BOLNEY, Bartholomew (d.1476), of Bolney and West Firle, Suss.

This MP’s family had been settled at Bolney in east Sussex since the late thirteenth century, and by the early fifteenth there were at least three other branches living in the vicinity, whose lands Bartholomew inherited and consolidated with his own. VCH Suss. vii. 138; Bolney Bk. pp. xxiii, xxxii-xxxiii. While Bartholomew was undoubtedly the most prominent member of the family and substantially improved the Bolneys’ social status, he was by no means the first to distinguish himself in the county. His kinsman Walter Bolney, named as an executor of Bishop Rede of Chichester in 1414, was among those granted the temporalities of the diocese in the following year, Reg. Chichele, ii. 40; CPR, 1413-16, p. 339. and his father John, who served as escheator of Surrey and Sussex in 1419-20, and under sheriff and then sheriff of the joint bailiwick in 1421-2, made himself indispensible in the affairs of the baronial family of Poynings. John was a feoffee of the estates of Robert, Lord Poynings, an executor of his son and heir Sir Richard Poynings*, and active on behalf of the latter’s widow, Eleanor, Lady Mautravers and countess of Arundel, in particular with regard to the wardship of the heir to the earldom. In 1435 he became a trustee of the Poynings estates settled on the countess’s daughter Eleanor, wife of Sir Henry Percy, the son and heir apparent of the earl of Northumberland. CPR, 1429-36, pp. 169, 444; CFR, xvi. 264, 295; CCR, 1419-22, pp. 122, 126; 1429-35, p. 363; 1435-41, p. 68.

Bartholomew was able to take advantage of his father’s reputation and contacts. Through his mother he was distantly related to William of Wykeham, so it was as ‘founder’s kin’ that both he and his brother John were educated at Winchester, he himself as a scholar and John as a commoner. Squibb, 189; T.F. Kirby, Annals of Winchester, 96. From there Bartholomew went on to New College, being admitted as a fellow in February 1422, but he left Oxford just over a year later to go ‘ad curiam’. Fellowship of Lincoln’s Inn followed in 1425, with two members of the Gaynesford family of Surrey acting as his sponsors. L. Inn Adm. i. 5; Lincoln’s Inn, Black Bk. f. 51. He long maintained a personal connexion with the Inn, acting in the course of his career as governor for three terms, pensioner for one, and as Lent reader possibly in 1435 and certainly in 1442, 1446 and 1467. At Martinmas 1461 he was admitted to repasts for life. Biog. Reg. Univ. Oxf. ed. Emden, i. 215; L. Inn Black Bks. i. 7, 36, 43; Readings and Moots, i (Selden Soc. lxxi), p. xii. Meanwhile, at home in Sussex he had joined his father in assisting the widowed countess of Arundel in the conduct of her affairs. On 6 Mar. 1436 the two of them were committed at the Exchequer certain lordships and manors in Gloucestershire, Dorset and Wiltshire pertaining to the inheritance of her grandson Humphrey, the heir to the earldom who was a minor in the King’s wardship; and four months later this was confirmed to them at a farm of £80 p.a. CFR, xvi. 273, 293. The lease led to the Bolneys having to defend suits in the common pleas over the countess’s dower, which continued after her marriage to Walter, Lord Hungerford†: CP40/701, rots. 315-17; 708, rot. 311. Bartholomew’s long association with Battle abbey may have already begun, for he is said to have served as steward of the abbatial estates for more than 40 years. As such he regularly received an annual fee of five marks, but other services he provided for the abbot (for example representing him as his attorney at the assizes at Lewes and in the court of the Exchequer), earned him additional sums of money. Naturally, he was accorded a place on the abbot’s council. E. Searle, Ldship. and Community, 400n, 418, 422-3, 428n, 429, 433; E315/56, f. 35v. Bolney’s training as a lawyer led in 1444 to his appointment to the Sussex bench, where he remained for the next 32 years, always, save for a brief spell in 1469-70, as one of the quorum. E371/234, rot. 50; C66/491, m. 27d. A highly-respected member of the legal profession, he was employed among the apprentices-at-law retained by the duchy of Lancaster in 1446-7. R. Somerville, Duchy, i. 545.

