ALFRAY, John II, of East Grinstead, Suss.

This MP came from the leading family of East Grinstead, and one which furnished the borough with representatives in at least 15 Parliaments of the later Middle Ages. Their landed holdings are not well documented, but by the sixteenth century included an estate called ‘Gulledge’, Suss. Arch. Collns. xx. 145; W. Berry, Suss. Gen. 244. besides several parcels of land in the neighbourhood. John was a minor when his father died, and in Easter term 1444 Edward Sackville sued William Fenningham* and others (presumably acting as feoffees) for custody of his inheritance, since John senior had held land of Sackville by knight service. Add. 39376, f. 31. By what means Alfray entered Henry VI’s household is unknown, but he did so within two years, and remained in royal service until the King was deposed. E101/409/16; 410/1, 3, 6, 9. Although he was carrying on a family tradition by sitting in the Commons (he was the fourth John Alfray in successive generations to do so), his election to the Parliament at Bury St. Edmunds, when still a young man in his early twenties, no doubt also owed something to his position at Court, especially as the session was notable for the number of household men returned. Six months after the dissolution he was promoted to be a yeoman of the Crown, a position which, coupled with the post of usher of the chamber, earned him 6d. a day from the issues of Guildford, by a grant made to him for life. CPR, 1446-52, p. 211. Alfray was exempted from the Act of Resumption passed in the Parliament of 1449-50 with respect to this award. PROME, xii. 128.

In the summer of 1450, as a yeoman ‘of Lingfield, Surrey’ (some three miles from East Grinstead) Alfray was among the many local people who obtained pardons in the aftermath of Cade’s rebellion. CPR, 1446-52, p. 373. This is not to imply that he himself was a rebel; probably he was seeking exoneration for any misdemeanours he may have committed in the previous months. He was returned to Parliament again in the autumn, and for a third time in 1453 (to the Parliament at Reading which like that of 1447 was attended by large numbers of royal servants). When, following the King’s mental collapse, ordinances were made for the regulation of the Household on 13 Nov. 1454, Alfray was one of the 23 yeomen of the Crown retained in service, and as such he was exempted from the workings of the Act of Resumption of 1455. PPC, vi. 224; PROME, xii. 417. He was still a yeoman of the chamber in 1459, when elected to the Coventry Parliament which attainted the Yorkist lords. E361/6, rots. 50, 51d. There can be no doubt of his loyalty to the Lancastrian regime. On 13 Jan. 1460, three weeks after the dissolution, he was granted for good service against the rebels the office of ranger in Cranborne Chase, forfeited by the duke of York. CPR, 1452-61, p. 572. This ‘good service’ appears to have been of a military nature, as on 1 Mar. Garter King of Arms, having been informed that Alfray had long pursued martial feats and had conducted himself honourably, devised and assigned to him and his heirs a blazon helmet and crest as a sign of his armigerous rank. Misc. Grants of Arms (Harl. Soc. lxxvi), 3.

