DEKEN, John

A Chancery bill dating from the late 14th century or early 1400s provides the earliest known evidence for Deken, a resident of the Ipswich parish of St. Mary at the Quay.5 PCC 13 Rous (PROB11/1, ff. 200v-201); CPR, 1452-61, p. 373. The bill was brought by Geoffrey Spaldyng, who alleged that the MP and his father were withholding various properties in Ipswich which they held in trust for him. Another Chancery bill, of uncertain date, suggests that the Dekens had a connexion with Bury St. Edmunds, since the plaintiff, a man from that town, claimed that John had agreed to sell him a property there only subsequently to renege on that undertaking.6 C1/7/219, 310. According to N.R. Amor, Late Med. Ipswich, 245, Deken was involved in another dispute in the earlier part of his career, leading to a conviction for assaulting one Henry Barbour in 1415, but Amor’s source is unknown since he fails to supply a supporting reference. Whatever his family’s origins, Deken was involved in affairs outside Ipswich at an early date in his career, for in November 1403 he took part in the release of a manor at Denham in west Suffolk, a property formerly held by Sir John Popham†, to John Staverton and others.7 CCR, 1402-5, p. 278. He himself acquired interests outside the town, purchasing and subsequently selling a messuage at Bildeston in the eastern half of the county.8 C1/16/396.

Although a mercer, Deken traded in other commodities besides cloth, so explaining why he was sometimes styled a ‘merchant’ (as in a royal pardon he received in July 1446).9 C67/39, m. 8. His markets included the Low Countries, and he was one of a group of non-London merchants who resisted the 1421 election of John Wareyn, a mercer from the City, as the governor of the English Merchant Adventurers there. Soon after the new governor took up office in September that year, Deken and other provincial merchants protested that a clique of Londoners had controlled the election and refused to contribute to the new governor’s salary. Wareyn’s immediate response was to seize his opponents’ merchandise in Zeeland, although he also appealed to the ruler of Holland and Zeeland, John, duke of Bavaria. The duke’s council found in Wareyn’s favour in October 1422, fining Deken and his associates 1,000 nobles and ordering them to pay the governor 200 nobles and costs. They refused to pay and Deken was still at odds with Wareyn in the early 1430s.10 Bronnen tot de Geschiedenis van den Handel Met Engeland, Schotland en Ierland ed. H.J. Smit, i. nos. 981, 1041, 1046; ii. 1163; N.J.M. Kerling, Commercial Relations of Holland and Zeeland with Eng. 148-51.

Deken was a shipowner as well as a mercer, and the Crown granted him a licence in May 1437 to carry 500 cloths overseas in his vessel, known as the Cristofre. According to the terms of the licence, he was obliged to ship his goods to territories at peace with the King, and to pay the customs collectors at Ipswich 12d. for every 20s. worth of cloth transported, over and above ordinary customs and other dues.11 CPR, 1429-36, p. 512; 1436-41, pp. 57, 59. He also shipped foodstuffs abroad, for in October 1427 and again the following February he was given permission by the Crown to export grain. In the early 1430s, the London draper John Brykles sued him in Chancery for allegedly discharging a cargo of Brykles’s grain, which he was supposed to take to Bordeaux, at Plymouth.12 C1/12/181. At the end of that decade, a jury sitting at Woodbridge presented that he had exported 12 barrels of salt beef on a Dutch ship from the port of Orwell to Holland without paying any customs or subsidies in October 1439, an allegation subsequently disproved.13 E159/217, recorda Easter rot. 2d. Deken also used the Cristofre to carry passengers, for on 1433 and again in 1445 the King licensed him to take pilgrims to Santiago de Compostella, and in March 1436 he was permitted to arm the vessel for defence against the King’s enemies.14 DKR, xlviii. 252, 254, 296, 366.

Elected a portman of Ipswich in July 1420, Deken went on to serve no fewer than ten terms as a bailiff of Ipswich, several of them consecutive. In November 1423, during his second term as such, he was obliged to give himself up to the Marshalsea in Southwark, following an appeal made by a convicted prisoner there, John Sperlyng of ‘Flexdon’. Having turned approver, Sperlyng alleged that early in the previous year Deken had helped him to steal £20 from two merchants (and taken part in a separate robbery) at ‘Burnbridge’. Deken was granted bail after appearing in the court of King’s bench and putting himself on the country, and a jury found him not guilty the following February. Presumably, his accuser met his end on the scaffold soon afterwards. The appeal against Deken was one of a series of accusations made by Sperlyng, and William Ketch, another Ipswich burgess, was also obliged to defend himself against similar charges, but the full circumstances of this affair are unknown.15 KB27/650, rex rots. 21d, 27, 27d.

