SKYDEMORE, John

Although Skydemore never achieved the wide-ranging influence of his father, he was, as one of the leaders of a strong Lancastrian faction in Herefordshire in the 1450s, an important figure. His early career is obscure for it cannot be distinguished from that of his elder brother and namesake. The latter died relatively young: on 21 Oct. 1418 the administration of his goods was granted to his father.6 Reg. Lacy (Canterbury and York Soc. xxii), 44. It may be that he died fighting in France. The chronicler, Adam of Usk, noted the death of one ‘Sir John Skidmore’ at the battle of Agincourt, and although this is probably a mistaken reference to the father (who is known from other evidence to have fought at the battle), our MP’s elder brother could well have met his death in France later, particularly if he is to be identified with the namesake who indented to serve in the retinue of Sir William Bourgchier† (d.1420) in the 1417 campaign.7 E101/51/2, m. 23. Our MP’s own military career, which he was to pursue intermittently for some 20 years, is not documented until the campaign of 1421, when he indented to serve under Sir John Cornwall (later Lord Fanhope).8 E101/50/1, m. 3; DKR, xliv. 636.

Aside from this foray abroad (or perhaps forays if he rather than his brother served under Bourgchier), Skydemore’s early career was dominated by his efforts to make good his claim to his maternal inheritance in Herefordshire. His title was contested by his maternal great-uncle, an elderly King’s esquire, Robert Brut of Thorney (Nottinghamshire). In a petition presented to the chancellor late in the reign of Henry V Brut claimed that his paternal grandfather, Sir Thomas Brut, had entailed the manors of Grove, Chanstone (in Vowchurch), Tretire and Westhide and other Herefordshire lands in tail-male, and that he had been seised under that entail until the previous 24 Nov. (probably 1421) when Sir John Skydemore, our MP and John Weston†, a lawyer, had disseised him. On 12 Feb. 1422, as a result of this petition, the parties appeared before the royal council, and the lands were committed to an important local figure, John Merbury*, pending a conciliar decision on ownership. In the meantime, on the following 6 Apr. our MP’s father found surety of the peace in £500 to Brut.9 C1/5/22; CPR, 1416-22, pp. 257, 414. The departure of our MP and his father to France very soon afterwards, followed by the King’s death, appear to have put an end to these deliberations, for litigation was resumed in the new reign. On 8 June 1423 Brut sued out an assize of novel disseisin against John, his father and others, and a month later he secured further sureties of the peace against the father. John replied by suing Brut for detinue of charters and Brut’s adherents, headed by another Nottinghamshire man, Norman Babington*, for close-breaking at Grove (in the time of Henry V).10 C66/410, m. 17d; CPR, 1422-9, pp. 66, 78; CP40/651, rot. 304; 672, rot. 401d. The pleading in these actions has not been traced, but it appears that, for a period, the disputed lands were divided. Subsidy commissioners in 1428 and 1431 returned our MP as seised of the Brut lands at Chanstone, and Brut as seised of Westhide (a few miles to the north-east of Hereford).11 Feudal Aids, ii. 410, 418, 421. A more durable settlement was probably in agitation in the early 1430s, for Skydemore, as the heir of Sir Thomas Brut and executor of Brut’s widow, Joan, released all actions to Babington and other associates of his rival, but it was not until the spring of 1440 that a final settlement was reached. Skydemore and Robert Brut then entered into mutual bonds in £500 as surety for an agreement largely favourable to the former: Skydemore undertook to pay Brut seven marks a year in two annual portions in the cathedral church of St. Paul’s for term of Brut’s life in return for a surrender of his claim, a settlement no doubt the easier to reach because of Brut’s apparent childlessness.12 CCR, 1435-41, pp. 162, 368.

In the early 1420s Skydemore and other members of his family became involved in the violent campaign conducted by John Abrahall* against John, Lord Talbot. He was among those indicted, before the Herefordshire j.p.s headed by Talbot himself, for having on 26 Mar. 1423 brought 1,000 men to Michaelchurch and Gillow (near Grove) with the intention of killing Talbot and his younger brother, Sir William Talbot. For want of a better explanation these disturbances may have been a reaction on the part of the old Talbot affinity against its new lord. Sir John Skydemore had been steward of Archenfield under the new lord’s late brother, Gilbert, Lord Talbot (d.1418), and Abrahall was receiver-general to Gilbert’s widow, Beatrice. Yet whatever the causes of the dispute, it quickly lost its intensity. In any case, our MP himself was probably only peripherally involved. He was not named in the petitions presented against the rioters in the Parliament of October 1423 (although his kinsman George Skydemore was). Despite the seriousness of the charges, he was able to purge himself of the King’s suit by making a fine of two marks in Michaelmas term 1428.13 PROME, x. 187-8; KB27/659, rex rot. 2; 670, fines rot. 1.

