DANVERS, Thomas

This one of the formidable Danvers brothers, the eldest son of the prolific John Danvers by his second wife (the heiress Joan Bruley), is now chiefly remembered for the important part he played in the foundation of Magdalen College, Oxford, as Bishop Waynflete’s right-hand man. His share of the principal Danvers estates was limited to the former Brancaster property in Banbury,11 Macnamara, 155-6. but he also benefited from his father’s determination to advance his second family by settling on it lands he acquired by purchase. Thus, by royal licence of June 1445, ‘St. Amand’s manor’ in Adderbury, bought by John Danvers from Sir Thomas Wykeham*, was entailed so that after John’s death it would descend in tail-mail to Thomas and his three younger brothers, with successive remainders to their sisters.12 CPR, 1441-6, pp. 344-5; VCH Oxon. ix. 17. Presumably, the manor passed to Thomas when he came of age, probably not long after his father died in 1449. From his mother he inherited various of the former Bruley properties (including Aston Bruley in Worcestershire), most important among them being the manor of Waterstock in Oxfordshire, which had belonged to her family since the thirteenth century. However, his mother and stepfather (Sir) Walter Mauntell, presented to the church at Waterstock in the late 1460s, so he may not have been able to take up residence there until after their deaths.13 VCH Worcs. iii. 559; VCH Oxon. vii. 221, 222-3; Macnamara, 226. In 1462 Danvers was called ‘of London’, so it was perhaps there that he usually lived in the initial stages of his career. Little is recorded either about his early life or about his first wife, save that she was a daughter of Lord Saye and Sele. It may be presumed that the marriage was contracted before Saye’s death at the hands of Cade’s followers in July 1450, and posited that Thomas’s brother-in-law, John Fray†, the former chief baron and in 1449-50 Saye’s under-treasurer at the Exchequer, had brokered the match. Together with Fray, and with his elder brothers Robert (elevated to the judiciary immediately after Saye’s fall) and Richard, Thomas made an appearance in the records in 1455, as a feoffee of a manor in Essex.14 CAD, iii. D562. A conveyance of property in London in 1458 also associated him with these two brothers,15 Corp. London RO, hr 187/11. who evidently helped to advance his career in the law. Like Richard he became a fellow of the Inner Temple.

It is now impossible to pinpoint when Thomas first came to the attention of William Waynflete, whom he was to serve for over 30 years, although his earliest appointment to royal office (as a collector of tunnage and poundage in London in 1456) coincided with the beginning of Waynflete’s chancellorship, and may be attributed to his patronage. He was certainly a member of the bishop’s household by January 1458, when, at the episcopal manor of Esher, Surrey, and acting as counsel to his brother-in-law, William, 2nd Lord Saye, he was intermediary for the sale to Waynflete of Saye’s manor of Otterbourne in Hampshire. This sale proceeded in the following month and in March Danvers authorized expenses to be paid for Waynflete in this matter.16 CCR, 1461-8, pp. 234, 255-6; Magdalen Coll. Oxf., Otterbourne mss, 81, 100, 113, 137. It was no doubt to Waynflete as chancellor that Thomas owed his initial appointment to the Oxfordshire bench as a member of the quorum. He was thus associated in an official capacity with his two older siblings and a younger one, William, the four of them together overwhelmingly dominating the bench. Later that year Thomas was also made a customs official in Sandwich, an appointment which coincided with that of his brother Richard in Southampton. No doubt both of them had an eye on their family’s interests in the wool trade, for, like Richard and Robert, Thomas was actively engaged in shipping wool from London in this period.17 E122/74/37.

