing Cassy paid the 100 marks to the couple instead.45 C1/60/25. Barnby was not originally Margaret’s intended, for at one time she had been betrothed to Thomas Rous*: VCH Worcs. iii. 284n. While it shows that Nottingham was Margaret’s brother-in-law, the bill does not reveal the name of her sister but she can only have been the chief baron’s second wife, Cecily.46 Glos. Archs., cath. deeds, D1609/7/14, proves that Nottingham married a Cecily following the death of his first wife Elizabeth. Whatever the truth of the Barnbys’ claims, in the same period Cassy was associated with his son-in-law as a feoffee of John Lisle (son and successor of Robert Lisle*), from whom Nottingham bought moieties of two manors in Gloucestershire.47 W. Suss. RO, Wiston mss, WISTON/2209; VCH Glos. vi. 100; xi. 91. He also featured in an out of court settlement of a dispute between the abbots of Westminster and Tewkesbury that Nottingham and Thomas Brydges, serjeant-at-law, made in May 1478. The two ecclesiastics had quarrelled over certain lands at Deerhurst: John Strensham, abbot of Tewkesbury, claimed that they belonged to Deerhurst priory, a dependant cell of his abbey; John Estney, abbot of Westminster, whose abbey owned a liberty and estates in the hundred of Deerhurst, asserted that they were part of his manor of Deerhurst. In deciding in favour of Estney, Nottingham and Brydges depended upon evidences provided by Cassy, a long-term farmer of Westminster abbey at Deerhurst, as well as the testimony of the oldest tenants in the area.48 Westminster Abbey muns. 32833.

In spite of the help he provided the abbot of Westminster on that occasion, Cassy himself was involved in a serious quarrel with Estney at some point after 1474. Among the muniments of Westminster abbey there exists an undated paper summarizing the abbot’s side of the dispute. First, Estney alleged that Cassy had wrongfully disseised him of the wardship of the son and heir of Thomas Celsye and deprived him of the lands that Celsye had held from him and his predecessors. Secondly, he claimed that William, one of Cassy’s younger sons, had deprived him of the profits of Whitefield manor, which should have come to him by virtue of an outlawry that Cassy had incurred.49 Ibid. 63965; VCH Glos. viii. 40.

Whatever its exact date, the quarrel with the abbot of Westminster occurred in the latter years of this John Cassy, who died in the early 1480s, probably in the second half of 1483. In October that year the escheator in Gloucestershire received orders to hold an inquisition post mortem for him in that county, but there is no surviving record of any such inquisition. His widow outlived him by over a decade. In her will, dated 11 Apr. 1493 and proved on 23 June 1494, Elizabeth requested burial beside her late husband in the parish church at Deerhurst. She left at least three surviving children, two sons and a daughter. The elder of these sons, another John Cassy, was known as ‘of Miserden’, a parish lying between Gloucester and Cirencester, while his father was still alive. He died in 1507.50 CFR, xxi. no. 738; xxii. no. 874; PCC 9 Vox; CPR, 1476-85, p. 228.