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.

Background and early career

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; 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. He is known to have been acting as an attorney at this time.

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. and almost at once became Lord Chief Justice. 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. 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). 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. Nicola remarried another senior Irish judge, John de Shriggeley.

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. 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.

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), and Robert, who inherited the estates. His descendants remained at Great Mitton for several generations. The family name was later spelt Sherburne.