Examination of the composition of the Parliament at Coventry in 1459 bears out contemporary accusations that it had been packed.18 PROME, xii. 514-15. Danvers himself clearly owed his membership of the Commons to the influence of the chancellor, Waynflete, whose borough of Downton he represented; and his fellow MP, John Wolffe*, was also a member of the bishop’s household. Even though in his speech at the opening of the Parliament Waynflete preached on peace and unity, the purpose of the session was to bring bills of attainder against the Yorkist lords for their treasons at Blore Heath and Ludford Bridge, and he actively moved to achieve this.19 Southern Hist. xi. 6, 11, 12. Shortly before the Parliament opened, Thomas had been named with his half-brother Master John Danvers, DCL, among the envoys given power to treat with the duke of Burgundy for prorogation of the Anglo-Burgundian truce, and six days after the assembly met they were confirmed in this task. There is no evidence, however, that the envoys ever set out.20 C76/142, m. 22. In any event, Danvers was apparently still in England three weeks later, for the day after the dissolution on 20 Dec. he was appointed to a commission of array to put the government’s measures against the attainted Yorkists into effect. However, any expectations he might have had of further advancement under Henry VI were soon quashed. In the aftermath of the Lancastrian defeat at Northampton in July following Waynflete swiftly fell from power, and those associated with him, including Danvers, were eclipsed for some time to come. A contemporary account lists him among those attainted in Edward IV’s first Parliament in the autumn of 1461, and although this was an ill-founded rumour it is clear that he was regarded with suspicion by the new regime.21 Letters and Pprs. Illust. Wars of English ed. Stevenson, ii (2), [779]. He is not listed on the parl. roll: PROME, xiii. 42-52. In an attempt to ingratiate himself Bishop Waynflete granted an annuity of £10 to the new King’s friend, William, Lord Hastings, on 20 Dec. that year, and at some point (but perhaps not until after a few years had elapsed), Hastings in his turn gave Waynflete’s man Danvers a retaining fee. Danvers obtained a royal pardon on 28 Feb. 1462.22 C67/45, m. 34.

Despite his brother Robert’s continued place on the judiciary, it would seem that Thomas’s links with the Lancastrians earned him the disapprobation of certain great men of the new order, most notably Richard Neville, earl of Warwick. So much is suggested by the failure of his marriage plans in the early 1460s. According to a petition he addressed to the chancellor, Warwick’s brother Archbishop Neville, in 1465, Danvers had entered a contract of marriage with the high-born Margaret John, an earl’s grand-daughter and widow of Sir William Lucy*, who had been killed on the Lancastrian side at the battle of Northampton. When her kinsman Warwick opposed the match, he was persuaded by her half-brother Sir Henry Fitzlewis to keep the contract secret, Sir Henry promising that the marriage would eventually take place, and offering bonds in £1,000 to that effect. Fitzlewis asked Bishop Waynflete to persuade Danvers to accept this arrangement, but never sealed the bonds, took 20 marks from Danvers as a reward, and encouraged his sister to make a new contract with one of the sons of Thomas Wake*. 23 C1/31/298, 527. Danvers’s bill in Chancery probably coincided with a mandate to the bishops of Winchester, Salisbury and Lincoln from Pope Paul II, dated 23 Aug. 1465, instructing them to investigate the veracity of Margaret’s petition to him, which claimed that Danvers’s assertion that they had been contracted in marriage was false, and that as a consequence of it she had been brought before Neville and unjustly excommunicated for contumacy.24 CPL, xii. 405. Danvers’s complaint to the chancellor was the pretext for the issue of a royal commission of 8 Oct. following for the arrest of the Wake couple and Thomas Pachet*, whose behaviour was also complained about in his petition. He was probably gratified that the commissioners included a number of his kinsmen.25 CPR, 1461-7, p. 491. The affair reveals a vindictive side to his character, and one which was given full rein in the law courts. He next brought a suit against Margaret in his brother’s court, the common pleas, in Trinity term 1466, alleging that she had failed to pay him £300 under the terms of bonds entered in November 1462. Margaret responded that at the day the writ was sued she was the wife of Thomas Wake, and not, as she had been named in the writ, the widow of John Stafford II* (to whom she had briefly been married before Stafford’s death at Towton). At the same time she and Wake brought a plea against Danvers for a forcible entry into her property at Dallington, Northamptonshire.26 CP40/820, rots. 488d, 533. A year later Danvers was attached to answer Wake’s suit alleging breach of the statute of maintenance at Northampton in November 1466, while simultaneously action was taken against Wake under the Statute of Praemunire for his prosecution of Danvers at the Roman Curia. In July 1467 sureties were provided for Wake to appear in court the following Michaelmas term to respond to the King for contempt and to Danvers for damages and injuries.27 CP40/824, rots. 286, 337; KB27/826, rot. 85d. The dispute came to arbitration not long afterwards, but the terms of the settlement are unknown.28 C1/90/34. It may be speculated that Archbishop Neville showed some sympathy towards Danvers (despite the low opinion his brother the earl of Warwick held of him); at least, our MP later had the archbishop commemorated in the windows of Waterstock church, linking him with Waynflete and himself in a request for prayers from the faithful.29 Macnamara, 166.

