KARR, John

Karr’s father, Thomas, was one of the wealthiest merchants in early fifteenth-century York, having gained the freedom of the city in 1406. A draper by trade, he supplied cloth to Durham priory among others, but made his fortune by acting as a middleman between the wool growers and weavers, fullers and dyers. In his will he made bequests to six weavers and one, John Staynoney, was named as his executor. Although he appears to have disposed of his property before his death, he passed on a considerable amount of cash, some £336, to his son. He also played a full role in the government of the city, in 1422-3 serving as chamberlain and five years later as sheriff. He subsequently became a member of the council of 24 and by June 1433, when he witnessed the parliamentary election, he had joined the ranks of the aldermen.4 J. Kermode, ‘Merchants of York, Hull and Beverley’ (Sheffield Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1990), app. 4; C219/14/4.

John is first heard of in 1423-4, when as a child, along with his parents he was admitted into the city’s prestigious guild of Corpus Christi, but it took a further ten years before he gained the freedom of York by patrimony.5 Reg. Guild Corpus Christi, 23; Freemen of York (Surtees Soc. xcvi), 148. Like his father, he embarked on a career in the government of York, being chosen as one of the chamberlains in February 1438 and elected sheriff in September 1440. His rise within the city’s elite occurred even during his father’s lifetime and his rapid advancement may have been due to the latter’s influence. John had joined the council of 24 by January 1442 when he witnessed the parliamentary election, but his role in the government of the city during the 1440s is obscure and it is unclear when he became an alderman. He had certainly achieved this status, however, by February 1448 when he was elected mayor of York. His acceptance of the office seems odd, given that on 21 Feb. the previous year the city’s MPs at the Parliament assembled at Bury St. Edmunds had secured letters patent exempting him from civic office.6 CPR, 1446-52, p. 49. Whatever the circumstances of his appointment, his mayoralty was a troubled one due to a dispute with the town authorities of Hull. They had been required by the King to certify the names of all merchants and ships travelling illegally from the port to Iceland and Denmark, but they failed adequately to execute the task and the King entrusted it to Karr. The response of leading townsmen of Hull was hostile: John Steton* , then mayor, Richard Anson* and John Spencer I* intimidated a jury into laying false indictments against Karr and other York merchants with the result, as Karr complained to the chancellor, that the merchants of York no longer dared to go to Hull. This prompted the King to command the authorities of Hull to desist from their intimidation on pain of £500.7 C1/17/111; Hull Hist. Centre, Kingston-upon-Hull recs., corporation letters BRL 1.

In the penultimate week of his mayoralty, on 20 Jan. 1449, Karr was present in the council chamber to witness his own election to the Parliament summoned to assemble at Westminster the following month. He was returned alongside another wealthy York merchant, John Thirsk*.8 C219/15/6. Both men were merchants of the Calais staple and concerns both for the wool trade and the defence of Calais were to be voiced in the forthcoming assembly. Their election to Parliament, therefore, was almost certainly connected with their vested interest in Calais and the wool trade. The two men set out from York on 5 Feb., a week before the Parliament began, and remained at Westminster until 13 Apr. They received wages of £13 4s. each for 65 days, at the customary rate of 4s. per day. Karr was paid for the period from 1 May until 6 June for his attendance at the second session, and on 16 June (because of Thirsk’s illness) he set off alone to Winchester for the Parliament’s final session. He received wages until 22 July (six days after the Parliament’s close) totalling £16 8s. Even if the affairs of the staplers were important to both of York’s representatives, they did not neglect the city’s business: as well as making gifts to lawyers, they were paid 20s. ‘pro copia diversorum actorum parliamenti’.9 York City Chamberlains’ Acct. Rolls, 67-68; York City Archs., chamberlains’ accts. 1449-50, CC1a, f. 12v. They were also prevailed upon to make their contribution to the administration’s last ditch efforts to preserve what remained of English Normandy: in the early summer of 1449 Karr, Thirsk, and another York stapler, Richard Lematon*, lent £315 12s. to the Crown, part of a larger loan of 3,000 marks made by the company of the staple for an embassy to the duke of Burgundy.10 CPR, 1446-52, p. 316. In October they were granted repayment from the customs in Hull for their loan, but in October 1454 the sum of £157 16s. was still outstanding and further arrangements were made for its repayment.11 CPR, 1452-61, p. 209.

