PAYN, John I

The antecedents of John Payn, who made his mark as a merchant and leader of a political faction in Southampton and ended his days as a wealthy citizen and member of the Grocer’s Company of London, are difficult to pin down.8 In HP Biogs. ed. Wedgwood and Holt, 669-70, he is confused with John Payn of Rockbourne, Hants, an esquire with land worth more than £40 p.a. who in fact died in 1448: PCC 13 Rous (PROB11/1, f. 99). It has been conjectured that he was the son of the Southampton ship-master William Payn who by 1418 was master of one of the largest vessels of Henry V’s navy.9 A.A. Ruddock, ‘John Payne’s Persecution of Foreigners’, Procs. Hants Field Club, xvi. 26. Another case could be made that he came from Salisbury: his mercantile interests often took him there, and he regularly used as a trading partner Richard Payn*, who became a citizen of Salisbury by the early 1420s. The two men, who may have been brothers, collaborated in bringing several lawsuits in the court of common pleas in pursuit of their debtors,10 CP40/715, rot. 66d; 724, rot. 170. and together in 1443 they were bound in £1,000 to the Somerset esquire Thomas Cheddar, undertaking not to pursue judgement against him for damages and costs in a more serious dispute.11 E326/9479. Furthermore, at the time of John’s death his sister Edith was living in Salisbury, where he himself owned property.12 PCC 18 Godyn (PROB11/5, ff. 129-30). Even so, there is no firm evidence to show that John (or indeed Richard and Edith) were natives of that city. A third alternative suggestion places the MP’s family background in the south-west of England. He is thought to have been related to Thomas Payn, another merchant who made his name in Southampton and became one of John’s most prominent supporters. A newcomer to the port, Thomas was the son and heir of a namesake from Looe in Cornwall, who entered the local community through marriage to the sister and heir of Richard Thomas.13 C. Platt, Med. Southampton, 254-5; Southampton City Archs., Soton. recs. SC4/2/279, 281; CP40/780, rot. 376; 781, rot. 241; 823, rot. 181d.

What may be said with certainty is that for many years, beginning in the 1420s and continuing until 1463, Southampton was the place where John usually resided and conducted the bulk of his business. In May 1427, already well established in the town, he is recorded importing wine and other commodities and making a shipment of 51 broad cloths on a carrack sailing to the Mediterranean; and before long the volume of his trade with Gascony and Spain increased dramatically. Woollen cloth, probably produced in Wiltshire, was a principal export – for example, he shipped 79 lengths of cloth in the summer of 1433 and 157 in 1437-8 – and wine, iron and oil his main imports, but he also traded in madder and woad for the cloth-finishing process, timber, soap, salt, lambskins and foodstuffs such as fruit and fish. It is not now possible to estimate the overall value of his cargoes, but one such of January 1444, consisting mainly of herring, was worth £61, and his regular shipments of 50 or more cloths must have been worth much more.14 E122/140/62, ff. 27, 62v; 141/21, ff. 35, 44v, 52v; 141/23, ff. 4, 5, 13, 14, 25v-27, 32; 141/25, ff. 11, 20, 50; 141/29, ff. 2v, 17; 184/3 (pt. 3), ff. 8v, 26v; 209/1, ff. 3, 9, 20v, 33, 37v, 44, 49, 52v, 62, 65, 72, 79v, 82v; Port Bk. 1435-6 (Soton. Rec. Ser. vii), 4, 16, 18, 32, 36, 42, 44, 46, 52, 54; 1439-40 (ibid. v), 9, 10, 12, 24, 29, 35, 42, 51, 53, 97. Payn was also engaged in the lucrative wool trade, for instance shipping nine sacks of wool on a Genoese carrack which left port in February 1454 ‘versus partes exteras’, for which, in accordance with the statutes, he paid subsidies at alien rates as the ship was licensed to avoid the staple at Calais.15 A.A. Ruddock, Italian Merchants in Southampton (Soton. Rec. Ser. i), 196. Besides his considerable trade with countries in southern Europe, on at least one occasion he freighted a vessel destined for Iceland.16 C1/43/275-8. As already suggested, the focus of Payn’s inland trade was Salisbury, the destination of regular consignments of victuals and dyestuffs sent by cart from Southampton for the city’s markets, but he also supplied tradesmen and inn-keepers in towns situated in a wide arc from the port, such as Ringwood, Farnham, Newbury, Oxford and Chichester. From 1441, after he set up in business in London, he sent cartloads of wine and spices there too.17 Brokage Bk. 1439-40 (Soton. Rec. Soc. 1941), passim; 1443-4 (Soton. Rec. Ser. iv, vi), passim; Port and Brokage Bks. 1448-9 (ibid. xxxvi), 93, 123-4, 165, 209.

