QUATERMAYNS, Richard

A younger son who unexpectedly succeeded to the family estates after both his elder brothers died, Quatermayns enjoyed a long and varied career as a London merchant, country gentleman and servant of the Crown. In the mid fifteenth century he entered the service of Richard, duke of York, and as a result he continued to prosper after York’s son seized the throne in 1461. Evidently a man of considerable ability, he was still publicly active when a very old man, and was returned to his last Parliament when about 80 years of age. Blessed though he was with impressive longevity, he failed to father any surviving children, meaning that his branch of a long established Oxfordshire family came to an end at his death.

When his father Thomas Quatermayns died in 1398, Richard was a child of about six years of age. John, the eldest of Thomas’s three sons, lived only until December 1403, either shortly before or just after attaining his majority. John’s brother and heir, Guy, came of age in the autumn of 1409 but died in May 1414 and in the following August Richard was granted livery of the Quatermayns estate.20 CIPM, xvii. 1248; xix. 522, 779; xx. 205. Quatermayns is next heard of in January 1416, when he bound himself in a recognizance for £60 to the influential Thomas Chaucer*,21 CCR, 1413-19, p. 293. and he entered a like security for £40 to Chaucer’s close associate John Golafre* in July 1420.22 CCR, 1419-22, p. 108 (misdated 2 July 1419 by Driver, 89). The reason for these recognizances is not known, although Golafre had been linked with the Quatermayns family for quite some time, since it was to him and Thomas Quatermayns’s widow that the Crown had granted the wardship of the young John Quatermayns in 1398. Conceivably, the second of these recognizances was in some way linked with Quatermayns’s marriage to Sibyl Englefield. Golafre’s second wife was the widow of John Englefield† of Berkshire, who in turn was probably related to Sibyl, not least because he had appointed her father Nicholas Englefield as an executor of his will of 1393. The match was not the only such alliance between the Quatermayns and Englefield families, because Quatermayns’s sister Elizabeth was the second wife of the same Nicholas Englefield.23 CFR, xi. 278; The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 199; E210/6658; W.F. Carter, Quatremains of Oxon. 19, 59. Whatever his dealings with Golafre, Quatermayns was probably most obliged to Thomas Chaucer and John Cottesmore, a prominent Oxfordshire lawyer, for his earliest advancement. Cottesmore was a family connexion since his wife was a daughter of Walter Bruley†, the father-in-law of Quatermayns’s sister Maud. In 1419 Quatermayns was associated with Cottesmore in a conveyance of land near Thame,24 CP25(1)/191/26/24. and just over two years later he and Thomas Haseley†, one of the more intimate members of Chaucer’s circle, stood surety for the lawyer in the Exchequer.25 CFR, xiv. 393. It should be noted that the ‘Richard Quatermaine’ for whom Haseley served as an advocate in the Parl. of Mar. 1416 (not that of 1415, as erroneously stated in The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 308) was an older namesake of the MP, possibly his uncle: PROME, ix. 143-4; Carter, 14, 19-21. Quatermayns was again associated with Haseley in the late 1430s, standing as a surety for him in the Chancery after he had temporarily fallen into disgrace with the Crown: CCR, 1435-41, p. 252. In return, Cottesmore was one of Quatermayns’s feoffees, and he helped Richard to obtain an estate at Shirburn, a few miles south of Thame, in the early 1430s.26 CP25(1)/191/26/47; Harl. Ch. 4031; C. Richmond, ‘Profiles in Sanity’, Common Knowledge, x. 259; VCH Oxon. vii. 127; viii. 184; C1/26/208.

When acquiring Shirburn, Quatermayns had yet to come fully into his own, for part of his inheritance was held in dower by his mother Joan, still alive in 1434. Following Thomas Quatermayns’s death, she had married John Creedy, a Devonian who had pursued a career in London and died in 1426.27 CIPM, xviii. 534; xx. 205; CCR, 1399-1402, p. 365; Fifty Earliest English Wills (EETS lxxviii), 74, 76; Macnamara, 204. Creedy was the bro. of Thomas† and Adam Creedy†: The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 689. The estates Quatermayns inherited from his father included the Oxfordshire manors of North Weston in Thame and ‘Quatremains’ at Ascot in Great Milton, as well as lands lying near Witney and in and around Henley in the same county.28 VCH Oxon. v. 127, 173; CIPM, xx. 205. According to the inquisition post mortem for his brother Guy, these estates brought in an income of only £6 p.a.,29 CIPM, xx. 205. but this was no doubt a serious undervaluation. Up until the 1430s at least, he could also look forward to succeeding to his mother’s manors of Tiddington in Oxfordshire and Corton at Hilmarton in Wiltshire. He is recorded as holding half a knight’s fee in each parish in 1428,30 Feudal Aids, iv. 198; v. 277. indicating that Joan had allowed him the tenancy of these manors during her lifetime, but he sold Corton and the advowson of its appurtenant chapel to Walter, Lord Hungerford†, in 1434. Willingly or not, her son consented to the sale by formally releasing the manor and advowson to Hungerford in November the following year. After the peer’s death in 1449, Corton passed to his younger son Sir Edmund Hungerford*, but Quatermayns was subsequently able to recover the manor for his own family. The opportunity to do so arose after the French captured the late Lord Hungerford’s grandson, Robert, Lord Moleyns, at the battle of Castillon in 1453. During Robert’s imprisonment, Sir Edmund Hungerford played a part in raising his very considerable ransom. Exactly when he approached Quatermayns and offered to sell Corton back to him for 460 marks is not clear, although the subsequent transaction was completed in 1463. As it happened, Sir Edmund’s efforts on behalf of his nephew were far from altruistic: although he passed the sum raised from the sale to Lord Moleyns’s widowed mother, Margaret, she was in return obliged to grant him possession of part of her own inheritance, the manor of ‘Lokynton’ at Kilmersdon in Somerset.31 Corton mss, 4, 10, 13, 17, 24, 33, 59, 60, 94; CCR, 1435-41, p. 35. Corton ms, 94, a description of the descent of Corton, represents the transaction between Sir Edmund and Margaret as a ‘sale’, although it may have been a mortgage since Margaret held the manor and hundred of Kilmersdon when she died in 1478: C140/67/40. In the mid 1460s Quatermayns pursued suits for substantial debts against Lady Margaret, Sir Edmund and several of their associates, although whether in connexion with Corton is unclear.32 CP40/814, rot. 79.

