COOK, John II

A skinner, Cook was active at Cambridge by the later 1440s, when one of 17 defendants in a lawsuit brought by a merchant, Thomas Kyrkeby, in the court of common pleas at Westminster. When pleadings in this suit opened in Trinity term 1447, Kyrkeby alleged that the defendants, who also included William Tame*, Simon Rankyn* and 11 other burgesses from Cambridge, had illegally maintained a suit that Richard Togood* had brought against him in the local borough court. Following out of court negotiations between the parties, there were further pleadings in Easter term 1448, at which both plaintiff and defendants agreed to a trial by jury, although this probably never occurred.5 CP40/746, rot. 512d; 749, rot 117.

As far as the evidence goes, Cook sat in his only known Parliament before holding office in Cambridge, beginning the first of his two terms as a bailiff of the borough some three months after leaving the Commons. Over two decades later, he served a term as mayor, during which he had problems with a former servant who had left his employ without permission. Shortly before he took up office in September 1473, a Cambridge jury had indicted Robert Maydewell, a husbandman from the town, for breaking into Cook’s house and close the previous May and abducting the servant, Joan Attewoode or Woode. Evidently, Joan was in league with Maydewell and a willing victim, for a later jury indicted her, under the description of ‘housewife’, for breaking into the house herself armed with a knife, in October 1473, and taking a kirtle worth 10s. belonging to Katherine Cook, presumably the MP’s wife. She was again indicted for breaking into Cook’s house a second time, in June 1474, and taking away goods worth 8s. and 26s. 8d. in cash. Cook’s term as mayor was also not without its physical dangers. On 4 Aug. 1475, William Seman, a shearman from the town, whom he was trying to arrest for assaulting his father, William Seman senior, earlier that day, attacked him with a pair of shears.6 Cambs. Archs., Cambridge bor. recs., ct. proceedings liberty of Cambridge, 1474, City/PB Box X/65; presentments, 1473-5, City/PB Box XVII/32/3, 6. The mayoralty was Cook’s last borough office, but he served the King as a j.p. in his later years.

What little evidence there is of Cook’s property dealings in Cambridge relates to the same later years. He rented a garden plot from the corporation in the early 1480s,7 Cambridge treasurers’ acct., 1483-4, City/PB Box X/71/1. Since Cook possessed a very common name, it is impossible to ascertain whether he was the John Cook who sold various lands and rents in Cambridge, Grantchester and other parishes near the town, apparently in Edw. IV’s reign: C1/38/292. and by the middle of the same decade he had an interest in a couple of tenements in the town, although only as a feoffee for William Berford*. Berford was dead by 1486, when Cook and two co-feoffees found themselves accused in Chancery of breach of trust. The plaintiff was Thomas Tower of Harleston, Norfolk, who had married Berford’s widow and executrix, Agnes, and who alleged that Cook and his associates had refused to release the properties when requested. In their answer to the bill, the defendants, evidently reluctant to act upon the request without appropriate advice, declared themselves willing to do as the court directed.8 C1/82/75-6.

Cook was still alive in January 1494, when he came before the mayor to enrol 14½ booths at Stourbridge Fair, but dead by 1496, when his widow, Katherine, granted three of them to the town. The local ‘Cross Book’ recorded the anniversary of his death, 25 Feb.9 City/PB Box X/71/1; Cambridge ‘Cross Bk.’, City/PB Box I/4, ff. 3v, 51; Gray, 19.