Although Payn prospered from his mercantile activities there is no sign that he chose to use his profits to make sizeable investments in land. He lived in Southampton’s parish of St. John the Baptist, and in 1442 took on a 50-year lease from God’s House hospital of a tenement on the east side of French Street for 10s. p.a., to which in the 1450s was added another building next door for an extra rent of 20s. a year. A large cellar provided storage space for his imported wines.18 Queen’s Coll. Oxf., God’s House deeds 464; Cart. God’s House, ii (Soton Rec. Ser. xx), 382, 393, 401; Southampton Terrier, 84, 130, 239-41, 267. Payn’s second wife brought him property in London. His association in June 1442 with the feoffees of the deceased fishmonger William Childe supplies an approximate date for his marriage to Childe’s widow Joan, although nearly a year elapsed before she received from the feoffees seisin of her former husband’s sizeable property known as ‘Childeskey’ in St. Botolph’s parish near Billingsgate. This consisted of a house with an adjoining wharf, cellars, solars and shops, all in Thames Street.19 CCR, 1441-7, pp. 78, 141, 495; 1447-54, p. 55. Payn altered the name of his wife’s quay to ‘Payneskey’, and adopted her house as his London home. It was presumably through purchase that he acquired the buildings in the parishes of St. Benet Fink and St. Clement Eastcheap which he was later to bequeath to Joan for her lifetime. Although he became a member of the prestigious fraternity of St. John the Baptist founded by the tailors of London, it was one of the greater companies of the City that he decided to join – the Grocers’ Company. Henceforth he was to be described interchangeably as citizen and grocer of London and burgess, merchant or draper of Southampton.20 Guildhall Lib. London, Merchant Taylors’ Co. wardens’ accts. 34048/1, f. 357v; C67/40, m. 30; 41, m. 32; 42 m. 31. On 28 June 1441 Payn paid as much as £6 13s. 4d. to be a freeman of the Grocers’, and within a year he established a branch of his business in London. He took on apprentices and along with his fellow grocers at the end of the decade he contributed towards their donation for an armed force to go to Calais, and for the defence of the capital (although he was tardy in paying his share of the £100 the Company raised for the latter cause).21 Ms. Archs. Grocers’ Co. ed. Kingdon, ii. 263, 270, 279, 301, 316; P. Nightingale, A Med. Mercantile Community, 450-1. Payn refrained from participating in the civic administration of London, but it is worthy of remark that at the parliamentary elections held in the capital on 19 Oct. 1450 he attested the indenture recording the return of the city’s four MPs, probably because two of them, Richard Lee* and William Marowe*, were fellow members of his Company.22 C219/16/1. He joined them in the Commons as a representative for Southampton, this being the third time that the burgesses had elected him.

