PORTER, John I

An MP who shared his name with several other fifteenth-century residents of Worcester, Porter is not automatically identifiable and it is possible that the cursus honorum above conflates him with one or more of these namesakes.3 W.R. Williams, Parlty. Hist. Worcs. 89, speculates that the MP was ‘an early member’ of a family long seated at Claines to the north of Worcester. The earliest evidence definitely relating to him is the indenture made when the city returned its burgesses to the Parliament of 1447, and it is unclear whether he was the John Porter who clashed with Sir William Lichfield* in the 1420s. Through his first marriage, Lichfield had come into possession of the manor of Eastham in Worcestershire but in 1423 he was forced to defend his title in the court of King’s bench at Westminster. His opponents, Ralph Porter and Thomas Rawlins, claimed the manor under the terms of a settlement that their great-grandfather, Richard Porter, had made of his estate at Eastham in 1319. In spite of his own modest birth, the knight must have found it humiliating to have to answer them, since both were his social inferiors. Evidently Richard Porter’s descendants had gone down in the world, for the plea roll identifies Ralph as a ‘barker’ from Worcester and Rawlins as a husbandman from Whitbourne in Herefordshire. It also reveals that their attorney was John Porter. Presumably this lawyer was Ralph’s relative, as well as the ‘gentleman’ of Worcester of that name whom Lichfield referred to as one of his rivals’ accomplices when he struck back with a suit of his own in the same court in 1425. Sir William alleged that, in pursuit of their claim, they and these accomplices had fabricated false deeds relating to the disputed manor. He also took advantage of his appointment as sheriff of Shropshire in 1427, exploiting the influence the office gave him to secure indictments against his opponents at Shrewsbury in the following year. In the end, Lichfield succeeded in retaining Eastham, of which he died seised in 1446, although the manor was afterwards disputed for many decades between his grand-daughter and heir’s descendants and the male heirs of the Cornwalls, the family of his first wife.4 KB27/648, rot. 66; 658, rots. 2, 76; 665, rot. 35; 672, rex rot. 2; 673, rex rot. 21; CIPM, xxvi. 404; VCH Worcs. iv. 268; PROME, xv. 341-3. If not the subject of this biography, the John Porter who was Lichfield’s adversary was probably related to the MP, as perhaps was Bartholomew Porter. A ‘yeoman’ resident in Worcester in the 1420s, Bartholomew was a follower of Sir Hugh Cokesey*, with whom he trespassed on lands in Warwickshire belonging to Joan Beauchamp, Lady Abergavenny, in 1425.5 CPR, 1422-9, p. 423; C. Carpenter, Locality and Polity, 378-80.

Notwithstanding the problems of identification, it is likely that the MP was the John Porter who witnessed deeds relating to property at Worcester in 1431, 1434, 1441 and 1453,6 Worcester Chs. (Worcs. Historical Soc. 1909), 22, 60, 67. the man who sued William Clyve* in the late 1440s for trespassing on a close in the city belonging to him,7 KB27/748, rot. 18d. and the John Porter, ‘gentleman’, who served as an executor of a local skinner, John Orchard. In 1450 Orchard’s executor of that name was a defendant in a suit that John Chambir of Worcester brought at Westminster. Chambir sought a debt of £13 6s. 8d. from this John Porter and two co-defendants, Thomas Walsall* and Alice his wife, of whom the latter was Orchard’s other executor.8 CP40/756, rot. 83d. It also seems likely that the MP was the John Porter of Worcester who joined Sir Hugh Mortimer (a landowner with estates in Worcestershire, Herefordshire and the Welsh marches) and John Staple senior of Martley in making a lease of a tenement in the city’s ‘Wynhalestret’ in November 1452. The deed recording this transaction does not reveal the exact nature of the interest which each of the lessors had in the property, although it does show that it lay next to another tenement belonging to Porter alone.9 Collectanea (Worcs. Historical Soc. 1912), 43-44. In September 1460, a few months after Mortimer’s death, John Campion of Worcester obtained a release from Staple and Porter of any claim to the property that featured in the list.10 C139/176/38; Collectanea, 44. Over 17 years later, two John Porters, one of them a ‘weaver’, witnessed the return of the burgesses for Worcester to the Parliament of 1478 but it is unlikely that either of them was the MP. As for the John Porter who was a bailiff of the city in 1485, the suggestion that he was the MP’s son is not implausible.11 Williams, 89.

Apart from the indenture recording his election to Parliament, the only evidence definitely connected with the MP is a mid fifteenth-century manuscript volume of considerable literary significance. It appears that he was the compiler of this volume, in which he is mentioned by name and which suggests that he was better educated than many of his fellow parliamentary burgesses. The term ‘commonplace book’ scarcely does full justice to this collection of 72 paper folios, of which all but folios 46-54 are in one hand – apparently his – for it includes copies of three rare and important texts: first a treatise on heraldry, one of just two known versions of one of the earliest treatises on heraldry in English; secondly, the only medieval manuscript of the ‘Art de Venerie’ by Edward II’s huntsman, William Twiti, the earliest treatise on hunting in English; thirdly, the earlier of two known manuscripts in English relating to the game of chess. The remainder of the manuscript is comprised of more mundane but nevertheless interesting notes and texts. These include menus of a Lenten breakfast provided by Richard Lee* during his term as a sheriff of London (1452-3) and of a feast given by the serjeants-at-law in 1454, as well as various recipes, a table of weights and measures, biblical quotations, a ‘Regimen Sanitatis’, a list of the ten commandments, a treatise on plague and a brief Latin chronicle of English history from 1066 to 1447. It also records that Porter and his fellow MP, Hugh Jolye*, arrived at the Parliament of 1447 on 12 Feb., two days after its opening at Bury St. Edmunds, although without giving a reason for their tardiness. Porter’s name also appears in an aphorism added near the bottom of another folio: ‘Intima per mores quoscumque exteriores. quod Porter’.12 ‘You can tell a man’s heart from his conduct, whatever it is – so says Porter’. Over the following centuries, Porter’s book passed through the hands of several different owners. At one stage it belonged to the celebrated early modern chief justice, Sir Edward Coke†, and it later came into the possession of the great 19th-century collector of books and manuscripts, Sir Thomas Phillipps. Along with other items from Phillipps’s enormous collection, it was sold at Sotheby’s in 1967.13 Bibliotheca Phillippica, iii (Sotheby’s Sale Cat. 28 Nov. 1967), 7, 67-72.