SHIPWARDE, John

Evidently well established at Bristol by the later Middle Ages, the Shipwardes were in some way related to the family of Shipwarde alias Barstable of Marlborough in Wiltshire.10 John Shipwarde the er. of Bristol was named as a remainderman in the will that William Shipwarde or Barstaple of Marlborough made in 1467: Bristol Wills, 141-2. In 1395 John ‘Shephurd’ of Bristol was left a legacy by a fellow townsman, and in the first decade of the fifteenth century John ‘Schiward’ imported iron into the port there from Spain.11 Bristol Wills, 45; E122/17/37. Another Bristol burgess of the early fifteenth century was Robert Shipwarde. He was a member of the fraternity of the guild that John Barstaple (possibly a relative) founded in the town in Henry IV’s reign, and he and his wife Joan obtained a lease of property in Wotton under Edge, Gloucestershire, from Thomas, Lord Berkeley, in 1414.12 CCR, 1413-19, pp. 187, 204; 1416-22, pp. 68-69, 222; Cat. Med. Muns. Berkeley Castle ed. Wells-Furby (Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc.), i. 345. He was certainly still alive in the later years of Henry V’s reign when he attested several of Bristol’s parliamentary elections.13 C219/12/2, 3, 6.

As it is not always easy to distinguish the MP from other family members with whom he shared his name, parts of the cursus honorum at the head of this biography are necessarily speculative. The John Shipwarde who served as one of the bailiffs of Bristol in 1415-16 was almost certainly an older man, and in all likelihood it was he who was sheriff of the town in 1429-30 and searcher or surveyor of the search at the port there in the 1430s.14 Trans. Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc. xxvi. 130; CFR, xvi. 55, 339; CPR, 1429-36, pp. 191, 346; 1436-41, p. 320. The identity of the Thomas Shipwarde, searcher at Bristol in 1448, has not been established: CFR, xviii. 80. By the later 1430s John Shipwarde ‘junior’ had joined this elder namesake as a member of the common council and it was the younger John who was appointed bailiff in 1439 and pricked as sheriff in 1441. Between the early 1440s and late 1450s the distinguishing terms ‘senior’ (or ‘the elder’) and ‘junior’ (or ‘the younger’) seem to disappear from the records, suggesting that none was then necessary since the elder John was no longer alive. The reappearance of these monikers at a later date was made necessary by the coming of age of another John Shipwarde of Bristol. What follows is based on the assumption that the MP began his career as ‘the younger’ or ‘junior’ and ended it as ‘the elder’ or ‘senior’ because by then it was necessary to distinguish him from his son of the same name; that he was the bailiff of 1439-40, the sheriff of 1441-2, the mayor (who is not distinguished by either sobriquet) of 1444-5, 1455-6, 1463-4 and 1469-70; and that he was the John Shipwarde, ‘the elder, merchant’ who made his will in late 1473. The testator of 1473 was the son of John Shipwarde (another merchant and probably the bailiff of 1415-16) by his wife Guynot, and the will also reveals that his own wife was Katherine, a daughter of William Philipps of Bath. Philipps’s will of March 1444 is also extant: he bequeathed a sixth share of the residue of his goods to his daughter and named his son-in-law as one of his executors.15 Bristol Wills, 158-61; Som. Med. Wills, 338-9.

