FRENCH, John

In spite of residing and holding office at Ipswich, French appears not to have been a typical burgess, since there is no evidence that he pursued a trade. An associate of the Suffolk lawyer, John Staverton,5 CFR, xiii. 223-4; Bacon, 89. at the end of Henry IV’s reign, he may himself have been a minor member of the legal profession. Whatever the case, he possessed sufficient administrative expertise to serve the widow of Henry IV and others as a bailiff in East Anglia. How he came to Queen Joan’s attention is impossible to say.

An inquisition of May 1400, held in the Essex port of Harwich, supplies the earliest known reference to French. The jury reported that he and two other Ipswich men had hired a small boat from ‘Fyssebane’ to take them across the Orwell estuary towards Harwich. Upon embarking, they had commanded its crew to row across to a vessel belonging to William Fuller of Nacton, which they had forcibly boarded, removing from it a priest, a boy and various items. The jury added that they had also taken two purses, containing ten marks in gold and silver coins, from the priest, John Brygge, on their return to ‘Fyssebane’.6 HMC 9th Rep. pt. 1, 259. A simple statement of alleged fact, the jury finding does not reveal what lay behind this curious incident.

French also ran into trouble on another occasion in the early fifteenth century, this time in his capacity as bailiff of the hundred of Hartismere in north Suffolk, an administrative division under de la Pole lordship. At some stage before 1419, William Wingfield (son and heir of Sir William Wingfield†) filed a bill in Chancery about the Wingfield manor of Hintlesham, a liberty over which no outside official had any jurisdiction. Despite this, French had entered the property, where he had executed writs, issued orders and oppressed the tenants. Wingfield’s purpose in going to Chancery was to call him to account for his actions, but the bill is the only evidence from the suit to have survived. Whatever the truth of its claims, it is worth noting that Hintlesham was not in Hartismere hundred.7 C1/69/393; The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 878. The filing of the bill must have occurred bef. Wingfield’s death on 24 Aug. 1419: CIPM, xxi. 48-49.

Also in the early fifteenth century, French was a feoffee of land in the west Suffolk parish of Exning, on behalf of the London goldsmith, Drew Barantyn†,8 CPR, 1408-13, pp. 143, 437; CP25(1)/223/112/36. and in 1411 he and John Staverton acquired the keeping of a cottage and a tenement in Ipswich from the Crown, at a rent of 5s. p.a.9 CFR, xiii. 223-4. In the same year he took part in his first parliamentary election, attesting the return of Ipswich’s representatives to the assembly which opened on 3 Nov. This was the first of many such elections in which he was an attestor or mainpernor. Among those for whom he stood surety were John Braham†, William Rookwood† and Thomas Cornwallis*, all knights of the shire for Suffolk, and Thomas Astylle*, his fellow MP in the Parliament of 1422.10 The others for whom he was a mainpernor were James Andrew† (May 1421), William Weathereld* (Dec. 1421), William Bury I* (1423), William Walworth* (1432), Robert Wood I (1435) and Thomas Dunton (Nov. 1449).

The Parliament of 1422 coincided with a lawsuit in which French was a defendant, for by Michaelmas term 1422 William Stephen had begun a suit against him and John Wade, a ‘shipman’ from Ipswich, in the court of King’s bench for allegedly assaulting and wounding him and his servants. The plea roll describes French as a ‘serjeant’, suggesting that he was serving as one of the borough of Ipswich’s four serjeants at the time.11 KB27/646, rot. 21; 647, rot. 18d; 648, rots. 31, 55d. Five years later, he was in trouble with the Crown. The sheriff of Suffolk received orders in 1427 to secure the appearance of French (described as a ‘yeoman’ on this occasion) and some 70 others in King’s bench, so that they might answer indictments for ‘divers’ unspecified trespasses, conspiracies, misprisions and other offences.12 KB27/666, rex rot. 9. French was again a defendant in a suit that came to pleadings in the same court in November 1429. The plaintiffs, Sir John Cornwall, Sir William Babington and several other leading East Anglian gentry accused him and Joan, widow of John Rous†, of forcibly entering into and damaging a house and close in Ipswich the previous September. In response, he pleaded not guilty, while Joan claimed that the property in question belonged to Robert Drye and Robert Byll and that she had entered it as their servant.13 KB27/674, rots. 6, 68d. This case appears not to have reached trial, although French probably still faced the threat of further litigation when he gained election to his second Parliament just over a year later. Whether he regarded Membership of either of his two Parliaments as a means of escaping the attentions of those pursuing him through the courts is impossible to say.

