BURGOYNE, Thomas

The epitome of a thrusting and ambitious late medieval lawyer – full of ‘insatiable covetise’ according to one of his opponents12 C1/40/30. The words are the abbess of Denney’s. – Burgoyne divided his career between his native Cambridgeshire and London. There is no known evidence for his legal training, although he may well have attended a London inn of court. In becoming a lawyer, he was following in the footsteps of his grandfather, a clerk to the Cambridgeshire j.p.s in the early 1390s, and his father, a legal adviser to the borough of Cambridge. Little is recorded of Burgoyne before his father John’s death sometime in the mid 1430s, but he must have been a young man when, in May 1426, he and his father acted as trustees for John Hore*.13 CAD, ii. 3040. In the following year, Thomas’s brother-in-law, the Essex lawyer Richard Baynard*, appointed both Burgoynes his executors. Thomas inherited most of his father’s estate, which consisted of property at Dry Drayton, Impington, Linton, Hildersham and Caxton. John’s younger son, William, succeeded to the Burgoyne manor at Caxton, although Thomas also had a stake in that parish, having obtained the farm of the rectory there from St. George’s College, Windsor, in 1430. (This was a long-term arrangement, for he was still leasing it from the college in the early 1460s.)14 The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 427-8; St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, recs. XV/48/10, 12, 23, 26, 31. Thomas’s estates were certainly modest at this stage of his career, for he was assessed at a mere £30 p.a. in lands for the subsidy of 1436. By the 1440s, Thomas also possessed a manor at Walton in Buckinghamshire, although how he came by that property and whether he still held it at his death is unknown. In late 1441, he leased it out for a year to a husbandman from Aylesbury, whom he sued for non-payment of his farm in the middle of the same decade.15 E159/212, recorda Hil. rot. 14 (i); CP40/736, rot. 437d.

Thomas had certainly established himself at London by 1434, since he was then one of the under sheriffs of the City. The appointment became a lifelong one in July 1441, when the common council decided that, for the sake of economy and convenience, under sheriffs should in future remain in office indefinitely during good behaviour.16 Cal. Letter Bk. London, K, 257; Corp. London RO, jnl. 3, f. 91. In all likelihood, Burgoyne was already married to his first wife, Isabel, in 1434, although the earliest known reference to them as man and wife is a royal pardon that they received in July 1437.17 C67/38, m. 7. Isabel’s father, Adam Book, is an obscure figure, but it is known that he was connected with the mercer, Geoffrey Boleyn*, who was to become one of Burgoyne’s associates.18 Cal. Letter Bk. London, K, 105. In his will of 1463, Boleyn gave directions for the foundation of a chantry for the benefit of the souls of himself, his first wife, his parents and Adam Book: PCC 1 Godyn (PROB11/5, ff. 3v-6). It is possible that Boleyn’s first wife, Denise, was another of Book’s daughters. Burgoyne had five children by Isabel, including his heir, John. After her death (perhaps in the late 1440s), she was buried in the chapel of St. Thomas in ‘Bowchirch’ (possibly St. Mary at Bow). He probably did not marry his second wife, Alice, much before 1450, for both his children by her were still below the age of 21 at his death.19 PCC 1 Wattys (PROB11/6, ff. 4v-5v). Burgoyne’s legal training ensured that he was soon involved in the affairs of prominent Londoners. In 1439, he witnessed the will of Robert Warner*;20 Cart. St. Bartholomew’s Hosp. ed. Kerling, no. 1144. and by the early 1440s he was acting as an executor of the grocer, John Wood,21 CP40/741, rots. 445, 447; 744, rot. 375. and as a feoffee on behalf of other leading citizens.22 Corp. London RO, hr 170/14, 171/46, 49. Later in the same decade, he took up his duties as an executor of another Londoner, Robert Clopton*, one of his ‘kinsmen’.23 CP40/752, rot. 465d; 753, rot. 339; 755, rot. 450d; 756, rot. 303d.