As the will of 1473 shows, Shipwarde owned a considerable amount of real property throughout Bristol although he was almost certainly a parishioner of St. Stephen’s, the church in which he was buried. St. Stephen’s was situated near the ‘Key’ and the notes that the well-known antiquary William Worcestre made on a visit to the town in 1480 indicate that ‘Shipwarde’s house’ lay in the same vicinity.16 William Worcestre: The Topography of Med. Bristol ed. Neale (Bristol Rec. Soc. li), 3. At the quay Shipwarde also held a mast-house, a dockyard building in which masts were made and stored; one of the properties at Bristol that he acquired from Sir Walter Rodney* and Rodney’s executors in the mid to late 1460s.17 Topography of Bristol, i (Bristol Rec. Soc. xlviii), 135, 144; Bristol Chs. ed. Latimer, 64-65; Gt. Red Bk. of Bristol, iii (Bristol Record. Soc. xvi), 162. In 1466 Shipwarde obtained the title to a messuage or tenement in St. Mary le Port Street, by virtue of a mortgage of just over £50 that he had afforded a fellow Bristolian, William Joce. It was agreed that Joce should remain in possession of the property as a tenant, paying Shipwarde an annual rent of £3 over the next ten years in part payment of the loan, the remainder of which he was to settle within the same period.18 Gt. Red Bk. iii. 104, 149. By that date, however, there already existed an uneasy relationship between the two men, for Shipwarde had begun a suit for debt against Joce in the town’s court in 1465. He subsequently won the action, only for his opponent to overturn the judgement several years later, by means of an appeal to the court of King’s bench.19 KB27/841, rot. 96. Furthermore, Joce sued Shipwarde in the Chancery over the mortgage in the late 1460s or early 1470s. Asserting that he had redeemed the loan, he claimed that Shipwarde had nevertheless evicted him from the tenement in question.20 C1/40/212. The MP also fell into dispute over another Bristol property, a house he held in Marsh Street. The house was charged with an assize rent of 2s. p.a. payable to the town’s parish of All Saints, but from 1462 until his death Shipwarde refused to pay this charge.21 Recs. All Saints Bristol, i (Bristol Rec. Soc. xlvi), 5, 6, 48, 100, 110, 111. Beyond the town, Shipwarde appears to have purchased a small plot of land at nearby Bedminster, Somerset, again from Sir Walter Rodney.22 Som. Feet of Fines, ii (Som. Rec. Soc. xxii), 208.

Save for the insignificant Bedminster property – not mentioned in his will – there is no evidence that Shipwarde invested in land outside Bristol, in spite of the wealth he had accrued through trade. Notwithstanding the problems of identification, there is no doubt that he was among the foremost Bristol merchants of his day. Exactly when he began trading is not clear but it was probably either he or his father who was in Bayonne when a fellow burgess, Thomas Pavy, died there in the 1430s or early 1440s. On his deathbed Pavy entrusted the task of shipping his goods home to England to John Shipwarde and William Water, evidently also in Gascony at that time. Pavy intended that his wife, Agnes, and children should have these goods, worth £500, although afterwards Agnes and her new husband, Thomas Parkhouse, sued Water and Shipwarde in the Chancery, claiming that the two trustees had ‘converten thes said godes and merchandises to their owen proper use and profyt’.23 Overseas Trade (Bristol Rec. Soc. vii), 82-83 (C1/10/136).

In August 1437 Shipwarde (distinguished in this instance as ‘junior’) exported cloth to Andalucia on a ship from Bristol called the Christopher, and during the mid 1450s he purchased various royal licences to trade with Gascony and Spain. In the later 1450s he obtained general licences to trade anywhere abroad except Iceland, a territory of the king of Denmark. Merchants from Bristol were not always punctilious in obtaining such licences but it is impossible to tell whether he applied for the royal pardons issued to him in 1452 and 1458 because he had breached trading regulations.24 E122/18/39; C67/40, m. 33; 42, m. 34. It is likewise impossible to say whether the second pardon was linked with non-payment of customs: in 1454 a yeoman from Southwark turned King’s approver accused two Bristol merchants, Richard Warde and ‘John Shepherd’, of each ‘stealing’ £5,000 worth of such dues from the Crown: KB9/273/2. In the early 1460s Shipwarde imported wine and iron from southern Europe and exported cloth, and by the same period the English and Danish authorities were licensing him to send merchandise directly to Iceland and to import other goods, presumably largely fish, from that island. By this period Shipwarde often received such licences to trade abroad as a member of mercantile syndicates. Among these was a business partnership that he formed with William Canynges*, John Gaywode and Robert Baron. During 1465-6 the four associates shipped through Bristol wine and other merchandise worth £4,769 11s. 1d., although in reality many of these goods (shipped free of customs in repayment of a loan to the Crown) belonged to other merchants using the services of their extremely influential partnership. In late 1465, the King authorized Shipwarde and the same partners to import in their own names goods with a customs value of over £320 and to keep the customs and subsidies arising for themselves, to repay them for the silk and other cloths they had bought from a merchant of Lucca, no doubt on behalf of the Crown. During the second half of the 1460s and in the 1470s, two John Shipwardes, the elder and younger, traded out of Bristol, apparently on their own accounts rather than together, even though they frequently used the same ships for these activities. Evidently the testator of 1473 and his son, their most important export was cloth, mainly destined for Gascony and the Iberian peninsula, from which in turn they imported salt, oil, woad, honey and wine, and the younger John is also recorded as having imported fish from Ireland.25 Overseas Trade, 97-98, 106, 109-10, 120, 125, 127-8, 130, 133, 134, 136, 210-13, 215, 218, 296; Accts. John Basall (Cam. Miscellany xxiii), 3-4; PPC, vi. 254-5; DKR, xlviii. 434; E122/19/3-4, 6-8, 10-11; E.M. Carus-Wilson, Med. Merchant Venturers, 83; CCR, 1461-8, p. 298.

