SAVILLE, Sir John

Saville, heir to one of the largest gentry inheritances in the West Riding, began his career some years before the death of his father. Of age as early as July 1429, when he was named as a feoffee by his neighbour, Richard Beaumont of Whitley Beaumont, his career began in the mid 1430s. According to a later indictment, on 3 Feb. 1434 he falsely imprisoned a local nailer in Sandal castle, suggesting that, as he was certainly to do later, he held office in the administration of the lord of that castle, Richard, duke of York.5 Yorks. Deeds, i (Yorks. Arch. Soc. Rec. Ser. xxxix), 112; KB27/747, rex rot. 31. It was at this early stage of his career that he married into another of the leading West Riding families, the Gascoignes of Gawthorpe. On this marriage, his father settled on the couple a manor of Botham Hall with lands at Golcar and Rishworth in the West Riding, to which he added soon after the family’s outlying lands at Coldeby in the Isle of Axholme in Lincolnshire and other small West Riding parcels of land at Thurlstone and East Rigton (in Bardsey).6 The deeds of settlement do not survive, but the fact of the settlement is mentioned in our MP’s will: Halifax Wills, i. ed. Caley, 21-22. The marriage had been made by 1438 and, since the couple had a son whose own marriage was being discussed in 1441, it may have occurred several years earlier: Notts. Archs., Savile of Rufford mss, DD/SR/209/230.

These lands were not sufficient to give the young Saville any meaningful stake in local affairs, and it is not surprising that he should have undertaken military service as he waited for his inheritance to fall in. The appointment of his lord, the young duke of York, as lieutenant in France in May 1436 made it the more natural that he should do so, and it may be that he went to France with the duke in the following month. He is not, however, known to have served until after the duke’s second appointment to the lieutenancy in July 1440. In February 1441 he purchased in London a complete suit of Milanese armour for £6, and four months later he set out for Normandy in the duke’s retinue.7 Archaeologia, lxxxvii. 320; E101/53/33, m. 1. Saville did not, however, remain abroad for long. According to depositions taken in the ecclesiastical court at York, he was with his father in that city on 28 Oct. 1441 when they discussed with Thomas Haryngton I* marriages between Haryngton’s daughter Joan and our MP’s infant son, John, and between Sir Thomas Saville and Haryngton’s widowed sister-in-law, Christine Lancaster.8 M. Habberjam, ‘Harrington v. Saville’, The Ricardian, viii. 51. He was still in England on 8 Jan. 1442, when he attested his father’s election to represent Yorkshire in Parliament, but it is probable that he returned to France thereafter. This is implied by his next appearance in the records. When he witnessed a deed on the following 23 Aug. he was described as a knight, and the most likely occasion for that knighthood is a period of campaigning earlier in that year.9 C219/15/2; Yorks. Deeds, iii (Yorks. Arch. Soc. Rec. Ser. lxiii), 97.

Saville soon exchanged service under the duke of York abroad for service under him at home, assuming a far more important place in the duke’s local administration than his father had done. By October 1442 he was acting as steward of the lordship of Wakefield, the duke’s principal office in Yorkshire.10 Arnold, ii. 43. If indictments taken before the county sheriff, Sir Robert Ughtred*, at his tourn at York castle on 21 Oct. 1447, are to be credited, he used this position as an instrument of oppression and extortion. Five instances of false imprisonment in Sandal castle, the administrative centre of the lordship, and extortion of bonds for release were laid against him. The first was dated to as early as February 1434 but the other four are all said to have occurred in the recent past, namely between 12 Apr. and 24 Aug. 1447. There is nothing to suggest that Saville was acting here as the duke’s agent, and it is much more likely that he was furthering vendettas of his own. The most significant of his victims was Robert Gargrave, a kinsman (perhaps even a younger son) of the West Riding lawyer, John Gargrave*. On 16 Aug. 1447 Saville and 40 others are said to have assaulted Robert at Wakefield, near the Gargrave residence at Snapethorpe, and imprisoned him for two days in Sandal castle. There, in the dramatic language of the indictment, two outlaws wished to murder him and he was saved only by God’s grace. Significantly, the jurors added the general accusation that Saville was a ‘common extortioner and oppressor of the King’s people’, an indication that these were not malicious indictments but reflective of a local concern at his oppressive behaviour. He was inconvenienced enough to appear along with 20 of his servants by attorney in King’s bench in Hilary term 1448 to secure an adjournment.11 KB27/747, rex rot. 31. Saville’s alleged oppression of Robert Gargrave may have prompted the lawsuit of Mich. term 1449 when John Gargrave sued our MP’s father for the arrears of an annuity granted as long before as 1418: CP40/755, rot. 624d. It is unlikely that they received any real punishment and Saville’s career was unaffected.

