COOPER, John

More can be added to the earlier biography.2 The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 647.

A couple of lawsuits that reached pleadings in the court of common pleas at Westminster in Trinity term 1427 provide further information about Cooper. By that date he was dead, for the defendants in both suits were his executors, who included the widowed Alice Cooper (evidently his erstwhile spouse) and Thomas Lamb*. The plaintiffs in one of these actions, Thomas Burton and Robert Tanner, were themselves the executors of the late Joan Felawe, widow, of London. They asserted that the defendants must pay her estate £40, a sum in which an auditing of accounts at London in August 1425 had revealed Cooper had owed to Joan. In response, Alice, Lamb and the others claimed that she had made a release of all actions to Cooper while they were both still alive.3 CP40/666, rot. 305. Lamb and his co-defendants attempted a similar defence to the second suit, by which Thomas Welles of Maldon and London sued them on the strength of a bond he had received from Cooper in London in July 1422. By means of this bond, Cooper had undertaken to pay Welles £15: Welles asserted that he had never done so, while the defendants claimed that he had released Cooper from this debt in 1425. However, in Hilary term 1428 a jury found for the plaintiff, who in the following May notified the court that they had satisfied him of the debt and paid him a further 40s. awarded to him for his costs and damages.4 CP40/666, rot. 344.