On 20 June 1467, shortly after the opening of Danvers’s second Parliament, in which he represented another of Bishop Waynflete’s boroughs in Wiltshire (that of Hindon), Neville was dismissed from the chancellorship, and began to waver in his support for Edward IV’s government. Nothing is known about our MP’s doings in the Parliament, but he figured largely in the political crisis which blew up immediately after the dissolution on 7 June 1468. A servant of (Sir) Robert Whittingham II* (then living in exile with Margaret of Anjou) was arrested at Queenborough and found to be carrying letters from the Lancastrian exiles, among them one from Whittingham addressed to Danvers. The latter was arrested outside the Temple in the middle of the night of 11 June by a trick of Sir Richard Wydeville (son of the treasurer, Lord Rivers), taken before the King, and three days later committed to the Tower ‘ad suum maximun timorem et dolorem’.30 Wars of the English, ii (2), [789-90]. Under torture the servant implicated several more alleged conspirators, among them other associates of Bishop Waynflete and a London alderman, Sir John Leynham alias Plomer, whose wife Margaret was Danvers’s niece, and with whom Danvers and his brothers had business connexions. Leynham hastily fled into sanctuary, and trials for treason and misprision followed against many of the rest, but Danvers himself was never indicted. The reasons for his escape from prosecution are open to speculation. It may be that insufficient evidence could be found against him, or that he was helped by his connexion with Lord Hastings, who had been involved in some way in the arbitration over his marriage contract. His master Waynflete felt it necessary to obtain a general pardon for himself in the immediate aftermath of the affair, a pardon which specifically excluded contact with a number of the men involved, and he took out another pardon in February 1469.31 V.G. Davis, ‘Bp. Waynflete of Winchester’ (Trin. Coll. Dublin Ph.D. thesis, 1985), 294; CFR, xx. 137, 208; A.F. Sutton, ‘Thomas Cook and his “Troubles”’, Guildhall Studies in London Hist. iii. 99. But there is no sign that Danvers himself was similarly pardoned at this stage. Nevertheless, he had probably learnt a lesson; some significance may be attached to the fact that following Henry VI’s restoration to the throne in October 1470, he was not appointed to any royal commissions. Perhaps his spell in the Tower two years before had made him wary of showing whole-hearted commitment to the Lancastrians. He eventually obtained a pardon from Edward IV on 10 Dec. 1471.32 C67/48, m. 27.

Danvers’s third Parliament, in which he once more represented Downton, opened in October 1472 and ran to several sessions before its dissolution in March 1475. While it was in progress he was reappointed to the Oxfordshire bench (after an absence of 16 years), in company with two of his brothers, and he subsequently also served under Edward IV as a j.p. for Oxford university and the town of Oxford. It was probably in this decade that he was formally retained by Lord Hastings.33 The evidence for this is a list compiled much later, but there is no reason to doubt its veracity: W.H. Dunham jnr., Lord Hastings’ Indentured Retainers, 118. The latter undoubtedly looked kindly on Danvers’s niece, Margaret Leynham, who in her will referred to him as her ‘most assured and speciall gode lorde’; and like her mother, the much-widowed Dame Agnes Say, she asked Hastings to supervise her will.34 PCC 6 Logge (PROB11/7, ff. 41-44); Cal. P. and M. London, 1458-82, pp. 136-9. Then too, Danvers himself appeared as a co-feoffee with Hastings of the manor of Quinton, Gloucestershire.35 CCR, 1476-85, no. 468. His last recorded return to Parliament took place at the end of 1477, and he sat for Waynflete’s borough of Downton again. He was currently serving as controller of customs and subsidies at Southampton, a post he retained until Richard III seized the throne and Hastings was executed. Yet Danvers cannot have displayed overt opposition to the usurpation, for although he was then also removed from the Oxfordshire bench, he remained on that of Hampshire, to which he had been first appointed six years earlier. There he stayed until Waynflete’s death in 1486. His continuous service on the Oxfordshire bench from 1485 until his death 17 years later indicates that he did nothing to offend Henry VII. Indeed, the King showed him signs of favour, notably by granting him in October 1490, together with (Sir) Thomas Lovell† and David Philip, respectively knight and esquire for the body, the right of presentation to the next vacant canonry in St. George’s chapel at Windsor.36 CPR, 1485-94, p. 332. Finally, near the end of his life he, his brother William and their nephew John Danvers of Dauntsey were all knighted at the wedding of Prince Arthur to Catherine of Aragon in 1501.