Despite his pressing commercial concerns, Payn had always found time to be involved in the governance of Southampton, although before his first election to Parliament in 1435 he had not yet occupied a major office. Perhaps his willingness to stand on that occasion was prompted by personal interests, for he took the opportunity presented by his stay at Westminster to bring three actions for debt in the court of common pleas, to recover sums amounting to nearly £40 from a Gloucester merchant, a gentleman from Oxford and a Southampton widow.23 CP40/699, rots. 167, 494. In the following year it was alleged that he had been party to a piratical attack on the Seynt Nunne lying in the harbour of St. Pol de Léon in Brittany, carried out by mariners in a flotilla of eight barges and balingers from various Channel ports. The vessel was taken to Plymouth with her cargo, which belonged to Thomas Horewood* of Wells, and orders were sent out in October 1436 for the arrest of the miscreants and their appearance in Chancery, but whether they suffered any penalty does not transpire.24 CPR, 1436-41, p. 83. By then Payn had been elected senior bailiff in Southampton, a post he perhaps held for two consecutive years, as in November 1438 the steward of Southampton entrusted him with £225 for the town’s fee farm, which Payn carried to the Exchequer.25 Stewards’ Bks. 1434-9, p. 64. He again sat in the Commons in 1447, when Parliament assembled at Bury St. Edmunds, and as sheriff of Southampton he assumed responsibility for sending to Chancery the returns to the Parliament of November 1449. His third election, to the Parliament summoned for 6 Nov. 1450, came at the start of his first mayoralty and immediately after he had relinquished the shrievalty. Just eight days after the session opened the government unknowingly commissioned him (the unnamed ‘mayor of Southampton’) to confiscate 11 tuns and three pipes of woad which he himself and Thomas Payn had wrongfully taken from a merchant from Bordeaux. In later years he attested the Southampton electoral indentures of 1453 and 1455,26 CPR, 1446-52, p. 432; C219/15/7; 16/1-3. Thomas was his mainpernor at the 1450 election. but whether he himself was ever elected again is not known, as Southampton’s returns to the last two Parliaments of Henry VI’s reign have not survived.

On the face of it Payn’s career in Southampton was conventional, but although to all appearances his rise in the borough heirarchy had been straightforward and unopposed, in fact he made many enemies in the town in his quest for power. Always a quarrelsome and highly litigious individual, he was not afraid to defy anyone, even members of the nobility, who crossed his path, especially where his financial interests were involved. The earl of Northumberland’s receiver in Sussex was outlawed in his master’s name following Payn’s suits for long overdue payment for wine supplied to the earl’s household in the 1430s.27 J.M.W. Bean, Estates Percy Fam. 99n, from Petworth House Suss. mss, receiver’s acct. 7215 (MAC/7). He also clashed with Henry Holand, duke of Exeter. In the spring of 1449 the duke’s servant Hugh Payn* (not known to have been a kinsman of the MP) took charge of two French merchants taken captive at Plymouth and committed them to gaol at Southampton, only for them to be forcibly removed on 7 Oct. by John Payn, the sheriff of the town, and his putative relation, Thomas Payn. The duke petitioned the King for redress, and, disatisfied with the subsequent ruling, pursued the matter in the court of common pleas, so that ten years later, in November 1459, a writ was sent from the court to the sheriff of Hampshire to distrain on John Payn’s goods to force him to respond to the duke’s plea that he had attacked his men and servants at Southampton.28 SC8/46/2278; C1/19/483; CP40/795, rot.108. Meanwhile, the dispute had provoked repercussions in London. Payn alleged in King’s bench in 1458 that a Holand retainer, John Chancy of Battersey, and his wife had assaulted him in the parish of St. Antonin in Cordwainer Street Ward on 13 Sept. 1451, and had held him prisoner until he paid a fine of 50 marks and sealed a bond releasing them from legal actions. He demanded damages of 1,000 marks. No verdict was reached before Payn’s death.29 KB27/789, rots. 80d, 81d.

