Adam Fraunceys rose to become one of the wealthiest and most influential members of the London merchant class of his generation, yet of his background we know virtually nothing. He was born, probably in the first decade of the fourteenth century, in the obscurity of a provincial town or village, perhaps in the north of England, of parents whose names alone we know. His patronymic is of little help in locating his origins. The name, which simply means Frenchman, was common enough throughout England, and there were many men of that name engaged in trade in London itself at this time who were not necessarily of the same family. Indeed, not a few of the Fraunceys living in England in the fourteenth century were also called Adam, a fact which not only adds to our problems of identification but was to cause some embarrassment to the London mercer himself in later life.

John Pyel was a Northamptonshire man from the village of Irthling-borough, lying on the upper bank of the River Nene four miles northeast of Wellingborough. Situated on the principal trade route from Northampton to Peterborough, and indeed to the port of King's Lynn, the village was well-placed to transport commercial produce, which in the fourteenth century consisted principally of hides for the leather industry and wool. The surrounding area was also likely to have been rich in cereals and other arable crops. John Pyel inherited a plot of land in the village from his father, John senior, in 1348, and, although by now settled in London, he began from about this date to build up an extensive estate in this part of Northamptonshire. He certainly showed special concern for Irthlingborough. It was at his prompting that Peterborough abbey was granted a licence in 1375 to establish the parish church of St Peter as a college and it was to St Peter's that he granted the remainder of his estate and in its porch that he was to be buried. He also made bequests in his will to both parish churches in the village and provided for thirteen crosses to be set up there and for repairs to the bridge and highways.

Pyel's first acquisitions in his native county took place in 1348. It was in this year that his father, John senior, died, and left to his son a plot of land in Irthlingborough. The details of this and of other purchases in the village were apparently recorded elsewhere, possibly in another register, and so, unfortunately, the cartulary gives no further account of them. In the same year John Pyel junior also began making small purchases in the neighbouring parishes. He bought some nine acres of arable land, meadow, a dovecote and some land held in dower in Little Addington, a settlement lying barely two miles north and east of Irthlingborough. These he increased in desultory fashion over the next few years, as opportunity arose, adding 2½ virgates in 1351, 7½ acres in 1352 and a messuage with a further virgate of land in 1354. He also bought small plots of land in Great Addington and, a little further afield, in the hamlets of Slipton and Twywell. Yet although he continued to buy land in the Addingtons and became a respected patron of Little Addington church, he never acquired the manor itself, content to remain a substantial landholder and rentier. Pyel's piecemeal acquisitions here, however, contrast with his principal purchase of 1348, the manor of Cransley.

The first purchases made by Fraunceys outside the city came, as with Pyel, at the time of the Black Death. Unlike Pyel, however, he seems not to have returned to his native county, wherever it may have been, to buy land, but stayed quite close to the city. Fraunceys was associated with Pyel in a number of property transactions in and near London, certainly from the late 1340s to the early 1360s. He was also nominally involved with Pyel's dealings in Northamptonshire, as joint purchaser or trustee. His purchases in his own right, however, focus on north Middlesex and the south-western fringes of Essex, within striking distance of London. On 1 February 1349 Fraunceys bought, jointly with Thomas de Langeton, the manor of Wyke from John Gauston and his wife, Eve. This manor, which included Hackney Wick, and parts of Old Ford and Stepney, had been consolidated by a London draper, Simon de Abyndon, mostly in the second decade of the fourteenth century. After Simon's death in 1322, his widow, Eve, married John de Causton, a London mercer, who thereby received the estate.

Both Adam Fraunceys and John Pyel amassed a large stock of tenements and rents in London, although Fraunceys seems to have been the more assiduous and consistent in property dealing in the city. It is indeed quite likely that buying and selling real estate formed a major part of Fraunceys's business in London, and that medium- and long-term investment in these assets provided him with a not insignificant income. We may be led to such a conclusion, of course, because there is much more information concerning the property deals of both Fraunceys and Pyel than there is about their other entrepreneurial ventures, but the scale and frequency of these transactions, certainly in the case of Adam Fraunceys, are evidence that he attached considerable importance to them. Here, too, there was a divergence between Fraunceys and Pyel. Although from early on Pyel was ready to co-operate with Fraunceys in the acquisition of property in London, he only came later in life to purchase property there on his own account. This is consistent with the generally detached attitude he seems to have assumed towards the city, until political commitment and financial involvement made his recular presence in the capital unavoidable.

A cartulary (Latin: chartularium) is a compilation of deeds and charters, mostly relating to land rights and other privileges and franchises which an individual or corporate body possessed. Its purpose was to gather together for ease of reference copies of these important muniments, so that the originals might be located at a time of legal dispute, or evidence to tide be supplied should those charters have been lost or destroyed.

The manuscript of John Pyel's cartulary is part of the great collection of manuscripts which belonged to Augustine Vincent, Rouge Rose pursuivant in 1616 and Windsor herald by his death in 1626. The collection was bequeathed to Ralph Sheldon of Beoley, Worcestershire, by Vincent's son, John, in 1671 and was presented by Sheldon to the College of Arms in 1684, a fact confirmed in the case of the Pyel cartulary by an inscription inside the front cover. The manuscript was bound by Augustine Vincent in a fashion similar to others in his collection, in reverse calf binding with leather clasps, later reinforced with brass strips. The outer cover is tooled with the motif ‘ZZ’ and inside is inscribed ‘Vincent 64’. It contains 120 folios of paper composed in nine quires of which none bears a number or identifying mark. The folios measure 270 × 202mm and the text varies between 196 × 115mm and 205 × 155mm. There are six fly leaves at the beginning and two at the end. The collation is as follows:

18 (2,3,5,6 missing); 27 (12–14 missing); 38; 48; 57+1; 67+1; 78 (3,5,14 missing); 87 (8–12 missing); 96 (5 strip c.4cm wide, 7,8 missing).

It seemed that the most useful treatment of both manuscripts was to produce a calendar in English rather than a full edition. Certain words or phrases in the original languages have been included in italics and in round brackets where the meaning may be obscure or to indicate variant spellings, and I have left wholly in the original the preface to the Fraunceys cartulary, where the scribe has given an account of his own editorial method and how it related to the archival system. Each item, whether charter or memorandum, has been numbered separately and the original language noted at the end. In the case of the Fraunceys cartulary, in which the details of each charter were written in Latin and all memoranda and scribal comments written in French, language has only been noted where an original charter was found to be in French. Where the documents from which the cartularies were compiled have been located, references are given below the respective entries.