Much of our MP’s career had been taken up with the affairs of Bishop Waynflete, whom he served as his principal man of affairs from the 1450s to Waynflete’s death and beyond. On occasion he was called upon to provide sureties for the bishop at the Exchequer, and his position as the bishop’s treasurer of Wolvesey accounts for his prominence in Hampshire from the mid 1470s onwards.37 CFR, xxi. no. 142. But Waynflete’s business took Danvers to various other parts of the country too, most notably to East Anglia, where as his agent and counsellor he was greatly involved in the prolonged winding-up of the late Sir John Fastolf’s estate. Such dealings led him to correspond with Sir John Paston†, whom he asked in 1467 to recommend him to ‘my lordes good grace as to hym whom of erthely estates next my dewte I moste love and drede’ (presumably the duke of Norfolk).38 Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 378-9. Then, too, he had much to do with Fastolf’s right-hand man William Worcestre, who sometimes grumbled when Danvers caused him unnecessary trouble, but had no option but to deal with him personally if Waynflete was absent elsewhere. The Pastons offered him hospitality in August 1470,39 Ibid. i. 430; ii. 583; William of Worcestre, Itins. ed. Harvey, 255. and may have welcomed the nomination of him and his brother William among the feoffees of the disputed Fastolf estates in Norfolk and Suffolk, when the duke of Norfolk was forced to relinquish them four months later.40 CCR, 1468-76, no. 622. Indeed, they evidently viewed Thomas as a useful intermediary who might act on their behalf. Danvers accompanied Waynflete to Framlingham in December 1472 for the christening of the duke’s daughter Anne, and after the bishop had spoken to the duchess about persuading her husband to relinquish Caister to the Pastons, he too sought her help, ‘besechyng hyr to be good lady in that mater as she had promysyd and as he knewe well that she had ben in tyme past’. He told her that ownership of Caister was a matter that touched closely the bishop’s honour, as he had promised Sir John Paston peaceable possession, and gained from her an undertaking that when she and the duke were next in London she would devise to Waynflete such a way to ‘brek in to my lord of that mater that he shold speed of hys entent’.41 Paston Letters, i. 585-6; C.F. Richmond, Paston Fam.: Fastolf’s Will, 235-6. Danvers was a pivotal figure in making the final settlements between Waynflete and William Worcester regarding Fastolf’s will, particularly in the matter of the sum of £100 which Waynflete paid for the delivery of evidences, money and goods, a sum which was promised before February 1473 but not handed over in its entirety by Danvers until a year later.42 Richmond, 255. Subsequent dealings between the two agents in the late 1470s saw them as travelling and dining companions, and on one occasion Worcester did some business for Danvers at Corton in Wiltshire, the manor our MP had recently inherited from his great-uncle.43 William of Worcestre, 35, 37.

