PECK, Robert

More may be added to the earlier biography.4 The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 34-35.

Shortly after completing his first term as bailiff, Peck faced legal action in the Exchequer. In a bill of November 1413, William Organ of London alleged that he and his erstwhile co-bailiff, John Wellyngbury, had wilfully failed to apprehend an absconding servant of his while this employee had been in their bailiwick.5 E13/129, rot. 4d. In the same November, Thomas Smith, parson of Abbots Ripton, Huntingdonshire, took action against Peck and John Bickley* of Huntingdon, on the strength of a bond in statute staple, for 40 marks, of June 1409. They entered into another such bond for that amount with the cleric in June 1422. By the following autumn, just before Peck entered the Parliament of that year, Smith had likewise begun proceedings against the pair for non-payment. Both securities referred to Bickley as a ‘yeoman’ but to Peck as a ‘gentleman’.6 C131/225/8; C241/216/3. Peck also features in a couple of bonds made later in the same decade. In 1427 he and Thomas Mysdue of Doncaster bound themselves in £24 to the clerk, William Wade, and John Buxton of London,7 C241/220/21. and in the following year he, along with John Wood, a woolmonger from Stoke Nayland, Suffolk, Nicholas Bury of Eye in the same county and John ‘Pykle’ of Huntingdon (possibly Peck’s associate John Bickley) entered into a statute staple for £176 to another Londoner, the grocer John Bloxham.8 C261/222/43. While the reasons for these securities are unknown, at least some of them are likely to have arisen from commercial dealings between the parties and they demonstrate that Peck’s horizons extended far beyond his home town.

Peck also faced demands from William Wade, the creditor of 1427, elsewhere. In the later 1420s or early 1430s, the chaplain sued him in the Chancery over another debt, although not as the primary debtor. In his bill, Wade claimed that the late William Welborne, a notary from Bedford, had died owing him £80 and that Peck was liable for this debt having stood surety on Welborne’s behalf for its payment.9 C1/7/82. Welborne should perhaps be identified with the otherwise unknown William Welburn†, who had sat for Bedford in the Parl. of Mar. 1416.

A deed of the early 1430s reveals the name of Peck’s spouse. It records that he and his wife Cecily conveyed a hostel in Huntingdon’s high street known as The Hert on the Hope to Thomas Charwalton* and others, apparently the couple’s feoffees, on 9 Feb. 1431.10 King’s Coll. archs. HUN/13. Contrary to the previous biography’s assertion, Peck does not disappear from the records after that year, for he was party to two further property transactions in 1433: in the spring he conveyed his ‘place’ in the Huntingdon parish of All Saints to Robert Phelpot of Catworth,11 Hunts. Archs., deed of May 1433, KHB1/TEMP/4. and in the autumn he granted 13 acres of arable land in Huntingdon’s town fields to Richard Bridges II*.12 King’s Coll. archs. HUN/7. In 1443 a certificate was issued for the recovery of the still outstanding debt of £176 arising from the statute staple that Peck and his associates had given John Bloxham 15 years earlier. But at that date Bloxham was certainly dead and it is unlikely that Peck was still alive: C241/230/28. Coincidentally or not, Bridges later came into possession of The Hert on the Hope, which he conveyed away to the Crown in March 1449, so that it might form part of the endowment of Henry VI’s new foundation, King’s College, Cambridge.13 King’s Coll. archs. HUN/6.