ALDEWYNCLE, William (d.1463), of Aldwincle, Northants.

William Aldewyncle’s pedigree is unclear. It is natural to assume that he was the direct male descendant of Henry Aldewyncle who owned half a knight’s fee in Aldwincle as early as 1223. Yet our MP’s paternal grandfather was not an Aldewyncle but a Tychemarsh, tenants of another half-knight’s fee there in the early fourteenth century. The Tychemarsh family failed in the main male line towards the end of that century and it is likely that our MP’s grandfather, as a representative of a junior line which had retained the family’s property in Aldwincle, united the two inheritances by marriage to the heir general of the Aldwyncles. VCH Northants. iii. 164-5; J. Bridges, Northants. ii. 208-10; CCR, 1468-76, no. 770. Their son then took his mother’s name. Neither the Aldewyncles nor the Tychemarshs had played a prominent part in local affairs and our MP was the first and last member of either family to break this pattern. His father’s career is one of almost unrelenting obscurity although he was clearly a man of some property and may have been, as his son was to be, a lawyer. In 1394 he was named to act as an attorney for Thomas Hyne, parson of Maiden Newton in Dorset, about to embark for Ireland with Richard II, and on 12 Apr. 1396 a writ of diem clausit extremum issued out of Chancery with respect to his lands in Northamptonshire. CPR, 1391-6, p. 458; CFR, xi. 216.

Since our MP survived his father by 67 years it is very likely that he was a minor on his father’s death. It may be that he was not the eldest son. In 1407 another John Aldwyncle of Northants. appeared as a mainpernor in Chancery: C54/256, m. 18d. If so, nothing is known of that minority, but it is a fair speculation that his early patrons were his immediate neighbours, the Greens of Lowick. Nearly all the early references to him concern his service to them. He first appears in the records on 17 Apr. 1403, when he witnessed a deed for Ralph Green*, and thereafter he was involved in nearly every important conveyance made by that family until his own death in 1463. From 1414 he was a feoffee for Ralph Green, and, in February 1419, he joined with Ralph’s widow in entering into a contract for the building of Ralph’s still-extant tomb. R. Halstead, Succinct Gens. 180-1, 188-9; CPR, 1413-16, p. 120; CCR, 1413-19, p. 355; CP25(1)/291/63/42; C1/4/45. This service brought some direct benefits: in October 1415 he was associated with Ralph in a royal grant of the keeping of the lands of their mutual neighbours, the Tyndales of Deene, during a minority, together with the marriage of the heir, and such rewards were no doubt supplemented by an annuity from the Greens. CFR, xiv. 125.

Important to Aldewyncle though his close connexion to this important family undoubtedly was, he had a standing of his own. After Ralph Green’s death in 1417, his widow’s interest in a substantial part of the Green estate meant that the family were not, until the late 1440s, as significant as they had been in Ralph’s lifetime. Yet our MP had an active public career during these years, and it was probably in the early 1420s that he was at the height of his local influence, at least if influence is to be measured in terms of office. As early as 1414 he was acting as one of the Northamptonshire coroners, an office he was to retain for some 50 years; in July 1420 the King appointed him as steward of the resumed lands of Joan of Navarre in the county; and soon after he was added to the county bench. It was also in these years that he is first found acting for the wealthy Benedictine abbey of Peterborough. In Easter term 1421, when the court of King’s bench was at Northampton, he stood surety for the payment of fine of 6s. 8d. so that the abbey might hold its own courts and markets notwithstanding the presence of that superior court. KB27/640, fines rot. 2d.

