FITZHERBERT, Nicholas

Since the early twelfth century the knightly family of Fitzherbert had been tenants of the priory of Tutbury at Norbury, on the Derbyshire side of the county border with Staffordshire. Their ancient ancestry was a source of pride to them: in his will of 1517, John Fitzherbert, our MP’s grandson, cited the fact that the manors of Norbury and Roston had ‘contynued in my name this CCCC yeres and more or there aboute’ among the justifications for disinheriting his daughter in favour of his brother. The status of the family had received recognition as early as 1252 when they secured a charter of free warren in these manors and in their lands at nearby Ash. Indeed, as physical embodiments of this early importance, there remains the fine monument of Sir Henry Fitzherbert† in the church at Norbury and the manor-house he built there. He represented Derbyshire in the Parliaments of May 1298 and January 1307, but, curiously, his immediate successors appear not to have maintained his prominence.4 Derbys. Arch. and Nat. Hist. Soc. vii. 221-2; S.M. Wright, Derbys. Gentry (Derbys. Rec. Soc. viii), 36-37; CChR, i. 403; Geneologist, n.s. vii. 131. Our MP’s father played little part in public affairs. Perhaps because he died relatively young, his recorded activity is limited to the attestation of the county’s parliamentary election returns in 1411 and April 1414.5 C219/10/6; 11/3. With the career of Nicholas, however, the family emerged from this period of comparative obscurity.

At his father’s death Nicholas Fitzherbert was a minor. Arrangements for his wardship proved complex. His father had died seised of only that part of the family’s lands that lay in Staffordshire; the Derbyshire lands, including the manor of Norbury, were in the hands of feoffees headed by Sir John Cockayne* and Thomas Okeover†. On 20 Oct. 1416 a grant of the wardship of the Staffordshire lands and the marriage of the heir was enrolled in the records of the duchy of Lancaster, but the grantees, John de la Pole* and Henry Booth, were already exercising these rights a month earlier when they came to an arrangement with the feoffees. On 25 Sept. the latter had agreed that de la Pole and Booth should have a 15-year lease of the Derbyshire property of the family in return for a payment of £40 to the three sisters of the ward. Presumably this payment was the only remaining charge on these lands under the terms of the feoffment, and the feoffees were thus prepared to surrender their interest in return for its discharge. Since Nicholas was later to marry a daughter of Booth, it is likely that their readiness to do so was due to an agreement that this marriage would take place.6 Derbys. RO, Okeover mss, D231M/E451 (calendared in Derbys. Chs. ed. Jeayes, 1769).

The length of the lease implies that Nicholas was only six years old when it was made. This is consistent with the fact that he does not reappear in the records until 1429, when, with his father-in-law, he won damages in an assize of novel disseisin.7 JUST1/1537, rot. 19d. It was not, however, until the early 1440s that he became a figure of any significance. It was at about this time that he, like so many of the Derbyshire gentry, expanded his horizons by finding a place as an esquire of the royal household. At Pentecost 1442 he received household robes for the first time, joining a local contingent which already included Fulk Vernon*, Walter Blount* and John Curson*. If he owed his place to an influential patron, there is nothing to suggest that person’s identity.8 E101/409/9.

Less happily, it was also at this time that Fitzherbert became involved in a serious dispute with two of his near neighbours, Ralph Basset of Blore and his father’s feoffee, Thomas Okeover. His earlier relations with the latter had been friendly for Okeover was one of his own feoffees in lands in Snelston near Norbury. These lands were to be one of the causes of the dispute, the other being the claims of Okeover, Basset and other local landholders to rights of common pasture in Norbury. Fitzherbert appears have been the first to court conflict by enclosing 150 acres there, thus creating a coalition of his neighbours against him. In May 1443 Basset and Okeover led a gang which cut down the hedges and levelled the ditch with which he had enclosed the disputed common. Fitzherbert replied by petitioning the chancellor and instigating an action for trespass in the court of King’s bench.9 C1/16/158; KB27/730, rot. 124d.

More significantly, Fitzherbert also presented a bill to the royal council. This is now lost, but among the fragmentary surviving conciliar records there is the text of the examination of Basset and Okeover in the Star Chamber on the following 29 June. They did not deny their presence with armed men or their intention to ‘drowe downe the ditch’, but implied that the fault lay with Fitzherbert for digging the ditch. They said that the ‘contrey was there that had interest in the commone’, naming Nicholas Montgomery, Joan, widow of Sir Thomas Clinton†, and others. The Council referred the matter to the judges and nothing further is heard of these deliberations, although it was no doubt at conciliar initiative that Basset and Okeover were required to find surety in Chancery to behave well towards our MP.10 PPC, vi. 290-1, 294-5; CCR, 1441-7, pp. 153, 200. In the following February Fitzherbert was able to secure the appointment of the justices of assize to inquire into Basset’s alleged offences against him, and soon after he won damages of £10 against his opponents on an action of trespass in the court of King’s bench.11 CPR, 1441-6, p. 246; KB27/738, rot. 73d; 739, rot. 76; 746, fines rot. 1d.

