MEEDE, Philip

According to John Smyth, the early modern antiquary and author of the Lives of the Berkeleys, Philip Meede hailed from a family long established at Failand in Wraxall, Somerset. In support of Smyth’s assertion, Meede certainly possessed a messuage known as ‘Meadsplace’ in Failand, along with other lands in Wraxall, and at Tickenham, Bedminster and Banewell in the same county.6 J. Smyth, Lives of the Berkeleys ed. Maclean, ii. 172; C140/55/23; Bristol RO, Ashton Court mss, AC/D/15/18, 19/a-b, 20/a; Som. Feet of Fines, ii (Som. Rec. Soc. xxii), 123; C1/84/21. Smyth also states that Philip was the son of Thomas Meede, who in turn was the son of another man of the same name. This is impossible to verify, although it is worth noting that in the 1360s there was a Thomas Meede of Bedminster, one of the parishes where Philip held lands.7 Smyth, ii. 172; Ashton Court mss, AC/D15/7; C140/55/231. Outside Somerset, Meede appears to have possessed several burgages and other interests at Thornbury in Gloucestershire, and in 1457 and again in 1464 he was party to conveyances of the manors and advowsons of Tormarton, Littleton, West Littleton and Acton Turville in the same county, although very probably only as a feoffee.8 Muns. Berkeley Castle, i. 492; Notts. Archs., Portland mss, 157 DD/P/121/1; CP25(1)/79/93/8. At one stage he may also have held lands in Dorset, although an inquisition taken after his death found that this was not the case at the end of his life.9 C140/55/23. In 1447 he took a couple of obligations from the parson of Bridport in that county – for what purpose is not known – on the strength of which he subsequently sued that cleric at Westminster for £33 6s. 8d.: CP40/753, rot. 306. However ‘ancient’ the Meede family, the evidence for Meede’s landholdings does not suggest a particularly exalted background, even though the Tickenham property was referred to as a manor in the late fifteenth century.10 C1/84/21. Although at least one of his contemporaries at Bristol considered him a ‘venerable man’,11 John Nanconthan, who made Meede the executor of his will of 1469: Bristol Wills (Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc. 1886), 143. the marriage of his daughter with Maurice Berkeley is said to have met with the disapproval of Maurice’s elder brother, William, Lord Berkeley, on account of her ‘mean bloud’.12 Smyth, ii. 173; Overseas Trade (Bristol Rec. Soc. vii), 141.

Whatever his origins and background, Meede was not the first of his surname to have a connexion with Bristol. In the late 1420s the town’s burgesses included the pewterer John Meede, one Robert Meede and the merchants Walter and Thomas Meede. Robert held property in St. Ewen’s quarter and was possibly the husband of the Margaret Meede for whom Philip was an executor in the later 1450s.13 CP40/670, rot. 455; CFR, xv. 296, 333; xvi. 287; Feudal Aids, ii. 304; Gt. Red Bk. of Bristol. Introduction (Bristol Rec. Soc. ii), 300; Church Bk. St. Ewen’s, 35. Walter was implicated in the seizure of a Breton vessel off the coast of Ireland in Henry V’s reign and was exporting cloth to Bordeaux in 1428,14 PPC, ii. 248; E122/18/19. while Thomas was bailiff of Bristol in 1438-9 and sheriff in 1452-3.15 Muns. Berkeley Castle, ii. 844; CFR, xix. 13. It is likely that Thomas was the MP’s brother of that name, a burgess who predeceased Philip by just one week.16 Trans. Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc. xliv. 284.

