GARSTON, John

The parliamentary return for Hampshire and its boroughs in 1429 names the MPs for Portsmouth as Richard Hunt* and John ‘Garton’, but no-one with the latter name has been found to fit the bill satisfactorily. It therefore seems likely that this was a mis-spelling of Garston, and the man elected was the John Garston who lived across the Solent from Portsmouth on the Isle of Wight. Whether he was a native of the island has not been discovered, but he had been living there from at least the early 1390s, and in the course of his career had established himself as a landowner of some substance.3 Ibid. app. 1, p. 136; S.F. Hockey, Insula Vecta, 156-64. From 1396 to 1420 he leased to the vicar of Arreton and others lands in Fulford and Horringford, and a deed of 1413 refers to his acquisition of property next to the ‘old road’ leading from his ‘mansion’ to the highway between Arreton church and Horringford mill.4 Feudal Aids, ii. 353, 355; I.o.W. RO, Brook mss, AC95/32.51. In Newport, the island’s most important town, he owned and probably lived at The Falcon, and besides the two messuages in Pile Street which he rented out in 1408 he acquired two more in 1410, from the Payns of Oxfordshire.5 I.o.W. RO, Newport bor. recs. NBr/1/10; CCR, 1409-13, p. 174. By 1412, when he was assessed for the tax on incomes from land, his holdings on the island were said to be worth 20 marks a year,6 Feudal Aids, vi. 454. although the fact that towards the end of his life he was fined for failing to take up knighthood indicates that he was then thought to have an income of at least £40. In the meantime he and his son-in-law John Roucle had acquired (in 1424) the manor of Osborne in the parish of Whippingham.7 CP25(1)/207/32/5; VCH Hants, v. 200. On the mainland Garston possessed a building in Southampton, in St. Michael’s parish, although the circumstances of this acquisition are obscure.8 Black Bk. Southampton, i. (Soton. Rec. Soc. 1912), 59.

Garston’s rise to prominence stemmed from a long involvement with the affairs of monastic houses on the Isle of Wight, in particular the Cistercian abbey of Quarr, from which in 1393 he and his wife leased a croft in Arreton.9 E210/6148. In April 1397 he witnessed an indenture made by the prior of Carisbrooke as proctor-general of Lire abbey in Normandy, regarding various properties including the yearly pensions paid to the prior from Quarr. A year later he was a mainpernor at the Exchequer for the keepers of the alien priory of Appuldurcombe.10 CPR, 1396-9, pp. 420-1; CFR, xi. 255. He may have already entered the service of the abbot of Quarr, perhaps as his steward, and in March 1399 the abbot authorized him to sell certain jewels in his keeping to raise the large sum of money necessary for some difficult business urgently needing to be transacted. On one occasion he supplied a horse for the abbot’s personal use, at the cost of 23s. 4d., and was frequently at his side to witness legal documents. Most important, in September 1407 the abbot granted him for 12 years the rectory of Arreton (recently appropriated by the abbey), comprising the tithes from five manors, along with the profitable rabbit warrens and the rectory lands, in return for an annual rent of £34 6s. 8d.11 Brook mss, AC95/32.45; Hockey, Quarr Abbey and its Lands, 163-4; Chs. Quarr Abbey, no. 71.

Garston was regularly appointed by the Crown as a collector of parliamentary subsidies, his brief probably being to collect dues on the island rather than elsewhere in Hampshire. When Henry V was commencing preparations for his invasion of Normandy in the spring of 1415, with the embarkation of his forces planned to take place across the water at Portsmouth, Garston was among those commissioned to array the able-bodied men living on the island for its defence. His motivation for seeking election to the Parliament of 1429 remains obscure, and nothing has been found to link him with his fellow MP for Portsmouth, Richard Hunt, who also seems to have been an outsider to the town. Parliament met for two sessions. During the first, in November, the young King Henry VI was crowned; the second prepared for his coronation expedition to France, and closed on 23 Feb. 1430. On the following 19 Apr. Garston conveyed to John Whyte and his wife and son a tenement and two shops in Newport, together with a parcel of meadow in Whippingham, in return for an annual rent of 27s.12 Brook mss, AC95/32.59. This was the last record of him alive, and he died within the next 16 months. A draft will made by his elder daughter Joan, wife of John Roucle, on 27 Aug. 1431, referred to the properties which Garston had left her in Newport, and to lands at Osborne, Brading, Newchurch, Arreton and Fulford, which she was to inherit after the death of her stepmother Elizabeth. These were to pass to her sister, another Joan, wife of John Hosyer, should her own two daughters die without issue.13 Ibid. AC95/32.60. By that date too Garston’s son-in-law Roucle had taken over his half a knight’s fee at Horringford.14 Feudal Aids, ii. 353, 366.

Garston had wished to found a chantry at Newport in honour of the Virgin, to provide religious services for the masters and mariners of ships wintering in the shelter of the harbour while waiting for favourable winds to sail to Aquitaine and Bordeaux for cargoes of wine and other merchandise. He had noticed that the chaplain engaged to administer to these shipmen in the existing chapel, situated some distance from the parish church, was often through absence or infirmity unable to perform his duties, so that sailors and women in childbirth had died without confession and infants without baptism; his proposed foundation would supply an additional chaplain. To make the endowment he had placed certain lands in the hands of feoffees, including Whyte, but had been unable to complete the project before he died. It was not until some 19 years after his death that, on 26 Jan. 1449, the feoffees obtained royal licence to grant the chantry lands worth 20 marks a year in mortmain. It was to be called the chantry of John Garston and John Whyte, and prayers were also to be said there for the King and queen.15 CPR, 1446-52, p. 244; VCH Hants, v. 263; Hants RO, Reg. Waynflete, f. 57v. On Roucle’s death in 1453 most of his Island estates passed to his younger daughter (Garston’s grand-daughter), Joan, wife of Thomas Bourman of Brooke.16 W. Berry, Hants Gen. 78.