POLE, Nicholas

Nicholas probably belonged to the family of Thomas Pole, the mayor of Chichester of 1424-5, who was also known as Thomas Spone and officiated for many years between 1420 and 1438 as a constable of the local staple.3 C1/7/30; CP40/667, rot. 399; C67/24, 25. Although he himself never became mayor, so far as the records reveal, his three elections to Parliament provide a measure of his standing among his fellow citizens. First recorded in 1431, when he appeared personally in the court of common pleas to sue two Sussex husbandmen for a debt of six marks, he had already by then set up in business as a draper. A similar legal action brought in the summer of 1432, while he was up at Westminster for his first Parliament, suggests that his wife’s former husband had followed the same trade: he assisted her and her fellow executor of John Budde’s will to sue a clothier from Maidstone in Kent.4 CP40/680, rot. 233; 686, rot. 426. His service in the Commons evidently proved satisfactory for at Michaelmas, following the dissolution, he was chosen one of the two reeves of Chichester.

In 1439 Pole was the subject of a petition to the chancellor from a husbandman named John Oxe who lived two miles to the south of the city at Donnington. Oxe claimed that he had been bound to Pole in the sum of £7, on condition that if he paid him £6 within ten years the bond would be cancelled, but Pole had refused to sign this defeasance, and even though the ten-year period was not yet up, he was unjustly pursuing him in the courts for the full amount.5 C1/9/144. Pole was one of the seven leading citizens of Chichester who on 13 May 1446 obtained a royal licence to re-found the guild of St. George and endow a chantry in the cathedral where services could be said for the brotherhood.6 CPR, 1441-6, pp. 461-2. Over the years he had occasionally been called upon to act as a juror at official inquiries conducted in the city (as at the post mortem for Joan Michelgrove), and in June 1451 he headed the list of jurors at a coroner’s inquest into the death of Richard Strete, a local yeoman. In January 1450, however, writs were sent from the justices of the common pleas to the deputy sheriff of Sussex to make distraint on Pole and 41 other members of juries summoned to appear in a suit brought by a London armourer against the abbot of Durford, since they had failed to do so.7 C139/91/18; CP40/756, rot. 109d; Suss. Arch. Collns. xcv. 55.

Nicholas Pole is not recorded after he attested the Chichester election to Parliament on 26 Feb. 1453.8 C219/16/2. Thomas Pole, appointed collector of customs in the port of Chichester five years later,9 CFR, xix. 215. may have been a kinsman of his, perhaps even his son.