EDWARDS, John

One of several lawyers who sat for Gloucester in Henry VI’s reign, John is of unknown parentage. He was nevertheless almost certainly a local man, not least because his brother Thomas, who bore the surname ‘Gloucester’ rather than Edwards, founded a chantry in Gloucester and bequeathed a substantial sum of money to the use of the town.7 Gloucester Corporation Recs. ed. Stevenson, 398; VCH Glos. iv. 34, 248, 356. There is no evidence to support the suggestion that the MP and John Edwards of Lavington, Wilts., who was also active in the first half of the 15th century, might have been one and the same man: VCH Wilts. vii. 200; CIPM, xxi. 90; Feudal Aids, v. 231; CPR, 1429-36, p. 371; Trans. Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc. lxxiv. 83. Thomas enjoyed a considerably more prominent career than did John, much of which he pursued outside Gloucestershire. A servant of the Household from at least the beginning of Henry V’s reign, he was receiver-general of the duchy of Cornwall for Henry VI and he held the office of cofferer of the Household when he died in early 1447.8 CPR, 1413-16, pp. 48-49; 1435-41, p. 345; 1446-52, pp. 134-5; Gloucester Corporation Recs. 398. The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 192, speculates that he was related to Henry IV’s servant Thomas Gloucester†, a man of unknown, but certainly humble, origins. Thanks to his successful career, he possessed the wherewithal to invest in land, mainly outside Gloucestershire, and during the late 1420s and 1430s he bought seven small manors in and around Broxbourne in Hertfordshire and another, known as ‘Hokes’, in Essex. When he received a quitclaim of one of those manors, ‘Baas’ in Broxbourne, in July 1426, John was associated with him as a feoffee.9 CCR, 1422-9, p. 315; 1429-35, p. 115; CAD, i. B241; CPR, 1452-61, pp. 30-31; VCH Herts. iii. 433-4, 436, 451-2.

The quitclaim is not the first known reference to John Edwards, since a plea roll of the court of common pleas records that he stood surety at Westminster in Michaelmas term 1421, on behalf of a brasier from Gloucester. As befitted his status as a lawyer, he did so as a ‘gentleman’.10 CP40/643, rot. 313d. Edwards gained election to his only known Parliament in 1429. In February the following year, during the second session of this assembly, he was among those who gave the Crown a recognizance for £100, as a guarantee that the Oxfordshire esquire John Hill of Burford would appear before the King and his council whenever summoned. In this security, he was described as ‘of Staverton’, a parish lying a little to the north-east of Gloucester.11 CCR, 1429-35, pp. 46-47. As far as the evidence goes, he never held municipal office in Gloucester, although he became a working j.p. and commissioner of gaol delivery in Gloucestershire and served as a steward of the duchy of Lancaster in south-west England. He held at least two duchy stewardships, of which the appointment of March 1437 was for life. It is also possible that he served the Crown at Westminster, for on at least two occasions in the mid 1440s the Exchequer, by order of the treasurer of England, rewarded John Edwards, ‘apprentice at law’, for prosecuting ‘divers matters’ in the King’s courts.12 DL37/26/2; E403/755, m. 14; 762, m. 6.

As one might expect, Edwards sometimes acted as a feoffee, mainpernor and witness on behalf of fellow residents of Gloucester and members of the Gloucestershire gentry,13 Glos. Archs., cath. deeds, D1609/6/1; CP25(1)/79/89/66-67; CFR, xvii. 316; Gloucester Corporation Recs. 392-3, 397. but he was also associated with other, more important individuals and at least one religious institution. As far as his private practice as a lawyer was concerned, his most prestigious client was John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury. He served as steward on that part of the Berkeley estates that had passed to Talbot’s second wife Margaret Beauchamp and her two sisters and coheirs, and he counselled the earl in the early 1450s in the bitter dispute over the Berkeley inheritance. It is possible that Edwards was also a counsellor of Ralph Butler, Lord Sudeley. A peer with important interests in Gloucestershire, Sudeley acted for him as a feoffee,14 CP25(1)/292/69/246. and was the treasurer when he received his rewards from the Exchequer in the mid 1440s. On a more humdrum level, Edwards was of some minor assistance to the well-known Sir John Fastolf in the summer of 1453, at the trial of a suit, heard at the Gloucester assizes, which the knight had brought against two husbandmen for trespassing on his wife’s manor at Oxenton. A record of Fastolf’s expenses in connexion with the proceedings at Gloucester has survived, and this shows that he spent 13d. on breakfasts for Edwards and another local lawyer, Robert Joos, in lieu of any other ‘regard’.15 Add. 28206, f. 124. Edwards also served the priory of Llanthony by Gloucester. He witnessed conveyances to the priory in 1431 and 1432; he was one of the local lawyers who mediated between its canons and Robert Bentham II* of Gloucester in 1439; and he was again an arbitrator (nominated by the canons) when the latest of a series of jurisdictional disputes between the town and priory was submitted to arbitration in 1456.16 C115/81, f. 107; 83, ff. 120-1; 84, f. 161; Cal. Regs. Llanthony Priory ed. Rhodes (Bristol and Glos. Rec. Soc. xv), pp. xvii, 3, 26; R.A. Holt, ‘Gloucester’ (Birmingham Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1987), 215.

