The exercise of ecclesiastical patronage could be an important profit of lordship for those Englishmen to whom lands were given in France. In November 1428 the University of Paris and Thomas de Courcelles came into the court to claim not only that they were opposed to the presentation of Michel Faucq by Walter Lord Filz. Walter to the church of Ecrammeville in Normandy, a presentation said to belong to the king, but also that the procedure pursued by the Englishman and his nominee through the courts of the duchy was contrary to the privilege accorded to the University and its members who were not obliged to plead elsewhere than in Paris.

On 4 February 1428 Lord Talbot received from Henry VI grant of lands in the ‘bailliages’ of Rouen and Caux, and elsewhere, which had been confiscated from Robert Stafford because, it was alleged, the town and castle of La Ferté-Bernard, of which he was captain, had, by his negligence, been captured by the enemy in February 1427.

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’.

Rewarded for his services at the battle of Verneuil with a grant of the lands of Tuillières to the value of 60 ‘livres’, early in 1434 William Zeman, who had already been involved in litigation over the lands, found himself sued by Guillaume and Guiot les Lormiers and Jean le Chandelier and his wife for a rent-charge of 12 ‘livres’ which they claimed on these lands. In March 1434 the Parlement, evidently after much consultation, found against Zeman who was ordered to pay several years of arrears.