The earliest known reference to Philip Meede is his purchase in 1439 of a tenement in Small Street, Bristol.17 Topography of Bristol, i. (Bristol Rec. Soc. xlviii), 158. He was said to have held 16 burgages in the town, where he resided in a house on Redcliffe Street.18 C1/84/21; Gt. Red Bk. of Bristol, ii. 131. Over the years, he was regularly involved in conveyances of property there, but in many cases on behalf of other burgesses and it is sometimes hard to ascertain when he was acting on his own account.19 Bristol RO, St. Thomas the Martyr parish recs., P/St.T/D/1, 2, 64, 66, 68, 137, 138, 310-11, 313-16; Braikenridge deeds, P.St MR/5163/260. Two of the most prominent burgesses for whom he was a feoffee were John Burton I* and William Canterbury. In his will of 1455 Burton devised various holdings at Bristol to his feoffees, including Meede, so that they might found a chantry in his memory in the parish church of St. Thomas the Martyr.20 Gt. Red Bk. of Bristol, iii (Bristol Rec. Soc. xvi), 56-61. Meede was likewise a feoffee to the use of Canterbury’s will,21 Bristol Wills, 139. and his own feoffees included the leading Somerset lawyer Richard Chokke.22 C140/55/23.

Like other prominent Bristol merchants of his day, Meede traded abroad, if not always in the easiest of circumstances after the final defeat of English arms in France. Following the loss of Aquitaine, formerly one of Bristol’s chief markets, it became illegal to trade there without a special royal licence. In March 1452 Meede and another burgess, Robert Ricart, obtained such a permit to export cloth to the duchy in order to raise the ransom of their friend Nicholas Parken, a captive there of the French.23 Overseas Trade, 99; DKR, xlviii. 393. On the other hand, foreign merchants likewise suffered at the hands of the English. In June 1453 the Crown ordered William Bonville*, Lord Bonville, and others to inquire into a complaint that Meede had made in his capacity as the factor and attorney of Peter de Seynt Crike, ironically a native of Aquitaine. According to this complaint, several Cornish vessels had seized and brought to Fowey La Seynt Cruce, a Spanish ship evidently carrying goods belonging to de Seynt Crike. Presumably the culprits had surrendered the vessel by the beginning of the following month when Meede purchased a royal safe conduct permitting it to sail home with a cargo of non-staple wares.24 CPR, 1452-61, pp. 118-19; Overseas Trade, 102. In the same period Meede and Ricart had business dealings with John Dyvarola, a merchant of Navarre. By 1459 these dealings had become the subject of a dispute between the two Bristolians on the one hand and another Spaniard, John de Gastelo of San Sebastian, on the other. In May that year the pair formally declared before Thomas Olney, the town clerk of Bristol, that they had fully satisfied Dyvarola of all the money that they had owed him (by payments made at Meede’s house in Redcliffe Street) and that de Gastelo’s claims to the contrary were false.25 Gt. Red Bk. ii. 130-2. Meede was still trading with Spain, from where he imported iron, wine and woad, in the following decade.26 Overseas Trade, 212, 217; E122/19/4, 8. Evidently Bristol was not always the only centre for his mercantile career. A royal pardon issued to him in November 1471 refers to him as ‘once of London, merchant’ as well as of Bristol, although nothing is known about his activities in the City.27 C67/48, m. 21. This link with London is not referred to in the other pardons that he received in Feb. 1458 and Jan. 1471: C67/42, m. 27; 44, m. 6.

Whatever the extent of his London connexion, Meede was always primarily associated with Bristol for it was there that he held municipal office. He began his career as an office-holder at Michaelmas 1444 as one of the town’s bailiffs. By 1446-7 he was a keeper of ‘Barstaples coffer’, a common coffer kept in Bristol’s guildhall, and in the summer of 1450 the common council ordered him and his fellow keepers to deliver assignments of cash to John Shipwarde* for repair of the town’s defences.28 Gt. Red Bk. of Bristol, i (Bristol Rec. Soc. iv), 127, 129-30, 131-2. Meede himself was a member of the common council, and he was present at its meeting of January 1452 when it was decided that the steward of Bristol, Thomas Exeter, should relinquish office at the following Easter, ‘for grete causes that moevid tham of the demenyng of Thomas Excestre in executing his Office of Styward of Bristowe’.29 Ibid. 135. Nominated but not pricked for the shrievalty of Bristol in 1449, 1451, 1452 (when Thomas Meede was the man chosen) and 1453, Meede was finally appointed to that office in 1454.30 Ibid. 254-5; CFR, xviii. 149, 261; xix. 13, 64, 115. In August 1455, late in his term as sheriff, he attended the meeting of the common council at which it was decided that the town should from henceforward have two chamberlains.31 Gt. Red Bk. ii. 48-52. A month after relinquishing the shrievalty, Meede was appointed to the first of his terms as a constable of the local staple, of which he was also mayor while mayor of Bristol, an office to which he was a three times appointee.

