CRESSY, Sir John (d.1445), of Dodford, Northants. and Wheathampstead, Herts.

Sir John Cressy bore the arms argent, a lion rampant, tail forked, sable, and this illuminates his otherwise obscure ancestry. The ancient family of Cressy of Hodsock, which failed in the male line in 1408, bore the same arms. A. Gardner, Alabaster Tombs, fig. 73; R. Thoroton, Notts. ed. Throsby, i. 111; S.J. Payling, Political Society in Lancastrian Eng. 24, 234. There can thus be little doubt that our MP represented a junior branch, one which separated from the main line in the early fourteenth century. His great-grandfather, Ralph Cressy, acquired a stake in landed society by purchasing the manor of Rothamsted at Wheathampstead in Hertfordshire in the 1350s, and thereafter the family added to this property by a combination of fraud and fortunate marriage. Ralph’s son, Edmund, married Maud, daughter of a near-neighbour, Laurence Ayot of Ayot St. Lawrence, by Joan, daughter of Hugh Mortimer† (a scion of the Mortimers of Wigmore). The death of Joan’s nephew, another Sir Hugh Mortimer, at the battle of Shrewsbury in 1403 brought to the Cressys manors at Luton in Bedfordshire, Quatt in Shropshire and Magor and Redwick in south Wales, together with the reversion of a manor at Chelmarsh, near Quatt, which Sir Hugh’s widow, Petronilla, held for her life. CIPM, xviii. 747-52; xxiii. 110-11; CCR, 1402-5, p. 391; CFR, xii. 245; VCH Herts. ii. 303; VCH Beds. ii. 352; R.W. Eyton, Antiqs. Salop. iii. 44-45; C139/150/39. More controversially, the marriage also brought them the extensive estates of the family of Keynes of Dodford in Northamptonshire. These came to them through the machinations of Sir William Brantingham†, guardian of the two children of Sir John Keynes (d.1366) of Dodford. They died young and childless in 1375, and Brantingham conspired to disinherit the right heirs, the descendants of the children’s aunt, Hawise Daventry. Edmund Cressy, whose wife, Maud, was a grand-daughter of Sir John Keynes’s paternal aunt, Lettice, originally opposed the conspiracy, but eventually compounded with Brantingham, who adopted the Cressys as his heirs in respect of the Keynes lands he had wrongfully acquired. Consequently, on Brantingham’s death in 1413, our MP acquired title to the manor of Dodford, which was probably worth in excess of £40 p.a., together with smaller manors at Oxhill in Warwickshire and Coombe Keynes in Dorset. S.J. Payling, ‘Imposter Pilgrim’, in The Fifteenth Cent. X ed. Kleineke, 24-31; CIPM, xx. 43-46.

Less positively, when the young John came of age, he inherited a very scattered estate, the most important part of which was held by an insecure title.

Cressy was born at Dodford in the spring of 1407 with his paternal uncle, William, standing as one of his godfathers. His father died a few months later, and the family inheritance passed into royal wardship pending the majority of our MP’s infant brother, Thomas. Thomas, however, survived their father by only 29 days, and it was as a mere baby that John fell heir. CIPM, xix. 370-8; xxiii. 316. With so long until his coming of age his wardship was a potentially valuable one, although it was devalued by the survival of his youthful mother and Brantingham’s interest. Within days of the young Thomas’s death Henry IV committed it to Henry, Lord Beaumont, and it is thus a fair speculation that John spent his childhood and youth at the Beaumont castle of Folkingham in south Lincolnshire alongside John, later Viscount Beaumont, who was two years his junior. This sojourn was ended shortly before his guardian’s death: in 1413 Beaumont granted his interest in our MP and his lands to the prominent royal servant, John Norbury†. This grant helps to explain why Cressy later so enthusiastically adopted a military career. On Norbury’s death in the following year, his custody passed to Norbury’s widow, Elizabeth, sister of Sir Ralph Butler, and her third husband, Sir John Montgomery*. CPR, 1405-8, p. 373; 1408-13, p. 468; CFR, xiii. 98; CIPM, xxiii. 110-11. Sir Ralph, Montgomery and her son, Sir Henry Norbury*, later became noted soldiers, and it is significant that our MP is found in association with them throughout his career, both in France and at home. Indeed, it may be that, despite his youth, he is to be identified with the man-at-arms serving in the garrison at Domfront, where Montgomery was captain, as early as 1420. Archives Nationales, Paris, K59/23/3.