It is a measure of Saville’s importance that he should have been returned to Parliament so soon after his father’s death late in 1449. His election on 5 Oct. 1450 in company with another who had served in France under the duke of York, Sir John Melton*, clearly had a political context. The duke had recently returned from Ireland in contentious circumstances, and evidence from other counties shows that he was actively engaged in promoting the return of his adherents to the forthcoming Parliament. No doubt both Saville and Melton saw their candidature as part of their service to the duke. More doubtfully it has been argued that their election was an early manifestation of a political alliance between York and the Nevilles of Middleham. The most that can be said is that the election indenture suggests that the Nevilles were sympathetic to the return of the duke’s men. The attestors were headed by Christopher Conyers, Richard Neville, earl of Salisbury’s steward at Middleham, and the election conducted by a sheriff, Sir James Pickering*, also connected with the Nevilles.12 C219/16/1.

Some 14 months later Saville may have been called upon to support the duke outside Parliament. As steward of Wakefield, he is likely to have taken part in York’s abortive Dartford rising of February 1452. That he should have felt the need to sue out a general pardon on the following 20 May is consistent with such participation.13 C67/40, m. 8. Later in the same year less contentious private matters engaged his interest. On 27 July he and his wife secured a papal licence to have a portable altar. More interestingly, two weeks later he entered into an indenture for the marriage of his daughter Anne to John, the young son and heir apparent of Sir John Boteler* of Warrington in Lancashire. This marriage came about through the mediation of the groom’s great-uncle, Thomas Haryngton, to whose daughter Saville’s own son and heir was already married. Boteler agreed to settle a jointure worth 40 marks p.a. on the couple with the significant concession that our MP was to have the custody of the couple until the groom reached the age of 17, taking £20 p.a. from the issues of the jointure until the groom was 14 and the whole sum thereafter. Since the groom appears to have been only seven Saville would receive as much as 330 marks from this arrangement. This explains why he undertook to pay as much as 700 marks for the marriage, with the whole sum to be paid within four years of the marriage and half to be repayable if Anne died without living issue before the age of 17. As it transpired the groom’s death as a child meant that the marriage was never made. The contract, however, is of interest both in its demonstration of Saville’s wealth and of the closeness of his connexion with the powerful Haryngton, to whom the contract committed the responsibility of reforming any ambiguities in its terms.14 Annals of Warrington, ii (Chetham Soc. lxxxvii), 270-4.