Alongside his municipal offices, Meede also received various ad hoc commissions from the Crown. The problem of piracy, with which he had considerable familiarity, prompted the issuing of several of these commissions. One of them arose from a petition that John Wych* of Bristol submitted to the chancellor in 1452. Wych complained that in May 1449 Philip and Patrick Martyn, John Hanyagh, Patrick Galway and many others from Kinsale had attacked his ship, the Marie (or Mary) while it had been fishing off the south coast of Ireland and seized an accompanying vessel, a Spanish merchantman that the Marie itself had previously captured. He also alleged that the assailants had killed three crewmen from his ship and wounded many others. The purpose of his bill was to secure the arrest of the culprits, of whom Hanyagh and Galway were then in Bristol, by means of a commission directed to the mayor and others, including Meede. Such a commission was duly issued on 13 Oct. 1452, although with what result is not known.32 C1/19/122.

During his first term as mayor of Bristol, Meede intervened in a quarrel between the same John Wych and another burgess, Thomas Talbot. He attempted to apprehend the latter for assaulting Wych but Talbot resisted and escaped out of the town’s Temple gate.33 Adams’s Chron. Bristol ed. Fox, 68. During the same term he also petitioned the King and his council about a notorious act of piracy. A fellow townsman, Robert Sturmy, had died on the return leg of a pioneering voyage to the Middle East in June 1458 when his ships were attacked by Genose freebooters off the Maltese coast. Sturmy’s partner in his enterprise, another Bristol merchant, John Heyton, managed to escape, and in the following October he charged the Genoese merchants in England with collusion in the attack. Meede’s petition, directed against all the Genoese and Lombards then in England, led to a lengthy suit and the Genoese were condemned to pay £6,000 to those merchants, of Bristol and elsewhere in the kingdom, who had suffered losses. In June 1459 he was appointed to a commission, headed by John Stourton II*, Lord Stourton, to which the Crown entrusted the task of distributing this compensation money.34 Overseas Trade, 117-18; CPR, 1452-61, p. 517; Oxf. DNB, ‘Sturmy, Robert’. Almost immediately, however, a third of the same sum was diverted to the more immediate needs of the King, to whom by the following month Stourton and his fellow commissioners had agreed to lend £2,000 in support of an embassy to the Pope. On 26 Aug. the commissioners received letters patent granting them repayment of £1,800 of the loan from the issues of 22 counties in southern England and the subsidy and alnage of cloth in Bristol, Wiltshire and Salisbury, and of the other £200 from proffers made by sheriffs and others of the King’s officers at the Exchequer.35 E207/17/9, no. 39; CPR, 1452-61, p. 511.

Within a few weeks of completing his first eventful term as mayor of Bristol, Meede was returned to the Coventry Parliament of 1459, the notorious assembly that attained Richard, duke of York, and his allies. The political situation had completely changed when he and his fellow MP, John Shipwarde, were re-elected to the Commons in the following year since the Parliament of 1460 was called by the Yorkists, now once again in control of the government. Months after the accession of Edward IV, Meede was appointed to a second term as mayor of Bristol, and in December 1461 he and his fellow burgesses acquired an inspeximus of the town’s royal charter of 1396.36 CChR, vi. 142. The town obtained additional privileges from Edw. IV in Dec. 1462 (ibid. 162-4), but this was after Meede’s term had ended. Ricart’s Kalendar (Cam. Soc. ser. 2, v), 42, mistakenly states that Meede was mayor when these ‘newe speciall addiciones’ were obtained. During this same second term Bristol also obtained a grant of its fee farm in perpetuity as well as charter renewing the town’s admiralty jurisdiction.37 Bristol Chs. ed Latimer, 111-12, 116.

