CUDDON, Robert

More can be added to the earlier biography.2 The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 709.

A surviving Dunwich minute book of the early fifteenth century confirms that Cuddon was one of the borough’s most substantial burgesses. In 1426-7 he was expected to contribute 3s. towards a local tax, more than anyone else except Robert Thorpe*, and when the town’s authorities imposed an extraordinary levy to support its MPs in the Parliament of 1427 Cuddon was asked to pay 5s., only 6d. less than the undoubtedly wealthy John Moreff*. When the borough collected contributions to a tenth granted to the King in the following Parliament, he and his mother jointly paid 10s.3 Bailiffs’ Minute Bk. 130, 132, 138.

A decade later, Cuddon was in dispute with Robert Duke of Brampton over a messuage or tenement in Shadingfield known as ‘Buntynges’. In September 1437 he and Duke exchanged bonds, each bearing a penalty of £40, by which they agreed to submit the quarrel to the arbitration of John Ulveston* and Robert Taylard.4 Suff. RO (Ipswich), Iveagh (Phillips) mss, HD 1538/341/24. The arbitrators’ decision is unrecorded but it would appear that Cuddon eventually lost out, since a deed shows that his mother-in-law, Sybil Francis, conveyed away the same property to John Duke in 1443.5 Ibid. HD 1538/341/28-29. Nevertheless, shortly before his death, Cuddon assigned various lands and tenements at Shadingfield, Weston and elsewhere in north-east Suffolk to his son William.6 Ibid. HD 1538/415/7.

William was one of the two sons of the MP who, as recorded in the previous biography, sued each other in Chancery for land in Stoven and Sotterley soon after his death.7 The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 709. There was further discord among Cuddon’s descendants at the end of the fifteenth century, when George Cuddon (son of the MP’s son Peter) sued Thomas Cuddon (another of the MP’s sons), likewise in Chancery. George alleged that Thomas was withholding from him deeds relating to Walpole Hall in Weston, one of the properties that the MP had inherited from his own father in the 1420s.8 C1/192/49.