Some 18 months after the dissolution of the Parliament of 1431, French was yet again a defendant in King’s bench, this time in a lawsuit brought by Sir William Drury. Drury laid an information against him, Gilbert Debenham I* and Thomas Predis (a husbandman from Copdock), as well as the men who had sat as jurors in a recent assize of novel disseisin (relating to property in Sproughton) in which Sir William had been the defendant. In pleadings of Hilary term 1433, Drury charged Debenham, French and Predis of having corruptly influenced the assize jury in favour of the plaintiffs, Thomas Sampson and his wife. He alleged that Sampson had plied Debenham, French and Predis with money, food and drink at Brockford the previous September in order to buy their support, claiming that French had received 40s. and Debenham no less than £20. In response to these charges, French and his fellow defendants sought licence to imparl, and the case probably ended in an out of court settlement.14 KB27/686, rot. 94d; 687, rot. 64d. Later, in 1436, French found himself at the receiving end of suits brought by his erstwhile associate, Debenham. First, in King’s bench, Debenham alleged that French and others had transgressed a statute against those conspiring to defraud and destroy the possessions of the King’s lieges. On 30 Nov. that year French and two of his co-defendants gave themselves up to the Marshalsea prison as a preliminary to obtaining bail. They were granted bail after John Andrew III* and others had stood surety that they would appear in court in the following Hilary term but this case, like that brought by Sir William Drury, does not appear to have progressed any further.15 KB27/702, rot. 77d. Secondly, in the court of common pleas, Debenham sued French for a debt of £40 arising from a bond of 1428. When the suit came to pleadings in Michaelmas term 1436, he alleged that the MP had since failed to pay him that sum, save for a derisory 6d. Appearing in person (presumably shortly before or after entering the Marshalsea in relation to the King’s bench suit), French claimed that his opponent had released him from the debt, but a jury sitting at the Norwich lammas assizes of 1437 found against him, obliging him to pay Debenham costs and damages as well as settle the debt.16 CP40/703, rot. 438d.

Although his career as an office-holder was apparently over by the time of Debenham’s suits, French was still active at Ipswich during the 1440s. As the chamberlains’ account for 1446-7 records, the borough paid him and John Douche 16s. 8d. that year as recompense for the damages they had suffered at the hands of the sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk in matters concerning its liberties. It is impossible to tell whether they had actively defended these rights, recently enhanced by the town’s charter of 28 Mar. 1446, or had simply fallen victim to an over-zealous sheriff, possibly ignorant that, thanks to the charter, royal officials could now no longer operate within the liberties.17 Suff. RO (Ipswich), Ipswich bor. recs., chamberlains’ acct., 1446-7, C/3/3/1/1. In the same period, French was party to a property transaction, joining Thomas Bushop, William Pertrich and John French ‘junior’ in conveying a tenement and curtilage in St. Nicholas’s parish to Roger Stannard and others.18 Ipswich Bor. Archs. (Suff. Rec. Soc. xliii), 563. In all likelihood, he was acting as a feoffee on this occasion, and there is next to no information for his own holdings at Ipswich. Yet his property interests in the town must have amounted to considerably more than the cottage he and John Staverton had acquired at farm in 1411 and the paltry plot of the ‘common soil’ that the borough had leased to him for 6d. p.a. at the beginning of 1435. 19 Add. 30158, f. 6v.

As for John French junior, he was almost certainly the MP’s son. Active in Ipswich and the wider county of Suffolk from at least 1430,20 KB27/686, rex rot. 6; Add. 30158, f. 6; C219/14/2. the younger John and his putative father were among the burgesses who had witnessed the making of a borough ordinance in 1434. 21 Ipswich bor. recs., memo. of agreement for annual election of serjts., 1434, C/2/11/1/1/1. Contemporary records fail consistently to use the labels ‘senior’ (or ‘elder’) and ‘junior’ (or ‘younger’) to distinguish between the two, and it is unclear which of them stood surety for Robert Wood I*, upon Wood’s election as an MP for Ipswich to the Parliament of 1435, and for Thomas Dunton*, one of the borough’s representatives in that of 1449-50.22 C219/14/5; 15/7. The identity of the burgess who ran into trouble with the authorities in 1453 is likewise uncertain. In July that year, the Crown commissioned the sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk and others to arrest and bring before the King and council John French and John Blankpayn of Ipswich, so that they might answer certain charges laid against them.23 CPR, 1452-61, pp. 122-3. Yet the chances are that the MP was already dead at this date and that Blankpayn’s associate was his namesake. There seems little doubt that the younger man was the John French who sold a pair of ornate spurs to (Sir) John Howard* in March 1464, 24 Howard Household Bks. ed. Crawford, i. 255, 429. and who attested the Ipswich election to the Parliament of 1467.