Payn’s relations with other members of the nobility became strained for different reasons. In 1446 he acted as attorney in Southampton for Cecily, the widowed duchess of Warwick, who employed him to sue out writs for her endowment, and at an unknown date during the next four years he made her a loan of 50 marks, which her receiver-general, Thomas Portalyn*, and the steward of her household, John Gerard, were formally bound to repay. When they failed to do so Payn sued them at common law, whereupon Portalyn entreated him to spare him, and agreed to pay Payn’s costs if he brought a suit against Gerard alone. Gerard was outlawed, but then died, leaving Payn, or so he said, ‘many yeres delayed of the seid deute’. Yet Portalyn asserted in a petition to Bishop Waynflete as chancellor (1456-60) that Payn had in fact received full repayment of the loan from the pesage of Southampton, which he farmed from the duchess for £35 p.a. Quite how long Payn farmed the pesage is unclear, but he was still occupying the ‘Poysagehous’ (the Weigh House where the King’s tron or weigh beam was kept) in 1454, and may have continued to do so until it was forfeited to the Crown by Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, in 1460.30 C1/16/352; 26/484; 31/486-8; Port Bk. 1439-40, p. xlii; Southampton Terrier, 249-50. In a suit brought in 1466 Payn and Richard Lee, his fellow grocer, said that on 12 Oct. 1461 at Southampton they met Portalyn to view the accounts regarding various sums of their money which Portalyn had received before then, and found that he owed them £37. The court amerced them for making a false claim: CP40/819, rot. 134.

Money-lending evidently played a regular part in Payn’s complex commercial dealings, but this did not always work to his advantage when the borrower was a magnate. Thus, he lent £40 to Edmund, duke of Somerset, but was allegedly defrauded of payment by the duke’s guarantors, so that at some point in the years 1450-2 he had to bring an action in Chancery against them. Similarly, he advanced sums of money to Somerset’s rival, Richard, duke of York, who attempted to satisfy him with a tally dated July 1446 for £200 assigned on the customers at Ipswich. The customs were then so heavily over-assigned as a consequence of grants made by Henry VI that Payn could not obtain payment, to his ‘importable charge and uttermost undoyng’, and it was not until York’s son took the throne (indeed, not until May 1462), that he was able to secure a royal warrant to the Exchequer to cancel the tally and issue another charged on the customs of London.31 C1/22/176; E404/72/2/21. He also obtained a pardon in May 1462: E159/239, recorda Trin. rot. 9. On one apparently isolated occasion, in July 1453, he advanced a substantial loan of £166 13s. 4d. to the Lancastrian Crown.32 E401/831, m. 33; E403/793, m. 15. How such dealings and the need to recover his money coloured Payn’s attitude as factions among the nobility hardened in the years leading to civil war is impossible to say. Like many of his fellow members of the Grocers’ Company he may have deeply resented the flood of prosecutions of London’s merchants which Henry VI’s attorney William Nottingham II* instigated in the court of the Exchequer in the summer of 1459. Payn was one of 104 merchants accused of giving illegal credit, in his case in the sale of 25 woollen cloths to Niccolò da Veghia.33 W. Childs, ‘English Credit to Alien Merchants’, in Enterprise and Individuals ed. Kermode, 72-75; Nightingale, 509-10; E159/236, recorda Trin. rot. 6. Nevertheless, there is no sign that Payn ever contemplated compromising his own interests by supporting either Lancaster or York.

