ESTBURY, John

Of unknown origin,3 The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 350, speculates that he was one of the Eastburys of Berks., but this is impossible to prove. Estbury appears not to have settled in Oxford until after marrying Agnes Shawe, the widow of one of the town’s aldermen and a niece of two high-ranking churchmen. Perhaps also related to Walter Dauntsey, a prominent Oxford burgess of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, Agnes was a valuable match since her previous husband had left her all of his estates to hold for life, with remainder to their son, Thomas Shawe. These consisted of Laurence Hall, an academic hall in Ship Street, as well as various other lands and tenements situated in Oxford and its suburbs, in Beaumont near Oxford, and in Hungerford, a parish straddling Berkshire and Wiltshire.4 Liber Albus, no. 208; Surv. Oxf. i. 35. Agnes’s lands and connexions may well have helped Estbury to become one of the bailiffs of Oxford and an MP so soon after marrying her.

The King called the Parliament of 1433 while Estbury was serving as bailiff and he attested his own election. He was still bailiff when he entered the Commons, although it is likely that he appointed a deputy to exercise his responsibilities in Oxford during his absence. A few months after the dissolution of Parliament, he appeared in the university chancellor’s court over a debt he allegedly owed Balliol College.5 Registrum Cancellarii Oxoniensis, i. 2. There is no evidence that he held any further public office and it is possible that he died within a few years of sitting in the Commons. He was certainly no longer alive by mid 1441. Agnes survived Estbury, as did the son and namesake she had borne him. She must have spent at least part of her second widowhood at Hungerford, where one of the Shawe residences lay, for it was as of the diocese of Salisbury that she received a papal indult to keep a portable altar in July that year.6 CPL, ix. 235; Surv. Oxf. i. 35. During the first half of the 1450s, the tenant and principal of Laurence Hall, Thomas Raynald of Exeter College, disputed her right to receive rent for it.7 Registrum Cancellarii Oxoniensis, i. 226, 230; Surv. Oxf. i. 35. Perhaps feeling it was more trouble than it was worth, she conveyed the hall away to Richard Bulkeley of Tackley’s Inn in March 1456, although by what right is unclear given that John Shawe had assigned it to her for life only.8 Biog. Reg. Univ. Oxf. ed. Emden, i. 302-3; Surv. Oxf. i. 35. Nearly 20 years later, Lincoln Coll. acquired the hall from Bulkeley: Bodl. Top. Oxon. c. 396, f. 345. Agnes was still alive in September 1461, when Philip Polton, archdeacon of Gloucester and a canon lawyer of Oxford university, left her in his will a silk belt gilded with strips of silver.9 Registrum Cancellarii Oxoniensis, ii. 81; Biog. Reg. Univ. Oxf. iii. 1493-4.