BRUYN, Richard, of Wistaston, Cheshire and Islingham, Kent and London.

Bruyn, who came from Cheshire, He was described as ‘of Wistaston’ in 1429: CP40/675, rot. 651d. was perhaps related to John Bruyn* of Bridgnorth, who belonged to a Chester family. He acted for John as an attorney in the court of common pleas, CP40/671, rot. 107d. and in the 1420s also represented there the abbot of St. Werburgh, Chester, and the north-western landowners Sir John Stanley† and Sir John Savage. CP40/656, rot. 112; 660, rot. 107d; 662, rot. 308. In 1460, when he sued the abbot of Chester for arrears of an annual fee of 40s. granted to him for life by the abbot’s predecessor at Westminster in 1436, he claimed that he had given good counsel in the law for 19 years: J.H. Baker, Men of Ct. (Selden Soc. supp. ser. xviii), i. 19; 388-9. Bruyn owed his further advancement to Humphrey, earl of Stafford and later duke of Buckingham, and the latter’s kinsmen, notably Archbishop John Stafford and the Bourgchier brothers. His qualifications for representing the Staffordshire boroughs of Newcastle-under-Lyme and Stafford, in terms of property and residence, remain uncertain (although he was said to live in the diocese of Lichfield where they lay), but his ability as a lawyer and his important connexion with Earl Humphrey must have recommended him to the burgesses. Having completed his training in the legal profession by the early 1420s, when he first accompanied justices of assize on their circuits, in the summer of 1429 he took up a post as one of the filacers of the common pleas (a lucrative position which he was to retain for 25 years). Bruyn primarily held responsibility for the suits coming to the court from the West Country, although this did not prevent him from continuing to appear as an attorney for litigants from elsewhere, including the earl of Stafford. e.g. CP40/675, att. rots.

Of necessity, Bruyn’s profession required him to reside close to Westminster, and before his first Parliament in 1435 he acquired property near the inns of court in the parish of St. Clement Danes without New Temple bar. CCR, 1435-41, p. 42. He was accompanied to the Commons on that occasion by William Lee*, an established apprentice-at-law sitting for Staffordshire, to whom he was closely related. Their precise relationship is now difficult to determine. Lee, the older of the two, was to call Bruyn his ‘brother’ in a fine made six years later regarding Lee’s manor of Aston and other holdings in Staffordshire, which were then entailed on the issue of Lee and his wife Maud, with remainder to Lee’s issue, and failing this to Bruyn and his male descendants. Wm. Salt. Arch. Soc. xi. 233. It may be the case, albeit unlikely, that he and Lee had the same mother, or that Maud was Bruyn’s sister. Another bond between them was that both men were in the service of the earl of Stafford.

Before their attendance in the Commons together, Lee had played an important part in the complicated legal transactions required to cement Bruyn’s marriage to the Kentish heiress Joan Rickhill. This marriage had come about through unusual circumstances. Joan, one of the grandchildren of the judge Sir William Rickhill (d.1407), had been married in 1421 to James Hopwode, nephew of the then chancellor, Thomas Langley, bishop of Durham. The match had been arranged by her father John, CCR, 1422-9, pp. 42-43. who, one of four brothers, had inherited from the judge the manor of Islingham and other valuable lands in Kent, situated to the west and north of Rochester. By the early 1430s Joan had fallen heir not only to her father, but also to her childless uncle Nicholas, who possessed the manors of Mokelton Hall in Essex and Paddington in Abinger, Surrey, and property in the parish of St. Mary atte Hill in London. Nicholas was party to the indentures completed on 25 Nov. 1431 which finalized his niece’s divorce from Hopwode and brought to an end lawsuits between the latter and Bruyn. Joan married our MP soon afterwards and in July following, after the deaths of her uncle and father, all these holdings were conveyed by Hopwode and his feoffees to another, more exalted group of feoffees, headed by the then chancellor, Bishop Stafford of Bath and Wells, the earl of Stafford and the latter’s half-brother Henry Bourgchier, earl of Eu, and with Lee taking a prominent role. Lancs. RO, Hopwood of Hopwood deeds, DDHP39/35a, b; CCR, 1429-35, p. 187. Evidently, this second group was acting on behalf of Bruyn, whose marriage to the heiress caused considerable scandal. Pope Eugenius IV was informed that although James and Joan Hopwode had lived together for some time as man and wife and there was nothing to invalidate their marriage, Joan had left her husband, and Bruyn, aspiring to the great heritage to which she was probably to succeed, had induced James to consent to a divorce, which was obtained by suborning a number of witnesses to give false depositions. In the eyes of the Church the couple were living together in adultery. In April 1435 the Pope ordered the bishops of Norwich and Rochester to summon Hopwode, Bruyn and Joan before them for examination, and if they found the facts as stated to be proved they were to annul the sentence of divorce and compel Joan to return to her lawful husband. CPL, viii. 545. That they found otherwise is evident from Bruyn’s continued tenure of Joan’s inheritance. According to the tax assessments of 1436, his lands in London and the counties of Kent, Surrey, Essex, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire were worth as much as £90 p.a. E159/212, recorda Hil. rot. 14 (iv)d.