As some of Shipwarde’s experiences illustrate, such trading ventures were far from risk-free. When the French seized Bayonne in August 1451 he and other Bristolians had goods in storage there, which they were only able to retrieve with the help of friends in the town and an English safe-conduct permitting their shipment home to Bristol by French vessels. At the same time, they were able to make the best out of a difficult situation, for their licence also permitted them to reload the same ships with cloth for export.26 Overseas Trade, 97-98. In the autumn of 1460 Shipwarde was among a group of Bristol merchants who complained to the King about an act of piracy against a foreign vessel called Le Marie (variously described as ‘of Dordrecht’ or ‘of Danzig’) that had sailed from Bordeaux carrying wine and other goods of theirs worth over £2,700. According to him and his co-petitioners, Le Petir Courtenay, owned by Sir Hugh Courtenay*, and another ship called Le Galyot had seized Le Marie off the Isles of Scilly and plundered it of its merchandise. In October that year John Arundell and the sheriff of Cornwall, John Trevelyan*, held an inquisition in that county which found that the petitioners had traded in France without licence, that on the previous 21 Jan. Le Galyot had taken wine and other goods from Le Marie and that a week later Le Petir had seized the unfortunate vessel and its remaining cargo and brought it into the Cornish port of Fowey. The two commissioners also returned that they had not found Le Marie, its cargo and captors, and that it was not possible to recover either the ship or the goods. The issuing of subsequent commissions of inquiry, and the fact that as late as February 1463 Sir Hugh Courtenay had yet to appear in Chancery in connexion with this matter, suggests that the merchants concerned were probably never compensated for their losses.27 CPR, 1452-61, pp. 612, 647, 649-50; CIMisc. viii. 255; CCR, 1461-8, p. 158.

As a wealthy and important merchant, Shipwarde was assured of a leading role in local administration at Bristol. When not serving in one or other of the major offices of bailiff, sheriff and mayor, he was often active as a member of the common council. During the summer of 1450 his fellow councillors assigned him the responsibility of overseeing repairs to the town’s walls and other fortifications, in pursuit of which task he spent £120 from the common coffer.28 Gt. Red Bk. i (Bristol Rec. Soc. iv), 125, 128, 129-32, 135, 254-5; ii (ibid. viii), 48-52, 57; iii. 82. Shipwarde’s first term as mayor was probably the least eventful. It nevertheless involved at least one controversy, for in April 1445 he and the rest of the corporation sued the customs collectors for the town, John Sharp III* and Thomas Bateman, in the Exchequer. They claimed that the collectors should have paid the town £160 out of the customs, in order to settle a loan that it had made to the King. In the event, Sharp and Bateman were subsequently discharged with regard to that sum and the responsibility for paying it was transferred to their successors as customers.29 Little Red Bk. ii. 49-51; E13/143, rots. 30, 44d.