Among the institutions in the City with which Burgoyne had dealings were the Drapers’ Company, of which Clopton was a member, the Mercers’ Company and the hospital of St. Bartholomew in West Smithfield. Burgoyne served as a legal adviser to the Drapers’, which he himself joined. In 1441-2, he received a yard and a quarter of scarlet and violet cloth, worth 13s. 4d., from the company, which he paid 12d. in quarterage fees during the same year.24 A.H. Johnson, Hist. Drapers’ Co. i. 344, 348. Burgoyne was active on behalf of the Mercers’ at the end of 1457, when he gave it his counsel in discussions relating to its quit rents from property near the Guildhall.25 Acts of Ct. Mercers’ Co. 1453-1527 ed. Lyell and Watney, 45-46. Since he died in 1470, he cannot have been the Thomas Burgoyne who was a mercer of the City in the mid 1470s: CCR, 1468-76, no. 1309. Yet, given the MP’s ties with the mercers, it is possible that this namesake was his son by his 2nd marriage. Burgoyne had become associated with St. Bartholomew’s hospital by 1442, when he acted as an arbitrator in a dispute between it and its sister foundation, St. Bartholomew’s priory. The quarrel, just one in a long series of dissensions between the two institutions stretching back to the twelfth century, concerned the terms of a composition that Simon Sudbury, a former bishop of London, had made following a quarrel between the priory and hospital in Edward III’s reign. The award decided upon by Burgoyne and two other lawyers, the future judges John Markham and Nicholas Aysshton*, was dated 5 July. They largely upheld the previous award and directed that the master and brethren of the hospital should swear an oath of obedience to the priory. They also directed that two representatives of the hospital should in future participate in a formal procession and thanksgiving at the priory every St. Bartholomew’s Day (24 Aug.).26 Webb, i. 74, 78-79; CPL, xi. 608-15.

Burgoyne’s association with the hospital was a lifelong one. Four years after making this award, he was associated with William Clere (clerk of the King’s works), Henry Frowyk I*, Richard Sturgeon, a clerk of the Crown, and others in a series of transactions by which the King granted certain lands in Hendon, Middlesex, to the hospital.27 N. Moore, Hist. St. Bartholomew’s Hosp. ii. 18-19; Cart. St. Bartholomew’s Hosp. nos. 1159-62, app. ii (p. 176); CPR, 1441-6, pp. 416-17. Later, in 1450, an inquisition found that it would not prejudice the King’s interests if Burgoyne and others were to convey to John Wakeryng, master of the hospital, some lands in Tottenham and Harringay.28 C143/452/21. In the same year, Burgoyne and Wakeryng were among those appointed to arbitrate in a dispute between Agnes Brugges and Thomas Ive of London.29 CCR, 1447-54, p. 402. By 1456, Burgoyne was paying the hospital an annual rent of 53s. 4d. for a large house within its precinct, but had probably already held it for some time by that date.30 Cart. St. Bartholomew’s Hosp. app. i. no. 26. Later, in October 1468, Burgoyne was again associated with Wakeryng, by then no longer master of St. Bartholomew’s, in a grant of land connected with the hospital.31 Ibid. no. 1107, app. ii (p. 176).

Perhaps the most important of Burgoyne’s connexions among individual citizens was the mercer, Geoffrey Boleyn. In the mid 1440s, he and Boleyn were co-plaintiffs in a debt suit initiated in the court of common pleas.32 CP40/734, rot. 512d; 736, rot. 186. The two men were probably on friendly terms, for in later years Burgoyne was to act as a trustee for manors Boleyn had acquired in his native Norfolk and Kent.33 CFR, xix. 251; CAD, ii. C1784, C2624. In January 1462, both men were among those to whom the King made a release of all his rights in a manor at Abbotsley, Huntingdonshire, which William, Viscount Beaumont, had forfeited following his attainder the previous year. (They were possibly acting on behalf of another Londoner, John Lok†, who seems to have acquired the manor).34 CPR, 1461-7, p. 94; CP, ii. 62; VCH Hunts. ii. 256. In his will of the following year, Boleyn appointed Burgoyne one of his executors and bequeathed him the substantial sum of £30 for his trouble.35 PCC 1 Godyn; CCR, 1461-8, pp. 206-7. Within weeks of Boleyn’s death on 17 June 1463, Burgoyne and his co-executors, Ralph Verney* and Richard Needham*, were seeking to ensure the repayment of the substantial sums that the late alderman had lent to the Crown.36 E403/830, mm. 1-2. In the following year, he and other Boleyn trustees were parties to an assize of novel disseisin upholding the deceased’s title to holdings at Hever and Chiddingstone in Kent.37 C66/509, m. 7d; CAD, i. C137.