Bruyn had established himself on his wife’s estates in Kent before the spring of 1434, being then among the gentry of the county required to take the oath against maintenance. CPR, 1429-36, p. 389. Yet the couple seem never to have been entirely secure in their possession of Joan’s inheritance. Over the years a number of challenges were made in the court of common pleas to her title to Islingham and the lands nearby in Frindsbury, Higham, Shorne, Stoke, Hoo and Clyve. CP40/710, rot. 123; 780, rot. 339. Other parts of the widespread Rickhill estates were the subject of transactions to which Bruyn was a party. He attested a quitclaim made by his mother-in-law of the Rickhill manors of Cheveley and Ditton Camoys, Cambridgeshire, in 1439, and he and his wife relinquished their right in these holdings to William Cotton* 11 years later. Another part of the inheritance, the manor of Paddington in Surrey, passed to Bruyn’s kinsman William Lee following a collusive suit in the 1440s. CCR, 1435-41, pp. 245, 457; CP25(1)/232/72/44, 293/72/22. Bruyn was a feoffee of other Rickhill manors in Kent, by nomination of his wife’s uncle William Rickhill†, in 1441: CP25(1)/115/315/534. Royal pardons granted in July 1446 to Bruyn and his wife and the latter’s mother gave them some protection in lawsuits relating to the executorship of Joan’s father’s will. C67/39, mm. 13, 32.

Further disputes related to the former Rickhill properties in the London parish of St. Dunstan in the East. These included a corner shop next to the Watergate in Thames Street, which Bruyn leased out for 26s. 8d. p.a., only to be sued for a breach of contract. More seriously, Hugh Cavendish, a London tailor, claimed title to several messuages in the parish against Bruyn and his wife. In 1447 the couple brought a plea against Cavendish, asserting that seven years earlier he had created fraudulent documents to deprive them of three such properties. Cavendish denied the fraud, but damages were assigned against him at £100 and costs at 100 marks. However, the Bruyns were amerced for making a false claim with respect to other deeds, and remitted 85 marks of the damages. At the same time, with the help of Archbishop Stafford, the duke of Buckingham and the earl of Eu (acting as his feoffees), Bruyn sued Cavendish for breaking into his house in the same parish in 1441. CP40/740, rot. 492d; 745, rot. 430d; 746, rot. 126. Early in 1452 the two men entered recognizances in £500 to abide the award of arbitrators regarding all the legal actions between them. CCR, 1447-54, pp. 355, 358-9. Besides all this, Bruyn was also drawn into litigation with his wife’s maternal relations. In 1441 he had entered a bond in 100 marks to the prominent Sussex landowner Sir Thomas Lewknor*, who was married to Joan’s aunt, Elizabeth, and also borrowed a further 30 marks from him. The debts remained outstanding at Lewknor’s death 11 years later. CP40/738, rot. 38d; 749, rot. 453. Yet it was together with the widowed Elizabeth that the Bruyns later brought suits in the 1450s against Sir Richard Fiennes to secure a fair partition of the manor of Bukholt and lands in Bexhill and Crowhurst as coheirs of their common ancestor, William Battisford. CP40/778, rot. 338; 779, rot. 658d; 780, rot. 66d.

In the years since his first Parliament Bruyn had risen to be a man of consequence, one of armigerous status, who could boast links with prominent figures on the national stage. These were not necessarily amicable: in 1439 he and the duke of Bedford’s bastard son, Richard, had formally released each other from all personal actions. CCR, 1435-41, pp. 252, 254. However, in the following year he attested important transactions for Henry, Lord Grey of Codnor. CCR, 1435-41, pp. 426, 454. Although he invariably sat in Parliament as a representative of Staffordshire boroughs, it was in Kent that he established himself as a landowner and there that he was engaged in local administration. Following the dissolution of his second Parliament, in 1442, he was made a j.p. in the county, thereafter being active on the bench, generally as one of the quorum, until nearly to the end of the reign. Leading landowners of the region employed him as steward of their estates, among them Archbishop Stafford and Lord Cromwell (both of whom had earlier acted as feoffees of his wife’s inheritance). There is further evidence of his personal links with the duke of Buckingham, who held substantial estates in the region: both men were among those to whom a Rochester man transferred his goods and chattels in 1445. CCR, 1441-7, p. 358. Although Bruyn continued to serve on commissions in Kent, and accounted in 1449 for the profits of a forfeited ship, the Katheryn of Holland, which he himself had arrested there, E101/515/11. it was again for the borough of Stafford that he sat in Parliament that year. No doubt his links with Buckingham had much to do with his return. At the beginning of 1450 the duke made him his steward in Kent, an office which he probably continued to occupy for the rest of the decade.