A far more significant quarrel – long remembered by subsequent generations of Bristol’s elite – marked Shipwarde’s second term as mayor. It was rooted in existing antagonism between the town’s English merchants and craftsmen and those burgesses of Irish birth or connexions. The former feared that the Irish masters would drive them out of business through their employment of low paid foreign workers, and in 1439 the common council (attended by both John Shipwarde senior and junior) had ordained that no Irishmen should enter its ranks.30 Little Red Bk. i. 86-88. Later, in August 1455, the council ordered that none who were not of English or Welsh birth could become a burgess without serving an apprenticeship and paying a fine of £5. Furthermore, they used this second decree against Henry May, the chief spokesman of the Bristol Irish, then seeking to have his brother Richard, one of his apprentices, admitted to the franchise. The chamberlains of Bristol raised several objections to May’s request, among them his failure to produce Richard’s indentures of apprenticeship, while May, contesting the recent ordinance, claimed that he ought to pay no more than the former customary fee of 2s. instead of £5. In pursuit of his claim, May sued the chamberlains and the then mayor, Richard Hatter, in the Chancery but the dispute was still unresolved when Shipwarde succeeded Hatter as mayor in the autumn. Proving no less implacable than his predecessor, he stripped May and four of his supporters, George Roche, Thomas Fraunces, Thomas Walsh and Nicholas Hoker, of the franchise. They reacted by suing further bills in Chancery against Shipwarde. In their suits the Irishmen demanded that he should answer for his behaviour and sought readmission as freemen of Bristol. Shipwarde defended himself by asserting that it was for the corporation of Bristol, a county in its own right, to decide whom it should admit as freemen and whom it might expel. In due course, however, the chancellor, Archbishop Bourgchier, decided in favour of the Irishmen and in February 1456 he ordered Shipwarde, under pain of 1,500 marks, to restore them to the franchise. Initially minded to resist the chancellor’s decree, Shipwarde relented just days later and formally readmitted his opponents as freemen. Yet this was not the end of the matter, for within another few days he had performed a complete volte face and yet again removed the franchise from Walsh, Hoker and Fraunces. The three men appealed to the chancellor once more, alleging that the mayor had forbidden them to trade on pain of 1,000 marks, that he had sent his officers to shut up their businesses and (less credibly) that he had hired men to murder them. Following a fresh hearing in the Chancery, Bourgchier issued Shipwarde with new orders to readmit his opponents to the franchise although he also expected all five Irishmen to behave obediently in future towards the mayor and sheriff. Even then, May and his associates were only very grudgingly restored to their liberties and soon afterwards they were compelled to enter bonds that they would pay substantial sums to the use and profit of the town. Hardly an impartial observer, the town clerk and chronicler Richard Ricart wrote that they had regained their freedom with ‘the blodde of theyre purses’, having appeared and knelt in submission before Shipwarde and the council. As it happened, the controversy outlasted Shipwarde’s mayoralty since there was yet further litigation in the Chancery, over the bonds extracted from the Irishmen, after he had completed his term.31 A.P.M. Wright, ‘Relations between the King’s Govt. and Bors.’ (Oxf. Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1965), 125-9; Gt. Red Bk. ii. 49, 54; C1/17/213-15; 26/102-5; 1489/77; Ricart’s Kalendar (Cam. Soc. ser. 2, v), 141.