In Gloucester Edwards resided in Lower Westgate Street and held tenements in Eastbridge Street and Oxbode Lane.17 Gloucester Rental 1455 ed. Cole, 52, 76. Just outside the town, he appears to have augmented whatever landed interests he must have possessed at Staverton by obtaining further holdings there and in neighbouring parishes from William Walker and his wife in 1453.18 CP25(1)/79/91/121. He also held lands within the earl of Shrewsbury’s manor at Badgeworth, although late in life he was obliged to go to law to defend his interests there against the claims of Thomas Goderich, a ‘franklin’ from Ham near Cheltenham.19 A.J. Pollard, ‘The Talbots’ (Bristol Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1968), 238; CPR, 1452-61, p. 522. Much more significantly, he purchased the reversion of the manor and advowson of Rodmarton from William Fitzwaryn in 1439. Situated between Tetbury and Cirencester, the manor had once belonged to the Burdon family, but by then it was in the hands of Roger Capes and his wife Margaret, formerly the wife of Robert Burdon. The couple held Rodmarton for the life of Margaret by grant of Fitzwaryn, presumably Robert Burdon’s heir. Whether through her death or an agreement to surrender the manor during her lifetime, Edwards must have come into possession of Rodmarton by the mid 1440s, if not earlier. It was perhaps already his by June 1443 when he agreed to pay £10 p.a. for ten years from his lands at Rodmarton and elsewhere in Gloucestershire to Fitzwaryn and his heirs.20 VCH Glos. xi. 236; CP25(1)/292/69/246; CCR, 1441-7, p. 148. He appears also to have acquired a moiety of a manor at nearby Sapperton, presumably from John Greville* or his trustees. The impecunious Sir Henry Hussey* had mortgaged the property to Greville in 1440, but he had failed to redeem it and in mid 1453 Hussey’s son and namesake formally released it to Edwards and his heirs.21 CP25(1)/79/91/120; VCH Glos. ix. 91. The fact that William Nottingham II bought Sapperton from Edwards’ da. and h. Margaret and her husband Thomas Whittington in 1480 (CP25(1)/79/94/54) supports the suggestion that it was one of the MP’s acquisitions. It is said (in VCH Glos. xi. 91) that Margaret was Greville’s gda. but this assertion is based on speculation by Trans. Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc. l. 188-9. Of course, it is possible that Margaret’s mother (whether Joan Edwards or another, unknown previous wife of the MP) was a Greville. Edwards also came into temporary possession of Barwick, a manor near Bristol, through his marriage to Joan, the widow of Henry Croke, although apparently not without quarrelling with his stepson Robert Croke. In April 1455, the latter undertook to cease all lawsuits against him and gave him and Joan a bond for £200, to guarantee their peaceful possession of the property. In the following July Robert made a formal grant of Barwick to the couple for their lives in survivorship, presumably in acknowledgement that his mother possessed dower rights in the property.22 CCR, 1454-61, pp. 82-83. Outside Gloucestershire, Edwards succeeded to his brother’s manors in Hertfordshire and Essex after Thomas Gloucester’s death in early 1447, but in the following year he sold them all to (Sir) John Say II*.23 CCR, 1441-7, p. 479; CAD, i. B241, 555; VCH Herts. iii. 433-4, 436, 451-2.