Skydemore’s hard-won maternal inheritance enabled him to play a part in local affairs as he waited to inherit the family patrimony. On 27 Aug. 1429 he attested the election of his father to Parliament; and by the mid 1430s he was acting as steward of Ballingham, a few miles to the north of Grove, for the priory of St. Guthlac, at a modest fee of 20s. p.a.14 C219/14/1; Trans. Woolhope Field Club, 1918, p. 34. In the meantime he went again to France, indenting, early in 1430, to serve with a small retinue of three archers on the King’s coronation expedition. This proved to be the prelude for a more sustained period of military service. His readiness to serve arose from the appointment of the great marcher lord, Richard, duke of York, as King’s lieutenant in Normandy. Early in 1436 he sued out letters of protection as departing there in the duke’s retinue, and he was presumably in the army which landed at Honfleur on the following 7 June. How long he remained is unknown, but an extended period abroad would explain why there was a delay between his inheritance of the family estates in 1435 and the beginning of his local administrative career. This suggests that he is to be identified with the namesake who, in May 1437, was in the retinue of the famous Welsh soldier, Sir Richard Guethin, at Mantes, and was serving under Sir Robert James at Tancarville in the following autumn.15 E404/46/262; DKR, xlviii. 310; Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, Fr 25773/1194; Add. Ch. 137.

Skydemore may have been back in England in the next year, for on 1 Sept. 1438 he was nominated by James, Lord Berkeley, as one of his feoffees in the advowson of Slimbridge (Gloucestershire).16 CPR, 1436-41, p. 250. But three years later, with York’s reappointment as lieutenant in Normandy, he again made preparations to depart with him. On 12 Feb. 1441 he sued out letters nominating his brother-in-law, Thomas Fitzharry*, and Urian de la Hay, as his attorneys; on the following day he conveyed a messuage in Hereford to two chaplains; and three days later he secured letters of protection. He and his son, James, duly mustered in the duke’s army at Portsdown at the end of March, but due to the problems the Exchequer had in raising the army’s wages departure was delayed.17 C76/123, mm. 14, 18; CCR, 1435-41, p. 455; E101/53/33, m. 1. Not until June did the army land in Normandy, and if Skydemore was with it, he did not remain long in France for he had returned by the autumn.18 On 5 June 1441 a London grocer chose Skydemore as one of the trustees of his goods: CCR, 1435-41, p. 477. On 7 Oct. he witnessed a deed at Pencombe for Sir Robert Whitney*, whose daughter, Ellen, if the traditional pedigrees are to be believed, was the wife of his eldest son, John. A month later the Crown appointed him to his first commission, and, on 30 Dec. 1441, he attested the county election.19 Herefs. RO, LC deeds 6566; CPR, 1441-6, p. 49; C219/15/2. This marked the delayed beginning of his administrative career, but he quickly made up for lost time. He was on the pricked list for the shrievalty of Herefordshire on 9 Nov. 1442, although he was not chosen, and a few months later he was added to the county bench.

Early in 1445 Skydemore was elected to represent the county in Parliament in company with Sir John Barre*, with whom he had fought in France under the duke of York.20 C47/34/2/4; CFR, xvii. 324. For reasons that are unclear he appears to have been one of those singled out for knighthood at the coronation of Queen Margaret at Westminster Abbey during the second session of this Parliament.21 He was still an esq. on 13 Jan. 1444, when he sat as a j.p., but he is styled a kt. in the tax allowance comm. of 3 June 1445: KB9/245/113; CFR, xvii. 324. The queen’s coronation is the obvious occasion for his assumption of the rank. His wealth amply justified both this new rank and his prominent place in local affairs. In the subsidy returns of 1450 he was assessed on an income of £40. This was a significant underestimate – a marriage contract of 1473 valued his lands at £120 p.a. – but £40 p.a. was enough to make him one of the richest gentry in an impoverished county.22 E179/117/64; Herefs. RO, Kentchurch Court mss, AL40/18/1000. Next to his assessment at £10 p.a. is that of Elizabeth Skydemore, perhaps the widow of his er. bro.