Payn stood out among the MPs for Southampton in this period for the excessive number of lawsuits he prosecuted in both the local and the central courts. This litigation, in part a response to personal quarrels with his fellow burgesses, itself acted as a spur to the factious disputes which racked the town from the late 1440s until Payn left Southampton for good in 1463. He must bear a considerable degree of responsibility for the creation of rival camps, with him and his supporters (among them his son-in-law, Thomas White, and his ‘servant’, the London salter Robert Basset*), in vociferous opposition to the recorder, John Fleming*, and other leading townsmen headed by the prominent merchant Peter James*. Payn assisted John Serle† and his wife Katherine (the widow of Andrew Payn, quite likely a kinsman of his), in the suit they brought in Chancery against Katherine’s father, Peter James,34 C1/73/144-5. and he and White stood as guarantors for the provost of Queen’s College, Oxford, in his action in the same court against Fleming. The provost alleged that the recorder had taken upon himself all the rule of the law in Southampton for 20 years or more, and similar allegations were made when White was disenfranchised by James (presumably during one of the latter’s mayoralties of 1447-9). White protested to the chancellor that with Fleming in control writs arriving in Southampton from Chancery, the Exchequer and the other courts at Westminster were often ignored. For example, when mayor Fleming had failed to return writs relating to the endowment of the duchess of Warwick (for whom he and Payn were acting as attorneys), and among the many wrongs and injuries done by Fleming and his son-in-law, Andrew James*, through maintenance and otherwise, was the wrongful condemnation of Payn to pay £7 13s. 9d. in the local court. In response Fleming railed about the ‘untrewe ymaginacon and wurchynge’ of Payn and White and their constant manipulation of the legal system to suit their own ends: they sued anyone who offended them and were ‘trobelers and letters of the lawe’.35 C1/16/352; 106/57-58. In April 1449 Payn and White were required to cease all their actions, suits and quarrels from ‘the beginning of the world’ to date against the then mayor, John William*, but Payn nevertheless later revived proceedings against William in the central courts.36 E326/11801; KB27/794, rex rot. 6.

There is ample evidence to demonstrate that Fleming by no means exaggerated Payn’s litigiousness, for he usually had several suits in progress simultaneously. For instance, in 1446 he was suing a London tailor in the city courts for a debt of £100, and men from Dorset and Gloucestershire in the common pleas for £4 and £40, respectively; while in the Easter term of 1450 at least four similar pleas were in train. Among his debtors was Thomas Hugford*, the Warwickshire esquire, who owed him £40.37 Cal. P. and M. London, 1437-57, p. 92; CPR, 1446-52, p. 92; CP40/754, rot. 157; 757, rot. 50d; 779, rot. 480d; 795, rot. 296d. Together with Richard Lee, the London grocer, he had earlier advanced £240 to Henry Bruyn* and his father Sir Maurice at the staple of Westminster, and when they failed to pay the money back on the agreed date he instigated legal action against them in 1451.38 C131/233/16; C241/235/52. Similar proceedings on bonds sealed in the staples at Westminster and Salisbury followed,39 C241/230/89; 233/4, 5, 13, 14. and in 1459 he was pursuing the Sussex lawyer Thomas Hoo II* for recovery of a debt of £140 incurred in London three years earlier.40 CP40/768, rot. 62d; 793, rot. 489. Hoo proved too clever for him, and Payn failed to get redress before he died: KB27/817, rot. 92.

In the Michaelmas term of 1460, Payn was suing six debtors, from London, Bristol, Guildford, Wareham and Wiltshire, for a total of £100. One of these suits, brought against Walter Clerk* of Southampton, had wide ramifications, arising from a background of quarrels and litigation dating to Clerk’s shrievalty of Southampton in 1455-6, and his mayoralties of 1457-9. After John Fleming’s death Clerk had taken over the leadership of the group of burgesses opposed to Payn and his friends, and in this he had been supported by the new recorder, John Ingoldesby. Payn alleged in pleas in the King’s bench in the Michaelmas term of 1459 that Clerk had assaulted and wrongfully imprisoned his servant, Robert Basset, at Westminster in January 1456, and along with Ingoldesby had maintained John William in his suit against him later that year. Furthermore, he accused Clerk, the latter’s brother-in-law John Hall II* of Salisbury, and Richard Gryme (the recently-elected mayor of Southampton) of offences under a statute of 1430, regarding malicious indictments of persons outside their own counties, since they had got him indicted before the j.p.s of Middlesex and summoned before the courts at Westminster on the charge that together with Basset he had assaulted Clerk at Hillingdon in January 1456 and made a riot against the peace at Westminster in July 1458.41 KB27/794, rot. 67, rex rot. 6; 797, rots. 9, 23d. Meanwhile, Clerk had sued a number of Payn’s associates, including Basset, Thomas Payn and John Payn, junior, in a plea of contempt and trespass against the statute against maintenance: KB27/790, rot. 3d. The lawsuits were clearly bound up with a struggle for power in Southampton which reached a climax at the mayoral elections of September 1460, when Payn’s son, John junior, and Andrew James (now his son-in-law and a convert to his party), burst into the guildhall with daggers drawn at the head of a mob some 100 strong, thereby preventing the election of Nicholas Holmehegge* or Walter Fettiplace†, the nominees of the out-going mayor, Gryme, and insisting that their own candidate, Robert Bagworth, be elected. In December a royal mandate was sent to the aldermen to hold a new election according to custom, but Bagworth remained in office.42 CPR, 1452-61, p. 639.

