PAULE, Peter

Of obscure background, Paule made his way in the world as a servant of the Holands, earls of Huntingdon and dukes of Exeter. His first known place of residence was Baldock in Hertfordshire where his wife Alice had succeeded to lands. She had also inherited a third share of the manor of ‘Kingswood Bury’ in Clothall, and in due course the couple gained possession of the whole manor, acquiring the shares of her sisters, Margery and Navarina, in 1422 and 1433 respectively.5 VCH Herts. iii. 224-5; CCR, 1419-22, pp. 251-2; 1429-35, p. 251; 1435-41, p. 121; 1447-54, pp. 424-5; CP25(1)/91/110/2, 14; Add. Chs. 35417-19. The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 321, incorrectly states that Navarina was Joan Venour’s only surviving child. There is no evidence that any of the estates that Joan’s fa., Sir William Hampton, had held in Herefs. passed to Alice Paule. Paule added to this estate over the following years. He acquired lands in Weston by Baldock from the descendants of John Nele, and in 1440 he purchased the manor of Weston Argentein in the same parish from William Allington II* and his wife, one of the heiresses of the Argentine family. He also obtained properties at Clothall, including the manor of ‘Mundens’, and (or so it would appear) at Arlesey in Bedfordshire, just a few miles north-west of Baldock.6 CCR, 1429-35, pp. 351-2; 1435-41, pp. 172, 436, 470; 1441-7, p. 32; 1447-54, pp. 98-99, 424-5; CP25(1)/91/113/90-91; 114/104. It is suggested in VCH Herts. iii. 173 that Paule was merely acting as a feoffee when the Allingtons conveyed Weston Argentein to him and others in 1440, but it features among the properties which he afterwards settled on his own trustees: Add. Ch. 35417; CCR, 1447-54, pp. 424-5. J.E. Cussans, Herts. ii (Broadwater), 43, claims that it was acquired by John Say II*, but it does not feature in Say’s inq. post mortem: C140/67/43.

Paule is first heard of in November 1419, when he and the clerk Thomas Smyth received a recognizance for 200 marks (a security presumably connected with the Venour inheritance) from Robert Scott*, Alice’s stepfather.7 CCR, 1419-22, p. 58. At this early stage in his career he was both a resident of the parish of St. Clement Danes just outside the city of London as well as of Baldock. When obliged in the spring of 1423 to answer a suit that Simon Eyre, a draper from the City, had brought against him in the court of common pleas, he was described as a ‘gentleman’ of the ‘New Hospital in St. Clement Danes outside the bar of the New Temple, otherwise of Baldock’. According to Eyre, Paule had entered into a bond for six marks with him in the London parish of St. Michael Cornhill in December 1419 but had failed to honour that security. Paule riposted that he had entered the bond under duress, not in London but at Huntingdon, while a prisoner of Eyre and his associates.8 CP40/649, rot. 124. Neither the reason for the bond nor its making in Huntingdon – assuming that version of events was true – is known. The address given for him in Eyre’s suit might suggest that Paule was an administrative employee of the New Hospital. It is also very likely that he was a lawyer: St. Clement Danes lay close to both the Inner and Middle Temple, and Exchequer records show that Peter Paule was an attorney in the exchequer of pleas in 1444.9 J.H. Baker, Men of Ct. (Selden Soc. supp. ser. xviii), ii. 1205.

Exactly when Paule entered the service of John Holand, earl of Huntingdon, a lord with whom Robert Scott was also associated, is unrecorded. Yet he was certainly Holand’s servant by February 1427 when he went to the Exchequer to collect an instalment of the earl’s fee as a royal councillor. During the next 27 years or more he regularly visited the Exchequer on behalf of Holand (who in 1443 recovered his father’s ducal title), and (to a lesser extent) his son and successor, Henry. Among other payments or assignments he received for John Holand were instalments of an annuity which the Crown had granted his patron in May 1428, as well as Holand’s fees, rewards and expenses as constable of the Tower of London and as a soldier in France and the marches of Scotland. On at least three occasions in the late 1430s and early 1440s he went to the Chancery to swear an oath in connexion with consignments of Gascon wine which Holand had licence to import, free of customs and other charges, for his household. After John Holand’s death, Paule continued to visit the Exchequer to collect the fees of Henry Holand, who had succeeded his father as constable of the Tower.10 E403/677, 683, 686, 688-9, 692-3, 695-6, 698, 700, 703, 706, 708-9, 712, 717, 719, 721, 723, 725, 731, 733, 736, 740-1, 743, 745, 747, 749, 753, 755, 757, 759, 765, 771, 773, 798; CCR, 1435-41, p. 304; 1441-7, pp. 15, 255. The frequency with which he performed such errands for the Holands means that he must have spent a considerable amount of time in London, and his admission in 1432-3 to the fraternity of St. John the Baptist founded by the city tailors indicates a familiarity with the City and some of its more important inhabitants.11 Guildhall Lib. London, Merchant Taylors’ Co. accts., 34048/1, f. 236v.

