HOLLAND, John

Holland is a surprisingly obscure figure. His election, on 5 Nov. 1459, to the Parliament in which the Yorkists lords were attainted, implies that he shared the Lancastrian sympathies of his fellow Hereford MP, Otto Cornwall* . This is confirmed by a later action brought by the Yorkist Thomas Bromwich*, who claimed that both MPs been among those citizens who had conspired to lay false indictments against the county’s Yorkists when royal commissioners came to the city in April 1457. In both this conspiracy action and the election indenture Holland is described as ‘esquire’, suggesting that he was a man of greater account than those usually returned for the city.1 KB27/809, rot. 60d; C219/16/5. Yet almost nothing else is known of him. He was not among the citizens of Hereford assessed to the subsidy of 1450-1, although his attestation of two of the city’s elections indicates that he lived there.2 E179/117/64; C219/16/6; 17/1. In Hilary term 1447 he had an action for a debt of 40s. pending in the court of common pleas against a husbandman of Wellington, a few miles north of Hereford. More interestingly, when, on 23 Feb. 1458, royal justices came to the city to hear a plea of trespass sued by Henry Oldcastle* and Thomas Monnington*, our MP, again described as ‘esquire’, was one of four jurors removed from the panel as ‘suspectuosi’. Since the two litigants were indentified with rival factions in the county – Oldcastle with the county’s Lancastrians and Monnington with county’s Yorkists – there may have been a political dimension to his exclusion. He last appears in the records in 1477, when, described as ‘of Hereford, esquire’, he was sued for a large debt of £100 by five men, headed by a local lawyer, William Wykes*.3 CP40/744, rot. 162; 864, rot. 81d; KB27/788, rot. 76.