OSENEY, Richard

More may be added to the earlier biography.4 The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 880-1.

The summons to appear before the King’s council which Oseney received in December 1406 related to a petition Nicholas Watyes of Worcester had submitted to the Parliament of that year. In his petition Watyes stated that he had lost a lawsuit at Worcester because Thomas Belne†, then one of the bailiffs of the city, had illegally maintained his opponent. The lawsuit in question must date from 1404-5 during Belne’s first term in that office, since he did not become bailiff again until 1415. Watyes further alleged that Belne had also stymied his subsequent attempt to have matters rectified in King’s bench, by sending a false record of the proceedings at Worcester to the higher court. If it were not possible for the King and Lords to provide a remedy in Parliament, Watyes asked that the chancellor, judges and other members of the royal council might examine the record sent into King’s bench, and that they might question Oseney who had been clerk of the recognizances at Worcester when Belne was bailiff. In response to this request, the petition was referred to the chancellor and justices, and the parties were directed to appear in Chancery in Easter term 1407. Whether Oseney, who was no longer clerk when Watyes submitted his complaint, had connived with Belne in committing forgery is impossible to say, since there is no record of the petition’s outcome.5 SC8/148/7366B; The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 182.

Oseney himself served at least three more terms as bailiff of Worcester than previously noticed. It was as former co-bailiffs that he and William Warde accounted at the Exchequer in Michaelmas term 1422 for forfeitures of Scottish coin. According to Exchequer records, they affirmed that they had received no such forfeitures for the year ending at Michaelmas 1422, indicating that they had served as bailiffs of Worcester in 1421-2. Furthermore, a statute staple taken at Worcester later that decade both confirms that the two men were the bailiffs in 1421-2 and shows that Oseney also held the office alongside Thomas Swyney* in 1426-7. Oseney was again in office in 1442-3, since an account for that year relating to Worcester records that he and Richard Bykerstath were then bailiffs. Finally, the city’s election return to the Parliament of February 1449 records that he and Hugh Jolye* were the bailiffs at that date, so proving that he was indeed in office in 1448-9, as previously speculated.6 E159/199, recorda Mich. rot. 19d; C241/220/16; SC6/1286/3/15; C219/15/6.

A case heard in the court of common pleas just after Oseney had begun his third term as bailiff shows that he had once employed Thomas Vale, a London butcher, as his receiver. In this suit Oseney, the plaintiff, alleged that Vale owed him 40s. Represented by his attorney, John Forthey*, he alleged that the debt arose from an audit of Vale’s account in late April 1425. In due course the matter was referred for trial at the Worcester assizes in the spring of 1427. Vale failed to appear at the trial so Oseney won his suit by default. Oseney’s employment of a Londoner might suggest that he had business or property interests in London, where he must have spent some of his time in pursuit of his legal career. The butcher in question was from the parish of St. Clement Danes without New Temple bar, situated near the inns of court.7 CP40/660, rot. 422d; 661, rot. 302d; 663, rot. 109d.

The cathedral priory at Worcester was not the only important religious house with which Oseney had dealings, for in 1433-4 he and his wife Agnes obtained the lease of a garden in the city’s Huckster Street from the abbot of Evesham. Oseney’s property interests at Worcester also included several houses which were the subject of a lawsuit of the mid 1440s. By Easter term 1446 he had initiated a suit in the common pleas against Isolda Rumney, for committing waste in these houses, which were part of his inheritance and which she – presumably a family connexion – held in dower. His attorney in this suit was his lawyer son Thomas.8 E210/5322; CP40/741, rot. 265d. Thomas was not an only child, for Richard also had a daughter, Margaret, who married Henry Newdyk*.9 Trans. Worcs. Arch. Soc. n.s. xxi. 51.