This was the peak of Alfray’s career at Court, which came to an end with the Lancastrian defeat at Northampton in July 1460. Now removed from the Household, he suffered an eclipse. Furthermore, a sequence of violent events at East Grinstead in the mid 1460s nearly led to disaster for his family. According to a coroner’s inquest heard on 29 Dec. 1466, at about 7 p.m. on the previous 11 Dec. three labourers (Robert Johnson alias Scotte, John Averey and Richard Lutterford) had allegedly lain in wait to murder one Thomas Brampton, and struck him blows from which he died. On 16 Jan. following the Sussex j.p.s sent into King’s bench two similar indictments, which added that the three principals were the servants of John Alfray, and that the latter’s brother Richard had aided and abetted the homicides. Furthermore, the Alfrays and their kinsman Peter Alfray, a London draper, had received, harboured and consorted with Brampton’s assailants, knowing they had committed the felony. Suss. Arch. Collns. xcv. 56-57; KB9/315/32, 33, 39, 40. The Alfrays were sent to the marshalsea of the King’s bench, and in Michaelmas term 1467 the court heard an appeal brought against them by Brampton’s brother Henry for their part in his death, and for sheltering the felons. In reply they said that on the date Henry sued his writ (12 Apr.), he had an elder brother living, so had no right to make the appeal. Pledges were given for their reappearance in court in Hilary term 1468. KB27/826, rot. 34; CPR, 1467-77, p. 92. Meanwhile, more information about the background to the killing was provided in a number of suits all heard in the King’s bench on 16 Oct. 1467, while the Alfrays were in custody. From these suits it can be seen that the assault leading to Brampton’s death had been one of several in a major dispute between the Alfrays and Richard Lewknor*, a member of a prominent Sussex family who had recently acquired through marriage the local manor of Brambletye. In one bill Lewknor’s servant John Bradbrigge sued John and Peter Alfray for assault and wrongful imprisonment at East Grinstead on 2 Nov. 1465. The Alfrays denied the charge, saying that on that date Bradbrigge had assembled a number of followers intending to murder their man Johnson and that they had merely responded to the request of William Modyll, the town constable, to help him keep order; this they had done by holding Bradbrigge captive for two hours so that peace might be restored. In his turn Modyll accused Lewknor and his men of assaulting him at Southwark on 4 Feb. 1466, and then holding him prisoner from the following 28 Mar. until the date of the bill. It was Lewknor’s contention that Modyll was a bondman on his wife’s manor. At the same time John Alfray brought a bill against Bradbrigge and others for attempting to kill him at East Grinstead on 24 Mar. 1466 (a charge which they denied, saying that they were the ones attacked), and also alleged that Lewknor and his men had not only assaulted his servant Richard Eliot at Southwark on 26 Jan. 1467, but had held him prisoner for six days. Lewknor replied that Alfray could not maintain his bill, as Eliot had abetted in the Brampton murder, and it was because he knew that Eliot was accused of this that he had seized him and taken him first to the King’s bench gaol and then to the custody of the under sheriff of Surrey. Alfray’s brother Richard made good use of his knowledge of the law by suing Lewknor on a plea of trespass against the statute of maintenance in the Brampton case. Later on the three Alfrays were all attached to respond to the King and Lewknor for a breach of the same statute in respect of their maintenance of Modyll at Westminster on 30 Oct. 1467. KB27/826, rots. 101, 110-13, 115, 118. Whether the disorder in Sussex should be set in a wider political context is uncertain, although it may not have been merely coincidental that Peter Alfray was convicted of treason in the following year, after plotting to restore Henry VI to the throne. His life was spared on the scaffold, with a last-minute grant of a royal pardon. It was not until the Hilary term of 1469 that John and Richard Alfray were finally acquitted on the charge of assisting Brampton’s murderers, while further pardons granted to Richard and Peter Alfray over the next three years helped to rehabilitate the family. KB27/826, rot. 34; CPR, 1467-77, p. 92; C67/48, m. 24; M. Hicks, ‘The Case of Sir Thomas Cook’, EHR, xciii. 92, 93, 95.

Otherwise, all that is recorded about our MP relates to his dealings in property. In the 1450s he had assisted his brother Richard in suits against Richard Forster III* regarding an estate at Houghton, near Arundel, KB27/773, rot. 22. and in transactions relating to land in East Grinstead which Richard held by grant of John Morris and his wife. This last apparently came into John’s own possession in 1457, passed to their kinsman Thomas Alfray (probably John’s son of this name) 12 years later, and in 1479 was held by John Wody†. Wody subsequently claimed that the Morrises had sold it to him. CAD, iii. C3391; vi. C3775, 4407-8; C1/74/90.

Our MP died intestate before Michaelmas 1472, by which date his brother Richard was acting as administrator of his goods and chattels. CP40/844, rot. 473d; Add. 39376, f. 208. John’s son Thomas petitioned the chancellor a few years later with regard to a tenement called ‘Brokeherst’ in East Grinstead, which his father had purchased for £40, and another chancery petition (of 1515) concerned a small estate called ‘Bentons’ of which the latter had apparently been enfeoffed on behalf of the Wody family. C1/114/51, 598/23. Thomas was presumably the esquire whose will, made in 1504, was proved in May 1507. He requested burial at Steyning, Suss.: PCC 23 Adeane (PROB11/15, f. 182).