In the meantime Parliament had been summoned to assemble on 7 Oct., and the coup in Southampton had prompted Payn’s rival, Clerk, to seek election to the Commons by another borough. He was returned for Chippenham, but on his arrival at Westminster he was arrested and committed to the Fleet prison, condemned to pay various sums of money at the suits of the King, Payn and Basset (the latter attending the Parliament as an MP for London). The arrest of one of their number was found to be contrary to the liberties and freedom customarily enjoyed by Members of the Commons, who immediately petitioned the King for Clerk’s release so he might attend Parliament daily according to his duty. Since the affair was causing ‘grete delaye’ to the start of parliamentary business, the King granted the petition, provided that the judgements against Clerk would be enforced after the dissolution. Needless to say, Payn long continued to prosecute Clerk, Ingoldesby and Hall for bringing false indictments against him,43 CP40/799, rot. 18d; C1/50/183; KB27/798, rot. 18d; 799, rot. 22; PROME, xii. 515-16. and Hall in turn sued Payn and his son, along with Bagworth, for assaulting, imprisoning and maltreating his servants in a confrontation at Romsey.44 CP40/799, rot. 393d.

The riot at the mayoral elections of 1460 was not an isolated incident, rather the product of grievances accumulated over many years of unchallenged domination of borough politics by a small group of men in whose hands the prosperity of Southampton had grown on a policy of steady encouragement of trading with alien merchants. Those who took the side of Payn followed him not merely in opposition to the establishment, but also in an outright hostility to foreigners, in particular to Italians who controlled the great volume of commerce with the Mediterrranean which was the mainstay of the port. Normally, the townsfolk treated the foreign merchants with friendliness and courtesy; indeed, Payn himself had carried on apparently amicable dealings with foreigners for several years. For instance, in March 1441 he had purchased part of a cargo of iron, worth £115, which the Spaniard Martin Ochoa had shipped to Southampton, selling him in return 29 broad cloths worth £81; and in the following year he bought 26 buttes of malmesey from a Venetian. These were just two of many similar transactions, and, far from showing hostility towards the strangers, when, in 1450, rioters from Romsey came to rob the Lombards in Southampton, Payn as sheriff escorted them to the gaol at Winchester.45 E101/128/31, mm. 8, 20; Soton. recs. SC5/1/7, f. 23v. Yet in the late 1450s, quite likely influenced by the prevailing attitudes in London, where foreigners were treated with distrust and even direct animosity (resulting in the anti-alien riots of 1455-6), Payn became the ringleader of a group of Southampton men who broke with the tradition of friendly relations.46 For this and what follows see Ruddock, ‘John Payne’s Persecution of Foreigners’, 23-37, and Italian Merchants, 168-86. In perhaps an isolated case, in 1451 he and other Londoners had disputed with some merchants from Genoa ownership of the Sancta Maria de Gracia of Lisbon,47 CCR, 1447-54, p. 251. and he may have begun to share the views of many enterprising merchants in the City who were eager to invest in overseas trade and resented the monopoly of the foreigners in the most profitable branches of commerce. Despite his earlier criticisms of John Fleming, when Payn himself gained a position of authority in Southampton he did not hesitate to manipulate the law to suit his own ends. During his first mayoralty, in 1450-1, so an esquire named Robert Whitehead complained, Payn had begun a plea of debt against him in the town court, bringing the case before himself as judge by virtue of his position,48 C1/19/117. and now in his challenge to the Italians he abused the system in the same way. In the years 1457-8 three Venetian merchants – Jacopo Falleron (who had lived in London for ten years, and was now a denizen and member of the Drapers’ Company), Niccolò da Veghia and Umfredo Giustiniani – all commenced suits against him in Chancery, complaining that he had unjustly arrested certain consignments of wine and woad belonging to them in Southampton, with the connivance of some servants of the duke of Somerset. Payn’s defence was that he had waited more than two years for Falleron and da Veghia to satisfy a debt of £164 owing to him since March 1455, and finally, despairing of ever recouping his money, he had brought a plea of debt against them before the mayor of Southampton, whereupon process had been awarded and woad to the value of £54 17s. seized and given to him in part satisfaction.49 C1/26/221, 385; 30/8-9. Suits against Falleron continued until Payn’s death: CP40/807, rot. 222.