Skydemore’s services were much in demand, partly no doubt because of his relative wealth but perhaps also because the bulk of his lands lay on the politically sensitive border between England and Wales. In the early 1440s Humphrey Stafford, duke of Buckingham, granted him an annuity of ten marks. He went on to hold office as steward and receiver of the duke’s great lordship of Brecon, although he was removed in 1451, seemingly for failing to punish cattle-rustlers and other offenders.23 Peniarth mss, 280, pp. 25, 50; Rawcliffe, 50, 233. In June 1446 he was in receipt of another annuity of ten marks as one of the 21 Herefordshire gentry with fees assigned on the Beauchamp lordship of Abergavenny, then in the hands of royal custodians. The purpose of these grants was the protection of the lordship against Edward Neville, Lord Abergavenny, a rival claimant (in right of his wife), but it is not known whether they were made by the young Henry Beauchamp, duke of Warwick, recently-entered into his inheritance, or by the keepers. If the former then it marked a new, and potentially significant, lordly association for Skydemore, which was cut short by Warwick’s premature death that same month.24 E368/220, rot. 122d; M. Hicks, Warwick, 33-35.

On 18 Jan. 1449 Skydemore was again elected to Parliament, on this occasion with his brother-in-law, Fitzharry, and at the end of the year he was named as sheriff of Herefordshire.25 C219/15/6. His official duties in that office may explain how he came to take the leading part in wide-ranging attempts at local peace-keeping. Among what little survives of the family’s medieval archive is a curious indenture, dated 29 Nov. 1451, drawn up between the ‘gentillemen, comeners, tenaunts and receants’ of Elvell and three neighbouring vills on the one part, and those of Hay-on-Wye, Talgarth and others, some in Wales, some in Herefordshire. These communities undertook to maintain the peace between them until the following 1 May. Contention seems to have arisen because of the murder of one Griffith ap Meyrik (perhaps during Skydemore’s shrievalty), and it appears that the indenture was an attempt to prevent matters escalating. Sir John played the major part in bringing this peace about for not only did he sign the indentures with his ‘owyn hande’ and seal them with his signet, but he was by far the most important of the men who offered surety on behalf of the individual communities that the agreement would be observed.26 Kentchurch Court mss, AL40/19/1027.

Later, on 3 Apr. 1452, Skydemore was the beneficiary of a politically sensitive grant. The Crown committed to him keeping of a moiety of the castle of Ewyas Lacy and a moiety of a moiety of lordship there to hold during the minority of George, son of the Lord Abergavenny whose potential claim to the lordship of Abergavenny had troubled Henry Beauchamp. This grant was made on the contentious understanding that Ewyas Lacy, as part of the Despenser inheritance, was subject to division between the young George (who claimed a moiety through his mother, Elizabeth, daughter of Isabel Despenser by her first husband, Richard Beauchamp, earl of Worcester), and his cousin, Richard Neville, earl of Warwick (who claimed the whole inheritance in right of his wife, Anne (Isabel’s daughter by her second husband, Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick). This grant marks Chancery’s acceptance of George’s claim and must have been unwelcome to Warwick, who moved to secure his own grant of the keeping of the moiety of Ewyas Lacy claimed by his cousin. This was granted in April 1453, but, on the following 21 July, a new grant was made to Skydemore. By this date the Neville earl was coming to identify himself with the Yorkist cause, and thus this second grant, at least when viewed retrospectively, identified Skydemore with York’s opponents.27 CFR, xviii. 255; xix. 35; Hicks, 78.

