MITCHELL, John II

A skinner by trade, Mitchell was sometimes known by his occupational alias, so adding to the problems of trying to identify an already obscure figure. During his first term as bailiff of Oxford, for example, he was referred to as ‘John Skynner’ in an Exchequer memoranda roll but as ‘John Michell’ in one of the surviving municipal records for 1427-8. Likewise, during his second term in the same office, it was as John Skynner that he witnessed a deed subsequently entered on the dorse of the close roll, but as John Michell that he attested the election of Oxford’s MPs to the Parliament of 1433.4 E159/205, recorda Mich. rot. 12; Oxf. City Docs. 180-1; CCR, 1429-35, p. 237. To confuse matters further, there was certainly more than one John Mitchell of 15th-century Oxford (see, for e.g., Registrum Cancellarii Oxoniensis, i (Oxf. Historical Soc. xciii), 245, for a cobbler of that name), and it seems likely that there was more than one John Skynner there. Moreover, among those who were witnesses in the court of the chancellor of Oxford university on 22 Mar. 1449 were two separate individuals, John Skynner and John Mitchell: Registrum Cancellarii Oxoniensis, i. 177-8. Evidence for Mitchell’s property in Oxford is lacking,5 He and Richard Wythigg* were involved in transactions of property in the parish of St. Peter le Bailey in 1430, but only as feoffees for John Walker of Oxford: Cart. Hosp. St. John the Baptist, ii (Oxf. Historical Soc. lxviii), 262-3. although he appears to have possessed interests in the wider county of Oxfordshire. He attested the election of the county’s knights of the shire to the Parliament of 1433, and was probably the John Skynner of Oxfordshire called upon to swear the oath to keep the peace administered throughout the realm in the following year. In 1435 Thomas Fuller and Agnes his wife formally released their title to a tenement and lands near Standlake to Mitchell and his wife Alice, and in the following year the Mitchells themselves quitclaimed lands in Sidenham and Chinnor to Roger May, clerk, Hugh Benet† and others.6 D.D. Harcourt mss, c. 68/38, 39; CP25(1)/191/27/72.

As far as is known, Mitchell did not begin his career as a municipal office-holder until 1427, although it was on behalf of his borough that he rode to London earlier that decade. The surviving account of the chamberlains of Oxford for 1423-4 records that he spent ten days in the City negotiating for a charter (possibly that granted to the town on 15 Nov. 1423, itself a renewal and confirmation of Henry IV’s charter of 1401), and a further five days away on another journey, probably again to London. The latter errand was connected with a dispute between the churchwardens of the town’s parish of All Saints and the master of University College over the ownership of the Maidenshead in Turl Street, presumably a matter in which he was acting for the churchwardens. His employment on such tasks suggests a man with some knowledge of the law as well as trade.7 Munimenta Civitatis Oxonie (Oxf. Historical Soc. lxxi), 283 and n; CPR, 1422-9, p. 142. It was not until nearly a decade after completing his final term as a bailiff of Oxford that Mitchell was returned to his only known Parliament, during which he sat in the Commons alongside the then mayor of Oxford, Thomas Bailey*. He subsequently served a year as a surveyor of nuisances, an office commonly held by former bailiffs of Oxford. It is unlikely that he was the ‘John Michel’ who confessed to having beaten someone (his victim is unidentified) with a stone when brought before the court of the chancellor of Oxford university in 1457. The MP certainly appeared in that court on several occasions in the late 1430s, but in the respectable capacity of a surety or arbitrator on behalf of fellow townsmen involved in suits that had come before the chancellor or one of his representatives.8 Registrum Cancellarii Oxoniensis, i. 23, 25-26, 47-48, 381.