Notwithstanding his London career, Burgoyne remained involved in the affairs of his native county, where he served as a j.p. and which he represented in the Parliament of 1442. During this assembly, he attended to personal as well as public affairs, beginning the process of safeguarding himself from the possibility of legal sanctions arising from the outlawry of a namesake, Thomas Burgoyne of Lamberhurst, Kent. This Kentish gentleman likewise had a connexion with London and it was as ‘lately of London’ that he had incurred the outlawry, for failing to answer a suit for debt in the court of common pleas. Concerned that the authorities might mistakenly take action against him rather than Thomas of Lamberhurst, the MP obtained a royal writ directing the court to investigate the matter, just over a fortnight after the Parliament opened. In the following Trinity term, a jury at Westminster declared that the outlawry did indeed apply to the Lamberhurst Thomas and not to the MP.38 CP40/724, rot. 336.

It is likely that Burgoyne had a flourishing legal practice by the time of his first Parliament, for in October 1442 he obtained an exemption for life from the onerous offices of serjeant-at-law, sheriff or escheator, presumably because they might restrict his legal income.39 CPR, 1441-6, p. 126. While he did not sit for Cambridgeshire again, he was to attend at least two later parliamentary elections for the county, and he performed legal services for at least two of its leading institutions, King’s College, Cambridge, and the cathedral priory at Ely, in the late 1440s and the 1460s respectively.40 Ramsay, app. 8 (p. lii). Furthermore, he found office under one of the greatest lay magnates of the realm, for he served Richard, duke of York, as his bailiff in Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire in the late 1440s, in return for an annual fee of 46s. 8d.41 Westminster Abbey muns. 12165, 12167. Burgoyne also continued to act as a feoffee for fellow gentry in Cambridgeshire, among them John Morys* and Gilbert Hore*,42 C1/150/58; E326/4458. and he strengthened his own interests in the county by investing in land there, including a manor at Cottenham that he had purchased by 1458.43 VCH Cambs. ix. 57.

The election of Burgoyne as an MP for London in the succeeding Parliament must have owed much to his ties with the likes of Geoffrey Boleyn and other leading civic oligarchs, although he also possessed other influential connexions at this stage of his career. In 1444 he had acted as a feoffee in a couple of land conveyances on behalf of the chancellor of the Exchequer and royal physician, John Somerset*,44 CP25(1)/152/92/112, 114. and he was already an associate of Thomas Kirkby, master of the rolls, his co-defendant in a curious Chancery suit heard in 1442. The plaintiff, Richard Barbor, was the rent collector of Thomas Rothwell and his wife, Elizabeth, on the manor of Sutton, Bedfordshire. This was a duchy of Lancaster lordship which Elizabeth, the daughter of Sir William Beauchamp† of Powick, held for life through a grant made to her in 1427, when she was married to her first husband, the Lincolnshire knight, Sir Thomas Swynford. In his bill, Barbor complained that he feared to perform the duties of his office following an assault upon him by Burgoyne and Kirkby, whom he identified as tenants of the lordship of Sutton. (Burgoyne was probably a tenant by virtue of property he held at Long Stanton, Cambridgeshire, where some of the lordship’s appurtenant lands lay.)45 CCR, 1441-7, p. 48; C1/11/519; The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 236. Almost certainly, a connexion existed between Burgoyne and the Burgoynes who established themselves at Sutton in the late 15th century. A namesake who settled in Beds. and died in 1516 may well have been his younger son. It is worth noting that John, the eldest son of this Thomas Burgoyne, was of Great St. Bartholomew’s, West Smithfield, as well as Beds.: VCH Beds. ii. 248; Beds. Historical Rec. Soc. lviii. nos. 119, 129-30; CCR, 1468-76, no. 1471; PCC 10 Alengar (PROB11/28, f. 79). He also alleged that they were counselled by a third defendant, Kirkby’s brother, Richard, a former scholar of Cambridge university who was reputed to have the power of turning himself invisible through necromancy and other crafts.46 A Richard Kirkby, a Carmelite friar, was a member of the university in 1415: Biog. Reg. Univ. Cambridge to 1500 ed. Emden, 338. The result of this suit is unknown, but Burgoyne maintained his connexion with Thomas Kirkby, for whom he acted as a feoffee in 1447, and Kirkby was later one of the feoffees of Burgoyne’s will.47 London hr 178/7; C1/51/341. In about 1446, possibly while he was still sitting in the Parliament of 1445, Burgoyne was retained as a legal adviser with a fee of £2 p.a. by Humphrey, duke of Buckingham, to help him in his dispute concerning the manor of Bisley, Cheshire, with (Sir) Thomas Stanley II*.48 C. Rawcliffe, Staffords, 157-8, 238. The government also made use of Burgoyne’s services. On 1 Aug. 1450, in the aftermath of Cade’s rebellion, it placed him on a commission of oyer and terminer to investigate all disturbances and offences committed in Kent. He was thereby empowered to act against those rebels who had refused the general pardon the King had offered to all Cade’s followers in early July. The following February he was one of those appointed to examine the complaints made by soldiers against Lord Hoo, who had lately seen active service as one of the King’s commanders in France.