Far less contentious for the town as a whole but still something of a local cause célèbre was a dispute resolved during Shipwarde’s third term as mayor. On this occasion he was not a party since the quarrel was between John Sharp III, the former collector of customs, and the parishioners of the Bristol church of St. Ewen. It arose from Sharp’s refusal to pay the parish an annual rent of 30s. for one of his holdings in the town and matters came to a head in the late spring or early summer of 1463 when the rector and churchwardens of St. Ewen’s sued him in the Chancery. By means of a writ of dedimus potestatem of 20 June 1463, the court commissioned the recorder of Bristol, Thomas Young II*, the parish’s counsel, Roger Kemys*, and two prominent burgesses, William Canynges and Shipwarde, to judge the case. The commissioners first met to hear evidence at the beginning of the following October, by which stage Shipwarde was again mayor, but matters were delayed by Young’s need to return to London in November to take up the appointments of serjeant-at-law and King’s serjeant. It was therefore not until early January 1464 that the commissioners were able to make their award, by which they upheld the church’s right to the rent but exempted Sharp from having to pay anything but a small fraction of it during his lifetime.32 Church Bk. St. Ewen’s ed. Masters and Ralph, pp. xxix-xxxii.

When Shipwarde began his last term as mayor later in the same decade, he assumed office in very troubled times. Edward IV was only just beginning to recover his authority following the rebellions and political crisis of 1469, during which one of his leading supporters, Thomas Herbert†, was brought to Bristol and executed, and there were further momentous events after Shipwarde had become mayor. In March the following year, the feuding Berkeleys and Talbots took advantage of a new rebellion against the King to fight a private battle at Nibley Green in Gloucestershire. Shipwarde’s son and namesake and another burgess, Philip Meede*, were implicated in this serious outbreak of disorder, since afterwards it was alleged that they had sent armed assistance to the Berkeleys. Strongly denying that they had done so, the younger John and Meede laid the matter before Mayor Shipwarde and a Bristol jury, and the allegation – although quite possibly true – was dismissed as groundless slander.33 P. Fleming and M. Wood, Nibley Green, 89; Cat. Muns. Berkeley Castle, i. 574. Within a fortnight of Nibley Green, the rebel leaders, the earl of Warwick and duke of Clarence, now in retreat to the south-west and exile abroad, halted at Bristol where Warwick left his artillery. For the King, such episodes must have served as worrying signs of disloyalty on the part of the burgesses, doubts no doubt compounded by events just as Shipwarde’s mayoralty was ending. In September 1470 Clarence, Warwick and leading Lancastrian exiles returned to England to restore Henry VI to the throne. They landed in the south-west, and it was at Bristol that they joined forces with the earl of Shrewbury and Lord Stanley.34 M.A. Hicks, False, Fleeting, Perjur’d Clarence (revised edn. 1992), 71, 85; idem, Warwick, 286.

The great political divisions that led to the civil wars had already surfaced when Shipwarde began his parliamentary career nearly two decades earlier. His first Parliament followed the upheavals of the early 1450s when Richard, duke of York, posed a serious threat to the authority of an unpopular government and royal court although the Lancastrian establishment had recovered the political initiative when this assembly opened in March 1453. Later the same month, at the end of the initial parliamentary session, the Commons agreed to a new type of grant, the levying of 20,000 archers to serve the King for six months, probably in France. Presumably this was a matter of specific interest for Shipwarde and his fellow MP, William Pavy*, since Bristol was expected to contribute of 91 of these archers. No doubt another matter of direct concern was an ordinance that Parliament passed just before it closed, namely that the kingdom’s leading towns and cities should provide loans for the keeping of the seas, £150 in the case of Bristol.35 PROME, xii. 236-8, 267; CPR, 1452-61, pp. 163-4. Shipwarde’s next two Parliaments were the notorious Lancastrian ‘Parliament of Devils’ of 1459 and the Yorkist-dominated assembly of the following year, but it is impossible to tell where his political sympathies (if any) lay in this period, notwithstanding his apparent support of the Readeption of Henry VI just over a decade later.

