JUGLER, Robert, of Chichester, Suss.

Published in The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1386-1421, ed. J.S. Roskell, L. Clark, C. Rawcliffe., 1993
Available from Boydell and Brewer

Constituency

Dates

May 1413
Nov. 1414

Family and Education

m. (1) bef. May 1409, Joan; (2) by May 1413, Isabel, wid. of William Waleys (d.1405), royal searcher of Chichester.1

Offices Held

Commr. of inquiry, June 1400 (concealment of goods of the late earl of Arundel); arrest, Suss. Apr. 1414.

Biography

At the Sussex assizes held in mid June 1389, it was alleged that Jugler, as ‘late sheriff’ of the county, had drawn up a panel of jurors on the nomination of one of the parties to a lawsuit. This allegation was promptly disproved by the triers of the jury, and, in any case, there is no record of Jugler ever being appointed sheriff. It is possible, however, that he had served as under sheriff to Thomas Jardyn*, who had held office between 1386 and 1388, most likely on the nomination of Richard Fitzalan, earl of Arundel. Certainly, many of the surviving notices about Jugler indicate that he, too, was a follower of the earl, and, indeed, served him and his successor from the very beginning of his career until its end. On 30 June in the same year of 1389, orders went out for the arrest of Jugler and three others who were to be brought before the King’s Council; only for all four then, on 12 July, severally to be bound over on penalty of £100 not to cause riotous assemblies. In spite of this, the group combined to break into a house at Lymbourne in Havant, Hampshire, which William Upton held as a tenant of the earl of Arundel, imprisoned and nearly starved to death Upton’s wife, and subsequently, in a related incident, took unlawful possession of the manor of Wymering. Upton and his wife complained of this violence to the Council, which on 20 Aug. issued subpoenae against Jugler and his accomplices. Royal commissions were set up to deal with the rioters in March and May 1390, but those appointed failed to act, quite possibly owing to reluctance to challenge the local authority of the earl of Arundel.2 Indeed, Jugler remained at large only so long as Earl Richard himself had his liberty.

Jugler’s antecedents are obscure, but his occasional appearances as an attorney at the Sussex assizes when they were held at Chichester suggest that he lived in or near the city which he was later to represent in Parliament, and early in 1397 he acted as a feoffee of property there. Furthermore, he subsequently married the widow of William Waleys, the royal searcher of Chichester harbour, whose accounts he presented at the Exchequer on her behalf. Then, too, his kinsman, Geoffrey Jugler, had considerable landed interests in the locality, including the manor of Littlehampton and property in Chichester itself, worth altogether at least £21 a year.3

Following the arrest of the earl of Arundel on the orders of Richard II in July 1397, Jugler was also taken prisoner and eventually sent to the Tower, where he was to be received by writ dated 18 Sept.—the day after the assembling of the Parliament which was to condemn his master to death for treason. When and how he secured his release remains uncertain, but it was undoubtedly soon after Henry IV’s accession and the restoration of the earldom of Arundel to the heir, Thomas Fitzalan, that he entered the latter’s service. In June 1400 Jugler was named among the royal judges and Fitzalan retainers appointed to hold investigations in several shires into the concealment by Richard II’s officials of the late earl’s goods (forfeited in 1397), which were then to be delivered to the earl’s executors in accordance with the form of the recent statute revoking his attainder. Later that year, on 1 Dec., Jugler stood surety at the Exchequer for John Wiltshire* of Arundel, another servant of the Fitzalans, then granted a share of the farm of the alien priory of Lyminster, and on the following day he provided mainprise in Chancery for John Goring of Sussex, at the suit of the executors of the late King’s cofferer. It may well be the case that Jugler’s connexion with the new earl of Arundel was a significant factor in his election to Parliament for Chichester in 1402. Certainly, by the time he was again elected (five years later) he had been named among the trustees of the earl’s estates in Sussex, Surrey and elsewhere, as formally appointed at Arundel castle in September 1406. Jugler attended the county court held at Chichester for the Sussex elections to the Parliament of 1407 (on the occasion of his own second return). While the Parliament was in session he and other Fitzalan retainers were conducting a legal action for debt against Sir John Trussell*, the former shire knight for Northamptonshire, and on 24 Nov. he provided securities in Chancery for Robert Archer of Winchester, a fellow Member of the Commons. That Jugler’s performance in the House was satisfactory from the point of view of the citizens of Chichester is clear from his being briefed to appear in Chancery, in February following, as attorney for the then mayor, Thomas Patching*, defending him in the suit brought by the bishop of Chichester, whose jurisdiction in the city Patching had challenged. It was in association with Robert Pobelowe, clerk, a co-feoffee of the earl of Arundel’s estates, that in July 1410 Jugler received a bond in £100 from certain men of London and the Isle of Wight, in connexion with a sentence of excommunication imposed on one of the latter by the earl’s uncle, Thomas Arundel, archbishop of Canterbury. Then, in October that year, he stood surety for the collectors of alnage levied on cloth sold in Sussex.4