How Burgoyne came to sit for the borough of Bridgwater in 1447 is not clear. In the past the electors of this Somerset port had often chosen outsiders to represent them,49 The Commons 1386-1421, i. 593. although it is perhaps significant that Bridgwater castle was the administrative headquarters of the Somerset estates of the duke of York, a magnate whom he began to serve in this period. It is possible that he may already have had dealings with the town, for in June 1442 William atte Welle, a mercer resident there, had made a grant of all his lands, goods and chattels to Sir Edward Hull*, Alexander Hody*, Thomas ‘Burgon’ and others.50 Bridgwater Bor. Archs. 1445-68 (Som. Rec. Soc. lx), 61. During his third Parliament, Burgoyne was among those who acted as proxies in that assembly for the abbot of Croyland and was active as an executor of the immensely wealthy London alderman, John Brockley†. By means of a petition to the assembly, he and several of his co-executors complained that another of the executors, Brockley’s widow, Katherine, and her second husband, Nicholas Wyfold, were impeding the implementation of the deceased’s will by detaining money and sureties worth between 7,000 and 8,000 marks.51 PROME, xii. 11-12. There was another dispute connected with Brockley’s affairs in the early 1450s. Acting alone, for by now Katherine was dead, Wyfold sued Burgoyne and one of Brockley’s feoffees, Thomas Scot, in Chancery for breach of trust. He alleged that Katherine had sold some of Brockley’s land in Chelmsford, Essex, putting the money she made from the sale towards performing Brockley’s will, but that Burgoyne and Scot had refused to convey the property to the purchaser, John Roper of Chelmsford, who now wanted his money back. Burgoyne responded to the charge with an answer and plea. In his answer, he doubted whether the sale had occurred and asserted that it should be up to himself and Scot to dispose of the estate. In his plea, he said that Brockley had not left instructions with regard to the land, either verbally or through his will, so it was the duty of himself and Scot to convey it to his heirs.52 C1/19/109-10.

In the early 1450s Burgoyne was the defendant in another Chancery suit, brought by Robert Shorditch of Chelsea sometime after July 1452. In his bill Shorditch referred to a conveyance by which his deceased father John* had granted a manor in Chelsea, along with his lands in that parish and Hackney, to Burgoyne and other trustees. (This transaction was almost certainly the one formally recorded by means of a fine in the common pleas in early 1450.) Robert said that he had agreed to marry Margaret, the daughter of Robert Tanfeld*, but that Burgoyne had refused to obey his instructions to convey most of this property to Tanfield and other new trustees. The court found for the plaintiff in a judgement of February 1453. A note on the dorse of his bill reveals a connexion with Burgoyne, for it records that he had previously been the husband of the MP’s late daughter, Alice. It is impossible to say whether the elder Shorditch’s conveyance arose from his son’s marriage to Alice, although the text of the bill shows that Burgoyne had chosen the other feoffees involved in it.53 C1/22/105-6; CP25(1)/152/93/148; CCR, 1485-1500, no. 116.