This raises the question of Skydemore’s sympathies as civil war threatened in the 1450s. No county was more riven by faction than Herefordshire in that struggle, and there were reasons why Sir John should have identified himself with York. Not only had he twice served under the duke in France, but he had no reason to love York’s rival Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset, who had, in the early 1430s, unjustly supplanted his father in his Welsh offices. To be balanced against this, however, his father had risen to prominence in the county through service to the house of Lancaster, and he himself, although no longer steward of Brecon, was an annuitant of the duke of Buckingham, a leading loyalist magnate. Further, he had close family ties with committed local Lancastrians, notably his brother-in-law, Fitzharry, and the powerful Welsh esquire, Gruffydd ap Nicholas, whose daughter had married one of his sons.28 Skydemore is often said to have married Gruffydd ap Nicholas’s daughter, Maud: R.A. Griffiths, Sir Rhys ap Thomas, 158n., 168n.; idem, King and Country, 208. However, a reliable ped. names Skydemore’s wife as Blanche ap Harry, and the contract of 1473 for the marriage of his gds. confirms that his wife was then called Blanche: W. Skidmore, ‘Skydmore-Glyn Dwr Alliance’, Burke’s Peerage Occ. Pprs. xiii. 15; Kentchurch Court mss, AL40/18/1000. This same ped. names Gruffydd’s daughter, Margaret, as the wife of our MP’s son, James, and the mother of this gds. Since our MP and Gruffydd appear to have been of about the same age, there is further reason for supposing that the daughter was married to the son. None the less, this does not lessen the evidence for the close relationship between Gruffydd and the Skydemores. Gruffydd had served as dep. to our MP’s fa. as steward of Kidwelly. It was these latter considerations that won out. Significantly, there is no evidence, after 1441, of any further association between Skydemore and York; and by the autumn of 1452 he was identified with the duke’s local opponents, at least if one may judge from his appearance at the head of the grand jury which laid indictments against those who had supported the duke’s abortive Dartford rising.29 KB9/34/1/3. Soon after, he is found acting more directly against the Yorkists. On 16 Aug. 1454 Gruffydd ap Nicholas was arrested at Hereford but, according to the early seventeenth-century life of Gruffydd’s grandson, Sir Rhys ap Thomas, he was rescued by Skydemore, ‘a powerfull man in those partes’.30 Griffiths, Sir Rhys ap Thomas, 22, 168; idem, King and Country, 208. Since York, as Protector, was attempting to remove the lawless Gruffydd from his local offices in Wales, this action provides further evidence of Skydemore’s opposition to York.

In these circumstances, it was natural that, when, in April 1455, the Crown summoned two men from each county to a great council, the choice, in respect of Herefordshire, should have fallen upon Skydemore and Fitzharry.31 PPC, vi. 341. Sir John was an equally obvious candidate for appointment to the shrievalty in November 1456, when the Lancastrians were firmly in control of government.32 As a mark of favour he secured a general pardon at the end of his term: C67/42, m. 37. He was thus in office in the following April, when, before royal commissioners at Hereford, a long list of indictments were laid against York’s supporters in the county, headed by Sir William Herbert* and Walter Devereux II*. The accused later claimed that the indictments arose from a conspiracy by Fitzharry, Sir John Barre and other local Lancastrians, but, interestingly, Skydemore was not among those they named.33 KB27/784, rex rot. 6; 791, rot. 19d. It must be supposed that, as the sheriff responsible for empanelling the juries, he was considered to have behaved fairly, and certainly later evidence suggests he was not on poor terms with Herbert and Devereux. None the less, he remained firmly identified with the Lancastrian faction. At a session of the peace at Hereford on 8 Jan. 1459 he and Fitzharry were among the j.p.s who took what may have been another example of a partisan indictment: Fitzharry’s enemy, Richard Lingen, was indicted for felonious theft from Fitzharry with John Kene, a lawyer allied with the Yorkist faction in the county, named as an accessory.34 KB9/292/5; KB27/804, rex rot. 27.

Soon after, the threatened civil war broke out in earnest and Skydemore took an active part. In company with Fitzharry and other Herefordshire Lancastrians, he was with the Lancastrian army that provoked a smaller one led by Yorkist lords into inglorious flight at Ludford Bridge on the night of 12 Oct. 1459. On the following day he travelled to Hereford to participate in a hastily convened parliamentary election (the writs of summons had been issued only four days before). In the light of events at Ludford Bridge, the gathering at the county court was a remarkable one. Skydemore was there with his son, Henry, and brother, William, and other local Lancastrians, but so too were several Yorkists, including the duke of York’s receiver-general, John Milewater. The three obvious candidates were Skydemore himself, Fitzharry and Barre, and it was the latter two who were returned. On the day after the Parliament ended, Skydemore was named to the county’s commission of array, and in the following spring he was appointed to two important commissions, the one of oyer and terminer in the Welsh and marcher lordships of the Yorkist lords, and the other to seize various of those lordships into the King’s hands.35 C219/16/5; CPR, 1452-61, pp. 559, 562, 602.