Elsewhere in Wiltshire, Quatermayns acquired interests in the right of his wife, and during the 1440s he and Sibyl, together with her sister Cecily and Cecily’s husband, William Fowler*, pursued a claim to lands in Market Lavington against John Dewall* and his wife, Joan.33 C66/457, m. 24d; CP40/732, cart. rot. It was also through his marriage that Quatermayns came into possession of Rycote,34 CIPM, xx. 329; CP25(1)/191/26/47. the manor which became one of his principal residences. Like most of his other Oxfordshire properties it lay near Thame, and his match with Sibyl Englefield helped him to consolidate his landed interests in that part of the county. Over the years, he further augmented his estates with a mixture of temporary and permanent acquisitions. As early as November 1419, he obtained the keeping of Oldland, a manor at Bitton, Gloucestershire, a property which had escheated to the Crown following the death of Sir John Devereux†. According to the terms of his farm, Quatermayns was to hold Oldland for as long as it remained in the King’s hands, but he did not enjoy untroubled custody of the manor, since at some stage before 1424 he sued Henry Mulleward and others in the Chancery for challenging him in his possession.35 CFR, xiv. 308; C1/4/15. A decade later, he secured the farm of a manor in Bentley, Hampshire, again from the Crown. In Oxfordshire his principal permanent acquisition of real estate was a manor at Shirburn, a parish where he already held lands,36 Feudal Aids, iv. 182. and which lay just a few miles south of Rycote, although he also added to his holdings at North Weston, where he obtained a property known as Hall Place. Achieved by mid 1432, the acquisition of Shirburn was a somewhat complicated process. He obtained three quarters of this manor from Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, a magnate into whose service he had entered by that date, and whose estates included holdings in Oxfordshire and the home counties, and the remaining quarter share of the manor from William Collingridge, a relative of the Quatermayns family. In return for the earl’s share, Quatermayns formally gave up any title to Wolverton in Warwickshire, a manor which another of his relatives, John Boteler of Eaton, Bedfordshire, had previously sold to Beauchamp. He also took care to obtain a release of the property from Sir George Neville and his wife in 1435, presumably because Neville had a possible claim to it through his Beauchamp mother. The transaction between him and Collingridge also involved an exchange of land but was far less straightforward. Following arbitration, Collingridge surrendered his share of Shirburn to Quatermayns, who in exchange re-granted it to him for life at a rent of £10 p.a. and gave him the manors of ‘Quatremains’ in Great Milton and Towersey in Buckinghamshire. Over two decades later, however, Collingridge was to renounce these arrangements, declaring that they had been forced upon him.37 Oxon. RO, Parker mss, I/i/5; VCH Oxon. vii. 127, 173; viii. 184; C1/26/208; CP25(1)/191/27/70. C. Carpenter, Locality and Policy, 166, 167, is correct in stating that Quatermayns engaged in exchanges of land with the earl, while Richmond, 259, is mistaken in contradicting her on this point. A survey held at Shirburn immediately after the MP had acquired the manor confirms that it was indeed through such means that he had obtained the earl’s share: Parker mss, I/i/5.

After gaining Shirburn, Quatermayns purchased at least three other manors. In the second half of the 1440s he acquired Weston in Welford, Berkshire, from Abingdon abbey; early in the following decade he obtained the manor of Long Crendon in Buckinghamshire (previously the property of Andrew Sperlyng*) which he endowed on a chantry he had founded at Thame; and in 1461 he paid Richard Fiennes, Lord Dacre of the South, 300 marks or more for ‘Fynes’ at Ascot in Great Milton.38 CCR, 1447-54, pp. 342-3; 1461-8, p. 143; VCH Berks. iv. 119; CP25(1)/191/29/1; Richmond, 260n. By the end of the 1460s, he had completed the purchase of another manor, Great Hambleton in Rutland. Great Hambleton was formerly the property of Ralph, Lord Cromwell, who had bought it from Richard, duke of York, in 1449, and Quatermayns acquired it from Cromwell’s executors at some stage after that lord’s death in 1456. It was a considerable investment: he still owed the executors £100 of the unknown purchase price in 1466, although he had paid the last instalment by April 1469.39 VCH Rutland, ii. 69; CPR, 1467-77, pp. 40-41; CP25(1)/192/9/14; Magdalen Coll. Oxf. Cromwell pprs. 127/31, m. 2; 34, m. 2.

Of course, not every land transaction to which Quatermayns was a party was of direct personal concern, for he frequently acted as a trustee for other landowners. In the great majority of cases he did so on behalf of his fellow gentry in Oxfordshire and neighbouring counties, although he was also a feoffee for John Timperley I* of Suffolk and the Leventhorpes of Hertfordshire.40 CCR, 1413-19, p. 516; CPR, 1436-41, pp. 31, 51, 347; 1441-6, pp. 344-5; 1452-61, p. 150; 1461-8, p. 367; C1/9/207; CP25(1)/191/28/9, 39; E210/6610; Northants. RO, Fitzwilliam (Milton) Ch. 675; Magdalen Coll., Tubney mss, 11; CAD, vi. C5014; KB27/818, rot. 120. On other occasions he was a surety for those to whom the Crown made grants of land, including the widow of Sir Ralph Gray of Northumberland.41 CFR, xv. 319; xvii. 28, 268-9; E159/223, brevia Easter rot. 7.

In all likelihood, Quatermayns had already embarked on his mercantile career when he unexpectedly succeeded to the family estates, since it seems unlikely that he would have chosen such a path after Guy’s death.42 Richmond, 257, suggests that Quatermayns, by then already 22 years of age, had yet to begin that career when he succeeded Guy but this is unconvincing. Certainly a citizen of London before the end of Henry V’s reign,43 CCR, 1419-22, p. 108. Quatermayns was to remain active in the City for the rest of his life. Although a fishmonger, he traded in many different commodities and he was admitted into the Mercers’s Company in 1445-6.44 A.F. Sutton, Mercery of London, 178. His business partners included Stephen Forster* and William Estfield*, with whom he imported luxury goods from Italy in the 1440s. He had a long connexion with the Italian trade in particular, for he was exporting goods on Venetian galleys by the late 1420s. He hosted a merchant from that city state, Jacopo Falleron, in London in 1440-1 and Niccolò Micheli, an Italian supplier of textiles to Henry VI, appointed him an executor of his will of 1449.45 Cal. P. and M. London, 1413-37, p. 145; 1437-57, pp. 83-84; E122/76/11, 13; 203/3, f. 15; C1/24/219; 43/36-38; CCR, 1435-41, p. 97; H. Bradley, Views of Hosts of Alien Merchants, pp. xxxvii, 7, 45, 238; Oxf. DNB, ‘Falleron, James’. Quatermayns was still associated with the Italian trade over a decade later, since in September 1460 he was nominated to act as an attorney, either before the Council or in Chancery, for a couple of Italian merchants against whom Thomas Podmore and others had laid certain plaints. The nomination, like his subsequent membership of the quorum as a j.p. in Oxfordshire and his service on commissions of gaol delivery, would suggest that he had received a legal training at some point during his busy career although there is no direct evidence to prove that this was indeed the case.46 Cal. P. and M. London, 1458-82, p. 15. Quatermayns also acted as an arbitrator (a task commonly assigned to lawyers) on several occasions: Magdalen Coll., Southwark deeds 37, 54c; Stonor Letters, i. 148. Throughout his career in the City, Quatermayns was also often involved in property transactions in and around London, both on his own account and as a feoffee for others, and he acquired holdings spread over several of the City’s parishes, including those of St. Nicholas Olave, St. Michael Queenhithe and St. Nicholas Cole Abbey.47 Corp. London RO, hr 155/37; 172/44; 178/11, 12; 181/14, 22; 187/35; 196/21, 22; 201/2; 206/23; CCR, 1435-41, p. 97; CPR, 1441-6, p. 243; 1446-52, pp. 130, 275; CP25(1)/152/93/147; CAD, ii. A2065; Cal. P. and M. London, 1458-82, p. 152; C1/38/70; CP40/803, rot. 113; 817, rot. 520.

Quatermayns appears to have derived some of his London property through inheritance rather than purchase. In the early 1420s he went to law against Richard Edmond to establish his title to premises in St. Nicholas Olave which he claimed as the heir of his great, great-aunt Cecily Quatermayns, who had married Henry Arderne of London. The property in question was probably a holding known as ‘Le Pecock’, which was certainly in the hands of him and his feoffees in the mid 1440s.48 Carter, 34-35; CPR, 1441-6, p. 243. Quatermayns also engaged in a dispute, again in the early 1420s, over a messuage in Bread Street, for which he sued John Shadworth†, Walter Cotton and others in London’s hustings court. Following the failure of his suit, he complained to the Crown that the court had mishandled the case, although the outcome of a resulting commission of inquiry, established in late 1421, is not known.49 CPR, 1416-22, p. 327; Cal. P. and M. London, 1413-37, p. 111. Along with his country estates, Quatermayns’s property and business interests in London made him a wealthy man. At various stages in his career he lent money to both the Lancastrian and Yorkist Crowns,50 PPC, iv. 238; E401/810, m. 22; 813, m. 15; E403/775, m. 13; 777, m. 6; 793, m. 11; 840, m. 17; E405/48, rot. 2d; Issues of the Exchequer ed. Devon, 465. and it would appear that he also contributed money towards the ransom of Lord Moleyns, whose capture by the French gave him the opportunity to regain Corton.51 CPR, 1461-7, p. 284.