The Shorditch suit was probably a minor irritant for Burgoyne, for he was already embroiled in a far more serious quarrel with the nuns of Denney abbey, a Cambridgeshire-house of minoresses. Although he was a combative character and, not surprisingly for a lawyer, habitually used the central common law courts, this affair was almost certainly his most protracted dispute, since it was still unresolved at his death. The result of the conflicting jurisdictional claims of Burgoyne, as lord of a manor at Impington, and the abbess and convent, as holders of the neighbouring manor at Histon, it had begun in 1452. Burgoyne was certainly a difficult and persistent opponent for, in a letter she wrote to her kinsman John Paston* seven years later, Joan Keteryche, the recently elected abbess, claimed that the stress caused by the (still ongoing) dispute had caused her predecessor, Katherine Sybyle, to resign.54 Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 265-6; VCH Cambs. ii. 299. Yet two earlier common pleas suits suggest that Burgoyne and his second wife, Alice, also suffered harassment during the quarrel. They were the plaintiffs in both: in the first, they accused 24 men, mainly husbandmen or labourers, of breaking into their close at Impington on 24 Sept. 1454; in the second, they accused some of the same men and others, 18 in all, of assaulting Alice on the same day. The residence of the first-named defendant in both suits, Reynold Arneburgh*, was given as Denney, so it is possible that he was an employee of the nuns. The majority of his co-defendants were from Denney or Histon and Impington, the other townships caught up in the dispute between Burgoyne and the abbey, making it likely that at least some of them were the nuns’ tenants.55 CP40/777, rots. 57, 520d. Probably linked to these suits was a recognizance by which Arneburgh and two others bound themselves to Burgoyne in October 1454. Its purpose was to guarantee that six Histon men (including one of those accused of assaulting Alice) would enter another bond, as security that they would abide by any award which two arbitrators, John Ansty* and John Green III* should make between them and Burgoyne.56 CCR, 1454-61, p. 33.

It is possible that the men whom the Burgoynes sued had been acting on behalf of the nuns, but a Chancery bill filed by the abbey against Burgoyne’s executors in the early 1470s suggests that the men of Denney, Histon and the other townships probably also had their own reasons for resenting his behaviour in their neighbourhood. Grasping the opportunity to strike back now that he was out of the way, the nuns summed up some 20 years’ worth of grievances in their bill. A general charge, to the effect that Burgoyne had sought to increase the value of his manor at Impington at the expense of the abbey’s at Histon, was followed by a series of specific accusations. They said that he had appeared in person at a leet held at the latter manor at Michaelmas 1452 and, with threats and intimidation, had forbidden the tenants to make any more presentments at the abbey’s courts and leets or to pasture their beasts in Histon fields. He had also each year impounded livestock belonging to them and their tenants and charged 1d. for every animal they wanted returned. He had further harassed the tenants by taking out numerous common law suits against them, by causing them to be indicted before himself in his capacity as a j.p. and keeper of the rolls (‘keeper of the books’ in the words of the bill) in Cambridgeshire, and by imprisoning them until they paid him fines. Finally, he had occupied a fen belonging to the abbey for over 20 years. The nuns also claimed that Burgoyne’s actions had cost them just under £600 in losses and damages, and that they had incurred debts of over £300 in defending their rights, forcing them to pawn all their plate and jewels, except for a single chalice. Even allowing for exaggeration on the nuns’ part, they had undoubtedly suffered at the hands of Burgoyne. In response to these charges his executors – his widow, Alice, and son, John – asserted that the whole business was a matter for the spiritual courts and was not determinable in the King’s courts at Westminster, and that, in any case, his death meant that no action could be taken for any trespasses that he might have committed.57 C1/40/30-32. The dispute was not finally resolved until 12 July 1480, when a formal agreement was made at Holborn in the presence of the chancellor and three serjeants-at-law, Richard Pygot, John Catesby and William Hussey*. Through it Burgoyne’s son John acknowledged that the abbess should have the right to hold her leets and lawdays at Impington and that her tenants, as well as his own, should have access to the common land there. Associated with the abbess in the agreement was the abbot of Eynsham, Oxfordshire, probably because his house, which owned one of the other manors at Histon, had likewise suffered at Burgoyne’s hands.58 CCR, 1476-85, no. 737; CPR, 1476-85, p. 304; VCH Cambs. ix. 94.

