DRAX, Richard

Drax’s antecedents are unknown, but it is likely that he was a kinsman of two Yorkshiremen, his namesake and John Drax, both royal serjeants-at-arms from the 1390s.4 CPR, 1388-92, p. 486; 1391-6, pp. 487, 577. The namesake was dead by 1409: CPR, 1408-13, p. 81. The latter had the longer and more successful career, surviving into the late 1420s and marrying the coheiress of Thomas Barley of Wombwell in Yorkshire.5 CCR, 1422-9, pp. 34, 177-9, 344, 502; CIPM, xxii. 534. He was briefly a j.p. in the W. Riding: CPR, 1401-5, p. 521; 1405-8, p. 500. Our MP may have been their son, the younger brother of Robert Drax of Wombwell, a lawyer of Gray’s Inn who was a j.p. of the quorum in the West Riding when Richard held the same position in Surrey.6 CP40/705, rot. 128; KB27/724, rot. 39; Baker, i. 605. This, however, is speculation. All that can be certainly said of our MP’s antecedents is that they very probably lay in Yorkshire. Such origins would help to explain his election, as a complete outsider, for the borough of Carlisle to the Parliament of 1422. He was then a young lawyer at Lincoln’s Inn and his election must have arisen from an association with another Yorkshireman at the inn, namely Thomas Manningham†, who had been returned for Carlisle in 1419, and with the prominent Carlisle citizen, Robert Carlisle I*, who was also of Lincoln’s Inn.7 C219/13/1; L. Inn Adm. i. 1. These northern connexions were, however, quick to fade. Indeed, after his election, only a single reference connects him with any activity in the north: in 1435 he was named to a commission to inquire into the alleged seizure of a Hanseatic ship by the men of Grimsby and Kingston-upon-Hull.8 CPR, 1429-36, pp. 470-1.

All else that is known of Drax’s career shows him operating as a minor lawyer in the south. The earliest of these references is the most interesting: on 11 Feb. 1423 he gave testimony in Chancery on behalf of Sir Hartunk van Klux, who had lost letters patent granted to him only three days before. Thereafter van Klux, a Silesian in the service of the English Crown, long continued to employ him: as late as 1454 Drax received reassignment in the Exchequer for a bad tally assigned to the knight.9 CPR, 1422-9, p. 75; E403/800, m. 4. His other known clients were less exotic. In 1427 he was a feoffee in a Hertfordshire manor, seemingly for John Ellerton of Kegworth (Leicestershire); in 1432 and 1433 he was a trustee in the goods of two Londoners, Richard Smithecote and Richard Rowe; and in 1434 he was one of those to whom the London draper, William Norton, conveyed various London properties. He also occasionally acted in the court of King’s bench: in Hilary term 1437, for example, he stood pledge for the payment of a fine by a hosteller of Kingston-upon-Thames.10 CCR, 1422-9, p. 379; Cal. P. and M. London, 1413-37, p. 264; CPR, 1429-35, p. 286; Corp. London RO, hr 163/4; KB27/703, fines rot.