During his early career Quatermayns must have spent most of his time in London, and it was in the City and its vicinity that he first held office under the Crown. In the spring of 1421 he was placed on a commission of inquiry charged with investigating the theft of wines and gear from a Breton ship which had foundered at the mouth of the Thames. Early in the following year, he was appointed during pleasure as controller of tunnage and poundage in the port of London, an office with a fee of 20 marks p.a. He was required to exercise this position in person, and when his appointment was renewed in the following year it was stipulated that he was to write his rolls in his own hand. It is more than likely that Quatermayns owed his appointment as controller to the hugely influential Thomas Chaucer, since the office was in the latter’s gift as chief butler of England. He was still controller at Michaelmas 1424, but in March 1426 Walter Green* was appointed to the office, presumably in his stead.52 CPR, 1422-9, p. 323; 1446-52, p. 221; E159/201, recorda Mich. rot. 10.

In the following decade, Quatermayns became a customs collector in London, an office for which he received a substantial fee of 50 marks p.a. As a customer he was long associated with Chaucer’s friend Thomas Walsingham†, a vintner from the City who had held that position since 1421. In August 1433 he and Walsingham were ordered to collect London’s contribution to the subsidy of tunnage and poundage granted by the Parliament of 1431, a commission they were required to exercise in person. Three months later, they were appointed to collect the City’s contribution to a like grant made by the following Parliament, along with various other taxes authorized by the same assembly.53 CPR, 1446-52, p. 221; CFR, xvi. 179-80. Driver, 89, conflates Quatermayns’s separate offices of controller and collector, while the cursus for Thomas Walsingham in The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 758, imprecisely refers to him as a collector of ‘customs and subsidies’. For a number of years Quatermayns served as a customer by appointment of Cardinal Beaufort, to whom in May 1443 the King assigned the customs of London so that he might recover part of a huge loan he had made to the Crown. Beaufort was also granted the right to appoint the customers for the City, but he chose to retain Quatermayns and Walsingham as the collectors of tunnage and poundage and reappointed them to those positions on the following 20 June.54 CPR, 1441-6, p. 182; CFR, xvii. 237. Walsingham was an obvious candidate for reappointment, since he had served the cardinal for many years. Quatermayns is not known to have had any previous dealings with Beaufort but, as already observed, he probably owed his initial appointment as controller of the same subsidy to the cardinal’s late cousin and associate, Thomas Chaucer. During the autumn of 1443 he and Walsingham delivered the revenues they had collected from the tunnage and poundage to Beaufort’s servant William Port, rather than to the Exchequer.55 The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 759; E403/751, m. 3. Two years later, the Chancery issued letters patent appointing the royal servant William Lynde collector in place of Quatermayns,56 CPR, 1441-6, p. 372. but the latter remained in office, presumably because Beaufort’s right of appointment rendered Lynde’s letters invalid. Walsingham surrendered his collectorship in late 1446,57 The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 759, states that Walsingham left office after Beaufort’s death in the spring of 1447. He was certainly collector until Mich. 1446, but when Quatermayns was issued with new letters patent as a collector on the following 31 Dec. it was in association with Thomas Pound, not Walsingham: E403/765, m. 6; CFR, xviii. 55. but Quatermayns retained his position until Michaelmas 1448 or shortly afterwards. His involvement with the customs did not end when he relinquished the position of collector, for on 6 Dec. 1448 he was appointed controller of the petty custom at London. In his letters of appointment the Crown recognized his years of often unpaid service as a controller and collector of the tunnage and poundage by additionally granting him a fee of £20 p.a. from that subsidy. No doubt his new office was intended as a sinecure, since he was permitted to exercise it through a deputy.58 CPR, 1446-52, pp. 83, 221. Presumably it was in error that these letters referred to his having served for ‘24 years’ as a controller and collector of the tunnage and poundage. John Cotford is named as controller in the accts. for 21 July 1448-10 Mar. 1450, and may therefore have been Quatermayns’ deputy: E356/20, rot. 6d. Although for life, the appointment proved short-lived, for Nicholas Gaynesford* replaced him as controller just ten months later.59 CPR, 1446-52, p. 304.

The records of the Exchequer contain various interesting details relating to Quatermayns’s time as a collector. In the late 1430s, for example, he and Walsingham informed the Crown that Henry Frowyk I* and other prominent mercers had illegally shipped merchandise to Flanders and Brabant, and in 1443 he seized the goods which an alien merchant was attempting to ship overseas without paying customs. He intercepted these goods, including seven gold rings decorated with precious stones, at the Steelyard, the Hanse headquarters in London. Some of the customs revenues he and Walsingham paid into the Exchequer were particularly substantial. In February 1434 they deposited a total of £600 there, of which £400 was assigned to (Sir) John Tyrell*, treasurer of the Household. In the spring and summer of 1438 they brought in over £638, of which more than £200 was assigned to Edmund Beaufort, the future duke of Somerset, to buy saltpetre for the war in France.60 E159/215, recorda Trin. rot. 62; 220, recorda Trin. rot. 5d; Driver, 91.

By now Quatermayns was a trusted servant of the Lancastrian Crown. In the previous December he himself had bought saltpetre on behalf of Gilbert Parr, keeper of the King’s artillery, and in the same month he and John Goulde had received an assignment of money at the Exchequer for repairs to the royal manor of Woodstock. He received another such assignment in February 1441, this time on behalf of the keeper of the wardrobe, Sir Roger Fiennes*, for Household expenses.61 E403/729, m. 6; 740, m. 15. In a general pardon issued to him in early March 1440 he was described as a ‘King’s esquire’,62 CPR, 1436-41, p. 382. Later that month he was granted another such pardon, although this time made out to him in his capacity as a former escheator of Oxon. and Berks.: ibid. 386. although there is no evidence that he was ever formally a member of Henry VI’s establishment.

The acquisition of saltpetre was far from Quatermayns’s only contribution to the English war effort. Earlier, in 1435, the treasurer of England, Ralph, Lord Cromwell, had commissioned him, Richard Buckland*, John Throckmorton I* and William Venour to fit out a couple of ships, Le Peter and Le Julyan of Newcastle, to guard the seas between 25 July and Michaelmas that year.63 E159/212, recorda Hil. rot. 12d, which erroneously gives the third quarter of 1436 as the period of the commission, clearly a scribal error: see, for example, E403/721, m. 14. Then treasurer of Calais, Buckland was another member of London’s Fishmongers’ Company, a shipowner and a business associate of Quatermayns, to whom he left £10 and named as one of his executors in his will of the following year.64 Essex Feet of Fines, iv. 20; Fifty Earliest English Wills, 107. If not already a shipowner himself, Quatermayns seized the opportunity to become one shortly afterwards, for it was in response to his petition that in March 1436 the Exchequer permitted him to purchase for £20 the Cristofre of Bristol, a vessel which Le Peter and Le Julyan had seized for trading illegally with Iceland and Norway.65 Overseas Trade (Bristol Rec. Soc. vii), 65-68. In the same month he was among those ordered to arrest ships in London for the expedition of Richard, duke of York, and other captains to France, and a year later he was commissioned to convey the King’s Gascon councillor Bernard Angevin (presumably in the Cristofre) to Bordeaux, along with a quantity of cash for Angevin’s servants.66 E403/729, m. 15. Quatermayns was further involved with maritime affairs in the early 1440s. In July 1441 he was among those commissioned to investigate the seizure of a Breton ship by Cornish pirates, and in March 1442 he was appointed to a panel which heard an appeal against a sentence passed in the admiralty court.67 CPR, 1441-6, p. 57.

