The family of Browe hailed originally from Cheshire, but acquired the Rutland manor of Teigh on the marriage of our MP’s grandfather, Sir Hugh, to the heiress of Sir Christopher Folville. Sir Hugh’s remunerative military career funded the purchase of another manor in the same county, at Woodhead in Bridge Casterton. His ill-advised support for the Percys at the battle of Shrewsbury led to the permanent loss of much of the family’s Cheshire estates and so further concentrated their interests on Rutland. Nevertheless, they maintained important links with the county of their origin, where a junior branch of the family remained settled.
Browe soon began to play a part in public affairs, sustained no doubt by the property he held under the terms of this contract. In company with his father, he may have attested the Rutland elections of 1432 and 1433 (although the attestor was perhaps his uncle), and in 1434, described as resident at Teigh, he was one of the gentry of the county sworn not to maintain peace-breakers. It is a measure of his family’s importance and the difficulty of finding suitably-qualified MPs in so small a shire that he himself was returned at the election of 22 Sept. 1435, an election his father attested.
Browe’s connections at Court may have assisted him in the making of a potentially very lucrative second marriage. Before his second journey to France he had married Elizabeth Tame, who was both an heiress in her own right and held dower from two previous husbands.
Less happily, Browe was soon after involved in a major episode of local disorder. On 29 Apr. 1450 he was indicted before Thomas Herryson, coroner of Holland, for receiving the murderers of one John Ankys at Deeping St. James, that is, in the immediate neighbourhood of the Lincolnshire estates (at Greatford, Barholm and Braceborough) he held in right of his wife and near his father’s manor of Woodhead. To this indictment had been added, in the following Michaelmas term, the appeal of Ankys’s widow. This murder was an episode in the dispute between Leo, Lord Welles, and the tenants of the duchy of Lancacter lordships of Spalding and Pinchbeck, and our MP was clearly involved as a supporter of Welles. In the indictment, he is styled, as he is on other occasions, as ‘of Maxey’ in the soke of Peterborough, very near Deeping St. James; and the manor of Maxey, the property of the Beauforts, had been in Welles’s hands since his marriage to the widow of John Beaufort, duke of Somerset, in 1447. Later, on 20 Sept. 1451, Browe witnessed a deed for Welles at Maxey, and it may be that, as he waited to inherit his patrimony, he briefly resided in that lord’s household.
That wait ended at about the same time as Browe witnessed this deed for Welles, but, from our MP’s financial point of view, it did not end entirely satisfactorily. At his father’s death, shortly before 18 Oct. 1451, his main estates may have been bound by a yet-undischarged mortgage. At Michaelmas 1448 Robert had taken a ten-year lease of his own estates from these feoffees, headed by the Northamptonshire lawyer, William Aldewyncle*, and two wealthy merchants of Stamford, William and John Brown, at an annual rent of £200, a considerable premium of their real value. The purpose of this arrangement is uncertain, but the discharge of debt is an obvious possibility.
These deductions from his patrimony may have given added urgency to Browe’s efforts to realize in full the expectations of his second wife. This led him to enter into an agreement he soon had cause to regret. On 5 Aug. 1452 he contracted the marriage of his stepdaughter, Elizabeth Seymark, to Thomas Pygge of Boston (Lincolnshire), a royal auditor and receiver, with the purpose of harnessing Pygge’s aid to the recovery of these lands.
By this time Browe had unwisely entered into a transaction which was to result in a more damaging defeat. Under the terms of the will of the Norfolk knight, Sir Henry Inglose*, made in June 1451, the manor of Pickworth, very near our MP’s manor at Woodhead, was to be sold to the disinheritance of his son, Henry. The son sought to subvert the loss by himself selling the manor to our MP. On 13 Feb. 1457 the two men entered into an indenture: Browe agreed to pay 300 marks for the manor, £40 to be paid on feoffment or release to be made before Easter, and thereafter £50 a year. Considering that the manor had been purchased by Sir Henry for as much as 1,000 marks some 30 years before, this was a bargain price. The sharp reduction was partly due to some unspecified calamity in the intervening period – a deed of 1436 says that the vill ‘per subitaneam adventuram ad vastum et destructionem devenitur’, which suggests something other than enclosure – but equally important was the fact that it was not the vendor’s to sell.
A confrontation between the two buyers was inevitable. Indeed, if later litigation is to be taken literally, it had already begun. Browe, Henry Inglose and others allegedly forcibly entered the manor in August 1456. There can be no doubt that our MP was well aware of the risks he was undertaking in agreeing to buy it. Under the terms of the agreement of 13 Feb., in addition to the sale price, he undertook to compensate the vendor for as much of the costs and damages of 40 marks as seemed reasonable to two lawyers, Richard Welby* and John Fincham. He soon found himself having to defend his position in court. According to a petition presented by Danvers in late 1456 or early 1457, Browe, ‘imagynyng as well by gret mayntenaunce and champertie as by grete routes and riottes’ to so intimidate him that he dare not approach the disputed manor, had assembled in the previous August upwards of 300 men to ambush and threaten him at Pickworth. Almost certainly it is this petition which explains why, on 10 June 1458, our MP was obliged to enter into recognizance for £100 to the King and find four sureties in £40 for his appearance in Chancery on the following morrow of St. Martin and for his good behaviour to Danvers.
