MOSELEY, Richard

Moseley hailed from Stoke-on-Trent, a few miles from Newcastle-under-Lyme. This is clear from the most interesting of the few references to him. In a Chancery petition dating from between 1433 and 1443 Thomas Bucknall, warden of the parish church there, made some striking and unusual allegations. He claimed that Moseley, as proctor of the parson, had been guilty of derelictions of duty and worse. Not only had he, for the past ten years, failed to maintain a deacon, as a result of which the security of the church had been neglected and goods worth 21 marks stolen, but he had also abused the churchyard, creating a common way through it so that he might drive his beasts in and out of the parsonage (of which he was presumably the farmer) and leaving these beasts in the churchyard over night with unfortunate consequences for its cleanliness. Indeed, on the previous Whitsunday he had left one of his cows to calve there, impeding the parishioners’ Whitsun procession. What resulted from this unusual complaint does not appear.2 C1/44/226.

The few other references to Moseley are less vivid. Late in 1439 or in 1440 he sued out a protection as going to France in the company of Sir John Robessart, captain of Valoignes, describing himself as ‘of Stoke-on-Trent alias of London, gentleman’. As he then remained in England, the protection was revoked on 8 Oct. 1440, but he may have seen service in France earlier. Either he or a namesake was present at the siege of Montfort l’Amaury in March 1434 and went on to serve in the garrisons at Coutances in the summer of 1436 and the city of Rouen in October 1439.3 CPR, 1436-41, p. 467; Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, Fr 25771/822, 25773/1127; Clairambault 206/2-3.

Later, in 1444, Moseley was one of many accused by John Kingsley, joint-steward of the duchy of Lancaster lordship of Newcastle-under-Lyme, of laying in wait to kill him and threatening his servants. Here our MP is described as a yeoman of Newcastle, and it may be that he had already been admitted to the freedom there.4 CP40/732, rot. 181d. In a deed of 1454 he is styled as a burgess of Newcastle, and that status explains his elections to represent the borough in the Parliaments of 1450 and 1455. In the indenture for the first of these elections, his name and that of his fellow burgess, Thomas Colclough*, have been added in gaps left when the return was originally drawn up.5 Staffs. RO, Sutherland mss, D593/B/1/6/1E/12; C219/16/1, 3. No references have been traced to him dating from after his second election in 1455.