MALLORY, John

More may be added to the earlier biography.4 The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 673-4.

John Mallory’s parentage is uncertain. It is tempting to identify his father, as the earlier biography has done, as Sir John, from whom he inherited both the ancient Mallory patrimony at Winwick and the manor of Newbold Revel (which had come to Sir John through his mother, Margery, daughter and coheiress of Sir John Revel† of Newbold Revel).5 Add. Ch. 21753. The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 673, is wrong to assert that the Revel inheritance came to the fam. through Sir John Mallory’s wife, Alice. This Sir John was at least twice married: in 1366 his wife was named Agnes and he had by her a son, Nicholas; and in 1391 his wife was called Alice.6 G. Baker, Northants. i. 406; Warws. Feet of Fines (Dugdale Soc. xviii), 2330. Our MP could be his son by either of these wives, but it is more likely, on chronological grounds, that he was Nicholas’s son. The family disappears from the records between 1393 and 1406, when our MP witnessed a deed, and this raises the probability that he inherited as a minor. If so he was more probably Nicholas’s son than Alice’s: by a final concord levied in 1391, Sir John settled the manor of Newbold Revel upon her in jointure, and, if, as seems likely, this marks the date of their marriage, then no child of theirs could have been of age in 1406.7 Field, 41-44.

The main interest of Mallory’s career lies in the disputed Warwickshire election of 1427, when Sir William Peyto‡ is said to have come to the county court at the head of a band from Warwick to set aside Mallory’s election and secure his own. This has been interpreted in terms of a struggle among the local baronage: the county court elected in Mallory an MP opposed to the interests of the leading local magnate, Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, then absent in France, and Peyto, as one of the earl’s leading men, acted in the earl’s interest to overturn the election. In this interpretation the dispute is also seen as a manifestation of rivalry between the east and west of the county, a division that was political as well as geographical in that the earl of Warwick had few estates in the east. At the previous hustings in 1426 the two MPs had been drawn from the west, a fact resented, in this reading, by the gentry of the east, who were prominent among the attestors of 1427.8 C. Carpenter, Locality and Polity, 385-7. The central difficulty with this interpretation lies in identifying Mallory with opponents of the earl of Warwick. Indeed, there is evidence to connect him with the earl’s circle both before and after the election, and little or none, aside from his residence in the east of the county, to place him in the service of the earl’s aunt, Joan, Lady Beauchamp of Abergavenny, and John Mowbray, duke of Norfolk, who appear to have been acting in opposition to the earl in the late 1420s. Indeed, in a suit in the Exchequer of pleas in Michaelmas term 1431 Lady Joan named him among those inimical to her who had been corruptly empaneled by the sheriff, Sir Humphrey Stafford I*, to try a case between her and the Crown.9 E13/139, rots. 12, 22; PROME, xi. 59.

A closer look at the surviving documents suggests a different explanation for the disturbance at the county court. It is worth noting that the complaint that brought the election to the attention of the Crown was not the allegation that Peyto had forcibly intervened; it was rather that Peyto, along with Sir William Mountfort*, had been duly elected and their return attested in an indenture made by Edmund Colshill, under sheriff of Sir Richard Hastings*, but that Hastings had falsely returned Mountfort and Mallory. In other words, the original complaint was not against Peyto but against Hastings. Further, this complaint was not made until after the Parliament had ended (and there can thus be no doubt that Mallory had taken the seat). On 20 Nov. 1428 Peyto, as the new sheriff, was ordered to summon Hastings into Chancery to show why he should not pay the penalty of £100 laid down by statute for a false return. Hastings then laid the defence that Peyto and men of Warwick had set aside Mallory’s election with the connivance of the under sheriff. The terms of his defence are significant: he asserted that the borough of Warwick returned its own MPs and that therefore the townsmen had no voice in the election of the knights of the shire. This suggests that a factor in the dispute was a rebuttal by Hastings of a newly-asserted claim by the townsmen to participate in the county election. A jury verdict went in his favour, and Mallory’s return was vindicated.10 C219/13/5; CIMisc. viii. 28; Parliamentarians at Law ed. Kleineke, 108-15; S.J. Payling, ‘Identifiable Motives’, in The Fifteenth Cent. VI ed. Clark, 95.

Mallory and his wife relied upon ties mediated through neighbourhood rather than affinity for the marriages of their daughters. In our MP’s lifetime their daughter, Philippa, was espoused to their Northamptonshire neighbour, Eustace Burneby of Watford, a few miles to the south of Winwick. This connexion soon produced another match: on 8 June 1434, very soon after Mallory’s death, his widow entered into arrangements for the marriage of Philippa’s sister, Isabel, to Edward, son and heir-apparent of Sir Edward Doddingselles* of Long Itchington, not far from Newbold Revel. Eustace Burneby’s mother, Clemence, had stood as godmother to Sir Edward in 1392, an old association now reinforced by a new.11 CCR, 1429-35, p. 313; CIPM, xx. 267. Carpenter, Locality and Polity, 215, wrongly identifies the Doddingselles groom as a younger son.