The apparent victory in this dispute marks Fitzherbert’s growing assertiveness in local affairs. In the late 1440s he no longer confined himself to the politics of his corner of Derbyshire but came to play a part in those of the county as a whole. On 19 Jan. 1447 he was elected to represent the shire in Parliament in what, judging from the relatively large number of attestors, was a disputed election. His return probably owed something to his Household connexion, as too did his appointment as sheriff in the following November even though he had no previous administrative experience.12 C219/15/4; CFR, xviii. 81. He was the first of his family to be appointed to the shrievalty since 1264. Not long afterwards the family’s social advance was marked in another way, with the marriage of Fitzherbert’s eldest son, Ralph, to an heiress, albeit not a very substantial one. It can be inferred from tax assessments that this marriage had taken place by 1451, when Ralph was assessed on an annual income of £10. His wife was Elizabeth, daughter and heiress of John Marshall of Upton in west Leicestershire. Marshall’s lands had been valued at £12 p.a. in the tax returns of 1435-6, and there can be little doubt that Ralph’s income was derived largely from this property.13 E179/91/73; 192/59.

It was at about this time that Fitzherbert’s career took a remarkable and unexpected turn. Through his second marriage, contracted at an unknown date, he had acquired interests in Shropshire. Little is known of his second wife, but she was either the daughter or the widow of one of the Ludlows of Hodnet and brought him a life interest in property significant enough to justify his distraint for knighthood in that county in 1458.14 C67/42, m. 30; E198/4/16. There is, however, no certain evidence that she brought him any property in the county town of Shrewsbury, and, even on the probable assumption that she did, it is hard to see why a man of his high gentry rank would have wished to involve himself in that borough’s affairs. Yet involve himself he did. On 8 Oct. 1450 he was admitted to the guild merchant and, most unusually, he went on to hold office, serving as one of the bailiffs in 1457-8.15 Shrewsbury assembly bk. 3365/67, ff. 20v, 97. Such a post was no sinecure, and he busied himself in protecting the interests of his fellow burgesses. The borough accounts for his term refer to the deputations he led to Chester and Tarporley to negotiate with Geoffrey Southworth* in the serious dispute pending between the town and various Lancashire gentry.16 Shrewsbury bailiffs’ accts. 3365/385, mm. 2-3. When he sued out a pardon on 1 Mar. 1458, ‘of Shrewsbury’ numbered among his aliases: C67/42, m. 30.

Fitzherbert’s mysterious interest in Shrewsbury was maintained alongside a continued involvement in Derbyshire politics. Like most of the leading gentry there, he was drawn into the disturbances which convulsed the county in the mid 1450s. As a near neighbour of the two leading protagonists, Sir Nicholas Longford and Walter Blount, he either had or was to form associations with both men. In January 1460 he was one of those in whom Longford enfeoffed his manor of Longford. Blount had been his parliamentary colleague in 1447, and the two of them had again been returned together at the Derbyshire election held on 8 Mar. 1453, when tensions among the shire elite were already apparent.17 Derbys. Chs. 1596; C219/16/2. Moreover, in the next reign the two men formed a close relationship, with Blount using his considerable influence at court to advance the Fitzherberts. It is thus perhaps not surprising that indictments taken by royal commissioners after the first round of the conflict provide contradictory evidence of Fitzherbert’s part in the troubles. He was indicted among those who assaulted the tenants of the Blounts on 17 May; who, ten days later at Longford, attacked and imprisoned a servant of the sheriff commissioned to deliver letters of privy seal to Sir Nicholas Longford; and who took part in the famous sack of the Blount manor at Elvaston on the following day. In each case, however, his name has been scored through, as has that of his son Ralph in the indictment concerning the sack of Elvaston (although Ralph’s name has been left un-erased in the indictment for the assault on the sheriff’s servant).18 KB9/12/1/13, 23, 24. The safest conclusion is that the Fitzherberts were suspected of being supporters of Longford, but that they did not participate in his crimes. This is certainly consistent with his later affiliation with the Blounts.

