Family and Education

? s. of Henry Loveryk*. m. 1da.

Offices Held

Mayor, Sandwich Dec. 1408-12, 1415-16; jurat 1413-14.1

Biography

During his fourth year as mayor (1412), Loveryk was in serious trouble with the government as a consequence of his fellow townsmen’s piracies. A band headed by Thomas Auncell and Thomas Baker took a ship containing goods valued at £80 belonging to a Flemish widow named Katherine Kalewartes and brought it to Sandwich. In accordance with the terms of the recent truce, the widow obtained orders from Henry IV to the warden of the Cinque Ports to arrest the malefactors and commit them to the custody of the mayor (Loveryk) and bailiff (Nicholas Reyner). However, before Auncell and Baker could be produced before the Council to answer her complaint, they and their fellow prisoners were allowed to go free, and it was supposed that Loveryk and Reyner had released them on their own authority, without trying to enforce restitution of the widow’s property. In July 1413, the warden was instructed to inquire what had become of the plunder, and to raise the £80 due because of the breach of the truce from Loveryk’s and Reyner’s own goods. The two men, when examined before the Council, tried to throw the blame for the escape of the miscreants on the town gaoler, and a fresh inquiry, held in August 1414, exonerated at least Loveryk while providing sound reasons for the premature release of two of the prisoners. But restitution was still delayed, and the widow’s complaints elicited orders from the Council in April 1415 for the arrest and imprisonment of the gaoler, followed by instructions in May that the value of her goods should be levied from the townsmen collectively. In response, in the Parliament meeting in November that year, the town’s representatives induced the Commons to sponsor a petition which, alleging that items worth only £2 had been brought ashore at Sandwich and pleading the injustice of mulcting the town without hearing its defence, asked for a delay and further investigation. The King’s lieutenant, acting as president of the Parliament and mindful of the wider diplomatic issues at stake, responded only by repeating the previous orders to execute the provisions of the truce. A similar petition addressed to the next Parliament (March 1416) brought the same unsympathetic response, and it must be presumed that the commission was eventually executed.2

In the course of his career Loveryk accumulated substantial landed property outside Sandwich. Some of his holdings were in the Isle of Thanet: in 1415 he made a conveyance of a tenement at Sarre, and in 1428 two men (possibly his feoffees) settled on his daughter, Joan, and her husband, William Manston, the manor of ‘Goteshall’ (perhaps as a marriage portion). By 1431 his lands at Minster together with property in the hundreds of Wingham and Preston, had an estimated worth of £7 a year, and he held more besides.3 By that time the former MP had entered the ranks of the country gentry. In 1427, as ‘of Herne, gentleman’, he had been bound in £200 to appear in Chancery to answer accusations brought by John Palyng (probably the London goldsmith of that name) only to be completely exonerated. Nevertheless, Loveryk was not above enlarging his properties by fraud or violence. At an unknown date between 1426 and 1432, John Brugge and others complained to the then chancellor, Archbishop Kemp, when he was visiting Canterbury, that by the maintenance of the jurats of Sandwich Loveryk had seized 30 messuages in the town as well as three neighbouring manors all belonging to the plaintiffs. Kemp ordered Loveryk to appear in Chancery at the following Easter, but although he went to Westminster at the term set, he quickly absented himself without leave and took advantage of the consequent delay in the proceedings to distrain the plaintiffs’ tenants for rent, knock down a windmill of theirs and carry off their ‘prevez’ (?title deeds), which he then offered for sale, as they alleged.4

In January 1435 Loveryk bound himself in ten marks to pay his portion of the expenses incurred during his final mayoralty of Sandwich (several years earlier), for a suit in the Exchequer to enable the mayor to escape accounting for the goods of felons and fugitives. He is not recorded thereafter.5

Ref Volumes: 1386-1421

Author: A. P.M. Wright

Notes

• 1. Kent AO, St. John’s hosp. deeds, Sa/QJt 1/22, 23; E364/44 m. A; E159/189, Hil. rot. 10; W. Boys, Sandwich, i. 155, 193.
• 2. SC8/303/15127-8; CCR, 1409-13, pp. 369, 416; CPR, 1413-16, pp. 110, 223, 344-5, 410; PPC, ii. 152; RP, iv. 67, 91; CIMisc. vii. 494.
• 3. Boys, i. 50; CAD, vi. C5671; CCR, 1422-7, p. 460; Feudal Aids, iii. 64, 76.
• 4. CCR, 1422-9, p. 332; C1/7/124.
• 5. Sandwich Black bk. f. 21.