In his will of April 1486, Waynflete left Danvers the sum of 40 marks.44 R. Chandler, Life of William Waynflete, 384. That he did not also make him an executor may be because he had already placed on his shoulders the burden of his foundation, Magdalen College. Much of the work relating to the business affairs of the college, especially in the gathering of endowments, was carried out by the bishop’s personal household, and in this respect Danvers was his principal agent.45 J.F. Mills, ‘Foundations of Magdalen Coll.’ (Oxf. Univ. B.Litt. thesis, 1978), 26-27. The foundation stone of the college had been laid in 1474, and Danvers’s participation in its endowment in the later part of the decade and in the 1480s is fully documented in the college archives. Such business involved him, and sometimes his brother William, too, in many transactions for the acquisition of manorial estates in East Anglia and Oxfordshire.46 Macnamara, 160; Magdalen Coll. Stanlake deeds, 21a, Petersfield deeds, 74; CPR, 1476-85, p. 143; C143/454/15. These last included the complicated transfer of estates belonging to the Danvers’s kinsmen the Barantyns, in which Thomas took advantage of the financial and political difficulties being faced by John Barantyn† and his mother in the early 1480s. The process encompassed spurious claims in the law courts, mortgages, leases and detailed financial arrangements, and it is not always clear as to who profited most from the deals. The usual pattern of acquisition for the college was that Danvers would offer a mortgage on a property, and then purchase it at the rate of 16 years’ profits. For instance, Barantyn and his mother mortgaged the manor of Henton to him for £135, and then sold it to him for at least £302 (calculated from its issues over 16 years). Similarly, the manor of Winnal came into Danvers’s possession, and in 1485, after a series of leases he sold both manors and the advowson of Henton to Bishop Waynflete for £740. They came to the college a year later. In the same way Danvers acquired from the Barantyns the manor of Goldor in Pyrton, which he granted to the college (without royal licence) in 1487, after Waynflete’s death, adding to the grant a few years later other lands and tenements in the neighbourhood.47 VCH Oxon. viii. 62-63, 152; Stonor Letters, ii (Cam. Soc. ser. 3, xxx), 129; Magdalen Coll. Henton deeds, 3d, 14c, 37a, 41a, 51c, 56; CCR, 1476-85, nos. 1109, 1193; CP25(1)/191/30/4; CP40/880, cart. rot. 2. Further dealings related to the Barantyns’ manor in Chalgrove. As before, the process began with a mortgage by John Barantyn and his mother of the manor for £72, in March 1484, with an agreement that if the sum was not repaid within a year Danvers might purchase the manor for 15 times its annual revenues. The manor was re-mortgaged for £303 in February 1485, with provision for Danvers to obtain possession in November by paying a further £147, so that the full purchase price would be £450. It is of interest that on 29 June 1485 Barantyn undertook that he would not ask the King (Richard III) or anyone else to put pressure on Danvers to give him extra time to pay off the mortgage. Danvers sold Chalgrove to Waynflete for £560.48 Magdalen Coll. Chalgrove deeds, 9b, 10b, 31a, 34, 40, 196, 218, 275; CCR, 1476-85, no. 1363; Add. Chs. 20326-7; CP25(1)/191/30/2. There was another manor in Chalgrove, called ‘Argentines’, which also came to Magdalen through Danvers’s endeavours. The Barantyns had sold or mortgaged it to (Sir) Richard Harcourt*, who instructed his executors to sell it to Danvers. This they did in 1487.49 PCC 27 Logge (PROB11/7, ff. 205-7); Chalgrove deeds, 7b, 198, 223. A third manor in Chalgrove, that of Rufford, also came to Danvers’s attention. He was dealing with it in the 1480s, and drew up an agreement to sell it to the college for £400, only to transfer it to a different purchaser, Sir Henry Colet, instead.50 Add. Chs. 20328-9; Chalgrove deeds, 40a; CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 70.

Danvers’s letters, some of which are preserved at Magdalen, provide glimpses of his personality. One, addressed to Richard Mayhew, the president of the college, then in London, tells how he was ‘yesterday at the college and had full good cheer with the bowsers’ (bursars). Another, dated 15 Aug. 1494, stated that the news that Henry VII had postponed going to Rome had pleased him more than if he had won £20, considering the great trust Waynflete had put in Henry to support the college. He asked Mayhew to move the King regarding matters relating to the endowment, sending a message to Henry to remember ‘the erandys that my Lord Waynflete before his dethe commaundyd me to opyn to hym for the execucion of Kyng Henry the Sixtes laste wylle, college of Etin, and Cambrigge, your college and Tatishall’, and advised him to get the chief justice William Hussey* ‘safe to him’, for his wise counsel would undoubtedly prove beneficial. Danvers also referred to an errand ‘known to the King’s mother’.51 Macnamara, 157, 162-3. The full extent of his personal benefaction to the college is sometimes obscured by the records. For instance, he and his brother William formally leased to the college a manor called ‘Browneisland’ in Harwell for ten years from 1482, but almost immediately afterwards released to the college all their right in the manor.52 Harwell deeds, 2, 5. According to VCH Berks. iii. 488, they acquired ‘Brownce’ by fine in 1484. Towards the end of his life, in 1501, Danvers obtained a royal licence to grant the college in mortmain the advowsons of the churches of Slimbridge, Gloucestershire, and Findon, Sussex, each with an acre of land attached. He had acquired Findon from Elizabeth, dowager duchess of Norfolk, and William, earl of Nottingham, 17 years earlier.53 CPR, 1494-1509, p. 226; Cat. Suss. Deeds, Magdalen Coll. ed. Macray, ii. 114, 122-3. Yet such direct gifts were unusual. More commonly the transactions involved a financial return, like his sale to Queen’s College for £200 of the manor of Baldon St. Lawrence (acquired from William Rademylde, the last of the Rademylde line, in the 1490s).54 VCH Oxon. v. 50; CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 786.