Deken was also in office as bailiff on each of the occasions that he was returned to the Commons, and it is likely that a deputy fulfilled his duties while he was away at Westminster. He and William Weathereld*, his co-bailiff during the two consecutive terms 1427-9, certainly had a deputy, and in the early or mid 1430s Thomas Mynton esquire sued them and this associate, Peter Terry, in the Chancery. Mynton’s bill concerned an episode alleged to have occurred in 1429. He claimed that he had contracted with the earl of Huntingdon to supply an archer for a force that the earl was taking to France but that Deken and his colleagues had taken legal action in the borough court against the archer, Thomas Hurt of Colchester, upon his arrival at Ipswich, the port of embarkation. As a result, Hurt (who may have committed an offence in the town while waiting to sail) had ended up in the town’s gaol and the expedition had departed without him, even though Huntingdon had previously acquired royal letters of protection for the archer, to whom he had also issued his own letters of credence. Mynton claimed that the bailiffs’ actions had left him open to legal action by Huntingdon, who had taken three bonds from him when he had contracted to supply Hurt.16 C1/45/254. Huntingdon was one of the English commanders in France in 1429: CP, v. 207. Deken was also named as a defendant in another Chancery bill, probably filed in 1434-5 when he and Robert Wood I* were the bailiffs of Ipswich. The plaintiff, William Dunton, alnager of Suffolk and Essex, claimed that they and three other Ipswich men had prevented him from serving a precept on behalf of the archbishop of Canterbury within the borough by threatening him with physical violence and death, and that they had prosecuted him by writ of praemunire in the King’s bench. He added that he feared for his life because the sheriff had failed to act upon the writ of supplicavit (requiring Deken and his associates to keep the peace) he had obtained in response. In July 1438, Dunton was pardoned his outlawry in Kent for not appearing to pay a fine due for failing to prosecute a bill in King’s bench against Deken for breach of the Statute of Provisors.17 C1/45/52; CPR, 1436-41, p. 176.

For most of his career as an office-holder, Deken served as a j.p. in Ipswich, and he was one of the first four burgesses chosen to hold the office after the borough had acquired the right to appoint its own justices. In November 1447, while still a royally-appointed j.p., he and two of his associates on the bench, William Weathereld and Robert Wood, complained to the King about the activities of Sir Robert Wingfield*. Explaining that a local jury had dared not indict the knight, they certified that on the previous 16 Sept. he and several of his servants had broken into a house in Ipswich with the intention of beating its inhabitant, John Creek. They added that one of Wingfield’s men had nearly killed another burgess and that the knight had helped to shelter three men who had attacked and injured a gentleman named Thomas Andrew on a royal highway within the town. Wingfield subsequently appeared in the King’s bench in connexion with these charges, but he received a royal pardon in early 1448.18 KB27/746, rex. rot. 46.

Deken died a year later, shortly after attesting his last parliamentary election. In his will, dated 1 Feb. 1449 and proved on the 26th of the same month, he sought burial in the church of the town’s Dominican friary. He left £10 to the fabric of the church and 40s. to one of the friars. He also made bequests to the local Franciscan and Carmelite houses and several local parish churches, and asked for one or more suitable priests to sing for his soul for seven years in the churches of St. Mary at the Quay and St. Stephen. He provided for his wife Eleanor by assigning to her a life interest in his tenement in ‘Brookestrete’ and a weekly allowance of 6s. 8d., and by bestowing on her various pieces of plate. He also bequeathed sums to each of his four apprentices and several household servants. Among those featured in the will were his sister, Alice Man, and her daughter, but there is no mention of any children of his own. His widow, who died some three years after him, chose burial beside her maternal uncle, William Stratford, in the local Franciscan friary, rather than with her husband.19 PCC 13 Rous; IC/AA2/1/178. Her will bears the probate date of 14 Jan. 1452.

After Deken’s death, his executors, John Brumley, rector of St. Stephen’s in Ipswich, and John Burdevaunt, a vintner from the town, sued John Gervays in the Chancery and Richard Syslyngham* of Maldon in the common pleas. According to their Chancery bill, Gervays had been a trustee of the messuage in Bildeston the MP had bought and afterwards sold. Their complaint was that Gervays had refused to release his title to the purchaser that Deken had found for the property, Thomas Thwayte.20 C1/16/396. As for Syslyngham, they alleged that he owed 100s. to their testator’s estate. Their suit against him was still pending in late 1457, when he received a pardon of the outlawry he had incurred for failing to appear to answer it.21 CPR, 1452-61, p. 373. Brumley and Burdevaunt were also at the receiving end of litigation in their capacity as executors. By the beginning of 1450, they were facing demands in the common pleas from the executors of John Joynour over a debt of £16 16s. that Deken had allegedly contracted with Joynour, a former royal messenger.22 CP40/756, rot. 299. Another plaintiff, Roger Messanger of Bury St. Edmunds, claimed in a Chancery suit of uncertain date that they had refused to fulfil the terms of indentures drawn up when his son, Thomas, had begun an eight-year term as Deken’s apprentice in March 1443.23 C1/17/101. Thomas is not one of the apprentices named in the MP’s will.

Deken was later remembered in the will that John Drayll, who had also once served him as an apprentice, made in 1464. Drayll had completed his apprenticeship as long ago as 1432 but he had evidently held his former master in high regard. He made provision for the performance of masses in Ipswich’s Carmelite church for 30 years, for the benefit of the souls of himself, the MP and others, and he included Deken among those who were to benefit from the prayers of a chantry priest in the parish church of St. Mary-le-Tower. Drayll’s will confirms that Deken was buried at the Blackfriars, since it includes a bequest to the local Dominicans, ‘for to haue a messe be an hole yeer at the auter ther Johan Deken lyeth for his sowle and myn’.24 Add. 30158, f. 4v; HMC 9th Rep. pt. 1, 229, 230.