Not surprisingly, Bolney was much in demand as a feoffee of property in Sussex and elsewhere, and in many of these transactions he was associated with another prominent lawyer, Thomas Hoo II*. In turn, Hoo brought his colleague to the attention of a number of his influential relations. In the 1440s the two men were active on behalf of Hoo’s kinsman Sir Roger Fiennes*, the treasurer of the Household: together they were enfeoffed in 1446 of property in Cousin Lane, London, and in the following year Bolney and Hoo were intimately involved in the arrangements for the marriages of Fiennes’s sons. CFR, xvi. 296; Corp. London RO, hr 174/28; CP25(1)/293/71/332; CIPM Hen. VII, i. nos. 189, 261. They also assisted Sir Roger’s brother, (Sir) James Fiennes*, afterwards Lord Saye and Sele, to bring to a successful conclusion suits in the common pleas for recovery of a Sussex manor. Add. 39376, ff. 40v-41v. Bolney was similarly engaged in the business of the Brenchesle family, both as an arbiter in their disputes over land in Kent, and, in the 1450s, as co-founder of a chantry in Bexhill on behalf of Hoo’s kinswoman Joan, widow of Sir William Brenchesle, j.c.p. CCR, 1447-54, p. 136; Suss. Arch. Collns. liii. 86-87. In 1448 he was among those enfeoffed of the manors in Norfolk, Kent and Wiltshire inherited by Joan Halsham, the wife of Hoo’s half-brother John Lewknor*, and for a while he held the Norfolk manors of her inheritance to the use of Geoffrey Boleyn*, who had married Hoo’s niece, the eldest daughter of Thomas Hoo I*, Lord Hoo and Hastings. As a feoffee he also had possession of various properties in Sussex belonging to the Hoo family in which his friend’s mother Elizabeth, wife of Sir Thomas Lewknor*, held an interest for life. Wilts. Feet of Fines (Wilts. Rec. Soc. xli), 587; CPR, 1452-61, pp. 215-16; C1/41/239-44. In her widowhood Elizabeth was to retain Bolney’s services, promising him 40s. a year for his counsel. He failed to collect this retaining fee in her lifetime, and on her death sued her executors for the £17 owing to him: CP40/834, f. 415.

Bolney’s close association with the families of Fiennes and Hoo may well have placed his life at risk in the summer of 1450, when Lord Saye was put to death by Cade’s rebels, and the considerable ill-feeling against Saye and his friends in Sussex and Kent was further exacerbated by the grievances expressed against Lord Hoo by soldiers who had served under him in France. On 7 July, at the height of the revolt, Bolney purchased a royal pardon for himself and his men and servants. This should not be taken to mean that he himself had been implicated in the rebellion, rather that he required protection against prosecution by his opponents. Clearly he was no insurgent; he continued to take his place on local commissions, including one set up in May 1451 to investigate treasons and felonies committed by the rebels in Sussex in the aftermath of the main revolt. Furthermore, his sound reputation in the county, where he was steward not only for the abbot of Battle but at some point also for the archbishop of Canterbury, gave him a strong vested interest in an orderly society. CPR, 1446-52, p. 355; R.A. Griffiths, Hen. VI, 622. In the 1450s he continued to be associated with Sir Roger Fiennes’s sons, CCR, 1447-54, p. 498. and on one occasion he was linked with Chief Justice Fortescue* as a feoffee of property near Lewes. CP25(1)/241/91/11. At an unknown date before 1453 he was enfeoffed by the Sussex landowner Sir John Passhele in the manor of Trefreak in Cornwall, so that it might be settled in jointure on Passhele’s second wife. However, this transaction later gave rise to suits in Chancery owing to the conflicting claims of John Chudleigh, who alleged that Passhele had sold him the manor for £100, and Passhele’s son John*, who petitioned the chancellor in the late 1450s to complain that the feoffees refused to grant him the reversionary interest to which he was entitled. By the time Chudleigh’s widow revived the suit in the mid 1460s, Bolney was the sole surviving feoffee. C1/26/305-8, 31/40-42. In the previous decade he had also been summoned to Chancery to answer a petition concerning the lands of the late Adam Iwode*, in which he was accused of failing to make conveyances as required, and among those for whom he also acted as a trustee in this period was another shire-knight, John Devenish*. C1/19/118; Add. Ch. 30337. For his feoffeeship of Iwode’s lands, see Huntington Lib., San Marino, California, Battle Abbey mss, deed 521. As before, he remained close to Thomas Hoo, not only taking on the trusteeship of his manors of Warnham and Roffey and other properties in and near Horsham, but also assisting him in transactions concerning the manor of Deenethorpe in Northamptonshire. CP25(1)/241/91/19, 21, 28, 29; Add. Chs. 713, 7575. A continued association with the Gaynesford family of Surrey led to his involvement in the long drawn-out quarrels over the disputed inheritance of the grand-daughters of Richard Wakehurst†. CPR, 1452-61, p. 599; 1461-7, p. 423; C1/31/281-4. Furthermore, like his father he had been engaged as a trustee of the substantial Poynings inheritance, which in the late 1450s was held jure uxoris by the earl of Northumberland. C67/42, m. 4.

