ST. LEGER, John

Unusually among those who sat in Parliament for New Romney in this period, St. Leger was not originally from the borough. Its records reveal that he was born at Chadstone in Northamptonshire, but the circumstances in which he became one of its freemen on 14 Dec. 1448, upon payment of a fine of 6s. 8d.,2 Ibid. assmt. bk. 1384-1446, NR/FAc 2, loose folio. are unknown. Conceivably, he was a distant kinsman of John St. Leger (d.1442) of Ulcombe, a Kentish landowner occasionally associated with Clement Overton* of Romney and others from the Cinque Ports.3 CFR, xvii. 197; E159/219, recorda Hil. rots. 21-24d. Whatever the case, his fellow Portsmen must have held him in high regard, since within a year of his admission to the freedom they elected him a jurat and returned him to the Commons. While there is no evidence of his activities in his only known Parliament, it was probably on business related to it that he and Richard Clitheroe* rode to Dover for meetings with the lieutenant of Dover castle and burgesses from the other Cinque Ports at some stage in this period.4 NR/FAc 3, f. 9v.

Like his fellow MP, Robert Scras*, St. Leger travelled to all three sessions of the Parliament of 1449-50, which finally closed at Leicester on 8 June 1450. In fact, his attendance record was better than that of the more experienced Scras, whose parliamentary wages came to £5 13s. 4d. while his own amounted to £6 19s. Unfortunately, the burden of meeting these expenses proved too much for Romney’s municipal purse. It was not until 1452 that the Port settled its debt to Scras but St. Leger, perhaps because he lacked the local influence of his colleague, was never paid in full. In 1454 he accepted a final payment of 40s. for his wages for the Leicester session, leaving an unpaid debt of £2 5s. 8d.5 Ibid., ff. 9v, 13, 17, 18v, 21. These difficulties may have soured his relations with his fellow Portsmen as there are no further references to him in the local records, perhaps suggesting that he returned to his native Northamptonshire.