Aldewyncle’s removal from the bench in July 1423 heralded a temporary end to his public career, and it may be that Queen Joan’s restoration temporarily diminished his influence. Not until the early 1430s does he once more appear as an attestor or office-holder. His private legal practice, however, continued to flourish. Indeed, during these years he was more than usually active in the private affairs of some leading local landholders. The wealthy knight, Sir Thomas Maureward† (d.1424) of Goadby Marwood in Leicestershire, named him as one of his executors, and he was subsequently party to an important fine settling the Maureward inheritance on Maureward’s daughter and her husband, Sir Thomas Beaumont, uncle of the young John, Lord (later Viscount) Beaumont. CP40/658, rot. 37; 663, rot. 325; CP25(1)/291/65/27. At about the same time he was involved in the settlement of a dispute between, on the one part, John Culpepper*, and his own relatives, Robert Longe and Longe’s wife, Anne, over the manors of Great and Little Newton. According to later litigation, at Northampton on 27 Sept. 1424 Culpepper entrusted to the safe keeping of our MP and Thomas Wydeville* the mutual bonds in which the parties had entered, presumably pending arbitration. Aldewyncle was clearly acting here for the Longes because he himself was surety for them in the bonds and he was further involved in the following year when he was among the feoffees to whom the two parties surrendered their rights in the manors. CP40/663, rot. 256d; CP25(1)/179/93/27, 28. Other business came his way through the Greens. In 1419 he had been named among the feoffees of Sir Simon Felbrigg, the husband of Ralph Green’s widow, Katherine, and, on 24 Oct. 1421, he had been one of those to whom Sir John Knyvet†, the husband of Katherine’s niece, had conveyed the manor of Great Weldon (Northamptonshire). Five years later he was again called upon to act for Knyvet, on this occasion as a feoffee in his manor of Boxworth in Cambridgeshire. CCR, 1419-22, p. 41; Add. Ch. 792; CIPM, xxvi. 394-5. His neighbours provided other work. On 1 Apr. 1430 he witnessed an important deed for William, Lord Lovell, the beginning of a periodic association between the two men. CCR, 1429-35, pp. 57-58.

During the 1420s Aldewyncle was also busy consolidating his own affairs. By a fine levied in Michaelmas term 1424 he acquired 20 acres of land in Brigstock near Aldwincle, and there can be little doubt that this represents a purchase on his part. The fine is curious in that his sis. Joan is named a party as neither wife nor widow: CP25(1)/179/93/16. Later, by another fine levied in 1428, he seems to have laid to rest a rival claim to his manor of ‘Tychemarsh’ in Aldwincle. Although her relationship to him is unclear, it seems that Robert Longe’s wife, Anne, could claim the manor as the representative of the senior branch of the Tychemarsh family (her daughter was later identified as one of our MP’s heirs) and the most likely interpretation of the fine is that it marks the surrender of her rights. CP25(1)/179/93/46; CCR, 1468-76, no. 770. More interestingly, undocumented connexions in London may explain our MP’s obscure first marriage. It is not known when this was made, only that it had been by 1 Dec. 1427 when he appeared in person before the court of the royal household at Southwark to sue a plea of account with his wife, Joan, as executrix of one John Downing, formerly of the Household. Joan was presumably Downing’s widow, and she may have become attached to our MP when he was training as a lawyer. KB27/633, rot. 77.

Aldewyncle resumed his public career when, on 3 Apr. 1432, he was elected to represent his native county in Parliament in company with another, more prominent, local lawyer, William Tresham*. He attested the next election on 25 June 1433, and on the following 17 July he acted as a mainpernor in Chancery for Lord Lovell’s good behaviour towards one William Penteney. By this date he was also among the lawyers formally employed by the abbey of Peterborough: on one occasion, for example, he spent three days at Higham Ferrers, meeting the auditor of the duchy of Lancaster on the abbot’s behalf. C219/14/3, 4; CCR, 1429-35, p. 228; Acct. Rolls. Peterborough Abbey (Northants. Rec. Soc. xxxiii), 165, 171. But this strengthening of his connexions with the Northamptonshire elite did not prove the prelude to a period of intense administrative involvement. His restoration to the county bench in the late 1430s was brief and not repeated, and appointment to an ad hoc commission of local government at about the same time proved to be the first of only two.

