LAURENCE, John

A lawyer of obscure background, Laurence was the son of Richard Laurence of Barnwell, a minor landowner from Northamptonshire.3 It is frequently difficult to distinguish Laurence from various namesakes, although he was not the man who served as a soldier in France in the first half of Hen. VI’s reign, nor the royal messenger of Edw. IV’s reign: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, fr. 25769/585, 591; 25774/1289; 25775/1384, 1397; 26278/6, 2; Clairambault 185/32; Add. Ch. 180. There is likewise no evidence to connect him with the John Laurence who served Humphrey, duke of Buckingham, as his bailiff at Tyseo, Warws. in the early 1450s, and he was not the man who acted as a feoffee for lands in Biddenham, Beds., since that John died before June 1452: Acct. Gt. Household Humphrey, 1st Duke of Buckingham (Cam. Soc. ser. 4, xxix), 15, 49; Beds. and Luton Archs., deed, 1452, TW/204. Richard died in the autumn of 1425, and a year later an inquisition held by the escheator in Northamptonshire found that his son, then a minor of 14 years of age, was the heir to his messuages, lands and rents in Barnwell, that these properties were worth 71s. 4d. p.a. and that they were held in chief.4 CIPM, xxii. 836. No other such inquisitions survive and, if these holdings comprised all of Richard’s real estate, he was of insufficient means to qualify as a ‘gentleman’. It is nevertheless possible that he possessed interests in neighbouring Bedfordshire as well, since a Richard Laurence attested the return of that county’s knights of the shire to the Parliament of 1425.5 Although it is worth noting it was not until 1429 that Parliament restricted the county franchise to resident 40s. freeholders: PROME, x. 405-6. The Crown granted the wardship of his heir to William Weldon of Northamptonshire in July 1427, a grant renewed in the following November. As it happened, Weldon did not have custody of the boy for long, since before the end of the decade Roger Hunt* and others, claiming that the holdings in question belonged to them, successfully challenged the findings of the inquisition into Richard’s lands.6 CFR, xv. 197-8; E159/204, brevia Trin. rot. 12d; 206 brevia Mich. rot. 8, Hil. rot. 5d; SC8/117/5832. It is not clear if Hunt and his associates were Richard’s feoffees, if Richard had held the lands from them rather than directly from the King, or if the young man’s wardship subsequently passed to them. Yet it was perhaps through the patronage of Hunt, a prominent member of the legal profession, that John Laurence came to pursue a career in the law.

By the late 1430s, John had settled at Wyboston, a hamlet of Eaton Socon in Bedfordshire. It was of Wyboston, ‘gentleman’, that he was included in a general pardon granted in May 1439 to those followers of the elderly Reynold, Lord Grey of Ruthin, who had clashed with John Cornwall, Lord Fanhope, and his men at the Bedford shire-house in the previous January.7 CPR, 1436-41, pp. 282-3. It is therefore assumed that he was not John Lawrence of Little Staughton, Beds., a franklin or yeoman who received a royal pardon in 1452: CPR, 1429-36, p. 170; C67/40, m. 32. Laurence may have become attached to the Greys through Roger Hunt, who served Lord Grey as an estate official, although it is equally possible that Hunt’s associate Sir Thomas Waweton* had drawn him into their circle. Foremost among the Grey retainers at the Bedford fracas, Waweton was one of Laurence’s neighbours, for his Bedfordshire residence was at Basmey, another hamlet of Eaton Socon. Reynold Grey died within two years of the disturbances at Bedford, but Laurence continued to remain associated with the Grey interest, now headed by the deceased peer’s grandson and successor, Edward, the future earl of Kent. In the early 1440s, he was a feoffee for William Furtho, a Northamptonshire landowner whose daughter married the eldest son of John Enderby*, a leading Grey retainer. In June 1447, he was party to a land transaction in Bedfordshire in which Waweton, Enderby and Roger Hunt were also involved. In the following month, he and Waweton witnessed a release of lands to the county’s Augustinian priory of St. Mary, Bushmead.8 The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 456-7; CP25(1)/6/80/21; 81/6; VCH Beds. ii. 224; E159/220, commissiones; CPR, 1441-7, p. 489.

The Grey connexion may well have assisted Laurence when he stood for election to the Commons. He entered his first Parliament in the autumn of 1449, while escheator of Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire, and he was re-elected, again for Bedfordshire, just under a year later. In both of his Parliaments his fellow MP was William Herteshorn*, an esquire from a family with a tradition of service to the Greys. Whatever backing he may have received from the Greys, Laurence is likely to have possessed estates of sufficient size to qualify him for election as one of Bedfordshire’s knights of the shire in his own right. In the previous decade his landholdings had been valued at £20 p.a. for the purposes of the subsidy of 1436,9 E159/212, recorda Hil. rot. 14 (iv)d. but he must have added to them by the late 1440s. On the other hand, he may have disposed of most – if not all –of his inheritance in Northamptonshire by the time he first stood for Parliament, since in 1441 he had released his interest in various lands and messuages in Barnwell and ‘Lyllesford’ to John Sturdys, a London goldsmith who had already purchased the manor of Barnwell All Saints from Sir Richard Stury.10 CP25(1)/179/95/104; VCH Northants. ii. 174. It seems likely that Sturdys had bought out Laurence as well as Stury, although not necessarily at the same time. Given the debts he incurred subsequently, it is possible that Laurence was already in financial difficulty when he made his release to Sturdys, and that his subsequent parliamentary career served to provide him with some temporary relief from his creditors’ lawsuits.