The way Bruyn exercised his stewardships in Kent was called into question in the aftermath of Cade’s rebellion, when serious allegations were made against his underlings, notably John Ram, his under steward of the estates at Hoo belonging to Lord Cromwell. Ram was among the more notorious oppressors of whom the rebels complained, but to what extent Bruyn encouraged his many acts of extortion is difficult to ascertain. At Rochester on 22 Aug. 1450 jurors presented that six years earlier as ‘a great supporter and maintainer’ of Ram, he had threatened the life of one Simon Dalham, compelling him to pay Ram £1. Although he was acquitted of the charge, and the only other accusation made against him was that when farmer of some of Cromwell’s land he had illegally enclosed part of the royal highway, Bruyn’s failure to control his subordinates places some culpability for the breakdown of order on his shoulders. As a j.p. he had a role to play in restoring order in the region, and when the Dartford inquiries were launched in May 1452 he was one of the commissioners of oyer and terminer assigned to investigate treasons committed during the previous two years. Med. Kentish Soc. 226-7, 259-60; R.A. Griffiths, Hen. VI, 620; KB9/273/10. He was present at Dartford on 28 June when the convicted traitor John Wilkins was executed, and was later able to testify that Wilkins made no last-minute accusations or confessions. The testimony proved useful to his former employer Lord Cromwell when allegations were laid against Cromwell by a priest, Robert Colynson, and Bruyn was subsequently placed on the commission which conducted inquiries about Colynson’s crimes. CPR, 1452-61, pp. 95, 171; KB9/273, mm. 131-4. Indeed, he was very active as a commissioner in Kent in the rest of the decade, often being appointed in association with Buckingham, now warden of the Cinque Ports.

Together with Buckingham and the latter’s half-brothers Henry (now Viscount Bourgchier) and John, Lord Berners, on 6 Apr. 1454 Bruyn received at the Exchequer guardianship of the temporalities of the archbishopric of Canterbury following the death of Cardinal Kemp. This was pending the elevation as primate of another of Buckingham’s half-brothers, Thomas Bourgchier, bishop of Ely. They were reappointed in June 1454 and May 1455. CFR, xix. 86; CPR, 1452-61, pp. 154, 233. Not surprisingly, Bruyn entered the service of the new archbishop, and it was to him as chancellor that, in the summer of 1456, he sent a petition for redress following attacks on his wife and property. He alleged that one John Brokke, sometime servant to the clerk of the under sheriff, had led some 70 armed and disguised men to Islingham at sundown, and having broken down doors they smashed coffers, assaulted Joan Bruyn and two of her women, and maimed three of her men-servants. Fortunately, the people of the country thereabouts had come to the rescue, but daily threats continued, so that the couple were unable to live in their home save under heavy guard. C1/121/50. Besides the archbishop, Bruyn could call on many other prominent figures to support him. His close associates in this period included Sir Thomas Kyriel* and Thomas Hoo II* (his wife’s cousin), who backed him and his wife in their many lawsuits, and these two and the duke of Buckingham, Viscount Bourgchier and other Stafford retainers such as the Hextall brothers, William* and Thomas*, all agreed to be feoffees of the former Rickhill estates on his behalf. Such was his friendship with the Hextalls that William Wetenale, the London alderman, was prepared to pay him a fee of £20 to negotiate a marriage between his son and William Hextall’s daughter Margaret. CP40/780, rot. 339; CCR, 1454-61, pp. 344, 347; C1/26/286 (although the marriage took place in 1454 Wetenale failed to pay Bruyn his fee before he died three years later, so Bruyn had to sue his executors for it). Bruyn was among those knights and esquires of Kent who were sent letters by the King on 8 June 1456 to assist the ‘lordes of oure bloode, oure jugges and other’ holding sessions at Maidstone, PPC, vi. 288. and he was placed on commissions of array in the late 1450s and in the winter of 1459-60, as England descended into civil war.

Like his lord Duke Humphrey, Bruyn remained loyal to the Lancastrian Crown in the summer of 1460. When the Yorkist earls landed in Kent that June and marched to confront the royal forces in the Midlands, he hastened to join (Sir) Thomas Brown II* and his followers who entered the Tower of London on the 28th to bolster the beleaguered garrison. From there they allegedly shot guns down into the city, in a storm of ‘wyldfyre’ which killed seven Londoners. Buckingham fell at the King’s side at the battle of Northampton on 10 July, and when the victorious Yorkists returned to the City they brought Brown and the rest, including Bruyn, to the Guildhall to stand trial for treason ten days later. KB9/75; KB27/798, rex rot. 6. Yet although Brown and some lesser individuals were executed, Bruyn survived, most likely because of his links with one of the judges, Viscount Bourgchier. Furthermore, on 22 Aug. he was granted a special pardon for any offences, including treason, murder and rebellion, he might have committed before 4 Aug. CPR, 1452-61, p. 599.