It may be that these dangerous disturbances in his native county prompted Fitzherbert to find a new focus for his energies in Shrewsbury, but, if so, the distraction was a brief one. Soon after he had ended his term as a bailiff there, he was named to an office more appropriate to his rank. In November 1458 he was pricked for a second term as sheriff of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. His appointment is explicable in terms of his Household connexion; and, as sheriff, he was responsible for conducting the Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire elections to the controversial Parliament of 1459, extending his term of office by a day to hold the latter as he had been empowered to do by a writ of privy seal.19 S.J. Payling, ‘Coventry Parl.’, Hist. Research, lx. 349-52. On 18 Jan. 1460 he was rewarded with an additional pardon of account of £20 over the £80 routinely granted to the sheriffs of Notts. and Derbys. and which he himself had been given near the beginning of his term: E28/88/33; E159/236, brevia Mich. rot. 12d, Easter rot. 6d.

Nonetheless, his Lancastrian associations did not prevent Fitzherbert from adapting to the change of regime. His first appointment to the county bench came in December 1460, when the Yorkists were in control of government. The trust placed in him by Edward IV is evident in his appointment to four commissions of arrest and one of array in the early 1460s. For his service he had some modest reward: on 6 Mar. 1463 he was granted the keepership of the park of Maunsell in the honour of Tutbury (to hold for life from Michaelmas 1461), and on the following 27 June he was granted that of the duchy park at nearby Shottle. His sons also benefited: in August 1461 his eldest son, Ralph, was appointed bailiff of the New Liberty in Derbyshire; four months later, Robert and John were granted the ten-year farm of the duchy of Lancaster’s lead mines in the soke of Wirksworth at the favourable annual rent of only £5 10s.; and Walter was joined with his father in the keepership of Shottle.20 DL37/32/15, 24; 54/16; R. Somerville, Duchy, i. 549.

There can be little doubt that the Fitzherberts found this favour with the new regime because they had joined themselves to the rising star of Blount, the leading Yorkist in their native county who was raised to the peerage as Lord Mountjoy in June 1465. On 29 Nov. 1464 our MP’s son John gained the first official appointment of what was to be a highly successful career in the Exchequer when Blount, as the newly-appointed treasurer, named him as clerk of the estreats. In the following November not only did John replace William Vernon* and his son, Henry†, as steward of the young John Mowbray, duke of Norfolk, at Bretby, but our MP was appointed to his third term as sheriff. He had been in office for less than a month when he secured a pardon of account in the sum of £100, a mark of favour which Mountjoy as treasurer was well placed to provide. Evidence of our MP’s connexion with Mountjoy at the local level comes in the will of their mutual neighbour, Nicholas Montgomery, drawn up at the end of 1465. The two men were jointly named as guardians of the testator’s son and heir, another Nicholas. Earlier, in June 1462, Fitzherbert had acted alongside Mountjoy’s eldest son William† as an arbiter.21 PRO List ‘Exchequer Officers’, 90; Wright, 139; E404/73/1/108; C140/17/20; Add. 6672, f.161v.

These strong Yorkist affiliations ensured that Fitzherbert remained heavily involved in administrative affairs. On the same day as his office as sheriff came to an end, he was, rather curiously, appointed to the lesser office of escheator in Shropshire. This did not, however, prevent him continuing his active role in the affairs of his native county. On 13 Jan. 1467 he sat as a j.p. at Derby with Mountjoy and (Sir) John Gresley*, and four months later he attested the election of Mountjoy’s eldest son to represent the county in Parliament.22 KB9/315/31; C219/17/1. This obvious commitment to the new regime threatened neither Fitzherbert nor Mountjoy during the brief restoration of Henry VI: the restored regime was too desperate for support to reject those former Household men who had supported Edward IV. Indeed, Fitzherbert was appointed to the quorum of the peace in the first commission issued after Henry’s Readeption. This may be taken to imply a connexion with George, duke of Clarence, who had held the honour of Tutbury since 1464, but there is no more direct evidence to support this supposition. Whatever his relationship with Clarence, there can be little doubt that Fitzherbert welcomed Edward’s return to power. The best indicator of his true loyalty is his appointment to the commission of array issued by Edward for Derbyshire on 26 Apr. 1471, shortly before the decisive Yorkist victory at the battle of Tewkesbury. When he sued out a general pardon in the following February it was as insurance against debts owed as a former sheriff and escheator rather than the consequences of equivocation during the Readeption.23 CPR, 1467-77, p. 284; C67/48, m. 15.

