STEVEN, Robert

A merchant active in the wine and cloth trade with Brittany, but also dealing in fish and iron, Steven first established himself in the city of Exeter, where he was admitted to the freedom in October 1433 on payment of a fine of £1.4 E122/113/55, ff. 8-9, 12; Exeter Freemen ed. Rowe and Jackson, 48. His business ventures, like those of many of his neighbours, sometimes crossed the boundary between the lawful and the illicit, and at times brought him into open conflict with the law. Thus, in 1434 he was among the Exeter men fined for selling wine and ale in unsealed measures,5 Devon RO, Exeter city recs., mayor’s tourn roll 12-13 Hen. VI, rot. 1d. and, more seriously, that same year an inquiry into an act of piracy against a Genoese merchant, Luca de Mathes, found that many of the Italian’s goods had come into Steven’s possession. Steven refused to restore the merchandise to its original owner, maintaining that he had bought it lawfully, and as a consequence was placed under arrest by the commissioners of inquiry, Sir Nicholas Carew and John Wykes. They had however underestimated the support Steven enjoyed among the citizens of Exeter: the mayor, John Salter I*, aided by the four bailiffs, arrayed a number of supporters, fought Carew’s servants and forcibly rescued him, necessitating the appointment in July of a commission of oyer and terminer to investigate the matter and punish the malefactors.6 CPR, 1429-36, p. 361. Not all of Steven’s business ventures were successful: in late 1436 the Devon landowner James Durneford charged him with the conduct of a ship from Plymouth to the bay of Biscay, and from thence back to Lyme Regis, but, whether by negligence (as Durneford claimed) or simply by misfortune, the vessel was lost at sea.7 KB27/702, rot. 90; 703, rot. 23d. Occasionally, Steven’s own ships also fell victim to the unwanted attentions of the numerous freebooters of the south-west, when a pinnace called the Mighell of Dartmouth, of which he was joint owner, carrying a cargo of 21 tuns of wine and 17 lengths of linen cloth from Brittany to Plymouth, was attacked by a barge called the Palm of Fowey just before it could reach the safety of Plymouth harbour. The pirates took the Mighell to Newport in the Isle of Wight, where one Thomas Rede received the stolen goods, leaving their rightful owners to petition for redress in Chancery.8 C1/16/234.

By the end of the 1430s, Steven had moved south to the port of Dartmouth, where he soon became active in public life. In 1439 he held office as a churchwarden of the chapel of St. Saviour, where his wife was to be buried in the following year, and in 1440 he was chosen one of the bailiffs of the town of Dartmouth during the mayoralty of Richard Carswell. While in office, he was accused by a group of merchants from Drogheda, whose ship had been driven into the port of Dartmouth by a storm, of having unlawfully seized their goods and in collusion with Thomas Wyse* despoiled them of their property,9 C1/71/54. but the Crown evidently did not take a serious view of his actions, as that November he was among a group of leading Dartmouth townsmen commissioned to bind over the masters of all ships leaving their port not to attack Breton vessels.10 CPR, 1441-6, p. 48. In 1445, finally, Steven was elected mayor of Dartmouth.11 Watkin, 185; SC6/827/7, m. 10. It was during the course of his year in office, in early April 1446, that he and one of the bailiffs (Robert Wenyngton alias Cane*) along with the leading townsmen John Brushford* (who later that year would succeed Steven as mayor), Nicholas Stebbing*, and Thomas Lanoy I* came to blows with the prominent lawyer John More of Collumpton at Kingswear. The background to the clash, in the course of which two of More’s horses were said to have been killed, is uncertain, but when the matter came to trial in the King’s bench early in the following year, Steven and Wenyngton denied all charges.12 KB27/743, rot. 46d.

At that time, Steven was in any event sitting in Parliament at Bury St. Edmunds. His motives for seeking election (unless they concerned the clash with More) are uncertain, but as a recent mayor he was clearly an acceptable candidate to the townsmen, who regularly called upon him to witness their property transactions, and to act for them as a trustee or attorney in such matters.13 Watkin, 120-3, 126-34. Further afield, however, Steven once again came into conflict with one of the leading men of his home county when in the summer of 1450 he was among a group of important Dartmouth men (also including, apart from his long-standing associates Wenyngton and Brushford, John Gayncote* and John Clerk*) who attacked and imprisoned Walter Reynell* of Malston (a fellow Member of the Parliament of 1447) at Totnes.14 CP40/760, rot. 208d; 761, rot. 200; 766, rot. 122d; CPR, 1446-52, p. 528.

By this time, the deteriorating military situation in France and the government’s increasingly desperate efforts to shore up the English position following the loss of Normandy began to have a serious impact on the business affairs of men like Steven. In June 1451 his ship Le Margaret Weston was requisitioned at Plymouth to provide transport for Earl Rivers’ expedition, and the sum of £30 which he was granted from the customs of Dartmouth for the wages of the master and mariners conscripted with the ship can have scarcely compensated him for the loss of income from trade.15 CPR, 1446-52, p. 448. He may, indeed, have faced some financial difficulties, and by the autumn of 1454 was being pursued in the courts by Sir Robert de Vere* for a debt of 40s. which he was said to have borrowed from the knight two years earlier.16 CP40/775, rot. 211d.

Little else is known of Steven’s career. In 1452 he had been among the trustees appointed by the Dartmouth merchant John Cleve to ensure the establishment of his chantry, and he is last recorded in September 1455 as one of the witnesses to a grant of a tenement in Dartmouth to the former mayor Nicholas Stebbing.17 Watkin, 133-5.