page_title: John Cokayne (died 1438)
section_title: Armed marauder
hierarchical_section_title: John Cokayne (died 1438) / Early career / Armed marauder
context_page_description: Sir John Cockayne (died 1438) was an English soldier, politician and landowner whose wealth made him a major force in the affairs of Derbyshire under the House of Lancaster. After numerous acts of criminality in concert with other Midlands landowners, he became a member of the Lancastrian affinity centred on John of Gaunt and a supporter of Henry IV. He fought in two campaigns of the Hundred Years War but his violence and lawlessness continued and he was decidedly out of favour during the reign of Henry V. With power less concentrated in the early years of Henry VI, he was able to serve three terms as High Sheriff of Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and the Royal Forests and to wield considerable power and influence. He represented Derbyshire no less than nine times and Warwickshire twice in the House of Commons of England.
context_section_description: Sir John Cokayne first appearance in the history of his region was as a bandit leader in the reign of Richard II. On 26 February 1388, while John of Gaunt was abroad and the Lords Appellant, including Gaunt's son,  Henry Bolingbroke, were at the height of their power, Cockayne's name headed the list of a group of young landed gentry accused of "divers enormous offences in the county of Derby, against the ministers, officers and servants of the king's uncle John, duke of Lancaster." It was alleged that they had set an ambush to kill Gaunt's officials. A substantial party of Midlands landowners, headed by Robert de Ferrers, 5th Baron Ferrers of Chartley, was deputed to bring Cockayne and his gang to justice. Among the posse were Sir Walter Blount, a justice of the peace, a veteran of Gaunt's campaigns and his main representative in the region, John Ipstones and Thomas Beek, both rewarded by Gaunt for their service in his campaign for the Crown of Castile. Ipstones had a reputation for violence and had besieged Blount's home with an armed band the previous year during a dispute over a bond that Blount had taken from John Moston, a tenant of Ipstones. This internecine warfare among Gaunt's affinity was a principal part of the wave of violence afflicting the north Midlands, a major embarrassment for Gaunt, who had been arguing in parliament that the great lords' affinities were a force for order. Cokayne's main disruptive activity seems to have been breaking into Gaunt's enclosures. Despite his family links with Gaunt, Cockayne was not at this time part of the duke's affinity: Simon Walker, the historian of the affinity, found no clear evidence of that before 1398, the year of Gaunt's death. The commission to arrest him named nine accomplices and he was said to have a retinue of twenty. However, he soon made friends with some of the very Lancastrian affinity members who had been commissioned to arrest him.
  Ipstones had long been involved in a complex dispute over lands at Tean, Staffordshire, and Hopton, Shropshire, which he claimed by right of his mother. The other claimant, Maud Swynnerton, a cousin, was still a child in 1381 when Ipstones seized the manors with the help of Richard Thornbury and John Wollaston. Ipstones seems to have quarrelled with Thornbury, his chief accomplice, as he was granted a pardon for his murder on 13 November 1387. Cokayne was one of those whom he recruited to fill the gaps in his own entourage. Maud continued to uphold her side in the property dispute and, now a widow, was living with Joan Peshale, her mother-in-law, at La Mote, a house within Chetwynd Park in Shropshire. Cokayne joined Ipstones and Beek in abducting Maud from Chetwynd in December 1388. They were said to be "armed as for war," but stole a collection of additional weapons as they took Maud, who was forced to marry William Ipstones, Sir John's son, and made to renounce her claim to the disputed estates. However, Joan Peshale pursued the matter through the courts, alleging that the gang had entered her manor by scaling the walls with ladders, threatened her and her tenants, attacked her servants and abducted a maidservant called Alice Costeyne as well as Maud. Property losses were put at £100. Cokayne was prominently named in all the allegations as well as in the gaol delivery made at Shrewsbury Castle when they were committed for trial in 1390. However, they were acquitted by the jury, probably because of intimidation.
caption: Richard II of England.
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