This relative lack of involvement in the administration of his native county is particularly odd in the context of Aldewyncle’s increasing wealth. Early in 1434 he added to his estates by purchasing about 50 acres of land in Thrapston near Aldwincle. In the following year he acquired a legal estate in the nearby manor of Sudborough for the life of Ralph Green’s widow. Here he was probably acting in the interests of Ralph’s nephew and heir, Henry Green*, with whom he was later to be very closely connected, but it is also possible that he was leasing the manor on his own account. At an unknown date he also acquired a property just outside his native county: in February 1448 he leased a manor in Swaffham Prior (Cambridgeshire) to a local esquire at an annual rent of as much as 20 marks. CP25(1)/179/94/73, 77; CP40/844, rot. 508. He was certainly a man of some financial standing by these middle years of his long career: in February 1436 the Crown called upon him for a loan of £40 towards the forthcoming French expedition, the same sum as was demanded of wealthy esquires, and in 1439 he was among those distrained to take up the rank of knighthood. This standing is also reflected in the many actions of debt he pursued, often in person, in the court of common pleas, and perhaps also in the advancing of money on loan or mortgage. This, at least, is the implication of a later arrangement he and two wealthy merchants from Stamford entered into with Robert Browe*: in 1448 Browe leased from them, for a period of ten years, his own estates in Rutland and five other counties at an annual rent of £200. This was in excess of their market value and it is a reasonable assumption that the lease concerned an earlier loan made to him by our MP and his colleagues. PPC, iii. 328; CP40/698, rot. 19; 699, rot. 77; 712, rots. 68d, 269d; E326/5553.

Despite his advancing age, Aldewyncle continued to strengthen and extend his connexions into the 1440s. At the end of 1442 Elizabeth, the elderly widow of Richard, Lord Grey of Codnor (d.1418), conveyed the bulk of her paternal inheritance to an august body of feoffees headed by John Beaufort, earl of Somerset, and including our MP. Here Aldewyncle, along with his friend William Tresham, was the nominee of another of the feoffees, William, Lord Zouche of Harringworth (d.1462). The feoffor’s daughter, Elizabeth, had married Zouche’s younger brother, John, and the intention of the feoffment was to divert a significant part of the feoffor’s inheritance to this favoured daughter and away from her son, Henry, Lord Grey of Codnor (d.1444). Later, in 1445, Lord Zouche named our MP among his own feoffees; and, in 1450, Aldewyncle acted for Lord Lovell in the fine settling a jointure on the marriage of Lovell’s son and heir, John, to Joan, daughter of John, Viscount Beaumont. CCR, 1441-7, p. 385; Notts. IPM (Thoroton Soc. xvii), 63; CP25(1)/293/72/357.

Aldewyncle’s closest association, however, was with Henry Green, who, in the mid 1440s, began to take an active part in Northamptonshire affairs, having spent the first part of his career in Wiltshire. It is no doubt more than coincidental that the local re-emergence of the Green family corresponds with a spate of references to our MP as their lawyer. On 19 Jan. 1447 he attested Green’s election to Parliament, his first recorded appearance at an election since 1433, and in the following year he was named as one of Green’s feoffees in the manor of Warminster (Wiltshire). In these circumstances his renewed interest in parliamentary elections may have been as Green’s agent. He attested the elections of 23 Oct. 1449 and 22 Oct. 1450, the second of which Green is known, from other evidence, to have influenced. CPR, 1436-41, p. 124; C219/15/6, 7, 16/1.

One so active in the affairs of others was bound to be drawn into litigation, and, in 1451, Aldwyncle was involved in an interesting Chancery suit. William Gedney* and his wife, Margaret, claimed that our MP, as the last surviving feoffee of Margaret’s late husband, Richard Chamberlain (d.1439) of Cotes in Raunds (near Aldwincle), had refused to allow her dower in the enfeoffed lands. Since the feoffment predated her marriage to Chamberlain, Aldewyncle was not bound by the common law to do so, but the plaintiffs alleged that his refusal was contrary to Chamberlain’s last will. Gedney, as a successful royal bureaucrat, was not a man to be crossed lightly, and our MP wisely conceded his claim. C1/18/18; C253/32, no. 134.