There is no evidence that Bruyn continued to be engaged as steward of the late duke of Buckingham’s estates, and so long as the Yorkists remained in power he was excluded from royal commissions. Yet Archbishop Bourgchier sometimes made use of his services, as when, in November 1460, he asked him to administer the goods of a Rochester man who had died intestate, and towards the end of his life he was described as being a member of the archbishop’s household. Reg. Bourgchier (Canterbury and York Soc. liv), 194. The early 1460s were spent by the aging Bruyn in tidying up his affairs. For instance, in 1462 he relinquished his feoffeeship of land near his home at Islingham, in which he had had a fiduciary interest for nearly 30 years, and he was party to several transactions regarding the inheritance of Joan, wife of John Lewknor*, his wife’s cousin, in whose interests he had been concerned as a trustee of manors in Norfolk since 1448. CAD, i. B1118; CCR, 1461-8, pp. 206-7; CPR, 1461-7, p. 141. Although he took on the administration of the estate of the late John Warner* (d.1460), this led to lawsuits against him in Easter term 1463, and at the same time he was outlawed in Surrey for failing to appear in court to answer a plea of debt. Later that year the executors of a London alderman, Simon Eyre, accused him of unlawful detinue of the sum of £103. CP40/808, rots. 192, 349d; 809, rot. 407.

Coincidentally, Bruyn’s standing in Kent, founded on the estates brought to him by marriage, took a severe blow when his wife died childless at some point before 18 Dec. 1463. In her will dated 8 June 1462 and made with her husband’s permission, Joan had directed her feoffees to make an estate for life to Bruyn in her holdings in Kent, Essex and the city of London, with the exception of some property in Old Fish Street, in which she left a life-interest to the supervisor of the will, William Gaynesford*. PCC 3 Godyn. She asked to be buried in the London church of All Hallows the Great. Her husband’s origins are recalled by the presence of Thomas Swynford of Eccleshall, Staffs. among the witnesses to the will. Joan had possessed a book of Hours of the Virgin Mary, in which were recorded obits of the Rickhill and Bruyn families: Bodl. Gough mss, Liturg. 9. Yet Bruyn did not keep the estates after her death; either he sold his life-interest, or it was taken from him against his will. His wife’s heir was her cousin, another Joan, the daughter and heir of Thomas Rickhill. In 1458 this Joan, by then the widow of Henry Pevensey, had entered recognizances in 1,000 marks to Bruyn, after making a series of formal quitclaims to him and his different sets of feoffees: firstly, to those in possession of Mokelton Hall and other lands late of her uncle Nicholas Rickhill, then to those in possession of five messuages in the London parishes of St. Mary atte Hill and St. Dunstan in the East (which had also belonged to Nicholas), and of two messuages in the parish of St. Mary Magdalene, of which John Rickhill’s widow had been tenant for life; and finally to Bruyn and one other person of his wife’s manor of Islingham together with some 860 acres of land and 50s. rent. CCR, 1454-61, pp. 344, 347. Yet despite this, on 3 Nov. 1465, after her cousin’s death, she, now wife of a Warwickshire esquire, quitclaimed to John Worsop* the London draper all her title to the Rickhill estates in Essex and Kent, including those at Islingham which the Bruyns had held, in preparation for the marriage of her son and heir to Worsop’s daughter. The transactions were completed in Hilary term 1468 and the estates duly passed to the young couple. Corp. London RO, hr 195/39; Essex Feet of Fines, iv. 64; C140/57/61.

Clearly, Bruyn had been dispossessed, perhaps by force. Just a few days before the conveyance to Worsop, on 16 Oct. 1465, he had been attacked at Cliffe near Lewes in Sussex by a group of malefactors bent on murdering him. With two serious wounds to his head, maimed by injuries to his left arm and right leg, and with stab-wounds from daggers, he was fortunate to survive. As it was, Archbishop Bourgchier had to make do without his services; he had still not returned to his lord’s household when some of his assailants were indicted early in 1467. KB9/315/5. The date of his second marriage, to Sir William Culpepper’s widow, is not known, but it probably took place around this time and owed something to his continued ties within the nexus of the Stafford affinity, for many of the Culpepper manors in Kent were held of the Stafford honours. C1/42/57-61; C141/6/28. That he lived on for a while longer is shown from his further involvement in transactions regarding the estates of John Lewknor’s wife in 1469, CCR, 1468-76, no. 311. and his reappointment as a j.p. in Kent in January 1471, during the Readeption. He is last recorded on 21 Sept. 1472, attending the shire elections to Parliament. C219/17/3.