JOHN, Lewis

More may be added to the earlier biography.2 The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 494-8.

In early 1415 Lewis and his first wife, Alice, purchased a royal pardon, although they found it necessary to acquire another pardon eight years later, specifically for marrying without licence.3 C67/37, m. 57; Essex RO, Petre mss, D/DP T1/1870 (1 Jan. 1423).

Before leaving England on Henry’s first great expedition to France in 1415, Lewis and his fellow Welshman and friend, John Montgomery (Sir John Montgomery* from the spring of 1418) received an assignment of jewels and plate worth nearly £42 from the King’s chamber. These valuables, including a gold tablet covered in precious stones and containing fragments of the True Cross, were a security that both they and their men would receive their wages and any due customary profits of war.4 E404/31/331; E358/6, rot. 10d. Immediately after acquiring the lordship of Blainville in the bailliage of Rouen in early 1423, Montgomery was one of those whom Lewis nominated to manage it on his behalf. From the same collection of manuscripts as this warrant of attorney is the deed by which the abbot of St. Ouen in Rouen granted him a share in all the prayers, masses and good works of the abbey: it bears the date 4 Nov. 1431 – not ‘1430’ as stated in the previous biography.5 Petre mss, D/DP T1/1631, 1846.

It was with another of his friends, Richard Buckland*, that Lewis was caught up in a dispute with John Boteler I* late in Henry V’s reign. In August 1420 they were among a group that forcibly seized goods worth more than £600 from houses belonging to Boteler at Calais. Furthermore, according to a petition (perhaps of 1427) that the latter submitted to the King and Lords, they had conspired to have him imprisoned in London after he had subsequently complained to the Council about their actions.6 SC8/96/4767.

As the previous biography notes, Lewis had dealings with financiers from Florence in 1417 and 1422, but the records of the Exchequer provide further evidence of contact with men from that city state. First, in 1414 he sued the merchant, Lorenzo degli Alberti, in the name of himself and the King, for breaching his monopoly of the foreign exchange in London, to his damage of no less than £3,000. Secondly, Lewis engaged in further litigation in the same court nearly five years later, this time against Bartholomeo Galle. He accused the Florentine of breaking into his house in the Vintry in April 1416, although Galle asserted that he had in fact rented the property to use while conducting his business in London, an arrangement agreed between a friend acting on his behalf and one of Lewis’s servants.7 E13/130, rots. 25, 26d, 27; 134, rot. 9d.

During the dispute between Lewis and John de Vere, earl of Oxford, Thomas Hayne, formerly a servant of the deceased Sir John de Vere (the MP’s brother-in-law), made some dramatic claims on the MP’s behalf. Hayne appeared in Chancery in June 1431, in response to a bill Lewis had entered there, to allege that at the end of the previous year a group of the earl’s men had taken him by force to Hedingham, the de Vere castle in Essex. There, he claimed, they had extorted a bond for £100 from him, told him that Lewis had died in France and compelled him to declare that the MP had no title to the properties at the centre of the dispute. In the following August the earl spent several days with his counsellors at Chelmsford in pursuit of a legal action against Lewis, but in October the MP obtained a letter of inspeximus in support of his case from the Crown. This contained copies of his bill, Hayne’s declaration and two affidavits taken from the latter.8 C1/9/370; Petre mss, D/DP T1/2070.

Shortly after his second marriage, Lewis and his new wife, Anne, went to law over the affairs of her previous husband Sir Richard Hankford. She was one of Hankford’s executors, and in Hilary term 1435 the court of common pleas heard pleadings in two suits which she and Lewis, in association with her co-executors, John Copplestone* and John Mules*, had brought against Hankford’s former comrade-in-arms, Sir Theobald Gorges*. These concerned loans totalling £60 that Hankford was said to have made Gorges in 1426, but Gorges was subsequently able to prove that he did not owe the money in question. In another lawsuit of the mid 1430s, John Lanoy and his wife Joan challenged the right of Lewis and Anne to hold the Hankford manor of East Cranmore in Somerset.9 CP40/696, rots. 104, 130; 700, rot. 132; CIPM, xxii. 313-21.

Anne was the daughter of a lollard, and it was possibly through her influence that, in a manner characteristic of followers of that sect, Lewis referred to his ‘wretched body’ in his will. It is also worth noting that Sir William Lucy*, who married Margaret, one of the MP’s daughters by Anne, came from a family which was no stranger to heresy.10 Lollardy and Gentry ed. Aston and Richmond, 252, 254, 255.