DUREM, John

A successful bureaucrat who rose to high office in the Exchequer, John was not a typical burgess, but he had family connexions with the borough he represented in Parliament. Durems resided at Wycombe and elsewhere in Buckinghamshire for most (if not all) of the fifteenth century, among them Thomas Durem and Mary his wife. Perhaps the MP’s parents, in the mid 1420s they conveyed a property in Wycombe, known as ‘Aylewyneslond’ and held of the manor of Temple Wycombe, to him and his sister Joan to hold in survivorship.5 CP25(1)/22/111/28; 115/16; Centre for Bucks. Studies, CH1 T/5/2, 6/14, T/14; D176/4, m. 4d; CAD, i. C911; vi. C5012; St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, recs. XV/15/1; CPR, 1416-22, p. 262; 1422-9, p. 150; DL29/654/10577, m. 7; C1/33/208. Thomas Durem was not a man of any great status, but he appears to have held lands outside the borough, at Great Kimble and elsewhere in mid Buckinghamshire, and to have acted as a feoffee for substantial gentry like Edmund Hampden† and Sir John Phelip†.6 CP25(1)/22/119/11; CAD, vi. C4136; CPR, 1413-19, pp. 234-5; 1422-9, p. 315; CCR, 1422-9, p. 150; 1441-7, p. 367-8. He also served as under sheriff of Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire in the reigns of Henry IV and Henry V,7 E13/127, rots. 12d, 14d; CP40/628, rot. 305d. and attested the return of the knights of the shire for Buckinghamshire to several early fifteenth-century Parliaments. Among his fellow attestors in the elections for the Parliaments of November 1414 and December 1421 was Thomas Durem the younger. Perhaps John’s brother, the younger Thomas was escheator in Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire in 1414-15,8 The escheator is not distinguished as Thomas Durem the younger but, presumably, the elder man would not have held the offices of under sheriff and escheator concurrently. and he became a tax collector in the latter county in 1417. In the later 1420s, he was one of the coroners for Buckinghamshire, although in mid 1427 the sheriff received orders to hold an election for a new coroner in his place, on the grounds that he was insufficiently qualified for the office.9 CFR, xiv. 222; CCR, 1422-9, p. 309.

By that date, John Durem had certainly come of age. He is first heard of in October 1422, when he stood surety for Richard Acton of Hertfordshire, and he was likewise a mainpernor for John Kympton from the same county in the following May.10 CFR, xv. 15, 35. Later in the decade he and two relatives, Edmund and Thomas Durem, attested the election of John Hampden II* and Andrew Sperlyng* to the Parliament of 1429 as the knights of the shire for Buckinghamshire. The election proved highly controversial, since the sheriff, Sir Thomas Waweton*, sent into Chancery an indenture recording that Sir John Cheyne I* and Walter Strickland I* were the men elected. A judicial commission subsequently established that Waweton had made a false return and that the election of Hampden and Sperlyng should have held good, although by then the Parliament was over. Among the Durems’ fellow attestors was Nicholas Clopton*, a lawyer who had sat as a burgess for Wycombe in 1422 and was probably one of John’s friends. Durem stood surety for Clopton in July 1435, when he acquired the keeping of the manor of Addington, Buckinghamshire, from the Crown, and Clopton was a mainpernor for Durem just over two years later, when the King granted him a seven-year farm of the manor of Great Kimble (formerly part of the dower estates of Henry IV’s widow Queen Joan). Clopton was again a surety for Durem in November 1439, when the latter undertook to pay the King a rent of £11 p.a. for the manor.11 CFR, xv. 241, 337; xvii. 107-8. After the lease expired, Great Kimble remained Durem’s place of residence. He bought property in that parish, and was described as one of its residents in the royal pardons he received in subsequent years,12 C1/66/28; C67/39, m. 35 (5 July 1447); 45, mm. 6 (15 Feb. 1462), 38 (17 Mar. 1465). during which he was active in county affairs, as a j.p. and as an associate and feoffee for local gentry families like the Hampdens of Great Hampden.13 CP25(1)/22/122/5; CPR, 1441-6, p. 138; CP40/771, rot. 85d; 772, rot. 227d.

