John de Sotheron

Sir John de Sotheron (died after 1398) was an English landowner, lawyer and judge, who served briefly as Lord Chief Justice of Ireland.^[1]

He was the son of Thomas de Sotheron or de Sotherne, Lord of the Manor of Great Mitton in Lancashire, and grandson of Sir Robert de Sotheron;^[2] Mitton had passed by inheritance to the de Sotherons from the de Mitton family.^[3] He inherited his father's lands in about 1369; at the time he was involved in a dispute with nearby Cockersand Abbey over the advowson (i.e. the right to select his own candidate as parish priest) of Mitton Church. In February 1368 he was the defendant in a claim for a debt of 40 shillings brought against him by William de Mirfeld.^[4] He is known to have been acting as an attorney at this time.^[5]

In 1377 he was pardoned for killing John de Holden. He lived in a violent age, where cases of manslaughter and even murder among the ruling class were not uncommon, and a royal pardon was easy enough to obtain; nor would a criminal record necessarily hinder one's career, as de Sotheron's own later life shows.^[1]

In 1384 he was sent to Ireland as Chief Justice of the Irish Common Pleas, but instead took office as second justice of the Court of Common Pleas (Ireland),^[6] and almost at once became Lord Chief Justice.^[1] He served for one year, during which there is a record in the Patent Rolls of him as one of three senior judges who acted for the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in his absence in hearing petitions.^[7] He returned to England after a year, then came back to Ireland in the summer of 1386, as a legal adviser to Sir John Stanley, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and was given letters of protection in June for the journey.^[8] He remained in Ireland for several years; he lived then at Dangan, County Meath (his wife's family, the Cusacks, held substantial lands in Meath).^[9] Ball states that his wife Joanna was kidnapped from Dangan Castle in 1392, but gives no further details of the episode.^[1]

He returned to England sometime after 1392, was knighted, and retired to his estates in Lancashire.^[1]

He married Joanna, daughter of Sir Simon Cusack,^[2] who was summoned to the so-called Good Parliament of 1376 as Baron Culmullen, and had extensive lands in Ireland, including Culmullin and Dangan, County Meath.^[9] Joanna and her sister Margaret presumably inherited a share of these lands, although their father had a son John by his second wife Nicola Bathe, who was apparently still a minor when his father died. His father had granted him the family estates at Dangan.^[10] Nicola remarried another senior Irish judge, John de Shriggeley.^[1] She and her second husband fought a long and bitter battle for possession of Culmullen against various Cusack relatives; the feud dragged on into the next generation, and caused a number of violent deaths.^[11]

John and Joanna had two surviving children, Christopher and Isabella, who married Walter Hawksworth of Hawksworth, Yorkshire: her father gave her a dowry of 80 marks.^[2] He was still living in 1397/8, when he and his son and heir Christopher were in dispute with Roger White and others as to the ownership of lands at Great Mitton.^[3]

The Great Mitton estate passed to Christopher, who had two sons, John (living 1419), who was parish priest of Upton-cum-Chalvey, Buckinghamshire (now a suburb of Slough),^[2] and Robert, who inherited the estates. His descendants remained at Great Mitton for several generations.^[2] The family name was later spelt Sherburne.^[3]