FRANK, Philip

More can be added to the earlier biography.2 The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 122-3.

Before they travelled to Westminster for the Parliament of 1427, Frank and his fellow MP, Bartholomew Petipas*, received instructions from the authorities at Lynn to bring a lawsuit (over a now unknown matter) against Sir Henry Inglose*, and to recover 400 marks, the borough’s contribution to a loan of 1,000 marks which Henry V had raised in Norfolk in 1415. He and Petipas subsequently wrote to the corporation to inform it that it was impossible to obtain more than £100 from that King’s executors, an offer which in due course they received authorization to accept. In the same letter, they took the opportunity to warn their fellow burgesses about a ‘malicious bill’ that the Dominican order had submitted against the borough to the royal council.3 King’s Lynn recs., translation of hall bk., 1422-9, 1450, KL/C 7/29, pp. 159, 167, 168.

Not long after leaving Parliament, Petipas and Frank, formerly allies in the faction-fighting at Lynn earlier in the century, were on opposite sides of a quarrel among several burgesses. It is likely that a bill, probably of 1429-30, that Frank, John Bryztyeve, Bartholomew Sistern† and John Brekrop brought in Chancery against Petipas and others related to this dispute. Frank and his co-plaintiffs claimed that the defendants had withheld from them bonds of arbitration, arising from lawsuits that the parties had conducted against each other at the Norwegian port of Bergen.4 Ibid. 244; C1/69/176. It therefore appears that Frank traded with Scandinavia.

Not long before his own death, Frank was active as an executor of a fellow burgess, Richard Waterden*, who had died in office as mayor of Lynn in February 1430. In Michaelmas term 1431, he and his co-executor, John Waterden*, had to render account in the Exchequer for goods that Richard had seized for the Crown in his capacity as mayor.5 E159/208, recorda Mich. rot. 5d.