Such lawsuits were troubling Laurence by the mid 1440s. In July 1444, for example, he entered into a couple of bonds with the London mercer John Sturgeon* and his brother Richard, a clerk of the Chancery, as a security that he would pay them £30 in the following year. After he reneged on his undertaking, they sued him in the common pleas. When the case reached pleadings in Trinity term 1446, Laurence admitted their claim and the court ordered him to pay the debt and damages of 20s. Laurence was the defendant in another suit in the same court four years later, when he faced a demand for £12 from a London carpenter named Thomas Coventre.11 CP40/743, rot. 417d; 757, rot. 349. A few months before attending his first Parliament, Laurence appeared before the statute staple at Westminster to acknowledge that he owed £80 to Ralph Legh* , a member of the King’s Household. He undertook to pay this sum by July 1450 but failed to do so, leading to a writ, of March 1451, ordering the sheriff of Bedfordshire to apprehend him and seize his lands. By the latter date, he was at Westminster attending his second Parliament (meaning that he enjoyed protection from arrest by parliamentary privilege) and the sheriff returned that he could not find him within his bailiwick. Several months after the dissolution of the Parliament, an inquisition found that Laurence held no property in Bedfordshire, perhaps because he had taken care to put his lands there in the hands of trustees.12 C131/67/15. Just over three years later, the MP was pardoned the outlawries he had incurred for not answering five suits for debt and another for cattle-lifting, and for failing to satisfy John Stokes of Abingdon, who had already successfully sued him over a debt of £40. He received the pardon after surrendering himself to the Fleet prison in London and repaying Stokes the sum he owed him, along with damages of £11 13s. 4d. The plaintiff in the first of the suits for debt was Ralph, Lord Greystoke, lord of the manor of Wyboston, who alleged that Laurence owed him just over 15 marks; in the second, over a sum of 100s., it was the abbess of the Minoresses without Aldgate in London, a house with interests in Bedfordshire. The other creditors were a draper and two tailors from the City, one of whom sought a debt of £50. Laurence may have incurred the debts claimed by the Londoners while visiting the City and Westminster in his capacity as a lawyer and MP. The cattle-lifting suit evidently arose from a dispute on his doorstep, since the co-plaintiffs, William Fitzhugh, gentleman, and John Baker, husbandman, were both from Beggary, a hamlet of Eaton Socon.13 CPR, 1452-61, p. 196; VCH Beds. iii. 192; CIPM Hen. VII, i. 243; VCH London, i. 519.

During the following three decades, other creditors similarly pursued Laurence through the courts. In the summer of 1459 he was pardoned his outlawry for failing to answer separate suits for debt which Ralph Legh (this time seeking £40), Joan Salbrook and John, the son of Sir John Radcliffe*, had brought in the common pleas.14 CPR, 1452-61, p. 456. He was likewise pardoned in November 1465 for not appearing in the same court to answer John Manningham and William Couper for debts contracted in Middlesex, and again during the Readeption of Henry VI, after he had given himself up to the Fleet and paid Manningham the £17 6s. 8d. he owed him, along with damages of six marks. The second of these pardons, dated 23 Nov. 1470, also absolved him for failing to pay the Crown a fine relating to Lord Greystoke’s suit of over 15 years earlier, or to answer the London vintner Henry Silver and the executors of (Sir) John Clay*, who had sued him for debts of £10 and £40 respectively.15 CPR, 1461-7, p. 414; 1467-77, p. 227. In July 1471, Laurence received another pardon for the outlawry he had incurred for not responding to the suits of Greystoke, Silver and of Clay’s executors, and near the end of Edward IV’s reign the administrator of the goods of the intestate Thomas Shotbolt of London and Ardeley, Hertfordshire, was suing him for a debt allegedly contracted in Hertfordshire.16 CPR, 1467-77, p. 253; 1476-85, p. 267; CP40/828, rot. 317d; VCH Herts. iii. 198.

The seemingly perpetual state of indebtedness in which Laurence found himself is striking, given that late medieval lawyers are commonly thought to have had better access to ready capital than many of their contemporaries. Professional incompetence would appear an unlikely explanation for his financial misfortunes, since he was of sufficient expertise to serve on the quorum throughout his 20 years or so as a j.p. As his lengthy service on the commission of the peace for Bedfordshire indicates, his frequent outlawries in the King’s courts did not preclude a career in local administration. This career was not restricted to Bedfordshire, for he was escheator in Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire, both counties with which he appears not to have had any other connexion, whether as an office-holder or landowner, in 1463-4. During this term, he obtained a pardon from the Crown, but this seems primarily to have related to his previous period as an escheator, since it refers to him as ‘late escheator’ in Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire. It was not until eight years later that he received a like pardon referring to his term as such in Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire.17 C67/45, m. 9 (6 Feb. 1464); 48, m. 17 (12 Dec. 1471). Laurence received his last ad hoc commission in 1483. By that date, he was aged over 70 and it is unlikely that he lived for much longer.