PULHAM, Godard

Pulham’s putative father, John, a shipowner, sat in five of the Parliaments of the 1380s for their home town of Winchelsea. As a Portsman he could claim exemption from taxation on the moveable goods he possessed outside the liberty, at Udimore, Ore and Guestling,10 The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 147. and in this he was emulated by our MP in the fifteenth century.11 E179/225/50; 226/69, 71; 227/94; 228/107, 118; 229/138, 154. That Godard became a more prominent figure than his forebear was due to his long service to the Crown, most notably his more than 15 years as a customer at Chichester. In practice, the two customs officials divided the ports of the extensive Sussex coastline between them, with Pulham concentrating on those in the east, which included Winchelsea. It was there, too, that he occupied the post of deputy butler for six years from the summer of 1429. At regular intervals he received rewards at the Exchequer for diligent service,12 CPR, 1422-9, p. 540; E403/696, m. 6; 700, m. 6; 721, m. 7; 731, m. 5; 740, mm. 4, 9; 743, m. 3; 747, m. 5; 749, m. 20; 751, m. 2; 755, m. 4; 759, m. 3; 765, m. 4. as well as payments for the many additional tasks he was required to perform. Among these was arranging for Roger atte Gate*, the mayor of Winchelsea, to provide a ship to carry the sum of £6,000 over to the King at Rouen in 1430; investigating a case of non-payment of customs for a cargo on Le Lezard; organizing shipping for Sir John Cressy* and his retinue sailing to Le Crotoy in 1435; and finding three balingers to supply the same fortress with victuals the following year. In 1436 Pulham provided other ships to patrol the seas for six weeks, ferry messengers over to the duke of York in France, and help relieve Calais, and three years later he assembled shipping to take the force commanded by the earl of Huntingdon from Plymouth to Aquitaine as well as numerous other Englishmen across the Channel.13 E403/696, m. 10; 698, m. 1; 719, m. 9; 723, m. 14; 725, mm. 3-4; 734, m. 1; 736, m. 12; 745, m. 15; 767, m. 11; E404/51/360; 54/151. Then, too, he was called upon by the royal searcher to appraise merchandise forfeited at Winchelsea.14 E122/183/10.

Besides these duties arising from his office as customer, Pulham was appointed to specific ad hoc commissions. In June 1436 he and John Godfrey* were instructed to conscript mariners to man five Winchelsea ships to combat the King’s enemies at sea, the two men being made responsible for paying their wages. In fact, he and Godfrey were co-owners of four of the vessels concerned (La Grande Trinite, La Marie, La Jonette and La Petre), which were duly put into royal service prepared for war.15 CPR, 1429-36, p. 609 (wrongly dated 1435); E28/57/26 June 14 Hen. VI. Formal commissions had him requisitioning shipping for the passage of the duke of York, and conscripting crews for the King’s balingers. In July 1443 the Council decided that Pulham should ‘be spoken wt for the vitailling of the Bastille at Diepe wt a balinger’.16 PPC, v. 301. Without doubt he proved a reliable royal servant, who might be depended upon for all sorts of naval exercises, from victualling garrisons on the continent to tracking down pirates. To protect his own interests, Pulham took out pardons in 1437 and 1443, the latter specifically covering all trespasses, offences, concealments, non-residence in office as customer and financial penalties.17 C67/38, m. 3; CPR, 1441-6, p. 174; E159, brevia Mich. rot. 27d.

While engaged on the Crown’s business, Pulham had not neglected to establish for himself a prominent place in the affairs of his home town. It seems likely that he was already a jurat when he witnessed grants made by William Skele† to a local chantry in December 1430,18 Cott. Julius BIV, f. 40v. around the same time as he was elected to the Parliament due to assemble on 12 Jan. following. As a warden of St. Thomas’s church he was party to the arrangements made to fulfil the will of John Salerne† in 1431-2.19 Ibid. ff. 42-43v, 46-47. During that same period he was returned to the next Parliament, which met in May 1432. For several years thereafter as one of the jurats he regularly advised the mayor, and was sent as Winchelsea’s representative to Brodhulls on at least 28 occasions, of which the first recorded took place in December 1434 and the last on 23 July 1454.20 Ibid. f. 72; White and Black Bks. 4, 8, 10, 11, 13-17, 20, 21, 23-25, 29-33. Quite often this assembly of representatives of all the Cinque Ports gave him special assignments. Thus, in December 1438 he was instructed with four other delegates to seek remedy from the warden of the Ports, Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, regarding the threat to their liberties posed by recent actions of justices of oyer and terminer at Rochester, where fines had been imposed on certain Portsmen for refusing to sit on juries at their command. In April 1442 he, John Greenford* and John Chenew* were assigned to sue in the Exchequer for the advocants’ allowance of the parliamentary fifteenths, and in July that year he, Greenford and Thomas Sylton* were asked to go to Rye to examine the rolls and process against a Folkstone man in an action of debt. Two years later Pulham was sent to Great Yarmouth as one of the Ports’ bailiffs at the autumn herring fair.21 White and Black Bks. 11, 15, 17-18, 24; Cott. Julius BIV, f. 72. After being elected mayor of Winchelsea, in the course of his second successive term, in 1441-2, Pulham played host to the earl of Shrewsbury as his army awaited embarkation.22 Suss. Arch. Collns. viii. 207. He was again mayor in 1446-8, and was returned to Parliament for the third and last time early in 1449. This last election came some 18 months after his dismissal from the post of customer. Following his departure suspicions arose that he himself had been engaged in smuggling, for on 26 Aug. 1448 John Yerman*, his successor as customer, was ordered to confiscate a cargo of wool and other merchandise shipped on one of Pulham’s vessels allegedly without due payment of customs and subsidies.23 CPR, 1446-52, p. 192. Whether he was in fact guilty of the offence has not been discovered, but perhaps he took advantage of his time at Westminster for the opening session of the Parliament to defend himself at the Exchequer.