The promotion of the duke of York to the protectorship in March 1454 brought Saville to a new prominence. On the following 29 Sept. he was named to a commission to resist a rising in Lancashire that represented the last embers of the failed revolt of Henry Holand, duke of Exeter, and his Percy ally, Thomas, Lord Egremont.15 CPR, 1452-61, pp. 219-20; R.A. Griffiths, King and Country, 353. Much more importantly a few weeks later he was named to the shrievalty of his native county.16 There has been disagreement about the duke’s success in securing favourable sheriffs. In one view, the appointees were, for the most part, lesser men chosen as compromise candidates by the great council then in session: P.A. Johnson, Duke Richard of York, 150. In another, the duke enjoyed significant success securing the inclusion of several of his adherents and the exclusion of political opponents: R.A. Griffiths, Hen. VI, 729. His appointment came at an important moment in Yorkshire politics: the state of the county made it vital that the duke of York and his new allies, the Nevilles, secured a sheriff favourable to their cause. A few days earlier, in a clash at Stamford Bridge, the Nevilles, now in open war with the Percys, had captured two of the younger sons of the earl of Northumberland, Lord Egremont and Richard Percy. Then, on the very day Saville became sheriff, the captured men were condemned before justices of oyer and terminer at York to make compensatory payments of 16,800 marks to the Nevilles.17 R.L.Storey, End of House of Lancaster, 148-9; Griffiths, King and Country, 354-5. Saville, as the new sheriff, presumably played a part here, as he was to do at the parliamentary elections held on 23 June 1455, a month after the Yorkist victory at the first battle of St. Albans. He himself probably participated with the duke at this battle and he then conducted the election of two Yorkist partisans, his friend, Haryngton (who was to replace him as sheriff during the course of the Parliament), and Sir James Pickering, the sheriff who had conducted his own election in 1450.18 C219/16/3; Arnold, i. 229-30.

The disturbed state of Yorkshire during his shrievalty brought Saville, at least on his own complaint, financial difficulties. On 5 Dec. 1455 he petitioned the Crown for a pardon of account because recent disturbances had left him unable to raise the usual revenues. He also claimed that he had been exposed to exceptional costs in executing the orders of the duke of York’s oyer and terminer commission in the county and keeping men under arms as defence against Scottish raids. His plea met with success: he secured a pardon of account in £246 13s. 4d., the standard sum allowed to Yorkshire sheriffs since the late 1440s, and a general pardon.19 Griffiths, King and Country, 358; Arnold, ii. 104. These concessions came just as the duke of York was losing the power he had won with victory at St. Albans, but Saville continued to serve him. On 2 Feb. 1458, with other of the duke’s leading servants, he entered into bonds in respect of the marriage of York’s daughter Elizabeth and John, duke of Suffolk; and on the following 22 Apr. he held a view of frankpledge at Wakefield as York’s steward there.20 CAD, iv. A6339, 6342; KB9/289/44. This continued loyalty explains why he was excluded from any part in county administration during the late 1450s.

By this date Saville’s eldest son, another John (the husband of Haryngton’s daughter), was also active in local affairs, and it appears to have been the younger man who took up arms in the Yorkist cause at the outbreak of civil war in the autumn of 1459. The commission issued on 14 Oct. for the confiscation of the son’s Lincolnshire lands and his inclusion among the Yorkists attainted in the Coventry Parliament of the following month shows that he was present in the Yorkist ranks at either Blore Heath or Ludford Bridge, and the likelihood is that he was present at both.21 CPR, 1452-61, p. 561. Our MP’s own losses were restricted to that of his office as the duke’s steward. With the forfeiture of the duke’s estates, the Crown was free to appoint its own officers there, and on 9 Dec. 1459 the stewardship and master forestership of Wakefield and constableship of Sandal castle were granted to John Talbot, the young son and heir of the Lancastrian earl of Shrewsbury.22 The offices were re-granted to Talbot a week later, the only difference between the two grants being that, in the second, the offices were described as held by Saville for life: CPR, 1452-61, pp. 532, 570-1.

The Yorkist victory at the battle of Northampton in July 1460 restored the fortunes of the Savilles. In the following October Sir John was named to a powerful and wide-ranging commission to expel Lancastrian loyalists from the castles of Pontefract, Wressle (then held by the earl of Northumberland) and Penrith.23 CPR, 1452-61, p. 651; A.J. Pollard, North-Eastern Eng. 280. He was very probably in the Yorkist ranks at the battle of Wakefield on 30 Dec. 1460, where the duke of York and (Sir) Thomas Haryngton were killed. Given the proximity of his home at Thornhill to the battlefield and his position as steward of the lordship of Wakefield, it would be surprising if he was not there. It has been suggested that he was among those imprisoned by the Lancastrians after the battle, but his appointment as sheriff on the following 6 Mar. 1461, only two days after Edward IV had made himself King, makes this unlikely. More probably the sheriff he replaced, Melton, had suffered that fate, thus occasioning Saville’s nomination as another Yorkist loyalist.24 CFR, xxi. 10. However this may be, Saville, as sheriff, almost certainly fought at the decisive battle of Towton.25 There is a deed dated at Almondbury on the day of the battle of Towton witnessed by our MP and John Neville, Lord Montagu, but no deed proves the presence of its witnesses: Yorks. Deeds, v (Yorks. Arch. Soc. Rec. Ser. lxix), 2.