Despite the protracted nature of Burgoyne’s dispute with Denney abbey, it would not appear to have disrupted his London career in the meantime. In the early autumn of 1455, he was part of a delegation from the City that waited upon the queen at Hertford.59 Jnl. 4, f. 265. During the second half of the 1450s, he held the office of keeper of the court of St. Bartholomew’s fair at West Smithfield, served as one of the mayor’s serjeants-at-mace and assisted the Pewterers’ Company in a lawsuit.60 C. Welch, Hist. Pewterers, i. 26. In the same period, he was associated with the recorder of London, Thomas Urswyk II*, in suing the grocer, Richard Joynour*, in the Exchequer of pleas. By means of a bill of April 1456, he and Urswyk alleged that Joynour owed them £100, by virtue of an obligation of the previous July. The plea roll refers to Joynour as the former collector of tunnage and poundage in London, perhaps suggesting that the suit arose from public rather than private affairs.61 E13/146, rot. 52.

Whatever the case, the city’s authorities entrusted Burgoyne with important official business later in the same decade. On 11 Oct. 1459, the day before the Yorkist defeat at Ludford Bridge and some five weeks before the partisan Parliament that sat at Coventry, the common council decided that the MP (identified in its minutes as a ‘councillor’) should wait upon the King to assure him of the City’s loyalty.62 Jnl. 6, f. 145. The following January, Burgoyne was a member of another London delegation – also including Geoffrey Boleyn, Ralph Verney and Thomas Urswyk – which met Henry VI at Northampton. The King had issued a commission to the authorities in London on the 14th of that month, ordering them to raise men-at-arms and archers to resist the duke of York and his allies, and the civic authorities were concerned that such a demand might derogate from London’s franchise and liberties. The interview ended satisfactorily, for the deputation came away with a royal letter stating that the commission should in no way prejudice the City’s liberties.63 Ibid. f. 196v; R.R. Sharpe, London and the Kingdom, i. 297-8. Like many lawyers, Burgoyne appears to have remained neutral during the struggles of the mid fifteenth century, although he took the precaution of obtaining a royal pardon in March 1458.64 C67/42, m. 28. Richard Burgoyne of Dry Drayton, ‘gent.’, also received a pardon on the same day, but it is unclear whether he was a bro. or otherwise unknown yr. s. of the MP. His appointment to one of the Lancastrian commissions of array in December 1459 is unlikely to have had any political connotations, for his career as a j.p. was not halted when Edward IV assumed the throne in 1461.

In his later years Burgoyne continued to act as a feoffee for various Londoners, most notably the grocer, William Taylour, for whom he was still performing this role in the later 1460s,65 London hr 169/4, 187/1, 193/22, 196/40. and to serve as a commissioner. At the end of the decade, he assisted the Goldsmiths Company by ‘overseeing’ its charters.66 Ramsay, app. 8 (p. lii). Yet he was probably feeling the effects of old age and infirmity when he made his will in July 1468, after which date he remained a j.p. but was not appointed to any new commissions. He survived into the next decade but was dead by mid May 1470.67 CFR, xx. 260. He was buried in the chapel of St. Bartholomew’s hospital, in accordance with his will.68 PCC 1 Wattys. The will of his widow (9 Wattys) proves that he was buried at West Smithfield . In the will, proved the following February, he disclaimed all pomp, directed his executors not to hold any feast on the day of his burial, and asked for eight poor men, carrying tapers and candles, to accompany his coffin. He stated that he wished for a simple funeral because his purchases of land, repairs on his estates and providing for his daughters’ marriages had overstretched his resources. If a common sense lawyer to the last, he had room for piety, since he also requested 1,000 placebos and diriges and 1,000 masses after his death. He did not name any of his sons-in-law in the will, but only Alice, his daughter by his second wife, was certainly not married when he drew it up. The respective husbands of two of his other daughters, Elizabeth and Anne, were Thomas Chichele and Richard St. George, both Cambridgeshire gentry, while Alice was to marry Thomas Lambert of ‘Bausworth’ (possibly Bosworth in Leicestershire) before her mother’s death in July 1473. His eldest son and heir, John, is purported to have married Anne, the daughter of one Reynold Potham.69 A.F. Bottomley, ‘Admin. Cambs.’ (London M.A. thesis, 1952), 167-8, 232-3; Add. 5812, f. 116. But when John died his widow was Margaret: C1/280/78.