In the meantime the judge had supplemented his suit in Chancery by suing his rival in the court of common pleas for forcible entry into the disputed manor. Browe and his three co-defendants, including Henry Inglose, were convicted and condemned in damages of £210 when, in Hilary term 1460, a Rutland jury, most unusually, took the trouble to appear at Westminster. On 28 Jan. 1461 the defendants were summoned to appear in King’s bench on the following quindene of Easter to show why execution of these damages should not be awarded against them.
Desperation led Browe into a dishonest ruse. He and Henry Inglose circulated the story that Sir John Fastolf, a feoffee of Sir Henry Inglose, had, before making release of his right to the disputed manor to the executors who had made the sale to Danvers, made a feoffment of Pickworth to John Mowbray, duke of Norfolk, Henry Inglose and others, and delivered seisin through his attorneys, James Gloys, clerk, and William Barker. As John Paston* wrote in a letter dated 9 Feb. 1462, almost certainly to Gloys, such a feoffment was ‘contrarie to the wille’ of Sir Henry, and, if it had indeed been made, was ‘to the gret disclaundre’ of Sir John and to the imperilment of his immortal soul. More importantly for our purposes, it would have rendered invalid the executors’ conveyance to Danvers. Thus, on 17 Mar. 1462, Gloys and Barker, probably at the instigation of Paston, came before the mayor and sheriffs of Norwich to deny any knowledge of such a feoffment and assert that they had not delivered seisin of Pickworth. On 16 May 1463 our MP admitted defeat by granting his lands in Pickworth to Danvers, and the deed was enrolled in Chancery nine days later.
The difficulties these disputes occasioned may have prevented Browe from benefiting from Edward IV’s accession in the way that his association with the house of York may have led him to expect. That association appears to have strengthened with his own troubles in the late 1450s. In February 1458, along with such high-ranking Yorkists as William Hastings and Walter Devereux II*, he was among those who entered into bonds to Alice, dowager-duchess of Suffolk, for the payment of the portion of Duke Richard’s daughter on her marriage to Alice’s son John, duke of Suffolk. His own associates reflect his Yorkist background: in May 1457 Hastings and Walter Blount* mainperned for him in Chancery, as did two other committed Yorkists, George Darell and Roger Eyton*, in October 1460.
In the new reign, however, Browe found not prosperity but a new dispute to add to his quarrels with Pygge and Danvers. In the late 1450s he had contracted his ill-fated son Thomas to Isabel, the daughter of one of the leading gentry of Nottinghamshire, Robert Clifton*. As part of the settlement he instructed his feoffees to convey the manor of Woodhead to Clifton and others to the entent that they settle the manor on the couple in tail-general with remainder to Browe and his heirs.
Meanwhile, the real points at issue in the dispute were being aired in the court of Chancery. According to a petition submitted by Browe between 1461 and 1465, Clifton and his fellow feoffees, following the groom’s death without issue, had refused to fulfill the condition of the feoffment, that is to settle Woodhead on Isabel with remainder to our MP. This petition did not achieve the desired result for, between 1465 and 1467, Browe presented another, on this occasion alleging, in contradiction of his first petition, that the feoffees held the manor on condition that they re-enfeoff him when required. It took yet another petition before what appear to be the full facts emerged. In late 1467 Browe returned to his original claim: Clifton replied that, after Thomas’s death, Isabel had married Thomas Blount*; that Blount had negotiated with our MP for the purchase of the manor; and that, after the sale had been agreed, Browe caused a release he had formerly made to Clifton and others to be enrolled on the dorse of the close roll with the intention that the feoffees, after Isabel’s death, should stand seised to the use of Thomas Blount and his heirs.
Aside from this dispute and his final appearance in Parliament, very little is known about the later years of Browe’s career. It would be interesting to know why, in January 1467, he conveyed all his lands to his neighbour, Henry Makworth of Empingham: the fact that there was only a single feoffee is suggestive of a mortgage and thus provides further evidence of his indebtedness. Later, on 20 Mar. 1469, he took the precaution of suing out a royal pardon, necessary insurance for one so frequently a defendant in the royal courts. Already relatively elderly he does not seem to have played an active role on either side during the crisis of 1470-1, although he did sue out a further pardon during the Readeption. The last years of his life were disturbed by the revival of a claim by the Woodford family of Leicestershire to the manor of Teigh, for, if a later plea is to be credited, on 12 Nov. 1470 Ralph Woodford took from there crops worth 40 marks.
Browe died between March and Trinity term 1472 (when his heir-male sued Ralph Woodford), and with him the senior male line of the Browes came to an end.
Browe’s career is a singular one. Although he sat as many as four times in Parliament in a period spanning over 30 years, he never held any of the major offices of shire administration and was infrequently appointed to local government commissions. Most remarkable is his exclusion from the county bench on which both his father and grandfather had served. While he may have deliberately eschewed office, it is at least equally likely that his near-continuous involvement in disputes with men of rank, albeit disputes that appear to have involved little in the way of open violence, meant that successive regimes considered him unsuitable for office. It is difficult to judge whether this affected his standing with his neighbours. His returns to Parliament suggest that it did not, and this impression is confirmed in part by his occasional employment in land transactions. In 1439 he was one of the feoffees for the implementation of the will of the Rutland knight, Sir John Basings; in 1443 he was among those to whom his fellow Household servant, John Bellers*, entrusted the Huntingdonshire manor of Sawtry; in 1444 he was a joint lessee in a Northamptonshire manor on behalf of Juliana, widow of (Sir) John Culpepper*; and in 1446, along with his father, he was among the witnesses to a formal instrument declaring that Robert Sherard was entitled to courtesy in his late wife’s estates.