John Heydon (died 1479)

John Heydon (

John was the son of a yeoman, William Baxter of Heydon, Norfolk. Legal records from as late as 1450 refer to him as 'John Heydon of Baconsthorpe alias John Baxter of Heydon'. His mother's name was Jane, daughter and heiress of John Warren, of Lincolnshire, whose arms, Chequey or and azure, on a canton gules, a lion rampant argent, is also quartered by the Heydons family;^[1] William was the first of his family that settled at Baconsthorpe, having purchased a moiety of the manor of Woodhall in this town, and was buried in the chapel in the north isle, with this epitaph, now lost: O Jesu tolle a me quod feci Et remaneat mihi quod tu fecisti, Ne pereat quod sanguine tuo redemisti.^[1]

John was educated at the Inns of Court, and, by 1428, was acting on behalf of Edmund Winter of Town Barningham, Norfolk, likely in connection with Winter's dispute with the Paston family over the manor of East Beckham.^[2][3][4][1]

In 1431, he was appointed

The conflict between the Pastons and Heydon over the years is recorded in the Paston Letters. In 1448, it centred on the manor of Gresham, which William Paston had purchased from Thomas Chaucer. In February of that year, 'almost certainly on Heydon's initiative', Robert Hungerford, 3rd Baron Hungerford, asserted his wife's claim to Gresham, then in the hands of William Paston's son, John. Paston attempted to recover the manor through negotiation and legal action; both proved fruitless, and, in October 1448, Paston asserted possession by sending his wife, Margaret, to reside in a house in Gresham. In the following January Hungerford's servants assaulted and damaged the house, forcing Margaret Paston to leave; Hungerford remained in possession of Gresham for the next three years. In a letter in 1448 Margaret referred to Heydon as a 'false shrew'.^[7][5][8]

Suffolk fell from power at the beginning of 1450, and Heydon and Tuddenham immediately found themselves under attack by their principal opponents in East Anglia. Sir John Fastolf, a kinsman of John Paston's wife, Margaret, immediately requested a servant to provide him with a list of the wrongs which Heydon had done to him over the previous thirteen years, and in October 1450, a commission was empowered to inquire into complaints in East Anglia.

Indictments were drawn up which provided details of Heydon's and Tuddenham's actions during the previous fifteen years; according to Richmond, these allegations were perhaps biased, since Fastolf,

Heydon died in 1479, leaving more than sixteen manors to his son and heir Sir Henry Heydon, purchased with the wealth acquired during his career. Among them was his seat at Baconsthorpe, where he had rebuilt the manor house, a project perhaps begun about 1446 when the King granted him forty oak trees from the forest at Gimingham.^[5]

His will, which he made in March 1478, makes no reference to his wife or to any child other than his son, Henry. In addition to numerous charitable bequests, he left £200 towards the marriages of his granddaughters, and £20 towards his burial in the Heydon chapel in Norwich Cathedral.^[2]

Marriage and issue

Heydon married Eleanor Winter,^[1] the daughter of his first patron, Edmund Winter (d.1448) of Barningham, by whom he had a son and heir, Sir Henry Heydon.^[11][2]

He disputed the parentage of a second child born to his wife Eleanor. In a letter written in July 1444, Margaret Paston claimed that Heydon would have nothing to do with either his wife or the child, and that he had threatened to cut off his wife's nose and kill the child.^[12][2]

Notes

References

• Castor, Helen (2004). "Paston, John (1421–1466), landowner and letter writer".
  doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/21511. (Subscription or UK public library membership
  required.)
• Davis, Norman, ed. (1971). The Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century, Part I. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
  ISBN 9780197224212
  .
• Gibbons, Alfred (1888). Early Lincoln Wills. Lincoln: James William son. p. 173.
• Gies, Frances, and Joseph Gies (1999). A Medieval Family: The Pastons of Fifteenth Century England. Harper-Collins e-books.
  ISBN 9780062016744.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link
  )
• Gurney, Daniel (1848). The Record of the House of Gournay. London: John Bowyer Nicholas. Retrieved 5 October 2013.
• Moreton, C.E. (2004). "Heydon, Sir Henry (d. 1504)".
  doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/13167. (Subscription or UK public library membership
  required.)
• Richmond, Colin (2005). "East Anglian Politics and Society in the Fifteenth Century: Reflections, 1956–2003". In Harper-Bill, Christopher (ed.). Medieval East Anglia. Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press.
  ISBN 9781843831518
  .
• Richmond, Colin (1990). The Paston family in the Fifteenth Century: The First Phase. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  ISBN 9780521520270
  .
• Smith, Anthony (2004). "Heydon , John (d.1479)".
  doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/52787. (Subscription or UK public library membership
  required.)