SHARP, John V

The son of a prominent Bristol burgess who outlived him, Sharp is not always easy to distinguish from his father and namesake, since he was not consistently styled ‘junior’ or ‘the younger’ in contemporary records. Although he predeceased his father, he was still a figure of some standing in his own right, not least as an MP in three consecutive Parliaments. Like the elder John Sharp, he was a substantial merchant and of sufficient status for contemporaries sometimes to refer to him as a ‘gentleman’.6 C219/15/7.

The first definite reference to Sharp is his appointment in 1442 as one of the bailiffs of Bristol. He is not known to have held any other municipal office although later he was nominated but not chosen for the shrievalty of the town. Within four years of completing his first term as bailiff, he was returned to the Parliament of 1447. His fellow MP in this and his other Parliaments was the recorder of Bristol, Thomas Young II*, a distinguished local merchant and lawyer. Given that their fellow burgesses returned them together on three occasions, he and Young must have worked well enough with each other, in spite of previous differences between Thomas and Sharp’s father that had led to law suits in the Chancery and Exchequer.7 C1/7/147; E13/143, rots. 30, 38, 44d. In 1447 at least, Sharp must have deferred to Young’s far greater knowledge and experience of parliamentary affairs, since by then the recorder had already sat for Bristol in five previous Parliaments. During the second of Sharp’s Parliaments, the mayor, John Burton I*, and common council of Bristol directed the keepers of ‘Barstaples coffer’ in the guildhall to send £20 to him and Young at Westminster, the venue for the first two sessions of that assembly. Frustratingly, the ‘Great Red Book’ of Bristol, which records this transaction, simply notes that the two MPs were expected to use the money for the ‘welfare’ of their town and provides no further information.8 Gt. Red Bk. of Bristol, i (Bristol Rec. Soc. iv), 127. The first of Sharp’s ad hoc commissions from the Crown arose from the same Parliament, since it related to a tax that he and his fellow MPs had granted the Crown. In June 1449, within days of the dissolution of his second Parliament, Sharp attended a meeting of the common council of Bristol alongside his father,9 Ibid. 129-30. and he was again appointed a bailiff of the town in 1450, after sitting in the Commons earlier that year.

Nearly two years later, in the summer of 1452, the Crown directed Sharp to support the expedition that John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, was preparing to lead to France, by commissioning him to contribute, fully crewed, the Marie of Bristol or two smaller ships to that enterprise. Unless any ‘reasonable impediment’ intervened, the vessel or vessels were not to leave Talbot’s service without licence from the earl or the Crown until Sharp’s retainer (of unknown duration) expired. Sharp himself was not obliged to participate in the expedition in person since he was permitted to appoint deputies in his stead.10 CCR, 1447-54, p. 360. The nature of this commission suggests that he was the owner of the Marie: if so, he must have acquired the vessel recently since a Chancery suit shows that a fellow burgess, John Wych*, had been the ‘possessor’ of that vessel three years earlier. Wych was the plaintiff in this suit, heard in the autumn of 1452. In his bill he complained that in May 1449 Philip and Patrick Martyn, John Hanyagh, Patrick Galway and many others from Kinsale had attacked the Marie while it had been fishing off the south coast of Ireland and seized an accompanying vessel, a Spanish merchantman previously captured by the Marie. He also alleged that the assailants had killed three crewmen from the Marie and wounded many others. The purpose of his bill was to secure the arrest of the culprits, of whom Hanyagh and Galway were then in Bristol, by means of a commission directed to the mayor and sheriff of Bristol and two of his fellow burgesses, Sharp and the latter’s uncle by marriage, Philip Meede*. Such a commission was duly issued on 13 Oct. 1452, although with what result is not known.11 C1/19/122; CPR, 1452-61, p. 60.

In January 1453, Sharp was associated with his father, the lawyer John Kemys* and Thomas Exeter, the former steward of Bristol, in an agreement that also involved the Gloucestershire esquire Hugh Mille* and his wife Margaret. The details of this agreement have not survived but probably it arose from a Chancery suit that, at about this time, the Milles brought against the elder Sharp, Kemys and Exeter, who were Margaret’s former guardians.12 Little Red Bk. ii. 192; C1/22/149. By June the same year a John Sharp was serving as the deputy at Bristol of Ralph Butler, Lord Sudeley, the chief butler of England, but his identity is uncertain. It was as Sudeley’s deputy that this John Sharp challenged the right of the prior of St. James, Bristol, to take prisages from any vessel entering the port of Bristol for a period of a week at Pentecost each year but the prior was able to produce charters in support of that right and the challenge was defeated.13 Little Red Bk, i. 236-8.

Still alive in September 1454 when nominated for the shrievalty of Bristol, along with the man who was pricked, his uncle Philip Meede, and Thomas Rogers,14 Gt. Red Bk. i. 254-5; CFR, xix. 115. Sharp appears to have died in 1455 or early 1456. The account for March 1455-6 of the churchwardens of his family’s home parish of St. Ewen records that at some stage that year the elder John Sharp paid them 6s. 8d., of his son’s ‘bequest’.15 Church Bk. St. Ewen’s ed. Masters and Ralph, 31. Sharp’s heir was his daughter Elizabeth, his offspring by an unknown wife. By 1460 she had married Philip Meede’s son and heir Richard, so strengthening the ties between the Sharp and Meede families. The elder John Sharp provided for the couple that year, by settling lands, tenements, shops and other properties in Corn, Broad and St. Mary le Port and Marsh Streets, including an inn called the Cardinal’s Hat, on them. Richard and Elizabeth received a further conveyance of properties in Bristol and elsewhere from the elder John’s widow in 1472.16 Gt. Red Bk. iii. 171; CP40/844, cart. rots. 1-3.