The majority of complaints against Payn were made after Edward IV came to the throne, when the Italians felt more confident of success. In Southampton Payn’s faction had retained power after the disputed mayoral election of 1460 (indeed, his son-in-law Thomas White had been particularly tyrannical in the following months),50 Ruddock, Italian Merchants, 177-8. and Payn himself was chosen mayor again in September 1462. He did not scruple to use his powers to oppress aliens in the town court, imprisoning them on the flimsiest excuse and acting as judge in his personal disputes with them. Demetrio Spinola, a Genoese merchant who had lived in Southampton for several years, complained that Payn’s son John, then constable, had imprisoned him without writ or other authority, in an effort to compel him to pay a debt allegedly owing to Payn by a kinsman. Spinola could not have a fair trial in the local court where Payn was ‘jugge in hys owne cause, whych ys ayenst all lawe and good conscience’.51 C1/29/403. Angelo Donato di Aldobrandi, representative in Southampton of the great Aldobrandini firm of Florence, accused Payn of trying to force him to pay again a debt which had been settled six years before, a matter which Payn said was determinable in common law, and indeed an action was pending in the court of common pleas.52 C1/29/264-5. Matters came to a head early in 1463. On 18 Feb. Payn confiscated 20 butts of sweet wine which was the property of two Venetian merchants, Andrea Morosini and Filippo Cini, on the pretext that they had not paid the local custom dues on merchandise they had brought into Southampton five months previously. The Venetians affirmed that they had paid the correct amount to the water-bailiff, and produced a bill testifying to this effect. Normally this acquittance, produced in the town court, would have secured judgement in their favour and compensation for their goods, which Payn had sold at half their true value. But Payn dominated the court and they could not obtain a hearing ‘bycause of his grete myght and supporte within the saide toune’. The Venetians cited the Statute Staple of 1353 which accorded protection and safeguard to foreign merchants, for the enrichment of the realm, and demanded double damages accordingly. Playing on the new King’s desire to encourage foreigners to come to England they stressed that Payn’s treatment of them would be ‘grete discorage and discomfort to other merchauntes if sharpp correction in such case be not hadd’.53 C1/27/416; 29/150. As a consequence, on 13 May Payn was deposed from the mayoralty by royal command, and Walter Fettiplace (one of the defeated candidates of 1460) was elected in his place.

Payn retreated to London. Falleron had renewed his suit in Chancery against him, and in the autumn of 1463 this won another hearing. Payn asserted that Falleron and da Veghia still owed him £85 3s. and that this was a matter for common law, not the equity court, but yet another year passed before the matter was put to arbitration, initially to be made before 25 Nov. 1464, then before January 1465, or else by an award by Master Robert Kirkham, the keeper of the rolls of Chancery.54 C1/28/346; 30/8-9; CCR, 1461-8, pp. 246, 252-3.