Robert Jugler and his kinsman Geoffrey both witnessed the electoral indentures for Sussex for the first Parliament of Henry V’s reign—that of May 1413—in which Robert again represented Chichester. In July, shortly after Parliament had been dissolved, he provided securities at the Exchequer for Richard Wakehurst (knight of the shire for Sussex in the same Parliament) and William Ryman*, both of them leading retainers of the earl of Arundel, to whom the latter, as treasurer of the Exchequer, then granted custody of the lands of the Norman abbey of Sées. Jugler was to act similarly in February 1414 for James Knottesford, grantee of those of another Norman house. Probably during the early part of Henry V’s reign (while Bishop Beaufort was chancellor), he was summoned to Chancery to answer the allegations of John Robroke, vicar of Lyminster, whom he had sued in the court of common pleas for a debt of 40s. According to Robroke, the sheriff had required mainpernors for his appearance in court, to whom he was obligated in £40, but although he had duly presented himself Jugler had persuaded the two men who had given sureties to start proceedings on the bond, so that besides his loss of ‘great sums’ the vicar dared not go near his church.5

Jugler put in an appearance at the shire elections held at Chichester on 24 Oct. 1415, just a few days after the death of the earl of Arundel. For the remainder of his own life he was kept busy in his capacity as a trustee of the Fitzalan estates, carrying out the earl’s testamentary depositions. Thus, he was involved in procuring, for as much as 250 marks, royal licences to make grants in mortmain to the hospital at Arundel (to which Earl Thomas had wished to donate land worth £100 a year) and to the college founded by Earl Richard (to which he and his fellow trustees were authorized to give land worth 100 marks p.a.). Then, too, he was party to the acrimonious disputes among Earl Thomas’s heirs and over the Countess Beatrice’s demands for her dower, and he also had to deal with the claims from Tortington priory for certain properties of which it had been deprived by Earl Richard. It is worthy of remark that although Jugler lived on at least ten years after Earl Thomas’s death, he was never re-elected to Parliament. He died at an unknown date between May 1425 and November 1429.6

Ref Volumes: 1386-1421

Author: L. S. Woodger

Notes

Variants: Ingler, Yngler.

  • 1. CCR, 1405-9, p. 497; E122/182/20.
  • 2. Sel. Cases King’s Bench (Selden Soc. lxxxviii), 81; CPR, 1388-92, pp. 132, 266, 270; CCR, 1389-92, pp. 50, 356; 1392-6, p. 514; SC8/216/10779, 10781.
  • 3. JUST 1/1503 m. 76d; CP25(1)240/79/6; E122/182/20; Feudal Aids, vi. 523.
  • 4. CPR, 1399-1401, p. 313; 1405-8, p. 397; 1452-61, p. 203; CCR, 1396-9, p. 152; 1399-1402, p. 298; 1405-9, p. 351; 1409-13, p. 119; CFR, xii. 97; xiii. 194; C219/10/4; SC1/43/129.
  • 5. C219/11/2; CFR, xiv. 34, 57; C1/6/289.
  • 6. C219/11/7; Reg. Chichele, ii. 71; CPR, 1416-22, p. 238; 1422-9, pp. 114-16, 282; CCR, 1413-19, p. 520; 1419-22, pp. 33-34; 1422-9, p. 105; 1429-35, p. 2.