Besides his work for the gentry of the region, Bolney was also employed by the barons of the Cinque Ports. Presumably in return for his services he had been admitted to the liberty of Winchelsea in 1446 without being required to pay a fee, Cott. Julius BIV, f. 73v. and three years later he provided legal counsel in the matter of the incorporation of Tenterden as a member-Port for Rye. The jurats of Rye sought his advice on later occasions too, both when he (‘Master’ Bolney) was in London and at home at West Firle, E. Suss. RO, Rye mss, acct. bk. 60/2, ff. 11v, 66v. and Winchelsea sent him as a delegate to the Brodhull at Romney on 4 Nov. 1451, where the Ports collectively instructed him to take a petition to the warden, the duke of Buckingham, and were prepared to pay him 3s. 4d. a day for taking on the task. Several years later he attended another Brodhull as a representative for Hastings. White and Black Bks. of Cinque Ports (Kent Rec. Ser. xix), 29, 52.

Despite his evident ability as a lawyer and his prominent connexions among the nobility and gentry of his native county, Bolney was not elected to Parliament until 1460, when Henry VI was under the control of the Yorkists following their victory at Northampton. There is no indication where his personal sympathies lay, for throughout the political changes of 1459-61 he continued to be placed on the Sussex bench. However, he thought it sensible to purchase a pardon from Edward IV in July 1462. C67/45, m. 16. In the 1460s he was engaged in several lawsuits arising from his continued friendship with the Hoos. These largely stemmed from the heavy burden of debt left by Lord Hoo when he died in 1455, the claims to his estates of his four daughters and their husbands, and the complicated dealings of his half-brother Thomas Hoo, doggedly attempting to fulfill the terms of his will and satisfy his creditors. Lord Hoo had left instructions that his honour, barony and rape of Hastings should be sold to provide marriage portions for his three younger daughters, with his half-brother having first refusal. Thomas duly bought the estate, only to sell it (perhaps under duress) in November 1461 to the new King’s friend William, Lord Hastings. Bolney acted as an attorney to deliver seisin, and subsequently offered his services as legal counsel to the new lord, a position which caused a conflict of interests when Hastings disputed the right of the abbot of Battle, whom Bolney still served as steward, to levy fines within the rape. CCR, 1461-8, p. 93; Cat. Battle Abbey Chs. ed. Thorpe, 104, 117; Suss. Arch. Collns. ii. 162-3; Battle Abbey mss, folder 37, no. 989. He held two of his manors indirectly of Hastings: SC11/658. He was also a feoffee of the manors reserved to Sir John Pelham, whom he served as bailiff of the hundred of ‘Shoswell’: Add. Ch. 29687; KB9/326/2.

