GAYNCOTE, John

Gayncote’s origins are obscure, but by the 1420s he was trading in cloth from the port of Dartmouth.3 E122/40/37, 41/1. He established close ties among the leading men of the town, including individuals such as the town bailiff, John Ford, whom he served as a feoffee,4 Watkin, 108. and Richard London, a one-time mayor, for whom he acted in a similar capacity in the establishment of a chantry for the benefit of his and his family’s souls.5 Ibid. 118. He himself joined the governing elite of the borough in the autumn of 1425 when he was elected one of the bailiffs, and it was while still serving in this office in the following year that he was returned to Parliament. The circumstances of his election are uncertain, but it is possible that the borough officers were struggling to find willing candidates to travel to provincial Leicester, where the Lords and Commons were to meet on this occasion, and had no alternative but to return one of their own number.

Few details of Gayncote’s commercial activities have come to light, beyond a dramatic incident in 1433, when he and his associate William Notefield* sent a ship called the Grace Dieu to Lisbon in the charge of a Portuguese factor, Alvaro Gonzales. Having sold his employers’ merchandise, Gonzales returned with a cargo of Portuguese goods. However, he also brought with him a sizable number of his friends, and when Gayncote and Notefield tried to take possession of their cargo in the port of Southampton, they were attacked, as they claimed, by a mob of around 100 foreign merchants and mariners, and were forced to appeal to the authorities for redress.6 CPR, 1429-36, p. 351. A more obscure clash with the prominent Exeter merchant John Hull* around 1430 probably also had a mercantile background.7 KB27/675, rot. 44d; 679, rot. 27. Gayncote’s expertise in naval and trading matters found recognition in his appointment (alongside other leading Dartmouth traders) as a commissioner to bind over the masters of ships leaving Dartmouth not to attack any Breton vessels. On other occasions he was called upon by the Dartmouth customs officers to assess the value of contraband seized.8 E122/183/18; 222/87.

In 1434 Gayncote sued out letters of protection for John, Lord Clinton’s expedition to France, which he may have joined as a victualler.9 DKR, xlviii. 299. If he ever set out, and did not merely avail himself of the royal letters to avoid prosecution in the law courts, it may have been in the course of this expedition that Gayncote became acquainted with John Sherwyn, then lieutenant of Honfleur.10 Ibid. 308. In 1440, when Sherwyn was appointed constable of Porchester castle, he employed Gayncote as his factor.11 CPR, 1446-52, p. 99; CP40/752, rot. 417. While their association may have been initially profitable, Sherwyn’s death within a few years of taking up his appointment at Porchester brought Gayncote serious legal difficulties. The former constable’s executors sued him for an account of his activities and as a result of his failure to appear in court, he was outlawed, and only secured a pardon in May 1448.12 CPR, 1446-52, p. 99; CP40/752, rot. 417. Further troubles followed a year later, when Gayncote was associated with a number of his more influential neighbours, including Robert Wenyngton* and John Brushford*, in a violent assault at Totnes on Walter Reynell* of Malston.13 CP40/760, rot. 208d; 761, rot. 200; 766, rot. 122d. The motives for the attack are obscure, but it is possible that Gayncote harboured a personal grudge, for Reynell had not long before sued him for debt over a bond in the court of common pleas.14 CP40/755, rot. 453. The suit brought by Reynell against his assailants and the commissions of inquiry issued as a result appear to have come to nothing.

Gayncote did not live long thereafter, and was dead by 1453, when his widow, Joan, and his putative younger son, Walter, who had settled at Barnstaple, gave a bond for £4 6s. 8d. to the prominent Dartmouth merchant Nicholas Stebbing*.15 Watkin, 400. It is likely that it was his elder son, also called John, who in the early 1460s was exporting cloth and pewter from Dartmouth in the balinger Le Katherine, of which his kinsman Nicholas Gayncote was master.16 E122/41/1.