The Yorkist victory at the battle of Northampton in July 1460 created a very different situation. Skydemore’s earlier connexion with York may have provided him with an opportunity to reconcile himself with the new government, yet reconciliation was not the course he chose to pursue. He was with the army commanded by Jasper Tudor, earl of Pembroke, which was defeated by the earl of March at the battle of Mortimer’s Cross on 2 or 3 Feb. 1461. The antiquarian, William Worcestre, who visited Herefordshire in 1479, reported the deaths of Skydemore’s sons, James and Henry, the one in the battle, the other by execution immediately afterwards, and remarks that Sir John was also present at the battle, noting, seemingly gratuitously, that he had 30 servants, perhaps to emphasize the high standing of the family. His list of those who died is unreliable – Henry lived until 1489 – but it may that he is correct in the case of James, who makes no further appearances in the records.36 William of Worcestre, Itins. ed. Harvey, 203. Although even in James’s case there must be a doubt. Confusingly, Worcestre also gives a different account of his death, saying that he was ‘occisus in manerio quodam apud Kingchych’ (presumably he means Kentchurch) for his service to Hen. VI: ibid. 207.

For what happened next in Skydemore’s eventful life, there survives his own account, presented to the Parliament of 1472 as he sought to secure the restoration of his estates.37 PROME, xiv. 65-68. At Edward IV’s accession in 1461, a month after Mortimer’s Cross, Skydemore had the keeping of the Lancastrian stronghold of Pembroke castle. He later claimed that, no sooner did he hear that there was a new King than he ‘made his diligent meanes and labour to dyvers lordes than being with the kyng’ to surrender the castle ‘withoute eny were or resistence’. This must be taken with a pinch of salt. It is difficult to reconcile with a commission issued on the following 12 Aug., which empowered the local Yorkist commanders, Herbert and Devereux, to pardon submissive rebels with the specific exemptions of Skydemore, Fitzharry and Thomas Cornwall.38 CPR, 1461-7, p. 45. The fact of what happened next however is not in doubt, although it may be that Skydemore’s later interpretation of it is not entirely candid. As soon as the castle was placed under siege, he made surrender: on 30 Sept. he delivered the castle to Herbert and Devereux on their promise of some sort of immunity. The area of doubt is the extent of that promise. Skydemore claimed, in 1472, that they promised that he would not only have his life, goods and lands, but also that they would ‘labour to the kynges highnes … that he shuld have better than his seid lyvelode’.39 H.T. Evans, Wales and the Wars of the Roses, 85. The only evidence he produced were Herbert’s letters patent of 30 Sept. stating that, under power conferred on him by the King’s letters of the previous 13 May, he had received Skydemore into the King’s ‘grace and pardon’ and taken an oath from him that he would be the King’s ‘true liegeman’; and that, therefore, no-one should disturb him in his person or goods (with, significantly, no reference to his lands). These letters themselves reveal a tension, for Herbert cites the power of pardon given to him in a commission of 13 May, carefully avoiding reference to the letters of four months later that had specifically exempted Skydemore from this power of pardon.40 These letters are SC8/29/1435A. In short, if Herbert did make the extensive promise claimed by Sir John he was acting ultra vires, as he was also, arguably at least, in taking him into the King’s grace.