In another far more important matter, however, Aldewyncle acted with great folly. On 5 June 1452 he allegedly took part in the entry which Henry Holand, duke of Exeter, ‘with grete multitude of people arraied yn maner of werre to the nombre of ccc persones and moo’ made into the Bedfordshire estates Ralph, Lord Cromwell, had purchased from Lord Fanhope. An elderly lawyer was an unlikely participant in such a violent act and an equally unlikely adherent of the volatile and unstable duke. However, the duke had recently inherited the Northamptonshire lands of Sir John Holand (d.1451) of Thorpe Waterville, for whom our MP had acted as a feoffee and for whose widow he was an executor, and it seems that he was now foolish enough to transfer his allegiance to his new neighbour. Bridges, ii. 365; Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. n.s. iii. 204. The consequences were, potentially at least, very damaging. In Trinity term 1455 a Bedfordshire jury came into the court of common pleas and condemned Aldewyncle and three others in the staggering sum of £1,000 in damages and costs. S.J. Payling, ‘Ampthill Dispute’, EHR, civ. 891, 905; CP40/769, rot. 328. Such a judgement might have been ruinous but there is no firm evidence to suggest that the defendants ever paid the sum awarded against them. Cromwell’s death in January 1456 may have relieved them of the necessity of doing so and the surviving accounts of his executors make it clear that they did not pursue the claim.

Aldewyncle’s advanced age rather than financial ruin are the obvious explanation for the obscurity of his last years, when he made only occasional appearances in the records. In 1456, described as ‘a worshipfull Esquyer and a man of grete credence’, he gave evidence before a representative of the chancellor in a dispute over the contract, delivered to him as an honest broker, for the marriage of Thomas Pygge of Boston (Lincolnshire), a royal auditor and receiver, to a stepdaughter of John Browe* Later, in 1460, he had a plea of debt pending against Thomas de la Laund of North Witham (Lincolnshire), who had also been implicated in the entry into Cromwell’s estates. There is nothing to show that he played any part in the civil war of 1459-61, although, on 11 Feb. 1462, he took the sensible precaution of suing out a general pardon from the new regime. C1/25/211; CP40/798, rot. 34; C67/45, m. 42.

According to his surviving monumental inscription Aldewyncle died on 28 Aug. 1463, a date consistent with the issue, on the following 26 Sept., of a writ for the election of a coroner to replace him. His brass in the church of Aldwincle All Saints portrays him in a long robe with his feet resting on a dog. VCH Northants. iii. 167; Bridges, ii. 211; CCR, 1461-8, p. 172. His widow, Elizabeth, married William Chamber, son and heir of Thomas Chamber I*, and acted as the executrix, alongside Henry Green and Thomas Palmer*, for a will now lost. Her survival into the late 1480s and maybe beyond implies that she was many years our MP’s junior. In November 1488 she and Chamber secured a royal licence to found a perpetual chantry of one chaplain at the altar of the Virgin Mary in the church of Aldwincle All Saints to pray for the souls of both themselves and her late husband. The foundation was carried through a year later when the priest was given the additional task of teaching spelling and reading to six poor boys of the parish. The endowment was a landed estate with an annual value of as much as 12 marks, part at least of which was drawn from lands formerly of our MP. It thus seems probable that the founders were belatedly implementing instructions that he had left in his will. CP40/823, rot.371; CPR, 1485-94, p. 253. His lack of a direct heir no doubt provided an incentive to set aside part of his estate in this way. Nevertheless, the greater part of his lands passed into the hands of his second cousin, Thomas Lenton, who died on 20 Dec. 1504, seised of the manors of Aldwincle and Woodford, held of the abbot of Peterborough. CIPM Hen. VII, ii. 916.

Aldwyncle’s career was representative of the able and well-connected lawyer who preferred a local practice to the pursuit of professional advancement in the courts at Westminster, although he was atypical in that he never served on the quorum of the peace or as escheator. There can be no question that he was qualified not only by expertise but also by landed wealth for such service. His avoidance may have been the product of a choice based on a lack of ambition. He never became as influential as his local contemporaries, William Tresham and Thomas Palmer (both of whom he must have known well), who also eschewed advancement in the legal profession, but he had a pivotal role in numerous conveyances in his native county for over 50 years.