CHAUCER, Thomas

More of interest can be added to the earlier biography.2 The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 524-32.

By virtue of his office of chief butler of England, Chaucer was also the chief coroner of the City of London, and it was as such that he presided over an inquest into the death of the constable of the Tower, Sir Thomas Rempston†. Rempston had drowned in the Thames on 31 Oct. 1406, after the boat in which he was travelling collided with one of the piles of London Bridge and capsized, and on the following day Chaucer and the sheriffs of London went to a riverside wharf to view his body. The jurors blamed Rempston for his fate, finding that he had forced the boatmen to take him out in dangerous conditions.3 SC8/25/1219C (printed in Placita Parliamentaria ed. Ryley, app. 675-6). Given that Chaucer spent so much of his time in London and was sometimes involved in property transactions there, it is scarcely surprising that the prestigious fraternity of St. John the Baptist, a body founded by the Merchant Taylors of London, admitted him to its ranks in 1411-12.4 Corp. London RO, hr 141/61, 142/74, 144/4, 155/46; Guildhall Lib. London, Merchant Taylors’ Co. accts. 34048/1, f. 61v.

Early in Henry VI’s reign, Chaucer became involved in a complicated series of transactions concerning the manor of Gresham, Norfolk. The manor had once belonged to his wife’s great-aunt, Margery, the wife and afterwards widow of Sir William Moleyns† (d.1381). She herself died in 1399, having appointed Chaucer’s old friend Richard Wyot* as one of her executors. It was on behalf of her estate that Wyot had retaken possession of Gresham from her grandson, also named Sir William Moleyns†, and another of Chaucer’s friends, who previously had agreed to buy the property but had proved unable to raise the purchase price of 920 marks. To resolve this unsatisfactory situation, Wyot agreed to sell Gresham to the wealthy London mercer Thomas Fauconer*, who undertook to settle it on his daughter Katherine for her marriage portion and to marry her to Moleyns’s son and namesake. In due course Fauconer bought Gresham, and he and Moleyns made a settlement for the proposed marriage, to take place when the couple were older. In May 1423, however, Moleyns reneged on the agreement by marrying his son, by then aged 17, to Anne, a daughter of the late Cornish esquire John Whalesborough†. Fauconer reacted by entering Gresham, as he was entitled to do under the terms of the settlement, and it was in his hands when the elder Moleyns died in June 1425. At this date, Wyot still had the burdensome task of fulfilling Margery Moleyns’s will, but he received assistance from Chaucer’s intervention. Following lengthy negotiations, Fauconer agreed to relinquish the manor to Chaucer, Wyot and others, in return for a sum of money ‘within the value’. In January 1427, the 14-year old Katherine appeared before a church court to renounce the Moleyns match and, soon afterwards, Gresham was sold to Judge William Paston, to provide Wyot with the wherewithal to fulfil his obligations as the long dead Margery’s executor.5 C.F. Richmond, Paston Fam.: First Phase, 47-52. According to Richmond, 52, Paston was another of Chaucer’s ‘friends’, presumably on the basis of the ‘good will’ that the MP was said to have borne Paston at the time the latter acquired Gresham: Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, ii. 31. As far as one can tell, Chaucer’s motives for intervening in this affair were primarily altruistic, although in helping to bring about a resolution he was in part demonstrating his own status as a man of influence and ‘honour’. He could not have conceived that a serious challenge to the Pastons’ possession of Gresham would arise two decades later, when Robert Hungerford, Lord Moleyns, who had married the daughter and heir of the third William Moleyns, put forward a spurious claim to the manor.