Quite possibly, Meede’s parliamentary career coincided with the marriage of his son Richard to Elizabeth, daughter of the late John Sharp V* and grand-daughter of John Sharp III. In March 1460, during the interval between Philip’s two Parliaments, John III settled lands, tenements and other properties in Corn, Broad and St. Mary le Port and Marsh Streets on the (perhaps only recently married) couple. There was already a strong connexion between the Meedes and Sharps, since the MP’s own wife, another Elizabeth (otherwise Isabel), was the sister of John III. The good relationship between the two families was further demonstrated in 1463 when Meede, in the capacity of a trustee, assisted John III during the proceedings arising from the latter’s dispute with the Bristol parish of St. Ewen’s.38 Gt. Red Bk. iii. 171; Church Bk. St. Ewen’s, 54, 57-60. A much more impressive match was the one made in about 1465 between Meede’s daughter Isabel and Maurice Berkeley. Presumably she contracted it on her own account, since she was already a widow when she married Maurice, although Meede did provide for the couple. In October 1467 he granted them a 20-year lease of ‘Meadsplace’ in Failand, for a rent of 45s. 8d. p.a., and seven years later he assigned to them and their heirs several holdings and burgages in Thornbury.39 Muns. Berkeley Castle, i. 492, 537. According to Smyth, ii. 172, Isabel also brought Maurice ‘divers lands’ in Som. for her ‘dowry’. It is also possible that Maurice looked to his wealthy father-in-law for loans and other forms of financial support. All of Isabel’s three children by her unknown first husband died young but she bore Maurice an all-important son and heir as well as two other sons (one of whom succeeded his elder brother) and a daughter.40 CP, ii. 135-6; Trans. Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc. xliv. 37. Assuming that her brother-in-law, William, Lord Berkeley, did object to the match, Isabel must have derived no small degree of satisfaction from the subsequent turn of events. When William, by then Marquess Berkeley, died without surviving issue in 1492 it was she who became the new marchioness since Maurice was his brother’s heir. Whatever any distaste that William, Lord Berkeley, may have felt towards his sister-in-law’s family, after Isabel’s marriage the Meedes were identified with the Berkeley interest. Following the clash between the Berkeleys and their opponent Thomas Talbot, Lord Lisle, at Nibley Green in March 1470, Meede and John Shipwarde the younger (the son of his associate in the Commons) were implicated in that illegal private battle, for it was alleged that they had sent armed assistance to the Berkeleys. Meede and Shipwarde strongly denied the claim. In order to clear their names, they went to the trouble of laying the matter before the then mayor of Bristol (Shipwarde’s father) and a jury from the town, which on 2 May that year declared that the allegation was a groundless slander.41 Muns. Berkeley Castle, i. 574.

By 1470 Meede was of relatively advanced years, although he remained active in public affairs at Bristol, as a constable of the local staple and as a member of ad hoc commissions issued by the Crown. In January 1471, during the Readeption of Henry VI, he took the precaution of acquiring a royal pardon, as he did again on the following 23 Nov., several months after Edward IV had recovered the throne.42 C67/44, m. 6; 48, m. 21. Just three days after the issuing of this latter pardon, he and three other burgesses, William Spencer†, John Cogan and Robert Strange†, bound themselves under pain of £100 to appear in person before the King and his council on 17 Jan. 1472, although for what reason is not known.43 CCR, 1468-76, no. 843. He drew up his will a few days before he was due to make that appearance, but in the event he was to live for nearly another four years. In the summer of 1472 he was a party to the conveyances made when Elizabeth, widow of John Sharp III, relinquished her holdings in Bristol, along with a manor at Swinford in Leicestershire and tenements at Isham, Northamptonshire, to his son Richard Meede and Richard’s wife, Elizabeth’s grand-daughter and heir. Philip was involved in another land transaction in November 1474 when he, acting in association with Richard, made the already mentioned conveyance of holdings at Thornbury to Maurice and Isabel Berkeley.44 PCC 21 Wattys (PROB11/6, f. 156); CP40/844, cart. rots. 1-3; Muns. Berkeley Castle, i. 492.