It is quite possible that Shipwarde had already had dealings with Parliament some years before first entering the Commons. In 1437 John Shipwarde, probably either the MP or his father, was among those who supported the petition that two other burgesses, the brothers Thomas* and Walter Norton, submitted to the Parliament of that year, in pursuance of a long-running quarrel between their family and a former clerk of the Chancery, Thomas Stamford.36 PROME, xi. 231-3. The petition is not the only link between the Shipwardes and Nortons. Earlier, in 1429, John Shipwarde, probably the MP’s father, had received a summons to serve as a juror at Westminster, in a trial between Stamford and the Nortons’ father Thomas†.37 C49/50/3. Later, and far more significantly, the two families forged ties through a series of marriages. First, Shipwarde had married his son, John the younger, to Walter Norton’s daughter Agnes by the early 1460s; secondly, Walter’s eldest son Thomas took for his wife Shipwarde’s daughter Joan; thirdly, Shipwarde’s grand-daughter Isabel, the offspring of his other daughter (also Agnes) by her husband Edmund Westcote† of Bristol, married another (unknown) member of the Norton family.38 Gt. Red Bk. iii. 146; Trans. Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc. xlviii. 198-9; Bristol Wills, 160. Naturally, these matches were intended for the mutual advantage of both families but the connexion was to bring nothing but trouble to Shipwarde in his later years when he suffered unpleasant threats from his son-in-law Thomas Norton. An unsavoury character, Norton appears somehow to have offended his father Walter, who in the late 1450s decided to set aside the bulk of his real property in Bristol and Worcestershire for his younger son. His action provoked a serious quarrel between the two brothers, during which the elder was said to have coerced Shipwarde into supporting him against the younger. According to one colourful account, he threatened in 1471 to behead his father-in-law if he did not get his way, apparently taking advantage of the trouble that Shipwarde was by then in with Edward IV, newly restored to the throne following the short-lived Readeption of Henry VI.39 Trans. Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc. xxii. 278; Oxf. DNB, ‘Norton, Thomas’.

During the Readeption, Shipwarde and other members of the municipal oligarchy were far more supportive of the new government than they would later care to admit. On 4 Feb. 1471 he and his son were issued with royal pardons, but evidently these were a formality, since a fortnight later the younger John replaced the recently deceased Henry Chestre as sheriff of Bristol.40 C67/44, m. 5; CFR, xx. 294. In late April that year, following the return of Edward IV to England but before the decisive battle of Tewkesbury on 4 May, the Lancastrian army headed by Margaret of Anjou was able to obtain money, supplies and artillery from Bristol, as well as reinforcements led by the town’s recorder Nicholas Hervy*, who was killed in the fighting.41 Arrivall of Edw. IV (Cam. Soc. i), 25; C.D. Ross, Edw. IV, 170. Eight days after the battle, the victorious Edward wrote to the burgesses of Bristol to express his displeasure at their behaviour although, because the duke of Clarence (who, ironically, may have encouraged their disloyalty in the first place) had interceded on their behalf, he was prepared to offer a full pardon to any of them who would sue for it, save for the ‘principall sturrers of rebellion’. He listed eight such principals, of whom the first-named was the dead Hervy and the second the elder John Shipwarde and he ordered the town’s authorities to arrest and imprison the latter and the other six and to seize their property.42 Little Red Bk. ii. 130-1; Gt. Red Bk. iii. 95. As it happened, Shipwarde was kept in custody for some four months only. On 5 Sept. 1471 the King wrote to the mayor of Bristol, informing him that he had pardoned Shipwarde and ordering him to release the prisoner and restore to him all his lands and goods.43 Little Red Bk. ii. 131-2. Although Shipwarde’s letters of pardon were actually dated 11 Sept.: CPR, 1467-77, p. 274.