The writ for John’s proof of age was not issued until 5 Feb. 1429, nearly a year after he had reached his majority. The reason for the delay is unknown, but little time was lost once the writ was issued. The relevant inquisition was held at Northampton only five days after the issue of the writ, its findings bringing him an inheritance burdened, but not seriously so, by his mother’s dower interest. CIPM, xxiii. 316. Her interests do not appear to have been extensive. A much later Chancery petition valued her dower at a modest 14 marks p.a., significantly less than a third of the value of the Cressy lands: C1/178/10. Further, what he lost by the survival of one widow, he more than gained by the death of another, namely Petronilla, widow of Sir Hugh Mortimer. She had died in 1422, but not until 1428 were writs issued for inquiry into her estates. The inquisitions correctly found that Cressy was her heir in respect of her dower lands, namely her thirds of the manor of Luton and hundred of Flitt, together valued by the jurors at £10 p.a., and of the manor of Quatt in Shropshire, valued at £3 p.a. Other evidence shows that her death also brought him the manor of Chelmarsh. On 16 Feb. 1429 the relevant escheators were ordered to give him seisin of these lands together with the rest of his inheritance. CIPM, xxiii. 110-11; CCR, 1422-9, p. 426.

No sooner did Cressy come into his inheritance than he alienated its most distant parts. By 19 Feb., only three days after he had livery of seisin, he had entered into an agreement with Sir Humphrey Stafford*, who agreed to pay 400 marks for the former Mortimer manors of Quatt and Chelmarsh. The sale was completed by a final concord levied at the end of the following Easter term, and on 10 June our MP acknowledged himself satisfied of the purchase price. E159/205, recogniciones Hil.; CP25(1)/195/22/5. None the less, despite this alienation, Cressy remained possessed of a valuable estate: in the subsidy returns of 1436 he was assessed on an income of as much £93 p.a. E159/212, recorda Hil. rot. 14 (iii).

Cressy’s desire for liquid funds almost certainly related to his commitment to a military career, and it is near certain that he was one of those knighted on 5 Nov. 1429, the eve of Henry VI’s coronation. In any event, he was a knight a week later, when Thomas, Lord Roos, who had himself only recently attained his majority, retained him for life to do him service in England. The fee was a remarkably generous one: in addition to an annual rent of 20 marks assigned upon the manor of Eakring in Nottinghamshire, Cressy was to have a life interest in his lord’s manor of Braunston, a few miles from Dodford. Private Indentures (Cam. Miscellany xxxii), 148-9; CIPM, xxiii. 538, 546. The two young men had probably met while serving in France under the duke of Bedford in 1427, and it is also likely that our MP went on to serve in Roos’s retinue during the King’s coronation expedition commencing in April 1430. His lord’s death in the following August did not deter him from further service. By the early spring of 1432 he was acting as joint lieutenant of Rouen under the captain, John Fitzalan, earl of Arundel. Curry, ‘English Armies’, 66; Bibliothèque Nationale, fr. 26055/1762. In the same year he received some of the rewards that came the way of the most important soldiers: on 8 Apr. he accepted a payment of 500 saluts as royal compensation for his surrender of an important French prisoner, and on 2 June the Crown granted him lands in the bailliage of Evreux valued at 600 livres tournois annually. Pièces originales 929, Cressy 2; Archives Nationales, Dom Lenoir 22, f. 245.

Cressy seems to have returned to England late in the following year, when he secured a royal confirmation of his Roos annuity during the minority of the heir and admittance to the prestigious fraternity of the London tailors. CPR, 1429-36, p. 330; E159/210, brevia Hil. rot. 19; Guildhall Lib. London, Merchant Taylors’ Co. accts. 34048/1, f. 246. The latter suggests that he was already a soldier of renown, and his sojourns at home were brief. On 8 June 1435 he indented to go to the castle of Le Crotoy in Picardy with a man-at-arms and 40 archers and stay there for half a year, but on the following day different arrangements were made. He undertook to serve in France with the much larger retinue of 30 men-at-arms (of whom two, including himself, were to be knights) and 90 archers. E101/71/3/882; E404/51/316. On 14 June he sued out letters of protection and, ten days later, he completed his preparations by purchasing a royal licence to grant his manors of Luton, Oxhill and Coombe Keynes to feoffees, headed by Sir Ralph Butler. He departed almost immediately afterwards – a commission was issued on 26 June to take the musters of his forces at Winchelsea – and he seemingly repaired to his original destination. In any event, he was at Le Crotoy in the following December, when commissioned to take the muster of the troops that Walter Cressoner, captain of the Le Crotoy, was bringing to that fortress. Cat. des Rolles Gascons, Normans et Francois ed. Carte, ii. 284; CPR, 1429-36, pp. 463, 476, 525. The captain’s arrival precipitated his own departure for Eu, a few miles to the west. On 1 Feb. 1436 he succeeded his former guardian, Sir John Montgomery, as Lord Bourgchier’s lieutenant there, and he was in command of the garrison when it was lost to the French late in the following month. Curry, ‘Military Organization’, ii. p. lxxiii; Bibliothèque Nationale, fr. 25772/938.

