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SOME ANCIENT INDICTMENTS IN THE KING’S BENCH REFERRING TO KENT, 1450-1452 By
R. Virgoe, B.A. Page 216

three former had taken a leading part in bringing about the agreement of 6 July 1450 that had preceded the dispersal of Cade’s followers.1 Probably they had promised that the complaints so bitterly made against the local officials in Kent should be investigated: in contrast to 1381 these promises were kept.
   The documents in the file are in the form of neatly drawn up rolls and do not include any of the original bills and other papers save the letters patent appointing the commission. They contain presentments made by jurors from the various hundreds of Kent and from the body of the county. They consist almost entirely of allegations of extortion, forcible disseisin and other offences, against gentlemen and officials, petty and exalted, from the late Lord Say and recent sheriffs down to minor bailiffs and their servants. The jurors clearly saw in this commission an opportunity for redress against the many royal and seigneurial officials whose corruption and oppression had reached new heights in the previous years. Another group of indictments charges such men as Lords Dudley and Rivers, Sir Thomas Stanley and Thomas Danyell for acts committed from 18 to 20 June 1450 when they were in command of the forces pursuing Cade’s rebels into Kent.
   Although proceedings appear to have continued seriously into the autumn and the last venire facias was for 17 December, by that date the position of the Duke of York 

and the "reforming party" was weakening and it is unlikely that anything further was done then or later. A number of those accused appear to have made fine for their offences, many were found "not guilty" of at least some of the charges, but the result of most cases is not known. It is unlikely that anything very serious happened to those indicted, but the accusations do throw considerable light on conditions in Kent in the decade preceding Cade’s rising.2

   (iii) K.B.9, file 47. This file contains indictments taken at Tonbridge from 26 June to 1 July 1451 before justices acting under a commission of oyer and terminer issued on 27 January 1451 to try all manner
   1 Collections of a London Citizen, ed. J. Gairdner (Camden Soc., New Series 17, 1876), p. 193.
  
According to a 15th century manuscript used by John Stow and now British Museum MS. Cotton Roll, ii, 23 (printed in part by C. L. Kingsford, English Historical Literature in the Fifteenth Century, pp. 358-68) thirty-two of the chief supporters of the Duke of Suffolk’s regime, including Dudley, Rivers, Stanley and Danyell, were indicted before the two archbishops and the Duke of Buckingharn at Rochester on the feast of the Assumption (15 August) and the feast of St. Laurence (10 August). The date cannot be correct, for on 19 August James Gresham wrote to John Paston that "this same Moneday (17 August) goth my Lord Chauncellor [Kemp] and my Lord of Buckingham into Kent to sitte upon an oier and determiner at Rochester" (Paston Letters. ed. J. Gairdner, 1872, i, p. 137). But it is quite likely that such indictments were made, though no record of them now survives.

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