By contrast, other properties which Danvers acquired from Rademylde (moieties of manors in Combe and Great and Little Chilworth) were intended by him to add to his own family’s estates. Indeed, the further expansion of the Danvers family’s holdings in the last 30 years of the century were largely attributable to him, and added considerably to the prosperity of future generations.55 CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 786; VCH Oxon. vii. 129. Some of his acquisitions came through inheritance from Richard Quatermayns, his great-uncle on his mother’s side, who died childless in 1477, leaving a widow, Sibyl (d.1483) and five coheirs, the descendants of his two sisters.56 C140/62/44; C141/3/33. Danvers took possession of Quatermayns’s principal manor in Wiltshire, that of Corton, together with the manors of Tiddington in Oxfordshire and Great Ickford in Buckinghamshire, but chose to sell Corton to Bishop Waynflete for Magdalen College, retaining the rest of his inheritance for his family.57 Macnamara, 202-7; Magdalen Coll. Corton deeds, 10-12, 18, 19, 21, 58; VCH Oxon. v. 10-11; VCH Bucks. iv. 58, 61. After the failure of his marriage plans in the 1460s, Danvers had eventually got married to Sibyl Fowler, a woman to whom he was already closely related.58 Sibyl was the niece of Quatermayns’s wife; her mother, Cecily Englefield, was the stepdaughter of Quatermayns’s sister Elizabeth; and her brother Richard Fowler† had married Danvers’s sister Jane. Together, Danvers and Sybil had an interest in the manor of Clewer in Berkshire, possibly pertaining to her as dower from a previous marriage,59 CPR, 1467-77, p. 568. Sybil is confused with a namesake in VCH Berks. iii. 73 and n. and in 1479 he settled on her in jointure his inherited manor of Waterstock, moieties of Combe, Great and Little Chilworth and property in Waterperry.60 C142/24/62. For the most part Danvers’s very considerable landed holdings were concentrated in south Oxfordshire, a few miles from Oxford.61 VCH Oxon. vii. 128-9; CCR, 1485-1500, no. 653. Of his business acumen in making these estates profitable there can be no doubt. Like other progressive farmers of the region he bought out peasant farmers and turned the land over to sheep. For instance, he had 300 sheep and 100 cattle on the common at Chilworth in 1476, and he subsequently enclosed some 100 acres of arable land nearby, converting it to pasture.62 VCH Oxon. v. 116, 133-4.

How he felt about the social consequences of his actions, which deprived villagers of their livelihood, is impossible to tell. As, too, is whether his benefactions of Magdalen and Queen’s were motivated from concern for his own soul’s welfare, or from a love of learning and wish to promote education. He was himself well educated, as is indicated by his jocular exchange with Sir John Paston (‘the best cheser of a gentellwoman that I know’), as to whether Ovid’s De Arte Amandi or De Remedio was the more appropriate reading for him.63 Paston Letters, ii. 378-9. Another side of his character is revealed from his astute financial dealings, often involving complicated mortgage arrangements and money-lending. Sometimes these transactions went wrong,64 C1/43/161-6. and on one occasion William Champernowne esquire vexed him with a subpoena demanding restitution of £59 which he alleged he had lost to Danvers ‘by wey of usure’. It was established by the chancellor that the usurer was in fact William Dere, sometime alderman of London, from whom Danvers himself sought redress for having extracted £22 from him by similar means.65 C1/31/527.