Saville’s career after the change of regime did not quite take the form one might have expected given the long service of himself and his family to the house of York. His close ties with that regime are witnessed by his nomination of the queen-mother, Cecily, dowager-duchess of York, and John Neville, Lord Montagu, among his feoffees in his manors of Elland and Tankersley in 1462.26 Savile of Rufford mss, DD/SR/209/307, 315. The generous pardon of account granted him at the end of his shrievalty in £340, higher than any sum previously granted to a sheriff, suggests that the King was not unmindful of his support.27 It may be that this was not a special reward, but rather the culmination of a steady increase in the sum pardoned to the county’s sheriff: Arnold, ii. 104-5. It may have exceeded the total amount due from the farm of the county: R.M. Jeffs, ‘The Later Med. Sheriff’ (Oxf. Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1960), 108. Yet for all this he gained very little from the change of regime. This is particularly surprising in view of the quantity of forfeited property available in Yorkshire. Save for his pardon of account he had to wait until 10 July 1465 for any reward and even then it was but little, namely a grant for life of the herbage of the King’s new park of Wakefield not exceeding the yearly value of £12.28 CPR, 1461-7, p. 466. Nor, after his shrievalty, was he active in local government, and it is curious that he was not added to the bench in the West Riding until May 1467. Even then his appointment and that of his younger son, William Saville, a lawyer of Gray’s Inn, owed more to special circumstances than an acknowledgement of loyal service.29 For William, who by 1478 was his father’s dep. in the Wakefield stewardship: Arnold, ii. 14, 44; J.H. Baker, Men of Ct. (Selden Soc. supp. ser. xviii), ii. 1368. The West Riding bench had steadily increased in size from the first commission of May 1461, when 17 justices were appointed, and recent disorders in the county, occasioned by disputes regarding the payment of thraves of corn to the hospital of St. Leonard, York, had brought a further increase to the 27 named on our MP’s first commission.30 C. Arnold, ‘Comm. of the Peace for W. Riding’, in Property and Politics ed. Pollard, 123-4.

Saville’s promotion to the bench came very soon after he had been elected to his second Parliament. At hustings convened in York castle on 27 Apr. 1467 he was returned in company with Melton, with whom he had represented the county in the 1450 Parliament. The naming of as many as 213 attestors suggests that their election may have been contested. If so it was a contest that Saville was well placed to win. The sheriff who conducted the election was Haryngton’s son, Sir James†.31 In 1464 Haryngton had married the wid. of our MP’s brother-in-law, Sir William Gascoigne: Test. Ebor. iii (Surtees Soc. xlv), 337. He accompanied Saville to the Parliament, as a shire knight for Lancs.

Further, it appears that Saville brought many of his kin and neighbours to the hustings. Among the attestors were his grandson, John Saville, his younger son, Henry, and his first cousin, William Hopton, together with at least 12 esquires and gentlemen from the near-vicinity of Thornhill.32 C219/17/1; Arnold, ‘Political Study’, i. 230-1. Why Saville should have been so seemingly anxious to secure election is unclear, nor is there any ready context to help explain why his election should have been contested. It has been suggested that the contest, if such it was, was the result of the declining relations between Edward IV and the Nevilles, and that Saville and Melton were returned so as to exclude men with closer ties to the latter. This is a possibility in that both MPs were far more closely tied to the house of York that they were to the Nevilles. On the other hand, the opposite could be said of the sheriff who conducted the election. Moreover, like Saville, Melton had benefited much less from the change of regime than he might have expected on the basis of his political antecedents. On this basis they could not be described as active partisans of the new King. Further, at least in the case of Saville, his kinship with the Haryngtons may have made him an acceptable candidate to the Nevilles. His employment of the earl of Warwick’s brother, John, among his feoffees, strengthens this impression. It is probable, therefore, that he and Melton emerged from the election as compromise candidates.