Following his return from Parliament, Karr’s role in civic government is hard to trace. He witnessed the parliamentary elections of October 1449, but not that of the following year and he was not recorded as having attended any council meetings. It seems likely that the letters patent exempting him for life from civic office were now put into effect. A possible explanation for his reluctance to serve further in the government of the city is that his business affairs frequently required his absence. By the late 1440s Karr was one of the leading northern merchants of the Calais staple. Lacunae in the customs records for Kingston-upon-Hull prevent a reconstruction of the scale of his dealings in wool, but by then he was renting a messuage there in Hull Street, perhaps a warehouse for his wool or a place from which to conduct his trading ventures.12 Kingston-upon-Hull recs., bench bk. 2, BRE 2, f. 61.

Despite the letters patent exempting him from office and an evident reluctance to serve, in February 1456 Karr again accepted election as mayor of York. The circumstances of his election to the mayoralty are not recorded and his mayoral year appears to have passed without incident. In June he was appointed to a commission to deliver York gaol, but no ad hoc commissions are recorded. He was, however, still owed money by the city chamberlains five years later for expenses incurred while in office.13 York City Chamberlains’ Acct. Rolls, 117-18. The close of Karr’s mayoral year almost certainly saw the end of his official involvement in the government of York, and little evidence survives of his personal affairs in the later decades of his life, although he continued to live and trade in the city and to enjoy the status of a former mayor. In 1459-60 he supplied timber to the wardens of Ouse Bridge and in 1472 he was still paying his dues as a member of the prestigious mercers’ guild of Holy Trinity.14 York Mercers (Surtees Soc. cxxix), 68; York Bridgemasters’ Accts. ed. Stell (York Arch. Trust, 2003), 356. Contacts made through trade continued into the 1470s and in 1478 he was owed £3 10s. by Walter, son of his old trading partner, Richard Lematon, although he appears no longer to have been active in overseas trade himself.15 CPR, 1476-85, p. 83.

When Karr made his will on 6 Nov. 1487, he was an old man, almost certainly in his mid 70s. He asked to be buried in his parish church of St. Sampson next to Joan, his late wife, and made provision his funeral there, specifying that 13 poor men, clad in white gowns, should attend his corpse. Karr was clearly concerned to ease his soul’s passage through purgatory and his will was almost entirely concerned with elaborate and specific instructions for prayers and masses. He made bequests to over a dozen religious houses and hospitals, including the abbeys of St. Mary, York, and Riveaulx, and the priories of Appleton, Clementhorp, Hull, North Ferriby and Watton, with specific instructions concerning the nature and number of masses to be said in each. Karr gave two gold rings, set with a diamond and a ruby, to hang on the image of the Virgin and Holy Child in York Minster in return for prayers there, as well as 4d. to every parish priest in the city and its suburbs. He also remembered the city’s poor: as well as alms to the prisoners in the various prisons, he made bequests of cash to provide for the marriage of 15 ‘pore madyns well disposed to mariage’, for 50 beds and sets of linen to be distributed among the impoverished, and a further £20 for married couples living in poverty within the city. Of the £145 of cash bequests made by Karr in his will, £125 was given to religious institutions or in alms. Several named servants received gifts of cash and silverware, but the most curious bequest was that of a ‘payr of spectacles of sylver and gylted and a bonet that was sumtyme the Bishoppis of Hereforth’ to the abbot of St. Mary’s. These had presumably belonged to John Stanbury (d.1474), Henry VI’s former confessor and councillor, but how they had come into Karr’s possession remains obscure. No mention was made of any property, apart from the ‘place that I won in and my other place in Fynkelstrete’, and these, like the remainder of his goods and chattels, were to be disposed of by his executors for the benefit of his soul. His executors, a chantry priest in St. Sampson’s and the parson of St. John, Micklegate, York, were granted probate on 20 Apr. 1488.16 York registry wills, prob. reg. 5, ff. 326v-328. On 18 Apr. the following year the executors were licensed to found a perpetual chantry in St. Sampson’s church in Karr’s name and receive an annuity of £5 16s. 4d. in mortmain from the abbot of Rievaulx for the maintenance of a chaplain.17 CPR, 1485-94, p. 265.