Despite his advancing years, Fitzherbert continued to be active in the early 1470s as an arbiter and feoffee for his near-neighbours in the south-west corner of Derbyshire.24 e.g. Derbys. Chs. 2288, 2366; Derbys. RO, Vernon of Sudbury mss, D410M/15/636; Add. Ch. 27510; Derbys. Feet of Fines (Derbys. Rec. Soc. xi), 1119. In these years he and his sons appear to have moved more closely into the King’s service. They benefited from the royal grants made in the aftermath of Clarence’s loss of the honour of Tutbury in December 1473. On 1 Apr. 1474 Ralph and John, who had joined their father on the Derbyshire bench at the end of the previous year, were granted for ‘good service’ a renewal of their farm of valuable lead mines in the wapentake of Wirksworth for 12 years, albeit at the greatly increased annual rent of 40 marks. More modestly, two days later, Nicholas himself joined John in a grant of the agistment and pannage in the parks of Maunsell (of which he was still probably keeper), and Beaurepaire at an annual rent of two marks. At the end of the same month the family’s high standing was further recognized when Ralph was among the first of those retained by William, Lord Hastings, after his confirmation by the King as steward of Tutbury; and in the following June John secured further advancement in the Exchequer with appointment as foreign apposer. Finally, on 31 May 1475 our MP was himself granted ‘in consideration of his expenses in the King’s service’ a tun of red wine to be taken annually from royal prises in the port of London.25 DL37/56/37, 43; W.H. Dunham jnr., Lord Hastings’ Indentured Retainers, 119; PRO List ‘Exchequer Officers’, 83; CPR, 1467-77, p. 518.

Fitzherbert died soon after. A writ of diem clausit extremum was issued on 20 July 1476 in respect of his property in Derbyshire, but no consequent inquisition survives. His monumental effigy in the church of Norbury represents him in plate armour with a collar of suns and roses. At the west side of his tomb chest are two female figures representing his two wives, and on the north and south sides the figures of his ten sons and seven daughters (their names were originally painted but none can now be read). Both his tomb and that of his son and heir Ralph were commissioned by his grandson John, probably in the 1490s.26 CFR, xxi. 330; Derbys. Arch. and Nat. Hist. Soc. xxv. 86-88; cxxxi. 242n. The lost epitath on our MP’s tomb misdates his death to 19 Nov. 1473 and is clearly, on this and other grounds, not contemporary.

It is a measure of the rise of the Fitzherberts during the second half of the fifteenth century that, in a marriage contract of 1501, their estates were valued at as much as £120. This compares with our MP’s tax assessments of £20 p.a. in both 1435-6 and 1450-1 (his father had been assessed on the same sum in 1412), and, while these assessments are certainly underestimates, there can be little doubt that the resources of the family were significantly expanded in the time of our MP and his sons. This rise occurred despite what must have been the considerable burden of his very large family.27 Staffs. RO, Stafford fam. mss, D641/5/TS/1/1; E179/91/73; 240/266; Feudal Aids, i. 414. Indeed, it is a tribute to the success of his career that he was able to contract good marriages for several of his children. His eldest son married an heiress; his second son, John, a niece of the wealthy Nottinghamshire esquire, William Babington*;28 This marriage presumably took place before Nov. 1465 when John and his father acted in the conveyances attendant on the marriage of Babington’s nephew to a da. of (Sir) Richard Illingworth*: CCR, 1461-8, pp. 378-9. another son, Robert, a daughter of the London draper, Sir Ralph Josselyn†;29 J.C. Cox, Notes on Churches Derbys. iii. 236. Robert himself became a draper in London: CCR, 1468-76, 39, 642. and another, William, a daughter of Robert Fraunceys*. The marriages of his daughters are less well recorded, but one, Isabel, appears also to have married into the Babington family, and another, Joan, was the second wife of John Cotton of Hamstall Ridware in Staffordshire.30 Wright, 213; S. Shaw, Staffs. i. 155*.

Nicholas’s career and, more particularly, that of his son, John, who advanced to be King’s remembrancer in the Exchequer, demonstrate that the family had a talent for something more than self-perpetuation. This became even more apparent in the generation after John. Our MP’s two grandsons by his eldest son, Ralph, were men of considerable intellectual ability. The elder, another John (d.1531), has been identified as the author of the Boke of Surveying and the Boke of Husbandry, both published in 1523, and the younger, Sir Anthony (d.1538), j.c.p. from 1522, compiled an even more notable work, the Graunde Abridgment, an authoritative digest of common law. Less happily, in the next generation the family suffered grievously at the hands of the Crown for their adherence to the Roman Church: Sir Anthony’s son Sir Thomas† died a prisoner in the Tower of London in 1591.31 Profession, Vocation and Culture ed. Clough, 183, 195, 210n.; Derbys. Arch. and Nat. Hist. Soc. xxv. 242-59; The Commons 1509-58, ii. 139.