Saville’s addition to the bench and election to Parliament was not the prelude to a new prominence. Indeed, the last years of his career were severely compromised by an escalating feud with his first cousin, John Pilkington†, who, in the way that our MP did not, had benefited significantly from royal patronage after 1461. Pilkington’s father, a younger son, had acquired a small estate at Sowerby, only a few miles from Saville’s manor of Elland, and, as an esquire of the royal body in the 1460s, Pilkington added to this estate through royal grants of forfeited Yorkshire estates. His local influence soon began to exceed Saville’s own. He was added to the West Riding bench in July 1464, and in February 1465 the Crown granted him the offices of master forester in Sowerby and parker of Erringden, offices that had once been held by Saville and his father.33 Arnold, ‘Political Study’, i. 59-60; ii. 61-62; CPR, 1461-7, p. 344. Although it is clear that our MP held his most important office, the stewardship of Wakefield, in the 1460s, the 1465 grant to Pilkington suggests that he was not restored to the master forestership he had held the 1450s in the neighbouring lordship of Sowerby. Alternatively, it may be that this grant contradicted one already made to our MP. The differing role the two men took in the great crisis of the reign served further to increase Pilkington’s standing and diminish Saville’s. Pilkington was captured and imprisoned by the Nevilles when Edward IV fled into exile in October 1470, only narrowly escaping execution, and then went on to fight for the returning Edward at Tewkesbury, where he was knighted. Saville, by contrast, seems to have been lukewarm or perhaps just inefficient in his support for the house of York. Although sufficiently distrusted by the Readeption government to be removed from the bench in November 1470, he was able to secure from it a general pardon.34 CPR, 1467-77, pp. 637-8; C67/44, m. 4. Much more significantly, he did not take the part expected of him after Edward landed at Ravenspur on 14 Mar. 1471. As steward of Wakefield, he had the responsibility of rallying the tenants of the lordship and would, theoretically at least, have been able to bring a significant force to its returning lord. Yet the author of the Arrivall, the official Yorkist narrative of the King’s victorious return, implies that he did not, remarking that, ‘Abowte Wakefylde, and in thos parties, came some folks unto [Edward IV], but not so many as he supposed wolde have comen’.35 Arrivall of Edw. IV (Cam. Soc. i), 7.

This contrast between Saville’s apparent inactivity and Pilkington’s active support may explain the grant made on the following 25 June when Edward IV was once more firmly established as King. The duke of York’s surviving feoffees, no doubt acting on royal instructions, granted Pilkington the reversion of Saville’s offices of constable of Sandal castle and master forester and steward of Wakefield. Saville might comfort himself with the consideration that he would retain the offices for his life, but he had probably hoped and expected that his own son would succeed him.36 CPR, 1467-77, p. 261; Arnold, ‘Political Study’, i. 177-8. Moreover, the grant was a further sign of what had already been apparent before the crisis of the reign. Pilkington, although new to the region, had become a more important local figure than our MP.

During the early 1470s Saville began to rebuild his family’s place in local affairs. He and his lawyer son, William, were restored to the bench on 24 Feb. 1472, at the next commission issued after Edward IV’s restoration. Two days later, in a rather curious grant, the Crown gave his wife, described only as ‘Alice Sayvile’ without reference to her husband, a yearly allowance of a tun of wine, a stag and two bucks.37 CPR, 1467-77, p. 310; PROME, xiv. 195. In 1474 his local position was recognized when, at an annuity of ten marks, he was retained by Richard, duke of Gloucester, now lord of Middleham and other Yorkshire estates once of the Nevilles. Further, he had connexions enough in the royal household to make a good marriage for his grandson and heir, John. By 1 Aug. 1477, when he entailed on the couple the site of the manor of Elland, he had married the young John to Alice, sister of the richest of the Derbyshire gentry, Henry Vernon† of Haddon, an esquire of the King’s body.38 Savile of Rufford mss, DD/SR/10/97.