Meede died just over a year later, on 27 Dec. 1475, and his will of 11 Jan. 1472 was proved before the ecclesiastical and municipal authorities on 11 Jan. and 26 Mar. 1476 respectively. Like his brother Thomas, who had died seven days previously, he chose to be buried next to St. Stephen’s altar in his home parish church of St. Mary Redcliffe. He set aside £40 to support a chaplain who was to sing masses for his soul, bequeathed 12d. to the cathedral at Wells, left a pipe of woad to St. Mary Redcliffe and 20s. to its vicar and forgave a debt of £3 5s. to the church of St. Thomas the Martyr, to which Bristol parish he also left 15s. Meede directed that his wife should have the residue of his personal estate and all his real property in Somerset and Bristol for the rest of her life, after which they were to pass to his son Richard. Should Richard die without issue, his daughter Isabel and her husband Maurice Berkeley and her children were to succeed; should Isabel likewise die childless they were to pass to a less immediate relative, Philip Ringston†, and his issue and then finally to Meede’s old business associate Robert Ricart and his heirs. Meede appointed three executors, his wife, his son Richard and son-in-law Maurice Berkeley.45 C140/55/23; PCC 21 Wattys; Bristol Wills, 157; Trans. Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc. xliv. 284. Almost a year after Meede’s death the escheator of Somerset and Dorset was ordered to establish what lands he had held in those counties but the subsequent inquisitions were not held until June 1477. In Somerset the jury neglected to mention his property at Tickenham and valued his lands at Failand and elsewhere in Wraxall and at Banewell and Bedminster at just under £5 p.a. This was undoubtedly a considerable underestimate, given that the jurors reckoned that the Failand holdings alone, which he had leased to his daughter and son-in-law for 45s. 8d. p.a., brought in an annual income of no more than two marks.46 CCR, 1485-1509, no. 14.

The inquisitions also found that Meede’s heir was his son Richard, then aged ‘30 years and more’.47 C140/55/23. Richard survived until 1491. In his will, made in May that year and proved on the following 15 June, he asked to be buried near his father in the church of St. Mary Redcliffe. He had outlived his first wife, Elizabeth Sharp, after whose death he had married Anne, daughter of the Gloucestershire esquire Thomas Pauncefoot*. Richard provided for Anne by awarding her a life interest in the bulk of his properties at Bristol and lands in Somerset. He also established an annual obit at St. Mary’s for the benefit of the souls of himself, his wives, parents and other relatives. Richard died childless, and the heir to his lands was his sister Isabel, the soon to be Marchioness Berkeley.48 PCC 45 Milles (PROB11/8, f. 353); Smyth, ii. 173. In about 1493 she and her husband sued her father’s surviving feoffees in the Chancery, for failing to convey to them her late father’s manor of Tickenham and holdings in Wraxall, Bedminster and Bristol.49 C1/84/21. Later that decade Isabel’s late brother was mentioned in the will of the Bristol weaver John Meede (d.1496). In his will John bequeathed to his ‘cousin’ Philip Ringston a tenement and other properties in Redcliffe Street that he had bought from Richard. Evidently a relative of the MP’s family, John was buried near Philip and Richard Meede in the church of St. Mary Redcliffe.50 PCC 30 Vox (PROB11/10, f. 239v).