XX Thomas Overton v. Sir John Fastolf

Abstract

It is not surprising that the longest suit on record involving Englishmen in France in these years should have had as its protagonist Sir John Fastolf who, in this suit, was at the centre of a lengthy legal process against one of his chief servants, Thomas Overton.Stripped of its inessentials, the suit was concerned with the charge that Overton had been cheating Fastolf of moneys due to him and, above all, that he had constantly refused to produce the accounts by which, it was implied, the charge might have been disproved. At the root of the trouble were the characters of the two opponents, each intent upon outdoing the other, neither, as a consequence, being shown up in a good light. If Overton, who said he was a well-born clerk educated at Winchester (and it was as an unmarried clerk that the bishop of Paris sought him for his own jurisdiction) was, in fact, a rogue and a deceiver, Fastolf appears as high-handed in his dealings with his servant. It was as denigrators of character that both men excelled, Fastolf depicting his servant as a man of mean birth, bigamous, a player of dice whom he had helped to promote from his lowly origins, while Overton was alleged to have stated that his master was a ‘chevalier fuitif’, a reference to Fastolf's flight from the field at Patay. The suit is also notable for Overton's full-scale attack on the ‘establishment’, and for the accusations brought against him of having denounced the ‘chappeles fourréz’ (or members of the Parlement), and of being the author of seditious pamphlets. The duke of Bedford had supported Fastolf before, in his suit against Denis Sauvage; now Overton's ridicule of the administration both in England and France, where Overton was accused of distributing his pamphlets, forced the regent to join suit again with his ‘grand maître d'holel’.