If, however, this was a recovery, Saville was still of less significance than his rival Pilkington. The latter, as the duke of Gloucester’s chamberlain, was more closely connected with the new principal power in Yorkshire politics than the former.39 Pilkington was the duke’s chamberlain by c.1472: M.A. Hicks, Ric. III and Rivals, 310. When, in November 1475, the West Riding bench was reduced from 23 to 16, Saville and his son were removed, but Pilkington retained his place, while his election to represent the county in the Parliaments of 1472 and 1478 provided additional evidence of his high standing. Saville was faced with a physical expression of the new local order: in May 1477 Pilkington had licence to crenellate his newly-built ‘Pylkyngton Hall’ in the parish of Wakefield.40 CPR, 1467-77, p. 71. Royal patronage had, in short, bolstered Pilkington’s power in the lordship of Wakefield without significantly degrading that of our MP, who retained office as the lordship’s steward. This was the context for the violence that broke out between the two families very soon after the end of the 1478 Parliament. An apparently trivial disagreement unleashed simmering tensions. According to the indictments taken before commissioners of oyer and terminer, the troubles originated from the erection of a hedge by Saville on the manor of Elland, the home of his grandson. On 12 Apr. 1478 one of his tenants, Richard Elistones, aggrieved that the hedge enclosed part of his property, sought Pilkington’s maintenance by enfeoffing him of the tenement. Then Pilkington, rejecting a polite request from the Savilles not to intervene, instructed his bastard son, Robert, to destroy the offending hedge. Thereafter matters very quickly escalated. A month later, on 14 May, Sir John’s son, ThomasSaville, at the head of 100 men, came to Elland and expelled Ellistones and another yeoman, John Holes, from their tenements and erected dykes on Holes’s land,41 KB9/349/23, 62, 93. which five days later Robert Pilkington and, in the improbable estimate of the indictment, some 500 men, joined the dispossessed yeomen in destroying. This provoked a minor battle on the following day at ‘Halifaxmore’ (or Skircoat Moor) in which at least one servant of the Pilkingtons and six followers of the Savilles met their deaths.42 KB9/349/12, 14-15, 24-26, 57-61, 82, 84, 88, 104, 119, 158, 160, 200. These fatalities did not bring an immediate end to the violence. On 22 May Sir John Pilkington’s brother, Charles, brought 400 men to Sandal castle, unsuccessfully demanding that our MP come out and fight; and, two days later, another brother, Thomas Pilkington, and others, ‘machinantes et inuicem confederantes qualiter et quomodo gubernacionem populi domini Regis in patria sua super se assumere potuissent’, caused proclamation to be made in a chapel in Holmfirth that all men living in the lordship of Wakefield should make joint confederacy with them against their enemies.43 KB9/349/23, 44, 100.

Here the story told in the indictments came to an end and perhaps peace was restored. Yet so serious an outbreak of violence, in an area of royal lordship and within the royal retinue, could not be ignored. On 5 Sept. a powerful commission of oyer and terminer, headed by the duke of Gloucester, was issued for Yorkshire, and when the commissioners sat at Pontefract between 21 and 25 Sept. many were indicted for these and other offences. Far more indictments were made against the Pilkingtons than against the Savilles, and it may be that the former were held to be primarily responsible.44 CPR, 1476-85, p. 144; Arnold, ‘Political Study’, i. 189-92. Interestingly, although the heads of the two families were indicted as accessories, it was the junior members of the two families who were identified as the active agents of the violence. Further, the proceedings ended, as such proceedings very rarely did, with sentences of death passed against men of some rank: our MP’s younger son, Richard, was sentenced to hang for felonious theft, as were two of the Pilkingtons. It must, however, be doubtful that these sentences were carried out. The Pilkingtons pleaded benefit of clergy and Richard had a bequest in his father’s will of 1481.45 KB9/349/224d, 225, 225d; Halifax Wills, i. 22.