It appears that Thomas Hoo had given his niece Anne and her husband Geoffrey Boleyn the manors in Norfolk inherited by Joan Halsham, promising the latter and her husband John Lewknor an estate of equivalent value, namely the property in Surrey and Middlesex belonging to his own wife’s kinsman Sir John Burcester. To do this, Hoo purchased the reversionary interest in Burcester’s estate and made Bolney one of the feoffees, to hold initially to his own use and then, from 1463, to the use of the Lewknors. However, it was later alleged in Chancery that Hoo had sold the reversion to William Lemyng, a London grocer, and there was considerable disagreement about the terms of the use, with claims and counter-claims being aired in the 1470s by widows of Lewknor and Lemyng. CCR, 1461-8, pp. 382-5; Add. 39376, f. 119; C1/39/284-7, 40/47-52. To what extent Bolney connived in Hoo’s devious plans is unclear, although he does not seem to have tried to extricate himself from the tangled affairs of Hoo’s relations. He continued to be a feoffee of Joan Lewknor’s property in Wiltshire and her manor of Brabourne in Kent, so that when in 1465 she decided to sell the reversion of the latter to Sir John Scott†, he was dragged into a suit in Chancery over that too. CPR, 1461-7, pp. 429, 493; CCR, 1468-76, no. 311; CIPM Hen. VII, i. 1078. Then there were further difficulties relating to the Hoo manors in Sussex held for life by Lord Hoo’s stepmother Elizabeth Lewknor, since in his will Lord Hoo had instructed Bolney and the other feoffees of the same to make estate of part of the property, to the value of £20 p.a., to his half-brother Thomas in tail-male, the income from the rest to be used to pay his debts before it passed to his widow Lady Eleanor. Elizabeth’s death in 1465 triggered off litigation brought not only by Eleanor and her husband James Laurence, but also by Lord Hoo’s daughters and their husbands, and by Thomas Hoo for his portion. Bolney appeared in Chancery to say that he himself had never had responsibility for administering Lord Hoo’s goods and paying his debts; when he received an assurance that these had indeed been paid he would be ready to fulfill the requirements of the will. Although he had already made a grant to Thomas Hoo of a moiety of the three manors in dispute, he told the court that he was uncertain which of the other properties should be his. In 1474 he was bound to abide by arbitration regarding title to the same. C1/41/239-44; Procs. Chancery Eliz. ed. Caley and Bayley, ii. pp. li-liii; Add. Chs. 23822-7.

As we have seen, Bolney had earlier been drawn into the affairs of Eleanor, countess of Northumberland, the Poynings heiress whose marriage contract his father had helped implement long before. Now, by a deed of April 1463, he and others had transferred certain of the former Poynings manors in Dorset and Somerset to a body of feoffees to hold to her use. CIPM Hen. VII, i. 468, 548; C141/2/26; C67/42, m. 4. But the countess was not the only member of the nobility who engaged his services in this period. Five years later John Mowbray, duke of Norfolk, made Bolney a feoffee of manors in Sussex and Kent he was in the process of selling. This was no doubt at the behest of Thomas Hoo, who was one of the duke’s councillors, and subsequently both Bolney and Hoo figured among the trustees of the widespread Mowbray estates. Bolney was probably then already in receipt of the life-annuity of £2 granted for his legal counsel to the duke, whom he also served as steward of one of his lordships in the 1470s. CP40/828, cart. rot. 1d; CP25(1)/294/74/64; CPR, 1467-77, p. 130; L.E. Moye, ‘Estates and Finances of the Mowbray Fam.’ (Duke Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1985), 211; DL29/454/7312. In association with his friend Hoo and with Lord Hastings he was among those entrusted in 1471 with the estates of Richard West, Lord de la Warre, until payment had been made to Edward IV of a fine of 1,000 marks imposed on de la Warre for supporting the Lancastrian side at the battle of Tewkesbury. CCR, 1468-76, no. 807. Bolney also served on the council of Bishop Arundel of Chichester, helping him to reach a settlement in a dispute over land in the mid 1470s. Chichester Cart. (Suss. Rec. Soc. xlvi), 867.