It was probably in this period that Drax acquired his own interest in property in London. At some unknown date between 1419 and 1439, but probably nearer the earlier one, he married the widow of Robert Louthe. Louthe, son of a London joiner, appears to have been a lawyer and this may have been the context for the match.11 In 1412 he acted as attorney for the dean and chapter of St. Paul’s in an assize: London Possessory Assizes (London Rec. Soc. i), 191. Under the terms of his will of 1419, he left his wife a life interest in a tenement in the parish of St. Mary Aldermary with rents in that parish and in Birchin Lane in the parish of St. Mary Cornhill.12 Cal. Wills ct. Husting London ed. Sharpe, ii. 486. In his will Louthe set aside a tenement in Sise Lane in the parish of St. Anthony for the maintenance of his obit in the church of St. Michael Paternoster, but it was in the hands of his wid. and Drax by 8 July 1439, when they gave it to a London grocer for her lifetime: London hr 168/25, 26. This is the first reference to them as a couple, but there can be no doubt that they had already been married for some years. Either through her or his own purchase, Drax also came to hold lands outside the city. In the Surrey tax assessments of 1436, he was assessed on an annual income of 20 marks derived from property in that county, Sussex and London.13 Surr. Hist. Centre, Woking, Loseley mss, LM 1719. The most important of these holdings lay in Thames Ditton, where, from the mid 1430s, he made his home. Perhaps he was moved to settle there by his friendship with the Skernes of neighbouring Kingston-upon-Thames. They, like him, appear to have originated from Yorkshire. On 28 Mar. 1437, only a fortnight before his death, Robert Skerne* named Drax as one of his feoffees in London property once owned by his late wife, an illegitimate daughter of Edward III’s mistress, Alice Perrers, and thereafter Drax is to be found in frequent association with Robert’s nephew and heir, William Skerne. In 1440, for example, the two men alienated to John Holand, earl of Huntingdon, the lands, formerly of Alice Perrers, in Coldharbour Lane; two years later, one of Skerne’s deeds was witnessed for enrolment in Chancery, seemingly at Drax’s home at Thames Ditton; and in the early 1450s our MP stood a pledge for the prosecution of a petition presented by Skerne to the chancellor.14 London hr 171/18; CIPM, xxvi. 540; CCR, 1441-7, p. 116; C1/22/2. There is little evidence of Drax’s other connexions in the later part of his career. In 1443 Simon Adam, rector of St. Clement Eastcheap, named him as a trustee of his goods and then as one of his executors. Later, in 1449, he and a lawyer of Gray’s Inn, Edmund Mille*, were nominated as arbiters to act indifferently between Bernard Brocas of New Windsor (Berkshire) and Robert Hulot, a Surrey gentleman, over the manor of Aldershot (Hampshire) and property in Surrey.15 CCR, 1441-7, p. 127; CP40/748, rot. 64d; 762, rot. 204.

By the mid 1440s Drax was well enough established in his adopted county to be added to the quorum of the bench there and to make appearances upon ad hoc commissions of local government. But he also maintained his identity as an active participant in the affairs of Lincoln’s Inn. On 5 Nov. 1436 he had been one of the 19 fellows who agreed to remain at the Inn during vacations, probably with the intent of providing the quality of the legal education offered there. His particular promise was, ‘to contynwe a monthe euery Lenton this iij yere next comynge’ on pain of 20s.16 L. Inn Black Bks. i. 7; E.W. Ives, Common Lawyers: Thomas Kebell, 41. Thereafter he served three annual terms as one of the four governors and, in 1451, gave ten marks to the building of new chambers. An entry in the Inn’s Black Book from his first term as governor provides a curious insight into the Inn’s domestic affairs: on the Sunday before the feast of St. George 1442 it was found that, due to the negligence of the steward, there was no bread in the pantry for dinner, and Drax paid 4s. 1d. to secure some for what must have been a considerable gathering.17 L. Inn Black Bks. i. 11, 13, 17, 20, 24.

Drax was probably nearing 60 years of age when he made his will on 15 Dec. 1457, requesting burial in the church of St. Nicholas in Thames Ditton. His long career in the law does not appear, judging from his bequests, to have brought him much wealth, and one must suppose the surviving will concerns only a few last-minute dispositions. His sister, Joan, was left a mere one mark; John Wakefeld, seemingly a favoured servant, 3s. 4d.; and each of his other servants half that sum. Most favourably treated in these few small bequests were his two executors, Peter Warner and Adam Odam, who were to have 40s. each for their labour in the execution of its modest terms.18 PCC 12 Stokton (PROB11/4, f. 90). Odam was also a lawyer, controller of great and petty custom in Bishop’s Lynn from 1460 and attorney of the bp. of London in 1463: CPR, 1452-61, p. 590; C76/147, m. 10. For the rest his second wife, Maud, was to have all his goods, ‘ad auxilium et sustentacionem puerorum meorum’. The use here of ‘my’ rather than ‘our’ implies that they were the issue of his late wife, although their apparent youth suggests otherwise. In any event, no more is known of them.19 Maud has not been identified. She had married Drax by 11 May 1444: London hr 172(57). On his death she married one John Green, perhaps also a lawyer. In Mich. term 1461 she and Green were distrained to produce before the barons of the Exchequer the inquisitions taken under the comm. issued to Drax and others in Nov. 1457: E159/238, recorda Mich. rot. 32d. Drax was dead by the following 14 Mar. 1458, when his will was proved. Although that will mentions no books, one that he owned is now in the British Library. It is a collection of statutes and ordinances largely drawn from the custumals of the city of London and was probably compiled in the 1380s.20 Add. 38131; H. Kleineke, ‘Carleton’s Bk.’, Historical Research, lxiv. 118-19.