This dramatic episode was followed by Sir John Pilkington’s death in the following spring leaving a minor as his heir. The Savilles could now resume their pre-eminent place among the gentry of the lordship of Wakefield, although not in the person of our ageing MP. Just as resistance to the Pilkingtons had been led by the younger members of the family it was they who now assumed its leadership. On 26 Mar. 1480 the Crown granted the reversion of Sir John’s offices in the lordship to his grandson and heir, John, and in the following June it was the grandson rather than the grandfather who was appointed to a commission of array in the West Riding for defence against the Scots.46 CPR, 1476-85, pp. 193, 213.

It was thus an aged and retired MP who made his will on 23 Nov. 1481. It gives the impression of fairly modest resources for a man known to have held so extensive an estate. He left £40 to his daughter Margaret, who was probably the only one of his daughters to remain unmarried. He singled out two of his younger sons, Thomas (who had taken the leading part in opposition to the Pilkingtons), and the lawyer William, for favourable treatment: they were each to have a moiety of his manor of Hunsworth (near Elland) in tail-male with provision for reunification of the manor in the hands of whichever of their male lines should survive the longest. His other three younger sons, Henry, Richard and Nicholas, had to content themselves with life annuities of £4 each assigned on the same manor. In terms of cash, the two favoured sons were to have 20 marks each and the three others only 40s. each. His wife was to have her jointure including the manor of Thornhill, which he had generously settled upon her in July 1450, soon after inheriting the family lands.47 Halifax Wills, i. 21-22; Savile of Rufford mss, DD/SR/36/44-45, 209/118-19.

Saville died on the following 15 June at Sandal castle. Writs of diem clausit extremum were quickly issued in respect of his lands in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, but, if these writs were acted upon, no inquisitions survive. His will was proved on 21 June and soon after his widow took the veil.48 J. Hunter, Antiquarian Notices of Lupset, 17; CFR, xxi. 664; Test. Ebor. iii. 346. His wiow survived at least as late as the summer of 1485: Savile of Rufford mss, DD/SR/28/3/11-12. Monumental effigies survive in the church of Thornhill to the couple with the male effigy bearing the Yorkist collar of suns and roses. The erection of this tomb was a part of the family’s active patronage of the church at this date, with Sir John’s son, William, responsible for enlarging the choir.49 P.E. Routh, Alabaster Tombs Yorks. 117-22; A. James, ‘Men and Gentry Culture in 15th-Cent. Yorks.’ (Univ. of York D.Phil. thesis, 2012), 138-40.

The family’s later history was long and distinguished. Sir John’s grandson and heir further advanced the family in a turbulent career. Knighted by the duke of Gloucester at the siege of Berwick on 22 Aug. 1482, he supported the duke’s usurpation of the throne. He was among the gentry of the north translated to the south to afforce Richard III’s rule there: in February 1484 he was named to serve, on generous terms, as captain of the Isle of Wight. This translation, however, did not suit him, and his relations with the usurper were compromised by royal insistence that he hold the office in person. After Bosworth, he very quickly won the trust of Henry VII. Just as his grandfather had been under Edward IV, he was the first Yorkshire sheriff of the new reign. He went on to serve as a knight of the King’s body and his affairs prospered until allegations of corruption against him resulted in the loss of his stewardship of Wakefield and other Yorkshire offices in 1502. He died in March 1505 leaving as his heir Henry†, his young son by his well-born second wife, Elizabeth, daughter of William Paston† by Anne, daughter of Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset (d.1455).50 W.A. Shaw, Knights of Eng. ii. 20; Arnold, ‘Political Study’, ii. 64-65; W.E. Hampton, Mems. Wars of the Roses, 236-7; CIPM Hen. VII, ii. 803. Sir Henry represented Yorkshire in the Parliament of 1539. On the death of his mentally-unstable son, Edward, in 1603, the family lands passed to the descendants of our MP’s younger son, Thomas, who had established a branch of the family at Lupset (near Thornhill). The line represented by Sir Henry’s illegitimate son, Sir Robert (d.1585), became earls of Sussex.51 CP, xi. 459-61, 531-3.