SQUIBBE, Robert, of Shaftesbury, Dorset.

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 1421
Dec. 1421

Family and Education

Offices Held

Bailiff, Som. and Dorset for the wid. of Henry IV, Joan of Navarre 19 May 1423-23 Nov. 1427.1

Verderer, Gillingham forest bef. July 1430.2

Churchwarden, Frome St. Quintin, Dorset by July 1453.3

Biography

Like many of his fellow parliamentary burgesses for Shaftesbury, Squibbe was a lawyer. Although at Michaelmas 1416 he was party in the court of common pleas to a suit for trespass at Wimbourne Minster, his main place of residence at this stage in his career was Shaftesbury. On behalf of clients, he often made the journey to Westminster: in February 1420, three months after the dissolution of his first Parliament, he appeared in the Exchequer as mainpernor for members of the Westbury family, including William, the future judge, pending a decision as to ownership of property in Somerset; and at the time of his fifth return to Parliament in 1422 he was acting as an attorney in a plea between the prior of Bruton and the Crown conducted in the Exchequer over the revenues of the priory, which he asserted was under the patronage of Sir Hugh Luttrell* of Dunster and so not subject to royal wardship during a vacancy.4 In the spring of the next year Squibbe was appointed to serve Joan of Navarre as bailiff of her dower lands in Somerset and Dorset; and it was during the period of four-and-a-half years in which he discharged the bailiffship that he again represented Shaftesbury in the House of Commons. From the Trinity term of 1427 Squibbe acted as a feoffee for John Hody, his fellow Member in three Parliaments, who was to rise to the office of chief justice. He also assisted Hody in his purchase of the Somerset manor of Stowell, helped him to entail the rest of his estates and, in 1428, stood surety for him at the Exchequer when he obtained the wardship of Sir Thomas Pomeroy’s* heir. It was in association with Hody, too, that before October 1430 he was entrusted by (Sir) John Stourton I*I (afterwards Lord Stourton) with various manors pertaining to his patrimony.5

In July 1430 the sheriff of Dorset had been ordered to replace Squibbe as a verderer of Gillingham forest on the ground of residential disqualification, but within a few years he acquired a reversionary interest in a small estate within the bounds of the forest. From about 1444 to 1453 he was a trustee of lands in Chicklade and Hindon, Wiltshire, to which Thomas Tropenell laid claim, but failed to appear to give evidence as to the purposes of the trust when the dispute over ownership was heard by Robert, Lord Hungerford. It looks as if he retired to live in Frome Quintin, since, as one of the wardens of that parish, he was involved in 1453 in a quarrel with the parishioners of the chapel of Evershot over contributions for repairs to the mother church, which was eventually settled only after an appeal to Rome. He is recorded as still living after the death of Lord Stourton in 1462, and may not have died until some years later.6

Ref Volumes: 1386-1421

Author: L. S. Woodger

Notes

Variants: Sqwybe, Swybbe.

  • 1. SC6/1093/3.
  • 2. CCR, 1429-35, p. 4.
  • 3. CPL, x. 655.
  • 4. CP40/623 m. 554d; Shaftesbury Recs. ed. Mayo, 76; CFR, xiv. 322; E368/195, recorda m. 25.
  • 5. Som. Feet of Fines (Som. Rec. Soc. xxii), 68, 192; CFR, xv. 248; CPR, 1429-36, pp. 112, 119; C.B.J. Stourton, Hist. Noble House of Stourton, i. 219.
  • 6. Dorset Feet of Fines, ii. 317; Tropenell Cart. ed. Davies, ii. 26-29, 31, 33, 48-50; CPL, x. 655; CCR, 1461-8, p. 125. The pedigree of the Squibbe family of Whitchurch, Dorset (Vis. Dorset (Harl. Soc. xx), 37) begins in 1477 with John Squibbe.