Paule also served the Holands as a trustee. In December 1439 he was one of a group of men, evidently acting on John Holand’s behalf, to which the Crown committed the keeping of lands in south-west England and the Welsh marches which Beatrice, the earl’s recently deceased second wife, had held in dower from her previous marriage.12 CFR, xvii. 123. Just under seven years later, he was party to a settlement of various manors and lordships belonging to Holand in Devon, Somerset, Berkshire and Cheshire.13 CPR 1441-6, p. 454. In June 1450 he was one of those associated with Henry Holand in obtaining the farm of estates in Somerset, Dorset and Cambridgeshire from the Crown,14 CFR, xviii. 175. and he was also party to the settlement of various Holand lordships in England and Wales on Henry and his duchess in the spring of 1459.15 DL41/145. Among Paule’s own feoffees were John Holand himself and Holand servants like Richard Caudray, dean of St. Martin le Grand, London. Other associates included Holand retainers like John Chancy of Surrey, for whom he was a mainpernor in February 1448, and Richard Knesworth of Cambridgeshire, to whom he married one of his daughters. He was nevertheless also able to forge links with men with no obvious ties to the Holands, among them two leading Hertfordshire gentry, Sir Philip Thornbury* and John Fray†, both of whom witnessed settlements and other land transactions on his behalf, and Thomas Kirkby, clerk of the rolls, who acted as one of his feoffees.16 CFR, xviii. 182-3, 238; Add. Ch. 35419; CCR, 1419-22, pp. 251-2; 1429-35, p. 251; 1435-41, pp. 121, 436; 1447-54, pp. 424-5.

Paule had a busier career as a servant of the Holands than as a public administrator, given that the position of escheator in Essex and Hertfordshire was his only local office of any significance and his sole Parliament was a short one. Henry Holand’s success in securing the return of several of his servants to the Parliament of 1453 demonstrates that the Holands were able to bring their influence to bear on parliamentary elections,17 S.J. Payling, ‘Ampthill Dispute’, EHR, civ. 895-6. but it is impossible to tell whether Paule enjoyed the active support of John Holand when he stood for the Commons. Holand died in early August 1447, five months after the Parliament was dissolved.

Although Paule remained in the service of the new duke of Exeter, it is possible that his attachment to Henry Holand was never as strong as that between him and the previous duke. Unlike Caudray, Knesworth and other Holand servants, he was not implicated in Henry’s quarrel with Ralph, Lord Cromwell, and there is no evidence that he was involved in his lord’s disorderly activities in northern England in the spring of 1454.18 KB27/775, rot. 46; 776, rots. 47d, 82; 777, rot. 90; R.A. Griffiths, Hen. VI, 604; Payling, 881-907. (In May that year he was in London, visiting the Exchequer to receive an assignment of the duke’s fee as constable of the Tower.)19 E403/798, m. 2. The late 1450s and early 1460s were a tumultuous period for Exeter, who having taken up arms for the Lancastrian cause, was attainted in Edward IV’s first Parliament and forced into exile.

Presumably as a precautionary measure, Paule obtained royal pardons in 1458 and 1462,20 C67/42, m. 6; 45, m. 16. but by this period he was a relatively old man and he is likely to have devoted much of his final years to his own affairs. In 1459 he helped to found a guild in the parish church of St. Mary’s, Baldock,21 CPR, 1452-61, p. 511. and in July 1465 he made a settlement of his manors of Kingswood Bury and Mundens. According to the settlement, these manors were to pass to his male offspring after the deaths of himself and his wife, with remainder to his five daughters (of whom at least two, Elizabeth, the wife of Richard Knesworth, and Alice, the wife of Richard Nudegate, were already married) and then to his brother Robert. If Robert succeeded, he was to sell a moiety of the properties, donating some of the money so raised towards repairs to Baldock parish church and the rest to the wardens of the guild which the MP had helped to found there.22 Add. Ch. 35419. In the event, Paule, who was certainly dead by 6 Mar. 1472, when his widow received a royal pardon,23 C67/48, m. 9. was survived by his son Richard. Richard failed to retain his inheritance, perhaps because he had run into financial difficulties. In October 1476 he let Kingswood Bury to John Sturgeon†, to whom both that manor and Mundens were permanently alienated in the following decade.24 Add. Chs. 35421, 35423-4; VCH Herts. iii. 225. By 1489 Weston Argentein had passed into the hands of Laurence Harneys.25 VCH Herts. iii. 173.