Perhaps because he spent so much of his time in London in the earlier part of his career, Quatermayns was not to hold office under the Crown in his native Oxfordshire until the 1430s. First appointed a j.p. in 1432 (after serving in the Parliament of that year), he was escheator in Oxfordshire and Berkshire in 1434-5 and sheriff of the same counties in 1436-7. While sheriff, he returned a family connexion, Robert Danvers* (stepson of his niece, Joan Bruley), as one of the knights of the shire for Oxfordshire to the Parliament of 1437. It was in relation to the same term as former sheriff that William Danvers* began legal proceedings against him in the Exchequer in mid 1439. One of the knights of the shire for Berkshire in the Parliament of 1437, Danvers alleged that Quatermayns had failed to pay him £9 of the £14 due to him in wages for his attendance at that assembly.68 E5/513. The matter was perhaps settled out of court since the suit does not feature in the Exchequer plea rolls. By the later 1430s Quatermayns also held the office of verderer of the royal forests of Shotover and Stowood to the east of Oxford. There was, however, a limit to the administrative responsibilities he could undertake outside London in this period, not least because he was still a customs officer. In the autumn of 1437 it was decided that he was too occupied with ‘diverse business’ in the City to attend to his duties as verderer, and his successor as sheriff was ordered to hold an election for his replacement.69 CCR, 1435-41, p. 143.

For the same reason, it is unlikely that Quatermayns had much time to exercise his duties as an officer on the estates of Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick. His attachment to Beauchamp must greatly have facilitated his acquisition of Shirburn, although it is not known exactly when he entered the earl’s service. He had certainly already done so by Michaelmas 1429 when he relinquished the stewardship of that lord’s household. Perhaps he was unable to devote sufficient attention to this office, although by the same date he had become steward of the Beauchamp manors of Quarrendon, Flamstead and Cosgrove with a fee of 40s. p.a. Even if this latter responsibility was far less time consuming, it was left to those who owed homage to the earl at Quarrendon to inform their lord about the illegal activities of some of the farmers and tenants on that manor. Quatermayns was nevertheless present at Quarrendon for the making of a new manorial survey in December 1430. Warwick evidently valued his services, since Beauchamp had also appointed him steward of his manor of Spelsbury, Oxfordshire, again with an annual fee of 40s., by 1438. He continued to serve the Beauchamp family after the earl’s death in April the following year, and in October 1440 he received £10 from the issues of Spelsbury, in part payment of expenses he had incurred while helping in some way to expedite the holding of the earl’s inquisition post mortem in Oxfordshire.70 Dillon mss, X/d/36-7; II/b/2, 3; Sinclair, 184-5. Unaware of these manorial stewardships, both Carter, 14, 20, and Richmond, 258-9, 265, wrongly state that Quatermayns was never a Beauchamp retainer. They also mistakenly suggest that the steward of Warwick’s household was Richard Quatermayns ‘senior’ (probably the MP’s late uncle). It is unclear whether it was the MP or his older namesake who had stood surety for several of the earl’s feoffees as far back as July 1417: CFR, xiv. 207-8; The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 141.

It is impossible to tell whether Beauchamp (or, indeed, any other patron) helped Quatermayns gain election to the successive Parliaments of 1432 and 1433. In any case, by the early 1430s he was of sufficient standing in Oxfordshire to seek election as a knight of the shire in his own right, and a few months after the Parliament of 1432 was dissolved he was appointed a j.p. for the county. No doubt the following Parliament was particularly memorable for him, if for the wrong reasons. The Parliament rolls record that he was assaulted while it was in session, although without revealing any details of the incident. The Commons reacted to this affront to their dignity by referring the Crown to a statute which the Parliament of January 1404 had passed in the wake of a near-lethal attack against Richard Cheddar*, a ‘servant’ of one of the knights of the shire in that assembly. Intended to secure future protection from criminal assault for Members of both Houses and their servants, the statute had laid out the procedure for dealing with any perpetrators of such assaults. In their appeal, the Commons of 1433 asked the King to confirm that the same procedure (whereupon the assailant was ordered by public proclamation to surrender himself to the court of King’s bench or else face instant conviction and financial penalties) might apply in the present instance. Their request was granted, although with what result is not known.71 PROME, viii. 273-4; The Commons 1386-1421, i. 148-9. The assault can only have reinforced a growing concern about the problem of lawlessness throughout the kingdom, and during the second parliamentary session both the Lords and the Commons swore an oath to uphold the peace. Following the dissolution of Parliament, Quatermayns, his fellow MP Stephen Haytfeld* and the other knights of the shire were ordered to make a list all those in their respective counties who should likewise swear the oath,72 CCR, 1429-35, p. 271. which afterwards they were commissioned to administer.

During the first session of the Parliament of 1433, Quatermayns was among those who acted as a mainpernor in Chancery for William, 7th Lord Lovell and Holand, to guarantee his good behaviour towards one William Penteney. This is the first known evidence of Quatermayns’s connexion with that peer, with whom he appears to have enjoyed a good relationship. He and Lovell served each other as feoffees, and a decade later Quatermayns appeared in the Exchequer to collect a sum of money on Lovell’s behalf.73 CCR, 1429-35, p. 228; 1441-7, p. 216; CPR, 1446-52, pp. 180-1; CP25(1)/191/28/31; Corp. London RO., hr 181/22; CP40/771, rot. 628; E403/749, m. 5. It was also during his second Parliament that Quatermayns became an executor of Thomas Polton, bishop of Worcester. An ecclesiastical diplomat who died in August 1433 while attending the Council of Basel, Polton had named Quatermayns for that role in his will of the previous December. (A family connexion appears to explain the bishop’s choice of the MP as an executor, since Quatermayns was described as Polton’s ‘cognatus’ in a minor suit for debt that he and his fellow executors pursued nearly two decades later.) By July 1434 the Crown was expecting Quatermayns and his fellow executors, who included Reynold Kentwood, dean of St. Paul’s, the testator’s nephew Philip Polton and William Lynde, to render account in the Exchequer for monies which it had assigned to the late bishop for a mission to Rome on the King’s business.74 CP40/760, rot. 390d; E159/211, brevia, Mich. rot. 12; CPR, 1436-41, p. 321; Oxf. DNB, ‘Polton, Thomas’. Quatermayns stood surety in the same government department on behalf of Lynde in the following year, when the Crown granted the latter custody of the rectory of Mapledurham in south Oxfordshire.75 CFR, xv. 248-9. More significant than Quatermayns’s connexion with Polton was his association with Ralph, Lord Cromwell, who had taken office as treasurer of England during the Parliament of 1433. In June 1434 he witnessed a release of property on behalf of Cromwell, who afterwards became one of his feoffees.76 CCR, 1435-41, p. 159; 1441-7, p. 216; CPR, 1441-6, p. 243; 1446-52, pp. 180-1; Corp. London RO, hr 181/22. Quite possibly Quatermayns was able to exploit his links with the treasurer when he acquired the farm of Pury, a manor at Bentley in Hampshire, just a few weeks later. Part of the inheritance of Philip Pagan, the Exchequer leased it to him to hold during Pagan’s minority, at a rent of ten marks p.a. If it had not already done so by that date, the farm must have expired when the young heir died without issue in 1442. Following his death, his cousin and heir, Geoffrey Burrard, conveyed Bentley and another former Pagan manor at Farlington in the same county to a group of feoffees, headed by Lord Cromwell. The feoffees also included Quatermayns, who later took part in conveying Farlington to Thomas Pound* and his wife.77 CFR, xv. 207; VCH Hants, iii. 150; iv. 8-9, 28; CPR, 1441-6, p. 144; 1446-52, p. 31.