In these circumstances, it is difficult to share Skydemore’s sense of injustice at the manner which he claimed to have been treated in the first Parliament of the new reign. He said that he had, ‘by synystre labour’ been ‘put in the comyn bylle of atteyndre’, but when the Commons learnt from Herbert and Devereux that they had promised him his lands and goods on the surrender of Pembroke castle, they removed his name from the bill. Similarly, a special bill to attaint him was disallowed by the Lords on the same grounds. Yet, he went on to claim, at the end of the Parliament, after many lords and knights of the shire had departed, ‘by marvelous pryvat labour’, a bill signed by the King was brought before the Commons, ordaining that Sir John should forfeit his lands (although not his life and goods and that he should not ‘hurt in his persone by ymprisonement or jeopardie of his lyfe’). In his petition of 1472 Skydemore presented all this as a clear case of unfair treatment. Far more probably, it represents the conclusion of a period of negotiation that ended unfavourably for him. After a period of debate, it was deemed that, quite reasonably, Herbert’s pardon should extend to his life and goods, but not to his lands. There are also some indirect grounds that Herbert himself shared this view. On 20 Feb. 1462 our MP’s forfeited lands were granted in tail-male to Herbert’s brother, Sir Richard, a grant repeated three years later. This can be interpreted in two ways: either Lord Herbert was at best indifferent to Skydemore’s restoration, or the grant to his brother gave him reason to do nothing to support his restoration.41 CPR, 1461-7, pp. 77, 372. Either way, it would help to explain why Skydemore was unable to regain his estates in the 1460s despite his abandonment of active support for the Lancastrian cause.

There is no evidence of where Skydemore spent that decade. Part of his lands may have remained in the hands of his wife and he perhaps stayed with her in relative poverty in his native county. He does not again appear in the records until the Readeption, when he was restored to the bench in Herefordshire. No doubt had Henry VI maintained the throne he would have secured a formal restoration to his estates. As it was, that restoration came anyway. His support for the Readeption, probably merely nominal, had not been enough to compromise him further in the eyes of the Yorkists. In the Parliament which met on 6 Oct. 1472 he presented the petition alleging the unjust repudiation of the promise he had been made on the surrender of Pembroke castle and asking for restoration to his lands. He was, it seems, pushing at an open door. The death of the royal grantee, Sir Richard Herbert, at the battle of Edgcote in 1469, leaving a minor as his heir, had removed a potential obstacle. None the less, it is still noteworthy that the attainder was reversed on generous terms, in that the rival claim of Herbert’s son, William, was specifically repudiated. The exemption granted to William, in the Act of Resumption of 1473, specifically excluded the Skydemore property, as did a grant made in favour of Sir Richard’s widow, Margaret, in May 1475, just after our MP’s death.42 PROME, xiv. 175; CPR, 1461-7, p. 535.

Soon after this complete restoration, Skydemore did what he had been prevented from doing by the cloud hanging over him, that is, contract a marriage for his grandson and heir-apparent, Thomas, son of his dead son, James. The bride was Margaret, daughter of a Welsh esquire, Morgan ap Jankyn ap Philip, and the terms on which the match was made, embodied in an indenture of 20 Nov. 1473, were highly favourable to her family. The entire Skydemore estate, valued at £120 p.a., was to be settled on the couple in jointure: the manor of Kentchurch and other lands to the yearly value of £20 were to pass to them immediately and the rest was to come to them on the deaths of Sir John and his wife. In return Morgan was to pay only £100. The probability is that the bride had something to recommend her which is undisclosed in the contract, most probably she was a widow with lands from an unidentified first husband.43 Kentchurch Court mss, AL40/18/1000. To give the couple and himself further security, in the following July Skydemore sued out of Chancery an exemplification of his petition for restoration with the Crown’s favourable response, and three months later he added the further assurance of a general pardon.44 CPR, 1467-77, p. 454; C67/49, m. 2.

By this date Skydemore was already an old man, at least as old as the century, and he could gratify himself that he had lived long enough to oversee the family’s recovery occasioned by his adherence to Lancaster. Worcestre, on his visit to Herefordshire in 1479, noted that he had died about three years before and that he was the ‘most valiant’ of his family. Writs of diem clausit extremum issued out of Chancery on 3 May 1475 in respect of his estates in that county. No inquisition was taken by which his death might be dated more precisely, and it may be that none was taken because all his land was in the hands of feoffees. 45 William of Worcestre, 203; CFR, xxi. no. 280. A Chancery petition of 1490 identifies them as Eustace Whitney†, Urian de le Hay, both from leading Herefordshire families, and William Rose, one of his servants. The petition arose out of the unsuccessful efforts of Skydemore’s heir, his grandson, James, brother of Thomas (who had died childless), to subvert the settlement Sir John had made in favour of James’s uncles. He had instructed Rose to convey the manor of Moccas to his younger son, Henry, and the manors of Kingstone and Thruxton to another son, Richard.46 C1/108/43-46. This generosity helped to ensure that the family long flourished in several branches.