A little over two years after regaining his freedom, Shipwarde drew up his will, dated 14 Dec. 1473.44 Bristol Wills, 158-61. By then his wife was already dead since he asked to be buried beside Katherine, in a tomb he had built in the chancel of St. Stephen’s church. In the will he made many charitable bequests, largely in favour of St. Stephen’s, its clergy and poor parishioners, as well as elaborate arrangements for his funeral and month’s mind. The main family beneficiary was his son. He directed that the younger John and his legitimate issue should succeed to numerous lands, tenements and other holdings at Bristol, including Gillowes Inn in the High Street, one of the properties that he had acquired from Sir Walter Rodney.45 Bristol Chs. 64-65. A substantial portion of these properties nevertheless came with a significant condition attached, since in return for them the younger John was to find two chaplains to celebrate divine services in St. Stephen’s for the souls of the testator and other family members over a period of 25 years, after which there was to be a perpetual chantry of one chaplain. Shipwarde also asked the parishioners to observe his anniversary every 2 and 3 August, at services supervised by the mayor, sheriff and recorder of Bristol, each of whom was to receive a fee for attending. Should the younger John and his issue fail to establish the chantry, his sister Agnes Westcote and her daughter Isabel Norton were to share the properties in question under the same condition; failing that, the same holdings and complete responsibility for the chantry were to pass to the mayor and commonalty of Bristol. As for those properties not bound to the chantry, Agnes and Isabel were likewise to share them should the younger John die without legitimate issue, with remainder to the testator’s other daughter, Joan Norton. Shipwarde also made further, smaller bequests of property in favour of Agnes Westcote, her husband Edmund and Isabel Norton. Finally, he committed the residue of his goods to his son John and Edmund Westcote whom he appointed his executors.

Shipwarde survived for another two years after making his will. Appointed to a commission of gaol delivery in February 1474 and granted his last known royal pardon on the following 1 Nov.,46 C67/49, m. 3. he died some time between the latter date and 1 Jan. 1477 when the will was proved. As it happened, the Reformation ensured that Shipwarde’s chantry was swept away in less than a century. Instead, the extensive rebuilding of St. Stephen’s in the later fifteenth century, most notably the construction of a new tower, appears to have provided him with a far more permanent monument. The great Tudor antiquary, John Leland, credited him as the builder of the ‘ryght highe and costly towre’ of St. Stephen’s and it is still commonly accepted that it was he who financed the work.47 A. Gomme, M. Jenner and B. Little, Bristol: an Architectural Hist. 62; J. Leland, Itin. ed. Toulmin Smith, v. 93. Within a year of Shipwarde’s death his son and successor, having already served as one of the bailiffs of Bristol in 1465-6 and sheriff in 1471,48 Gt. Red Bk. iii. 78, 95. became mayor, holding the latter office in 1477-8.49 Recs. All Saints Bristol, iii. 442. By January 1479 the younger John was embroiled in a boundary dispute with the churchwardens of the parish church of St. Nicholas, and in the following month he was placed on commissions of gaol delivery for the town.50 St. Leonard’s Vestry recs., 40365/D/2/47; C66/543, m. 15d; 544, m. 15d. As in previous decades, he continued to trade abroad, apparently mainly with the Iberian peninsula although also with Ireland and Iceland.51 E122/19/14; Overseas Trade, 225-7, 231, 233, 236, 245, 246, 253, 256, 260, 277, 285. On 18 Apr. 1481 the Crown appointed him a customs collector at Bristol during pleasure, and a day later granted him a licence to trade abroad.52 CFR, xxi. nos. 624, 626, 628; CPR, 1476-85, p. 271. Within a few months of his appointment as a collector, he himself was among those investigated for non-payment of customs but cleared of any such offence. The records of these investigations show that at that time he owed a ship or barge called Le Cristofer but it is not known whether this was the Christopher used by his father over 40 years earlier.53 E122/19/16. In late 1484 the Crown assigned Shipwarde’s wife Avice £40 p.a. from the issues of the lordship of Barton by Bristol and a tun of wine annually from the port of Bristol but the reason for this generous grant, which was for life and presumably in return for some service, were not stated in her letters patent.54 CPR, 1476-85, p. 499. Shipwarde was no longer a customs collector at Bristol by Richard III’s reign when several Londoners took legal action over debts he owed them55 E13/169, rots. 19, 40d; C241/264/66; C131/81/11. although he was reappointed to the office at the accession of Henry VII.56 CFR, xxii. nos. 36, 37, 80. He was still alive in the early 1490s when two of the Londoners were given possession of Gillowes Inn and other properties of his at Bristol, in settlement of their joint claim against him.57 C131/82/34, 38.