In spite of his connexion with Cromwell and apparent links with Cardinal Beaufort, Quatermayns was also associated with Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, a political opponent of both men, in the later 1430s. In December 1437 he and Thomas Parsons went to the Exchequer on Gloucester’s behalf, to receive an assignment of an annuity of 500 marks which Henry V had granted to the duke. Quatermayns was again one of the duke’s sureties two months later, when the Crown awarded Gloucester the wardship of the daughters and heirs of the late Sussex esquire, Thomas St. Cler.78 E403/729, m. 7; K.H. Vickers, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, 9; CFR, xvii. 69. However it came about, the relationship which Quatermayns formed with the duke is unlikely to have lasted for long, since by the mid 1440s his feoffees included Ralph Butler, Lord Sudeley,79 CPR, 1441-6, p. 243; CCR, 1441-7, p. 216. who had succeeded both Thomas Chaucer as chief butler of England and Lord Cromwell as treasurer. An ally of Gloucester’s opponent William de la Pole, marquess of Suffolk, Sudeley was constable of Kenilworth when Gloucester’s duchess was imprisoned in that castle between 1443 and 1446, and he was among those who arrested the duke at Bury St. Edmunds in 1447. The removal of Gloucester from the scene confirmed de la Pole’s supremacy in national affairs until his own downfall three years later. It was perhaps in recognition of this political shift that Quatermayns appointed Suffolk as one of the trustees of a chantry and guild at Thame for the foundation of which he secured a royal licence in December 1447. The son-in-law of Thomas Chaucer, Suffolk wielded considerable influence in Oxfordshire, but there is no evidence that Quatermayns joined his affinity.80 Carpenter, Locality and Polity, 455n, states that Quatermayns was a member of de la Pole’s ‘circle’, but her authority for this statement is merely the reference in Driver, 94, to the MP’s appointing of Suffolk as a trustee of the Thame chantry. The trustees for Quatermayns’s chantry also included several other notable figures,81 CPR, 1446-52, pp. 180-1. among them the archbishop of Canterbury, the bishop of Lincoln, the duke of Buckingham and Lords Cromwell and Sudeley. Quatermayns and Sudeley were further associated with each other in April 1448, when the MP’s business partner, Stephen Forster, transferred his interest in the office of provost of Bayonne in Gascony to them. Less than four years earlier, the Crown had granted the office to Forster and John St. Loe* to hold for 60 years, but St. Loe was now dead and, for whatever reason, Forster had decided to relinquish the remainder of his term. Sudeley and Quatermayns were ordered not to render any of the profits arising from the office to the royal officials in Gascony, although they were permitted to farm out subsidiary offices and raise a tax for the repair of Bayonne castle. The office was of considerable importance because the castle commanded the southernmost frontier of English Gascony, but neither of them can have exercised it in person.82 CCR, 1447-54, p. 73; M.G.A. Vale, English Gascony, 119.

Notwithstanding his links with Sudeley and other prominent members of the Lancastrian establishment, Quatermayns entered the service of Richard, duke of York, who was to assume the leadership of the opposition to Suffolk’s government. He had begun his association with the duke, his most important patron during the later years of Henry VI’s reign, by July 1448 when he appeared in the Exchequer on York’s behalf. By 1448-9 he was a member of the duke’s council, and at some stage during that accounting period the receiver of the duke’s estates in East Anglia and south-east England rode to meet him and other councillors at Rayleigh in Essex. In December 1451 he was among the councillors to whom York referred his quarrel with the former under treasurer of England, Thomas Brown II*.83 E403/771, m. 1; SC6/1113/10; CCR, 1447-54, pp. 326-7; P.A. Johnson, Duke Richard of York, 60-61. Driver, 95, failed to establish a definite connexion between Quatermayns and York predating the same Dec. Following the recovery of Lancastrian fortunes in the wake of the abortive Yorkist rising at Dartford in March 1452, Quatermayns took the precaution of obtaining a royal pardon.84 C67/40, m. 8 (25 May 1452). He was wise to do so, since on 28 Oct. that year commissioners of oyer and terminer sitting at Peterborough took an indictment for treason against him and another of York’s servants, Thomas Palmer*. In the indictment both men were described as ‘of Fotheringhay’, York’s castle in Northamptonshire. The jury declared that on 3 Nov. 1450, and on other occasions on either side of that date, the pair had come together at Fotheringhay and elsewhere in the county to plot the death and destruction of the King, and that they had procured Thomas Mulsho* and others to levy war against him. There is little doubt that these allegations were not literally true and that the purpose of the indictment was falsely to portray the gathering of York’s retinue for the Parliament of 1450, which had opened on 6 Nov. that year, as a series of risings against the Crown.85 KB9/94/1/2; J. Watts, Hen. VI and the Politics of Kingship, 296n. Innocent of treason though he undoubtedly was, Quatermayns’s association with York had clearly incurred the displeasure of the government, which had already dismissed him from the bench in Berkshire. As it happened, he suffered no serious consequences for supporting the duke, and just six months later the government placed him on an ad hoc commission for Oxfordshire. Perhaps to assure the authorities of his loyalty, he made the Crown an outright gift of £13 6s. 8d., towards the salvation of the last remnants of Lancastrian Gascony, in January 1453.86 E401/830, m. 22; H. Kleineke, ‘Comm. de Mutuo Faciendo’, EHR, cxvi. 23.

It was probably no coincidence that Quatermayns served a second term as sheriff of Oxfordshire and Berkshire during York’s first protectorate, since at least a quarter of the new sheriffs appointed in the autumn of 1454 were connected with the duke. Exchequer records reveal that he took office at the ‘special entreaty’ of the Council after all the other potential candidates had refused it, for fear of the financial losses they might incur.87 R.A. Griffiths, Hen. VI, 728; E159/233, brevia Hil. rot. 5. In spite of its risks, his association with York also brought rewards. Presumably it was through the duke that he acquired Great Hambleton, since the manor was part of his patron’s inheritance,88 CPR, 1467-77, pp. 40-41; PROME, xv. 168-9; VCH Rutland, ii. 69. and his service to York and his family ensured that he would continue to prosper after the overthrow of Henry VI in 1461.

Amidst all the political upheavals of the early and mid 1450s, Quatermayns was also kept busy by his own affairs. In 1454 he was party to a settlement which provided for his wife’s nephew Richard Fowler to succeed to the manor of Rycote, should he and Sibyl die without surviving issue, indicating that their son William was already dead at this date.89 Harl. 4031. William’s existence is revealed by a descent of the manor of Corton, in which he is described as Quatermayns’s only son (‘filius unicus’). By means of another conveyance of July the following year, Quatermayns had his estate at Shirburn settled on himself and Sibyl and the heirs of their bodies, with remainder to a powerful group of trustees headed by the bishops of Ely and Exeter and the chief justice (Sir) John Fortescue*.90 CCR, 1454-61, p. 268. Perhaps the latter settlement was intended to safeguard his possession of this estate, for by the mid 1450s he and William Collingridge were quarrelling over the agreement they had reached nearly a quarter of a century earlier. The first evidence of this dispute is a suit which Sibyl Quatermayns’s brother-in-law, William Fowler, and two other Quatermayns feoffees brought against Collingridge and his wife in King’s bench. In pleadings of Michaelmas term 1455 Fowler and his associates alleged that the Collingridges had neglected to pay a rent of 30s. p.a. from the manor of ‘Quatremains’ in Great Milton which Quatermayns had reserved for himself and his widowed mother at the time of the exchange. Alleging that the demand for rent was intended to disturb him in his title to that property, Collingridge responded with a counter-suit in the same court. He seized the opportunity to do so in the spring of 1456, while Quatermayns was temporarily in the custody of the Marshalsea, although for what reason is not known. By means of a bill brought in Easter term that year, he accused his opponent of having forged a deed to support his right to such a rent, in breach of a statute passed by the Parliament of 1413. In the event, these allegations were rejected, for Fowler and his associates won their suit and Collingridge was obliged to settle with them for £35.91 KB27/778, rot. 38; 781, rot. 40.

