FITTON, Richard

More can be added to the earlier biography.3 The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 77-78.

Fitton had moved south by Easter 1412, when he purchased property in Salisbury,4 Wilts. Hist. Centre, Salisbury city recs., Domesday bk. 1, G23/1/213, f. 104. and he entered the service of the bishop of Salisbury within the next two years. Continuing to serve the bishops after the death of Bishop Hallum in 1417, he was still acting as bailiff of the episcopal liberties in Somerset and Dorset when he represented Dorset in the Commons of 1432, and carried on doing so as late as 1435. One of his kinsmen, John Fitton, was a canon of Salisbury, executor of Hallum’s will and chancellor of the cathedral from 1422 onwards, and another, Laurence Fitton†, held office as bailiff of the bishop’s manors in Berkshire.5 The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 77; Reg. Hallum (Canterbury and York Soc. lxxii), app. EI. Together with Laurence, Richard was named in 1420 as an executor of the will of Lucy, widow of Sir William Langford† of Bradfield, Berkshire, who after Langford’s death had married Ralph Fitton, esquire, yet another member of their family. Lucy left bequests to Richard’s wife.6 PCC 48 Marche (PROB11/2B, f. 380v).

The MP was associated with Robert Neville, bishop of Salisbury, Sir Humphrey Stafford* and others in an undated petition to Parliament (probably that assembled from January to late March 1437), requesting letters patent licensing the establishment of an almshouse in Sherborne, where he lived. The licence was issued to the other petitioners on 11 July 1437, three months after his death, and the sizable foundation became known as the hospital of St. John the Baptist and St. John the Evangelist. Fitton was almost certainly remembered in the prayers of the brethren.7 SC8/130/6479; CPR, 1436-41, p. 77; VCH Dorset, ii. 104.

More about Fitton’s circumstances at the time of his death are revealed in another petition, sent into Chancery by John Bishop I* and Lucy his wife, complaining about the actions of his executor, William Browning I*. The Bishops explained that Fitton, as guardian of William Everard of Castleton, near Sherborne, had held Everard’s property for 18 years from 1413, during the boy’s long minority. The ward had been married to Lucy, but after both he and Fitton died Browning refused to hand over to her the 316 marks Fitton had received from the Everard estate, even though he had in his possession goods of Fitton’s to the value of 1,000 marks.8 C1/15/90. Browning evidently took his duties as executor seriously, for as late as 1455 he was pursuing in the law courts Isabel, widow of John Gargrave and by then the wife of John Pury* the Berkshire esquire, for payment of the sum of 50 marks which Gargrave, as receiver-general of Bishop Neville’s estates, had been bound to pay Fitton as steward of the same 20 years earlier.9 CP40/779, rot. 558.