Burgoyne left his widow half of any goods and chattels that might remain after the performance of his will. As for the remainder, his eldest son, John, was to have half and the children of his second marriage, Thomas and Alice, the rest. There is no extant inquisition post mortem for his lands, but his holdings must easily have qualified him for knighthood, an honour he had declined five years before his death, opting to pay a fine of 60s. instead.70 E405/42, m. 1d. As for his lands, Burgoyne requested his feoffees to convey to John his manors and lands in several parishes to the north of Cambridge, including his home at Impington. His widow was to retain further properties situated in Long Stanton, to the north-west of the town, and other parishes, to hold in trust for his younger son, Thomas, still a minor. She herself was to have tenements in the market place at Cambridge he had bought from John Ansty (either the MP who first sat for Cambridgeshire in 1445 or his father). Some directions Burgoyne gave at the end of the will show that he was worried about his family’s hold on their property in Long Stanton. His father, John, had acquired the manor of ‘Colvyles’ and the appurtenant right of patronage over the rectory of St. Michael’s church in the parish from the Cheyne family by 1433, but possibly only through a temporary arrangement. During his lifetime, the MP appears to have remained on good terms with the Cheynes: he was a feoffee of the settlement made upon the marriage of John Cheyne II* in 1449 – and he was undoubtedly in de facto possession of ‘Colvyles’ when he presented a new rector, Henry Silvester, to the living in 1466. Yet his will shows that he did not feel secure in that possession, for he directed that Cheyne might recover some of the Long Stanton lands – upon payment of £40 to Burgoyne’s widow (or, after her death, his younger son) – if, in return, Cheyne would release to the Burgoynes all claim to the remainder.71 Add. Chs. 22597-8; VCH Cambs. ix. 234; CPR, 1446-52, pp. 258-9; CIPM Hen. VII, i. 569-70.

Perhaps not surprisingly, for the Burgoynes were certainly a fractious family, a quarrel erupted between Burgoyne’s executors immediately after his death. His son John accused his stepmother of frustrating the execution of the will by detaining deeds and goods belonging to the former MP’s estate, whereupon the auditor-general of the archbishop of Canterbury excommunicated Alice. She appealed to the Pope, who in November 1470 ordered the abbot of Westminster and a canon of the diocese of London to grant her conditional absolution while they investigated the matter.72 CPL, xii. 801. The outcome of their inquiry is not known, but Alice was faced with more problems the following May when Sir John Cheyne, seizing the opportunity presented by Burgoyne’s death and her quarrel with her stepson, entered the disputed Long Stanton lands. In 1472, he and Alice presented rival candidates to the living of St. Michael’s church, leading to two episcopal inquiries (which found for Cheyne) and a Chancery suit.73 C1/44/90; 47/230-2; Cambridge Univ. Lib., Ely Diocesan recs., G1/5 (Reg. Gray), ff. 84v-86. The following year Alice died and was buried near her husband in the chapel of St. Bartholomew’s hospital.74 PCC 9 Wattys. Within two years of her death her stepson, John, and his half-brother, Thomas, had begun a quarrel over their father’s inheritance.75 C1/51/341-3; 280/70. The dispute between the Burgoynes and the Cheynes continued into Henry VII’s reign.76 CP40/920, rot. 308d.