More about Pulham’s widespread commercial concerns may be learned from the suits for debt which he brought in the court of common pleas, sometimes while he was attending the Commons on this and earlier occasions. Certain of his debtors (such as a ‘hosier’ of Lewes who owed him £22 8s. 4d.), lived close to home, but others came from further away in Surrey and Essex, and included merchants from Bishop’s Lynn and John Strange*, the Norfolk esquire. In 1439, in association with Thomas Pope* of Rye (for several years his fellow customer and colleague), he sued two mariners from Dartmouth.24 CP40/686, rot. 76d; 715, rots. 488, 552d; 753, rot. 197. A more serious lawsuit involved an alleged case of piracy, and also reveals that Pulham had an unexpected patron. In the Michaelmas term of 1444, describing himself as a ‘servant of the chancellor’ (Archbishop Stafford), he brought a plea in Chancery claiming that on 10 Sept. 1443 one Arnold Gremonde had taken by force his ship La Petre, containing 20 tuns of red wine worth 300 marks, from her berth at New Shoreham, and had held one of her crew prisoner for a whole year. Gremonde was bound over under a pain of £100 to appear in court in person pending judgement, and in Easter term following the chancellor himself came into King’s bench to deliver the record of the proceedings for enrolment. When Gremonde denied culpability, a jury of 24 knights was summoned by the sheriff from the New Shoreham area to pronounce a verdict.25 CCR, 1441-7, p. 271; KB27/736, rot. 85d. Pulham evidently recovered his ship, for La Petre was one of the vessels used to bring Henry VI’s queen and her entourage over to England from France shortly afterwards.26 Add. 23938, f. 19d.

Following his marriage to the widow of the London brewer, John Walpole, Pulham was described as a draper, but it remains uncertain that he ever traded as such in the City. On 13 Aug. 1443 the mayor and aldermen committed the guardianship of Walpole’s seven children and their patrimony worth over £93 to him and his wife Agnes, the orphans’ mother.27 Cal. Letter Bk. London, K, 284-5. Agnes brought him property in the capital, while in Sussex they jointly held some marshland near Rye.28 Cat. Rye Recs. ed. Dell, 123-4. By an unknown title Pulham also possessed a reversionary interest in a large estate in the neighbourhood of Winchelsea, consisting of eight messuages and some 700 acres of land which his colleague John Godfrey and John’s wife Joan held for life. This interest he placed in 1444 in the hands of feoffees, including Thomas Thunder I*, his companion in his first Parliament.29 CP25(1)/241/89/14.

Pulham himself had been made a feoffee of the manor of Codyng and lands in Bexhill by Sir William Brenchesle’s widow and the lawyer Richard Wakehurst†, but relinquished them to Thomas Thunder II* and George Oxenbridge in 1453, apparently for the endowment of the Batisford chantry.30 CCR, 1454-61, p. 140; Add. Ch. 24855. When he sued out a fourth pardon, in October 1455, he was styled ‘gentleman’ as well as ‘merchant’ and former customer,31 C67/41, m. 19. although it was still as ‘merchant’ that he stood surety at the Exchequer for John Haysand esquire in March 1457, when Haysand took on the lease of the manor of Higham near Winchelsea.32 CFR, xix. 185. In Michaelmas term 1460 Pulham brought suits regarding illegal entries into his land across the border in Kent, and his closes at Icklesham, and was still claiming exemption from taxation there and elsewhere, as a baron of the Cinque Ports, in 1463.33 CP40/799, rots. 48, 233d; E179/189/96. His final appearance in the records, eight years later, related to a debt of very long standing. In November 1451 the Sussex lawyer Thomas Hoo II* had entered a statute staple at Westminster to Pulham in £500, due to be paid in the following June. Hoo’s defaults led eventually, in October 1468, to the sheriff of Sussex delivering to his creditor his manor of Buckholt and 100 acres of land in Hastings, Hooe and Westfield, valued at over £20 p.a., but this can hardly have compensated Pulham in full.34 C131/241/17; C241/250/31.

Pulham is thought to have founded a chantry in Winchelsea, which, however, ceased to exist before the Reformation.35 Suss. N. and Q. viii. 4.