Throughout his life Danvers displayed a deep concern for the well being of members of his close family. He acted for his half-brother Richard as a feoffee and business agent from early on until Richard’s death, notably as a trustee of manors in Northamptonshire settled on Richard’s younger son at the time of his marriage.66 CP25(1)/152/96/4; CCR, 1461-8, pp. 256, 299-300, 368; Add. Chs. 38866, 38869. Then too, he offered support to his brothers William, the judge, and Henry, the mercer, in numerous landed transactions.67 CCR, 1476-85, nos. 818, 947, 1401, 1195. Even so, and despite his great wealth, his will, made ‘remembering my great age’ on 1 Nov. 1501, just a few days after he was knighted, hints at miserliness. Although he made bequests to a number of churches he left them sums of just £1 or half a mark each; the warden and fellows of New College were to receive a paltry 26s. 8d. for prayers for his soul; and two Oxford scholars were each to have just £2 p.a. for two years for saying masses at Waterstock on principal feast days. Slightly more generosity was shown to family members, such as his principal heir, his brother Sir William, who was bequeathed a silver basin and ewer engraved with their parents’ arms, and his great-nephews Richard and Robert Croke were left sums of ten marks and £10 when they came of age. An old servant, William Rabbes, who had often assisted him in his transactions, was left in perpetuity some property in Wheatley, while five other servants were each to have £1 over and above their normal wages. His wife Sibyl, named as his executrix, was instructed to sell any land he had purchased in Oxford, Woodstock, Clewer and Bensington for the good of his soul, and to give that in Longstock, Hampshire, to St. Swithun’s priory, Winchester, for masses for Bishop Waynflete and himself. No doubt bearing in mind the many journeys he had made in his lifetime, he left £20 to be spent on highways and the bridges at Wheatley and Ickford. Danvers asked to be buried in the church at Waterstock, where he had undertaken extensive works, beginning by rebuilding the nave. The north aisle was still under construction, and he left instructions that it be finished as soon as possible and roofed with lead, as ‘my wif knowith my mynde’.68 PCC 10 Blamyr (PROB11/13, ff. 93v-94), calendared in Some Oxon. Wills (Oxon. Rec. Soc. xxxix), 75. His monument, described by Wood in the eighteenth century, no longer exists. It was an altar tomb of grey marble, with a brass depicting a man in armour, kneeling upon a cushion, flanked by his two wives.69 VCH Oxon. vii. 227-8; Macnamara, 165-6.

Although writs de diem clausit extremum were issued on 8 Sept. 1502 and again in February following,70 CFR, xxii. nos. 749, 752. no inquisitions post mortem survive, and it is only from the inquisition held following the death of Sir William Rademylde that we learn that Danvers died on 16 Aug. 1502.71 CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 786. As he left no children, his brother Sir William inherited various of the Danvers estates which had been settled in tail-male in the 1470s and earlier,72 Descent in male line given in VCH Oxon. ix. 17. together with a number of purchased manors in Oxfordshire and Berkshire, although he himself lived on only to April 1504. Sir Thomas’s widow kept for life the manor of Waterstock and other estates worth at least £40 p.a.73 C142/24/62; CPR, 1494-1509, p. 371. She outlived not only Sir William but also his son and heir, John, and died in 1511.74 C142/26/52. In her will, made on 13 May that year, she left £8 to two virtuous priests, scholars at Oxford university, for prayers for Danvers’s soul and her own. Her lands at Staines, Middlesex, were eventually to pass to her great-nephew Thomas Fowler, while other properties in Buckinghamshire (which do not appear to have been part of Danvers’s estate), were to be sold after supplying revenues for the performance of the will, which the former Speaker Sir Thomas Englefield† (who had married her late husband’s niece), was asked to supervise. 75 PCC 2 Fetiplace (PROB11/17, f. 11). Following Sibyl’s death the heir to our MP’s estates was his great-nephew, another John Danvers, who himself died childless in 1517, whereupon John’s four sisters, on whom Sibyl had already settled a number of properties, divided the inheritance between them.