TITELOTE, John

Although not foremost among the governing elite of Kingston-upon-Hull, Titelote was a figure of some importance in the town where he enjoyed an office-holding career lasting nearly 40 years. Perhaps a kinsman of Robert Titelot (d.1390) of Hornsea (16 miles from Hull), accused of piracy in 1383, he was admitted to the freedom of the town (upon payment of the customary fine) in 1433-4.4 SC8/304/15154-5; Kingston-upon-Hull recs., bench bk. 1, BRG 1. By trade Titelote was a draper, and in 1445 he sold cloth to the corporation of Hull for its officers’ livery.5 Kermode, app. 4; C67/40, m. 20. His own first known office was that of chamberlain, to which he was appointed at Michaelmas the following year. He also served a term as sheriff and became an alderman although he was never to attain the mayoralty.

Almost certainly because he dealt principally in domestic rather than the more important overseas trade,6 Titelote was recorded in 1452-3 as importing salt fish valued at £6 13s. 4d. and three tuns of wine, but no other evidence survives of his involvement in overseas trade: Customs Accts. Hull, 1453-90 (Yorks. Arch. Rec. Ser. cxliv), 7-9. Titelote had to wait until 1463 to become an alderman. On 19 Feb. 1453, however, he was one of the four individuals put forward for election to the Parliament summoned to meet at Reading in the following month. The other nominees were all serving aldermen but the commonalty opted to return him alongside Robert Auncell*.7 Bench bk. 3a, BRB 1, f. 23. Both he and Auncell received wages for 107 days’ service in the Commons, at the normal rate of 2s. per day.8 Kingston-upon-Hull recs., chamberlains’ acct. 1452-3, BRF 2/366. On his return from Parliament, Titelote continued to play an unusually active role in local affairs for a burgess who had yet to reach the rank of alderman, and when he witnessed the town’s election to the following Parliament his name immediately followed those of the aldermen on the return. In the following December, he was one of a handful of burgesses who joined the mayor and aldermen in meeting with representatives of the Hanseatic League, to discuss the fate of a Prussian ship that had been shipwrecked in the Humber. Titelote also played a leading role in Hull’s affairs in the late 1450s and early 1460s, a period of considerable national unrest. Having witnessed its parliamentary election of 1459, he was involved in measures taken to safeguard the town in the following year. In the latter part of 1460 he was one of the burgesses chosen to search ships in order to prevent any grain from leaving its port, among those charged with ensuring that Hull’s walls were defensible and a contributor to the cost of a large iron chain laid across the mouth of the harbour. Titelote also contributed towards the purchase of the wine that the town sent to the new King, Edward IV, at York, in the spring of 1461, and the wages of the soldiers it dispatched to Edward in late 1462 and of the 20 men it assigned to serve with the warden of the East March, John Neville, Lord Montagu, against the Lancastrian rebels in April 1463.9 Bench bk. 3a, BRB 1, ff. 45, 73v-74v, 76v, 82, 92, 93. Titelote was finally elevated to the aldermanic bench in the following November, replacing the deceased Hugh Clitheroe*. As an alderman, he served twice as coroner alongside the outgoing mayor and was regularly an auditor of the chamberlains’ accounts. It is likely that he was on particularly good terms with at least one of his fellow aldermen, John Spencer I*, who appointed him his executor in September 1464.10 York registry wills, prob. reg. 2, ff. 485v-6, 489.

Both before and after becoming an alderman, Titelote was active in property dealings at Hull. In May 1450, for example, Nicholas Robinson and Stephen Hyngham and his wife conveyed a tenement in Finkle Street to him and John Darris, and in July 1453 he received a demise of half a garden and a dovecote from Margaret Masham, daughter and heir of Richard Bate.11 Cal. Hull Deeds ed. Stanewell, D380, 394; bench bk. 3a, BRB 1, f. 24v. It is possible that property matters lay behind a quarrel between Titelote and Thomas Dale, the subject of an arbitration award made by the mayor and aldermen in 1455. One property dispute in which Titelote was certainly involved occurred in 1466 and ended in his losing out to a wealthier rival. On 28 Jan. that year Margery, widow and executrix of Thomas Oversey, and her co-executors appeared before the mayor and aldermen and swore on the gospels that they had sold a property in Kirklane to William Eland*, ‘of theyr own free will without any maner of compulcion’. Two days later, Thomas and Margery’s son, John Oversey, likewise appeared before the mayor, who reminded him of an oath he had made relating to the same property, namely that he had sold it to Titelote prior to any deal with Eland and that he had been forced to acquiesce in the sale to the latter ‘by compulcion & fere of deth & lesyng of his goodes’. John now told the mayor that he had remonstrated with Eland about the previous bargain with Titelote but had agreed to go through with the sale to him after Eland had replied ‘if þe said John Tyttlotte gave hym lose a peny therefore he shuld gyff hym two penys’.12 Bench bk. 3a, BRB 1, ff. 37v, 43v, 105v.

The settlement of his real property was the dominant concern of Titelote’s will. In the will, dated 3 Sept. 1484 and proved on 18 Jan. 1485, he sought a modest funeral and burial in the parish church of the Holy Trinity at Hull. He assigned to his wife, Alice, the tenement in Monkgate in which he lived, along with another in the same street, five others in Old Kirklane and two in Finkle Street. After she died, the Monkgate residence was to pass to Edmund, son of Thomas Brackenburgh, again to hold for life and provided that he spent 3s. 4d. annually on masses for the good of the testator’s soul, and then to her assigns. Titelote named three executors: Alice, the merchant James Tomlinson and the merchant and apothecary Lawrence Swattok, bequeathing 20s. in cash to each of the latter two for their trouble.13 York registry wills, prob. reg. 5, ff. 246v-7. It appears that he died childless.