Nothing daunted, Collingridge repeated his claims of forgery in a Chancery bill he brought against Quatermayns in the summer of 1457. At the same time, he also complained about the exchange of 1432 in general, alleging that Quatermayns had sought by ‘diuerse fayned menys’ to gain his part of Shirburn ‘for lytill or naught’, so forcing him to agree that John Cottesmore and Thomas Chaucer should arbitrate between them. In response, Quatermayns stated that Collingridge had committed many trespasses against him and his tenants at Shirburn and denied acquiring Collingridge’s estate there by unfair means. Furthermore, he claimed that Chaucer had played no part in the arbitration process and alleged that Collingridge had ‘laboured’ Cottesmore for the very award about which he was now complaining. In fact, Collingridge had done very well out of the exchange, since the properties he had received at Great Milton and Towersey were respectively worth some £7 10s. p.a. (after the deduction of the rent of 30s.) and ten marks. What was more, he had breached the arbitration award by deserting the tenancy granted to him at Shirburn after just two years, having struggled to pay the rent for it, a situation for which he had only himself to blame. According to Quatermayns, Collingridge and his friends had sworn to Cottesmore that the Collingridge estate at Shirburn was worth £10 p.a. rather than its true value of £8, but when making his award Cottesmore had called their bluff by setting the farm at this supposed value. The bill, the resulting writ of sub poena and Quatermayns’s answer are the only records from this Chancery suit to survive, but Collingridge must have lost his case since Quatermayns remained lord of the whole manor of Shirburn. Although the full intricacies of the complicated quarrel between the two men are now impossible to discern, resentment on Collingridge’s part must have lain at the heart of it. Evidently he had parted with his share of Shirburn reluctantly, perhaps after coming under pressure from the likes of Cottesmore and Chaucer to co-operate with Quatermayns.92 C1/26/208; C253/35/304; E405/54, rot. 6; CP25(1)/191/29/14; Richmond, 259. Quite possibly the Shirburn dispute was still in progress when Quatermayns was sent to the Fleet prison in London in early 1458, although in connexion with another matter. His brief imprisonment there arose from his failure to pay a fine of 50 marks the court of King’s bench had imposed on him for making a false return to a writ during his second term as sheriff of Oxfordshire and Berkshire. After pleading a pardon which he had secured on 12 Jan. that year, he was released into the bail of William Fowler and William’s lawyer son and heir, Richard, on the following 9 Feb. At this date Richard was known as ‘of Rycote’, so it is possible that he was then a member of the Quatermayns household.93 Confusing Fowler with his younger brother Thomas†, the Tudor antiquary John Leland recorded that Quatermayns had employed Thomas as his clerk, while adding that afterwards this same protégé became chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, in fact one of Richard’s offices: J. Leland, Itin. ed. Toulmin Smith, i. 115. In due course the matter was referred to Exchequer chamber, where in February 1459 Quatermayns’s pardon was ruled admissible and all proceedings against him were dropped.94 Sel. Cases in Exchequer Chamber (Selden Soc. li), pp. xcv-xcvi, 162, 167, 168-9, 171-2; KB27/787, rex rot. 24; E159/234, brevia Hil. rot. 17. Just over a year later, Quatermayns was embroiled in another quarrel, this time in the court of common pleas. In pleadings of Easter term 1460, Walter Bergh* alleged that muniments relating to his family’s extensive estates in Hampshire and Wiltshire had fallen into the MP’s hands six years earlier, since when Quatermayns had refused to return them. Quatermayns denied this claim and the case was still pending in early 1461.95 CP40/797, rot. 409; 800, rot. 111d. While these proceedings were ongoing, the disputatious Quatermayns was engaged in yet another suit in the same court, this time as the plaintiff. In pleadings of Easter and Trinity terms 1460 he alleged that Roger Fasnam*, a ‘yeoman’ from New Windsor, owed him £20, a debt arising from a bond he had taken from the latter in London on 20 Oct. 1455. In response, Fasnam claimed that he did not owe the MP that sum and that he had entered the security under duress ten days earlier, at Maidenhead in Berkshire rather than London, while facing a threat of imprisonment from Quatermayns and his associates. The matter was referred for trial but a jury had yet to deliver a verdict when Edward IV seized the throne.96 CP40/797, rot. 155; 798, rot. 145d.

In the meantime the Lancastrian regime continued to appoint Quatermayns to public office, in spite of his connexion with Edward’s father, the duke of York. By 1458-9 he was steward of the queen’s manor of East Greenwich, where he spent £63 on works for the tower that Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, a previous holder of the manor, had begun building there,97 E404/73/2/54; CPR, 1429-36, p. 250. and he was even appointed to an anti-Yorkist commission of array at the end of 1459. These appointments must have reflected the uncertainties and administrative chaos of this troubled period rather than any renunciation of his ties with York on his part, since he was once more associated with the duke and his followers after they regained control of the government in the following year. It was during this period of Yorkist ascendancy that the Lancastrian John, Lord Lovell (son and successor of William, Lord Lovell) was obliged to surrender the manor of Ashby de la Zouche to the earl of March and others, including Quatermayns, in November 1460.98 HMC Hastings, ii. 2. Following York’s death at the end of the year, Quatermayns remained loyal to Cecily, his widowed duchess. A few months after March took the throne as Edward IV, she appointed him to the office of surveyor of her estates, to hold for life with a substantial fee of £20 p.a., and in November 1461 he was among those whom she commissioned to inquire into the state of her lordship at Bridgwater. The income she derived from her share of that Somerset borough had declined for lack of proper supervision and maintenance of her property there, and Quatermayns and his associates were directed to prepare a written report for her and her councillors, so that they could take measures to rectify matters.99 SC6/764/10; Bridgwater Bor. Archs. 1445-68 (Som. Rec. Soc. lx), 118-29.

By the autumn of 1461 the new government had already made Quatermayns a member of the quorum as a j.p., a position he was to hold continuously for the rest of his life, save for a brief hiatus at the Readeption of Henry VI. Given his identification with the Yorkist regime, the letters of pardon he acquired in February 1462 were probably no more than a pro forma grant.100 C67/45, m. 46. The same must apply to the pardon granted to him seven years later: C67/46, m. 7 (10 Feb. 1469). In the following November he witnessed a lease on behalf of one of Edward IV’s leading supporters, Henry Bourgchier, earl of Essex, and in 1465 he was summoned to receive a knighthood, presumably at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth Wydeville. In the event, he chose to decline the honour and pay a fine at the Exchequer, just as he had done on several occasions in Henry VI’s reign. At some unknown date before 1467, he and his nephew by marriage, Richard Fowler, were granted the stewardship of the royal manor at Woodstock in Oxfordshire,101 The Act of Resumption passed in the Parl. of that year included an exemption with regard to their tenure of that office: PROME, xiii. 290. and by that year he was attending meetings of the King’s Council.102 C81/1547/6; SC8/141/7009.