In the course of his career Bolney had built up a sizeable estate in Sussex, partly through inheritance as other branches of his family failed, partly by purchase using the profits of his profession. As a marriage settlement in 1437 he and his wife were promised the manor of Bolney in jointure on the death of his father. They came into possession when John died in 1445, and Bartholomew duly paid homage to the new bishop of Chichester for it in 1457. Ibid. 249; Bolney Bk. 8, 13. His father had been taxed on a landed income of £22 p.a. in 1436: E159/212, recorda Hil. rot. 14(vii)d. The process of his acquisition of the rest of his landed holdings, largely completed by 1450, is charted in the book of record which he compiled. This shows that by the time his father died Bartholomew already held the manor of Amyse in Firle, where he lived, together with land in and around Selmeston, in the same area to the south-east of Lewes, and by his death the estate had grown to include the manors of Bolney, Medese in Eastbourne, West Firle, Stonelynk in Fairlight near Winchelsea and Catsfield. He put considerable effort into reinforcing his title to his acquisitions. CPR, 1441-6, p. 400; VCH Suss. ix. 177; CCR, 1447-54, p. 491. In several of his transactions his wife Eleanor was associated with him, but her family background remains obscure. She apparently brought him an interest in a moiety of the manor of Wykham in Steyning and the advowson of a local chantry, which, however, the Bolneys relinquished to another lawyer, Richard Jay*, in 1446, though they continued to keep other property in Steyning which Bartholomew had inherited from his father. CP25(1)/241/89/29; Add. 39376, f. 44v; VCH Suss. vi (1), 263; Bolney Bk. 13-14. Bolney took advantage of the privileges he enjoyed as a baron of the Cinque Ports by claiming exemption from parliamentary subsidies on his moveable possessions in the rapes of Arundel and Pevensey. E179/189/96, 229/151.

Bolney compiled his book towards the end of his life, and it was left unfinished at his death; the text breaks off in the middle of a sentence. It provides much evidence of the complexities of landownership in the fifteenth century, for he noted many details about leases, rentals, terriers and tenancies, and in establishing his title to properties he was careful to supply genealogies and record evidences in full. Bolney Bk. passim, esp. pp. xxvii, xxix. Bolney’s wife died shortly before February 1475, and not long afterwards, having made a new will, he left Firle and went to live in the manor-house at Catsfield. By a deed of 30 Apr. 1476 it was arranged that after his death this manor would pass in tail to his second son, Edward, with remainder to Edward’s younger brother Richard. Bolney Bk. p. xxvi states that he retired to Stonelynk but the deeds mentioned refer to Catsfield: ibid. 83. The date of Bolney’s death is not known, but it happened before 2 May 1477, and probably before 25 Mar. that year as the monumental brass commemorating him and his wife in West Firle church bears the date 1476. He had not been reappointed to the Sussex bench in the previous November, so it is possible that he was dead by then. CFR, xxi. no. 403 is a writ de diem clausit extremum, but no post mortem survives; Suss. Arch. Collns. lxxvii. 175-6.

Bartholomew’s eldest son, John, got into trouble soon afterwards: in 1479 he was accused of the homicide of a man named John or Thomas Style in Arundel castle, although he managed to obtain a royal pardon when the justices of gaol delivery found that he had killed him in self defence. C260/154/15; CPR, 1477-85, p. 166. John fell out with his brothers over the division of their late father’s estate. In a petition to the chancellor in the 1480s Edward Bolney stated that his father’s feoffees held the manors of West Firle, Stonelynk and Bolney, along with various parcels of land, to the use of John and his issue, with successive remainders in tail to their brother Richard and himself, and that Bartholomew had stipulated that if John sold any part of his inheritance the feoffees were to make estate of Stonelynk to Edward. Nevertheless, even though John had sold some 140 acres of land in Wiston, the feoffees refused to carry out his instructions, claiming that John had done nothing contrary to his father’s will, and that they had conveyed the manors to him a long time before the supposed sale. Richard Bolney also put in a claim to Stonelynk, saying that as John was now dead without issue it should pass to him, and he was ultimately successful in gaining possession. C1/36/43-48. John did not die in 1461 as given in Bolney Bk. ped. p. xxxiii. When Richard died in 1500 seised of the bulk of his late father’s lands, these were said to be worth some 50 marks a year. CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 1134.