Payn retained his house in St. John’s parish, Southampton, but now allowed his lease on the property in French Street to lapse,55 Cart. God’s House, ii. 382. and for the rest of his life he lived in London. By a testament made on 12 Apr. 1466 and a final will of 16 Apr. 1467 he left £10 to poor people attending his funeral and small bequests to his parish church, St. Botolph’s, that of St. Mary Spitel outside Bishopsgate, and to the Bethlehem hospital; and a fraternity in St. Botolph’s was to receive an annual rent of £2 from a messuage in the middle of ‘Payneskey’. But the principal legacies went to members of his family: £100 for the marriage of his daughter Katherine, 54s. 4d. to another daughter (a nun at Wilton abbey), £5 to his grand-daughter Joan (the child of his now deceased son John), and to the children of Andrew James by his daughter Margery the 100 marks which their father owed him. Payn’s widow was to keep for life all the London property, which after her death was to be divided so that ‘Paynskey’ would pass in tail to their daughters, Elizabeth Hawes and Katherine, and the rest be sold to pay for the marriages of poor maidens ‘of goode fame’, to maintain highways, and for other works of charity. For as long as she stayed single, the widow was also to keep Payn’s principal dwelling in Southampton, with remainder to Margery James and her children; while his grand-daughter Joan was to inherit all his tenements in the parish of Holy Rood, and her brother, Thomas, all his possessions in Salisbury. Payn died before 25 May and was buried in St. Botolph’s.56 PCC 18 Godyn.

Payn died owing the authorities at Southampton 40 marks. Two years later they paid 3s. 4d. to obtain a copy of his will in preparation for suing his executors, but although they eventually recovered £13 6s. 8d. in part payment this was not before they had spent 29s. 8d. more in costs.57 Soton. recs. SC5/1/12, f. 8; 13, f. 26v; 15, ff. 3, 13. The MP’s grandson Thomas also contested the will. Just after Payn’s death the young man acknowledged a debt of £110 to his grandfather’s executors, but although they released him from all legal actions three years later, in 1471 they demanded payment and had him thrown into Newgate prison. The executors were required to appear in Chancery on 12 Nov. that year, and the case against him was dismissed. Thomas also alleged that long before his death Payn had settled the messuage in Holy Rood parish in Southampton on his son John Payn the younger (Thomas’s father), in fee tail, but Thomas’s sister Joan and her husband Thomas Braytoft said that the younger John had only held it to John senior’s use, and that in his will the latter had left it to Joan and her heirs (as indeed was the case). In 1478 the chancellor ruled in favour of the couple.58 C1/56/147; C131/76/8. In another case in Chancery it was stated that Payn had left his widow money and property to the value of 2,000 marks. This was in a suit brought against Joan, as Payn’s executrix, for damages suffered by a London stokfishmonger namded John Richman, who alleged that Payn had deliberately diverted a vessel freighted with his goods from Iceland to Ireland, after arranging for him to be arrested there and for his merchandise to be sold to Payn’s profit.59 C1/43/275-8.

Within six years of Payn’s death Joan married another London grocer, Edmund Kervile, only to be widowed for the third time before April 1474. She then sold all the chattels of her three husbands for a sum of money to be spent for the good of their souls. Her daughters appear to have been no longer alive by the time she made her will on 25 Feb. 1483, for she left the residue of her estate, after the distribution of many legacies, to a draper called William Spynke, and when dying on 6 May 1487 she authorized Spynke to spend up to 100 marks on legal costs should he be challenged in possession by the fishmonger Robert Cryket, or else to buy vestments for her parish church of St. Peter, Cornhill. Joan asked to be buried next to her second husband, Payn.60 CCR, 1468-76, nos. 524, 1038; Cal. P. and M. London, 1458-82, p. 89; PCC 6 Milles.