In July 1467 Quatermayns surrendered the former Mortimer manor of Great Hambleton to the Crown at the ‘full speciall and laborious desire’ of Edward IV, who soon afterwards alienated it to the royal servant Henry Ferrers.103 PROME, xv. 168-9; CPR, 1467-77, pp. 18-19. In return, the King made a grant to Quatermayns and his feoffees, headed by no less a figure than George Neville, archbishop of York, of the manors of Wilbraham in Cambridgeshire, Halton in Oxfordshire and Wickmere in Norfolk, all properties which the Lancastrian William, Viscount Beaumont, had forfeited in 1461. Little Wilbraham and Halton were made over to Quatermayns and his associates permanently but Wickmere was assigned to them to hold for his life only and, a few weeks after the exchange was completed, Richard Southwell* took the opportunity to secure letters patent granting him the reversion of that manor. Presumably Quatermayns had at least some previous knowledge of the manors he received in compensation for Great Hambleton, since the Crown had commissioned him and others to investigate the extent of Beaumont’s estates in several counties, including Cambridgeshire, Oxfordshire and Norfolk, in 1463.104 CPR, 1467-77, pp. 26, 40-41, 123; VCH Rutland, ii. 69. Another peer who had suffered the confiscation of his estates in 1461 was John, Lord Lovell, and in August 1462 he had entered a recognizance for 1,000 marks to Quatermayns and Richard Fowler, perhaps after they had agreed to stand as guarantors for his good behaviour.105 CP, viii. 223; CCR, 1461-8, p. 139.

Whatever the circumstances of the recognizance, Quatermayns remained associated with the Lovells after this date, since during the later 1460s and early 1470s he had dealings with Lovell’s younger brother William Lovell, Lord Morley, for whom he acted as a feoffee. In the same period he was also involved in the affairs of the Illingworth and Babington families, as a feoffee of the settlement made in 1465 when a marriage was contracted between the daughter of (Sir) Richard Illingworth*, chief baron of the Exchequer, and William Babington. Babington was the nephew of William Babington*, in turn the second son and eventual heir of the late Sir William Babington, c.j.c.p. The match arose from the legal and Nottinghamshire connexions the respective families shared, but the branch of the Babingtons into which the bride was married was settled in Oxfordshire and the jointure provided for her comprised lands in Quatermayns’s native county.106 CPR, 1461-7, p. 538; VCH Herts. iii. 154; CCR, 1461-8, pp. 378-9; 1468-76, nos. 1257, 1268.

During Edward IV’s first reign Quatermayns was also involved in several disputes, both as an arbitrator and as one of the parties concerned. In 1466 he arbitrated in a quarrel concerning one ‘Fowler’, presumably William or Richard, and began a series of actions in the common pleas against Elizabeth, the widow and administratrix of (Sir) John Heron*. He sought debts of no less than £240 from her, although the circumstances in which these debts had arisen are unknown.107 Stonor Letters, i. 93-94; CP40/820, rot. 43. Later in the same decade, he was the plaintiff in one Chancery suit and a defendant in another. His own case was against John Daunce of Thame whom, he alleged, had agreed to buy some lands in that parish on his behalf but failed subsequently to convey them to him. In the other suit he himself was accused of breach of trust by Thomas Billing, the son and heir of the judge Thomas Billing*. According to Billing, Quatermayns was a feoffee of the settlement made when the former had married Margery, the daughter and heir presumptive of the Oxfordshire esquire Robert Fitzellis, in the late 1450s. Fitzellis had set aside lands in Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire for Margery’s dowry, and Billing alleged that Quatermayns had refused to release these lands to him and his wife.108 C1/31/350; 33/144. More significantly, by the late 1460s Quatermayns had become drawn into a series of quarrels with John Barantyn† of Chalgrove. Previously he had enjoyed an extremely good relationship with the Barantyn family. He had served both Drew* and Reynold Barantyn, John’s father and grandfather, as a feoffee, and in return Drew had served him in a like capacity. In December 1446 he and Drew, acting in association with the royal financier William Beaufitz*, had obtained the wardship of two of the daughters of Sir Stephen Popham*, of whom one had become John Barantyn’s wife. Shortly before his death in 1453, Drew had appointed Quatermayns, his ‘beloved kinsman’, the principal executor of his will.109 CP25(1)/191/28/39; C139/151/40; C1/39/248; Corp. London RO, hr 181/22; CPR, 1441-6, p. 243; 1446-52, pp. 180-1; Early Lincoln Wills ed. Gibbons, 179; CP40/792, rots. 81d, 200. It is not known how Drew and Quatermayns were related. Relations between Quatermayns and the younger Barantyn were far less cordial. A possible source of friction was the apparent mortgaging by John of his manor of Chalgrove (for over £180) to the MP in 1459. Whatever the case, in a bill submitted to the chancellor a decade later, Barantyn claimed that Quatermayns had breached his trust as a feoffee by refusing to convey the Barantyn estates to him and detaining the deeds to the lands in question. Obliged to answer the bill by virtue of a sub poena, dated 5 Oct. 1469 and bearing the penalty of £100, Quatermayns accused his opponent of having acted against the intent of the wills of Reynold and Drew Barantyn. The outcome of this Chancery case is not known, but the two men were still at variance during the first half of the 1470s, by which stage John had also fallen out with his stepmother and others. The various quarrels were referred to arbitration but only a fragmentary draft of the subsequent award has survived. As far as the differences between Barantyn and Quatermayns were concerned, the arbitrators, who included (Sir) Edmund Rede* and Thomas Stonor II*, directed the pair to cease all litigation against each other and ordered Barantyn to pay Quatermayns the sum of £30.110 Add. Ch. 20320; C1/39/246-8; C253/42/80; C47/37/22/94.

It is possible that differing political views added piquancy to the quarrels between the two men. During the Readeption of Henry VI Barantyn continued to serve as a commissioner in Oxfordshire but the Yorkist Quatermayns lost his position as a j.p. for the county. Also excluded from all ad hoc commissions, both in Oxfordshire and elsewhere, in late 1470 Quatermayns took the precaution of securing a royal pardon from the restored Lancastrian King.111 C67/44, m. 3 (22 Dec.). Following the return of Edward IV he recommenced his service as a commissioner, recovered his place on the Oxfordshire bench and was appointed a j.p. for the town of Oxford.112 Presumably the pardon he obtained in early 1472 was another such precautionary measure: C67/48, m. 1 (12 Feb.). A few months into Edward’s second reign, Quatermayns and Richard Fowler were associated with the latter’s brother-in-law Richard Danvers* and others in receiving bonds totalling £585. It was intended that these securities would be cancelled at the death of Thomas Witham, whom Fowler had replaced as chancellor of the Exchequer in 1469, but the reason for them is unknown.113 CCR, 1468-76, no. 723; CP40/831, cart. rot. 1d. It was at this time that Fowler himself resigned from the same office, upon his appointment as chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster.

By now some 80 years of age, Quatermayns remained active as an office-holder for the rest of his life and in the autumn of 1472 he was returned to his third Parliament, 40 years after first entering the Commons. Over the course of this prolonged assembly he devoted at least some of his time to advancing and protecting his own interests. In late July 1473, during the recess between the second and third sessions, he obtained letters patent confirming his grant of the manors of Wilbraham, Halton and Wickmere. The new letters also licensed him and his feoffees to convey Wilbraham to a chantry chapel dedicated to St. Michael which he and his wife had founded at Great Rycote in 1449, and in the following autumn he secured an exemption for this alienation in mortmain from the Act of Resumption passed in the third session.114 CPR, 1467-77, p. 399; Macnamara, 215; N. Pevsner, Buildings of Eng.: Oxon. 747; PROME, xiv. 169. Driver, 99, mistakenly states that he secured a like exemption for his grant of the manor of Wickmere. In fact, the exemption was obtained by Richard Southwell, to whom the Crown had granted the reversion of this property: PROME, xiv. 190. In February 1474, during another parliamentary recess, he and Richard Fowler, a constant associate in his later years, obtained a royal grant. Their letters patent made them joint stewards for life of the royal manors of Woodstock, Handborough, Stonesfield and Wootton and the hundred of Wootton, so superseding their previous stewardship of Woodstock. If formerly a protégé of Quatermayns, Fowler had become an extremely significant figure in his own right, for by now he was under treasurer of England as well as chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster.

