SHORT, Nicholas

Short is probably to be identified with a man of this name whose family were from East Knoyle in Wiltshire. The earliest reference to him shows him living there in April 1394 when a visitation carried out by the bishop of Salisbury alleged that he had committed adultery with a family servant named Joan. Neither party appeared to answer the charge and so both were excommunicated prior to the case being heard in the commissary court.2 Ibid. By the summer of 1401 Short had established a connexion with Sir Amauri St. Amand, the son and heir of Amauri, 4th Lord St. Amand, who was then involved in a serious dispute with William of Wykeham, bishop of Winchester, and members of his household, headed by Master John Campden. In June that year St. Amand was bound over in £1,000 not to do his adversaries any harm, and Campden and four of St. Amand’s associates, including Short and Robert Shotesbrooke*, entered into mutual recognizances for £40 to keep the peace towards each other. The bishop alleged that Short and the rest had illegally hunted in his park at Cheriton in Hampshire and assaulted his ranger.3 CCR, 1399-1402, pp. 410, 413-14; C1/68/127. Following these events nothing is known of Short for more than a decade, but in May 1413, once more described as ‘of Wiltshire’, he acted as a mainpernor at the Exchequer for Thomas Parker of Herefordshire, who was granted the farm of the estates of Kerswell priory in Wales, while later that year he himself was granted custody of the alien priory of Holme in Dorset, a cell of Montacute priory, at an annual farm of £4 6s. 8d. His tenure was short lived, however, for on 25 June the next year his letters patent were revoked after the prior of Montacute established a superior claim.4 CFR, xiv. 8, 16, 46; CPR, 1413-16, p. 200. Short probably owed his good fortune to an association with the treasurer, Thomas Fitzalan, earl of Arundel, and while it is improbable that he may be identified with the archer of the same name who served in Arundel’s retinue during Henry V’s first campaign in France in 1415, it was probably this connexion to which he owed his return in 1422 for the borough of Reigate, which was by then part of the dower of the widowed countess Beatrice.5 Suss. Arch. Collns. xv. 130. Trouble may have overtaken Short in 1417 when he, or a namesake, was among a group of prisoners who were to be moved to the Tower of London: CCR, 1413-19, p. 390.