The affairs of his late brother occupied a considerable amount of Edwards’ time in the late 1440s and early 1450s since he was one of the executors of Thomas Gloucester’s will, dated 31 Jan. 1447. He had a considerable personal interest in this matter, since Gloucester left all his estates to him, comprising holdings in Gloucestershire, Middlesex and London as well as in Essex and Hertfordshire. In return, Gloucester expected him to establish two chantries, one at the Greyfriars in London and the other at the parish church of St. Nicholas, Gloucester, and to furnish the parish church at Broxbourne with a new bell. Thomas directed that the Greyfriars chantry should be a perpetual foundation, for the benefit of himself, his late wife Anne and their parents, and that the chaplain at St. Nicholas, who was to teach grammar, should have a suitable dwelling place and a salary of 20 marks p.a. As for the bell, the will shows that Edwards had already ordered it from a bell-founder in London, at a cost of no less than £50. Thomas also remembered four young kinswomen, leaving £10 each to Edwards’s daughter and another niece for their marriages, and similarly providing for his ‘cousins’ Elizabeth and Eleanor Orell, the daughters of the late Alice Kingston. Shortly after making the will, Gloucester added a codicil in which his first request was for the settlement of his debts, above all those he owed the Crown. In spite of these debts, Gloucester was a man of no little wealth, for in the same codicil he bequeathed £500 as a fund to the town whose name he bore. The fund was to provide loans to its poor men and to its younger tradesmen, although in 1529 the corporation borrowed £80 from it to rebuild the town’s booth-hall. It was in the codicil that Gloucester chose the Greyfriars as his burial place, asking his executors to provide a tomb for him and his wife before the altar of Our Lady in the church there.24 Lambeth Palace Lib., Reg. Stafford, ff. 146v-147; Gloucester Corporation Recs. 398; VCH Glos. iv. 34, 248, 309, 356; Collectanea Topographia et Genealogica ed. Nichols, v. 282.

The task that Edwards and his co-executor, the Exchequer official Walter Gorfen, faced after probate of the will and codicil on 5 Apr. 1447 was far from trouble-free. Gloucester’s concerns about his debts were prescient, for his executors soon found themselves confronting the demands of Sir John Popham*, a former treasurer of the Household. Popham alleged that the late cofferer had failed to settle with various creditors of the Crown, and when examined in Chancery in the spring of 1448 Gorfen acknowledged that some £585 in total was owing to the creditors in question, whose demands he and Edwards subsequently undertook to meet.25 CPR, 1446-52, pp. 134-5. In late 1452, however, the Crown pardoned Edwards nearly £128 still due to the King from the testator’s estate and released him from all actions and demands that it might have brought against him as executor, save for any relating to the duchy of Cornwall, in recognition of his late brother’s long record of service to all three Lancastrian monarchs.26 CPR, 1452-61, pp. 30-31. For whatever reason, Edwards did not feature in a Chancery bill of the late 1440s or 1455-6 that one Guy Keterycke brought against Gorfen alone. The bill is no longer extant but in his answer, which has survived, Gorfen declared that both he and Edwards had administered the will appropriately. Gorfen also declared that the latter, who presumably Keterycke had not realized was still alive, was ‘in pleyne life’.27 C1/15/338.

In October 1457, probably because the MP was of advanced years and not expected to live for very much longer, the Crown granted the reversion of the duchy of Lancaster stewardship which he had held since 1437 to the King’s attorney-general, William Nottingham II*.28 DL37/26/2. In the event, Edwards survived until 8 Jan. 1462. He was buried in the parish church at Rodmarton, where his brass, now set in the south wall of the chancel, depicts him in civilian dress and wearing a cap, possibly a symbol of his profession. The inscription describes him as sometime lord of the manor and advowson of Rodmarton and, somewhat over-grandiloquently, as ‘ffamosus apprentici in lege peritus’.29 C.T. Davis, Mon. Brasses of Glos. 60-61; VCH Glos. xi. 246; Profession, Vocation and Culture ed. Clough, 189. Davis suggests that the cap represented the cap or coif worn by serjeants-at-law, but Edwards never attained that rank. He was succeeded by his daughter Margaret, who had married Thomas Whittington† (d.1491), another Gloucestershire lawyer. Her heir when she died in about 1496 was her grandson Robert Wye.30 VCH Glos. xi. 236.