The elderly Quatermayns was as busy as ever after the Parliament finally closed in mid March 1475. Within a month of its dissolution he was placed on the commission of the peace for Oxford University, and in the following summer he and a couple of associates successfully applied for a grant of the temporalities of Godstow abbey, to farm from the Crown until a new abbess was appointed.115 CFR, xxi. no. 317. On 6 Dec. of the same year, he and three sureties, including Richard Fowler, entered a bond (for no less than £758 19s. ½d.) to the mayor and aldermen of London. Presumably he was acting as a trustee for the recently deceased London fishmonger John Fenne, for the bond was to ensure that he would pay that sum to the use of Hugh and Margaret, two of Fenne’s children, when they came of age or married.116 Cal. Letter Bk. London L, 136; PCC 17 Wattys (PROB11/6, ff. 125v-126v). Later that month, he and Fowler were among those commissioned to survey Windsor castle and other Crown lands in the Thames valley and Hertfordshire, and early in the new year they and their fellow commissioners received a similar appointment, as surveyors of Windsor and various royal estates in Berkshire and Oxfordshire. They wielded particularly wide-ranging powers, including the authority to inquire into the extent and annual value of the properties in question, to deal with the rents, customs and works owed to the King by his free and bond tenants on these estates and to audit the accounts of the constable of Windsor and other royal officers.117 CPR, 1467-77, pp. 573-4.

It would appear that the second of these commissions was Quatermayns’s last appointment to public office. At the end of 1476, no doubt because he sensed that he had not long to live, he made a settlement to ensure that his wife would remain in possession of various London properties of his after his death.118 Corp. London RO, hr 206/23. He is known to have made Sibyl his executrix, although his will, save for a few transcribed extracts, is no longer extant.119 Carter, 63. Quatermayns died on 6 Sept. 1477, and in the following month inquisitions post mortem for him were held in Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Wiltshire and London.120 C140/62/44. A writ of diem clausit extremum was also sent to the escheator in Cambs. but there are no surviving records of a like inq. in that county. These inquiries found that he had possessed no lands in Buckinghamshire; that he and his feoffees had held the manor of Halton (although by then it was in the hands of Richard Fowler, who had bought it from him);121 PROME, xv. 168-9. that he had conveyed away Corton in Wiltshire to feoffees; and that in London he had held a dye-house in the parish of St. Peter Paul’s Wharf and two others in those of St. Mildred and St. Mary Magdalen. These inquisitions valued his lands at no more than about £30 p.a., almost certainly a very considerable underestimate. In any case, the Oxfordshire inquisition did not refer either to Sibyl’s manor of Rycote or to his own manors of North Weston (part of his wife’s jointure).122 VCH Oxon. vii. 173. Having died without any surviving issue, Quatermayns was succeeded by no fewer than six coheirs: Thomas Danvers* (a younger half-brother of Richard Danvers), Richard Butler, Alice wife of Thomas Walrond*, Richard Rous, Margaret wife of Peter Fettiplace and Sibyl wife of Humphrey Forster†. Danvers, Butler and Rous were his great-nephews; Danvers being the grandson of his elder sister Maud Bruley and Butler and Rous the grandsons of his second sister, Elizabeth Englefield. Alice, Margaret and Sibyl were Elizabeth Englefield’s surviving daughters. Danvers’s share of the Quatermayns estate included Corton and Tiddington, although he was to sell Corton to Bishop Waynflete of Winchester, who used it to endow Magdalen College, his foundation at Oxford.123 VCH Wilts. ix. 55. All the coheirs were of mature years, bearing testimony to Quatermayns’s longevity. With regard to their ages, none of his inquisitions post mortem accords precisely with any of the others, although each found that the two youngest, Butler and Rous, were both aged 30 ‘and more’ and that none of the women was younger than 50 years of age.124 C140/62/44.

According to the Tudor antiquary John Leland, Quatermayns was buried at Rycote,125 Leland, i. 115. although his fine altar tomb, in which Sibyl was later placed beside him, survives in the south transept of Thame parish church. The tomb bears the brass effigies of himself, Sibyl (her head now missing) and another male figure, depicted between and below theirs. Presumably this represents William, the son who had predeceased them.126 Unaware of William’s existence, Driver, 101, suggested that this other figure represents Richard Fowler. Macnamara, 212, surmised that it depicted a son of the couple called ‘Guy’, although on what authority is not known. Both men are dressed in armour. It would appear that the tomb was made in Quatermayns’s lifetime since the date in the brass’s inscription is incomplete. The inscription reads:

O certeyne dethe that now hast ouer throw

Richard Quatremayns Squyer and Sibil his wife that lie here now full [lowe]

That with rial princes of Counsel was true and wise famed.

To Richard Duke of york and aftur with his Sone kyng Edward the iiii named.

That foundid in the Churche of Thame a Chauntrie vi pore men and a fraternite:

In the worshipp of Seynt Cristofere to be relevid in perpetuyte.

[They] that of her almys for ther Soulis a paternoster and [Ave] devoutly wul Sey

of holy ffadurs is grauntid they pardone of dayes forty alwey.

wiche Richard and Sibil oute of this worlde passid in the yere of oure lord A MCCCClx-Uppone their Soules Jhesu haue mercy Amen.127 Driver, 101. F.G. Lee, Hist. Thame Church, 330n, states that Quatermayns and his wife were also commemorated in a now gone stained-glass window in their chapel at Rycote. According to Lee, the window depicted him wearing the Lancastrian collar of ‘SS’, but this seems more than a little unlikely.

In spite of the incomplete date on the monument at Thame, Sibyl is known to have survived until 22 May 1483. During her widowhood she was sued in the Chancery by Richard Burton and John Ernest, the executors of Sir Matthew Philip of London. These plaintiffs claimed that the executors of the late Stephen Forster, Quatermayns’s onetime business associate, had taken legal action against them over a bond of £40 which Philip had given Forster on the MP’s behalf. They called upon Sibyl, in her capacity as Quatermayns’s executrix, to settle the debt to Forster’s estate, although with what result is not known. Following Sibyl’s death, the manor of North Weston passed (by virtue of a settlement made in Quatermayns’s lifetime) to Richard Fowler’s widow Joan, a grand-daughter of Maud Bruley, and afterwards to Joan’s son Richard Fowler† (d.1502).128 C140/62/44; C141/3/33; C1/54/382. Shortly after Sibyl died, the lawyer William Danvers†, a younger brother of Thomas Danvers, began a Chancery suit against Quatermayns’s feoffee, Thomas Palmer, chaplain of the Quatermayns chantry at Great Rycote.129 CPR, 1467-77, p. 399. Danvers declared that he had served his great-uncle Quatermayns for over 24 years as a counsellor, advising him in many lawsuits and helping him to acquire land and to establish his chantries at Thame and Great Rycote. Claiming that Quatermayns had promised him the manor of ‘Fynes’ in Ascot as a reward for his loyal service, he complained that Palmer had refused to release this property to him. Danvers said that he had entered Quatermayns’s service at the MP’s request. He must have done so before the end of the 1440s, since he also stated that he had done so with the agreement of his father, John Danvers*, who had died in early 1449. Representing himself as something of a surrogate son to the late MP, Danvers asserted that John had left him less of a ‘livelihood’ than he had for his other sons, on the understanding that Quatermayns was going to provide for him. Presumably Quatermayns’s son William was already dead and buried by 1449, for Danvers also claimed that the MP and his wife had given up hope of any children when he joined their household. The bill is of further interest for its claim that Quatermayns had held estates worth 400 marks p.a. when Danvers entered his service, so suggesting that his inquisitions post mortem had indeed seriously underestimated his landed wealth.130 C1/53/180.