A few weeks after standing surety for Clopton in 1435, Durem gained election to Parliament as one of the burgesses for Wycombe, no doubt assisted by his family connexions with the borough. It is very likely that he had found employment at the Exchequer some considerable time before entering the Commons. He had acted as a mainpernor for William Ward, one of the barons of the Exchequer, as far back as mid 1427,14 CFR, xv. 178. and he was certainly a clerk in that government department by the late 1430s. In Trinity term 1439 he appeared in the Exchequer as an attorney for Robert Darcy I*, William Flete*, William Ludsopp*, Robert Olney*, Thomas Torell* and other gentry from south-east England, to pay the fines they owed the Crown after declining to accept the honour of knighthood.15 E159/215, recorda Trin. rots. 14, 15, 15d, 16, 18d, 45d, 50d, 51d, 52. Later that year he rode through Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Suffolk in attendance upon two barons of the Exchequer, Roger Hunt* and William Fallan, whom the government had commissioned to inquire into concealments of the Crown’s prerogative rights in those counties.16 E403/755, m. 6; CPR, 1436-41, pp. 314-15. By the spring of 1447 at the latest, Durem was a clerk in the office of the King’s remembrancer, and on 17 Mar. that year he and Thomas Leversham were jointly granted the position of King’s remembrancer itself. For the previous 20 years, Leversham had occupied the office alone during pleasure, but the new letters awarded it to him and Durem for their lives in survivorship. In the event, the grant was made null and void by previous letters (dated just six days earlier) in favour of Thomas Daniell* and John Troutbeck*, but both Durem and Leversham were appointed barons of the Exchequer shortly afterwards, Durem on 27 pr. 1447 and Leversham on the following 11 May. For whatever reason, Durem’s promotion did not become effective until 16 May 1449, when he received a reappointment as baron in place of Leversham.17 CPR, 1446-52, pp. 32, 33, 235, 254; PRO List ‘Exchequer Offs.’, 44; Judges of Eng. 117. He and Leversham were among a number of fifteenth-century clerks of the Exchequer who rose to the rank of baron;18 Ives, 82. the previously mentioned William Ward is another example. It is possible that John had never received any formal legal training, although he served as a member of the quorum for most of his time as a j.p. and must have possessed a good working knowledge of the law.

As a baron of the Exchequer, Durem received a fee of 40 marks p.a. and, in all likelihood, an additional salary (frequently £20 p.a.) commonly granted to those who held the office.19 Judges of Eng. 105-6. He and his servants also enjoyed the right to pursue all lawsuits at the Exchequer. In the mid 1460s, for example, he sued two husbandmen there, alleging that they had trespassed on his close at Great Kimble, and his servant William Bull brought a case in the same court against Henry Brynde, a brewer from Middlesex. Bull claimed that Brynde had refused to return certain goods entrusted to him for safe-keeping; Brynde responded by declaring that he was a servant of the Chancery clerk John Davyson and ought not to answer Bull’s plea in the Exchequer, on the grounds that this would derogate from the jurisdictional rights and privileges of the Chancery. Later in the same decade, Durem brought a suit in the Exchequer against Thomas Hervy, a fuller from Bedfordshire whom he said had assaulted one of his servants in that county.20 E13/148, rot. 20d; 151, rots. 37, 73, 74, 76; 152, rot. 52; 153, rot. 101d; 154, rot. 13d.

For all the fees and privileges of their office, Durem and his fellow barons served in difficult times, particularly during the latter years of Henry VI’s reign, a period of considerable instability. For much of the later 1450s the Lancastrian regime based itself at Coventry, a situation that created administrative complications for the Exchequer and other government departments.21 R.A. Griffiths, Hen. VI, 785. Following the country’s slide into civil war, the Exchequer went into adjournment for part of the autumn of 1459. As a result, Durem and his fellow barons could not receive the oath of the newly elected mayor of London there, a duty which ordinarily they were expected to perform whenever the King was absent from London and Westminster. The Crown was therefore obliged to send them a writ directing them to go to Westminster Hall, where the Exchequer normally sat, to admit the mayor-elect William Hulyn to office.22 CPR, 1452-61, pp. 556-7. Shortly after the accession of Edward IV, Durem was confirmed in office as 5th baron of the Exchequer. Likewise reappointed in November 1467, he was made 3rd baron and placed on two ad hoc commissions in Buckinghamshire following the Readeption of Henry VI in 1470. He was dismissed as a baron and j.p. after Edward recovered the throne, although not necessarily for political reasons since by the early 1470s he was an old man.

It is likely that Durem spent his last years in London, since he sought burial in the priory church of St. Barthlomew in West Smithfield in his will of 9 Mar. 1474. In spite of having fathered a son and heir, Thomas, he ordered his executors to sell most of his real property. By contrast, he provided generously for his widow. While she lived, Elizabeth was to retain his mill and land at Marsh in Buckinghamshire, his messuage at Wendover in the same county, a manor at Roxton, Bedfordshire, his lands and rents in Shelton, Upper and Lower Dean (now in Bedfordshire but then in Northamptonshire) and other lands not specifically mentioned in the will. After her death, his executors were to sell all of these holdings, save those in Northamptonshire. He instructed that the money raised from the sale of the messuage at Wendover should go to his daughter Anne, and he awarded first option of purchase of Roxton (for £50) to his son-in-law, John Fitzgeffrey of Sandon, Hertfordshire, who had married his other daughter Elizabeth. Durem also left directions with regard to the manor of Barford, another of his acquisitions in Bedfordshire, which he had agreed to sell to William Selby for 100 marks. He directed that Elizabeth and Fitzgeffrey should each receive £20 of this sum, and a chaplain the remaining £26 13s. 4d., in return for prayers for his soul during the four years following his death. As for Thomas Durem, he was to receive the MP’s holdings in Northamptonshire and nothing more, so stripping him of most of his inheritance. Durem appointed Elizabeth and Fitzgeffrey the executors of the will, which was witnessed by Robert Tollerton, sub prior of St. Bartholomew’s, and Hugh atte Fenne*, clerk to the treasurer and auditor of the Exchequer, among others. He was dead by 18 Apr. 1474, when the prerogative court of Canterbury granted probate.23 PCC 14 Wattys. Some six or seven years after the MP’s death, his daughter Elizabeth Fitzgeffrey, by then a widow, petitioned the King for the return of her young son, another John Fitzgeffrey. She alleged that John Durem, claiming that the boy should become a royal ward, had wrongfully seized young John on behalf of the Crown and then kept him in his own custody: SC8/344/1298. This namesake of the MP has proved impossible to identify.

Within months of the MP’s death, his widow began a suit in the Chancery over lands he had purchased in Great Kimble and Stone, to secure her possession of these properties against a feoffee of the former owner.24 C1/66/28. She survived until 1477. In her own will, dated 5 June 1476 and proved on the following 5 Apr., she asked to be buried beside the MP at St. Bartholomew’s and requested that a priest should sing for the souls of herself and her late husband for a period of two years, whether at the priory or in another suitable place. She left her household goods to her daughters and their husbands (by now Anne was married to John Taylard, probably a younger son of Walter Taylard*), but nothing to her son Thomas Durem, whom she did not even mention.25 PCC 28 Wattys. Seemingly heartily disliked by both his parents, Thomas met with further misfortune after his mother’s death. Appointed escheator in Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire in the autumn of 1480, during his term in that office he was accused of making a wrongful seizure of livestock and briefly imprisoned in Aylesbury gaol.26 C1/63/197; CPR, 1476-85, p. 322. In March 1483 he received a royal pardon as ‘of Great Kimble’,27 C67/50, m. 2. but within a couple of years he had sold to Henry Danvers all his lands and interests in that parish, Little Kimble and Stone, save for an annual rent of 110s. that he reserved for himself for life.28 CCR, 1476-85, no. 1401.