Cressy remained in Normandy after this loss (on 9 Feb. 1436 he had sued out letters of protection as staying in France), and was thus there when he learned that his manor of Coombe Keynes had been seized into royal hands on the false grounds that it had been alienated to Butler and his other feoffees without royal licence. This was a curious way of rewarding a soldier, and it is a fair surmise that the seizure had been engineered by a rival claimant to the manor, probably Katherine Hathwick, grand-daughter and heiress of Hawise Daventry. Fortunately for him his representatives at home seem to have weathered the threat: on 5 July one of his feoffees, John Deye, a London draper, stood mainprise on the grant of the manor to two royal keepers, one of whom was the chancery clerk, William Godyng*, as a preliminary to its restoration. Cat. des Rolles Gascons, Normans et Francois, ii. 286; CFR, xvi. 293-4. In 1441 he avoided any further difficulties by alienating his interest in the manor to John Newburgh II*: Dorset Feet of Fines (Dorset Recs. x), 358-9.

Cressy was distantly related to Richard, duke of York, through his great-grandmother, Joan Mortimer, heiress of a junior branch of the Mortimers of Wigmore, and this may have given him reason to welcome the duke’s appointment as lieutenant-general of France in May 1436. Indeed, by the following November he was serving as the duke’s lieutenant at Caen, and he continued to do so until 28 Dec. 1437 when his half-brother, Thomas Wylde, was named to act in his place. Bibliothèque Nationale, fr. 26061/2978; Collection Mancel XVI/43.

Whether this nomination immediately followed our MP’s return to England is not clear. It is possible that he had returned in the previous summer, for on 19 July he had been granted a general pardon, but it is equally likely that the pardon was sued out on his behalf by attorney. C67/38, m. 9. Perhaps he returned with the duke himself early in the following November. At all events, he was at home in Easter term 1438, when he troubled to answer three pleas in the court of common pleas over his contentious taking of a distraint at St. Albans. The distraints were allegedly taken on 19 Dec. 1435, when Cressy was certainly in France. The date and perhaps also the taking of the distraints themselves were fictions. The purpose of the pleading was to try the question of whether a certain tenement in St. Albans was or was not a common inn known as Le Lyon on the Hope: CP40/709, rots. 318-19d. This was one of several domestic matters that engaged his attention in what appears to have been an extended break in his military career. In the following October he secured a writ of non molestetis, addressed to the Exchequer, in respect of the feoffment he had made to Butler and others in 1435, no doubt to prevent any further seizure of the enfeoffed lands. On 12 Mar. 1439 he witnessed an important deed for his Hertfordshire neighbour, the abbot of St. Albans; and on 9 June he called upon two fellow soldiers, Sir Thomas Grey and Edward Hull*, to act for him in conveyance of property in Luton. E159/215, brevia Mich. rot. 8d; J. Amundesham, Chron. S. Albani ed. Riley, ii. 185; CAD, iii. C3728.

Cressy was probably temperamentally unsuited to such mundane business. This, at least, is a reasonable inference from his extraordinary outburst in the presence of the royal justices in Westminster Hall. On 4 July 1439 John Blacwell, one of the criers of the court of common pleas, in response to an order from the justices, arrested him at the bar of the common bench to find surety of the peace (perhaps in connexion with the disputed distraint taken at St. Albans). The choleric Sir John responded with fury: he assaulted the unfortunate crier and, with dagger drawn and crying ‘Slay the yokel who would have arrested me’, pursued him across the Hall into the Exchequer. CPR, 1436-41, pp. 361-2. So open an affront to royal justice and the dignity of the royal courts was unlikely to be ignored, and there can be little doubt that it was in search of some protection that the soldier showed his first interest in parliamentary affairs. Parliament was summoned on the following 26 Sept. and Cressy secured return for Hertfordshire. He put his time at Westminster to very good use. Soon after Parliament assembled he was an unlikely promotion to the commission of the peace in that county, and on 20 Jan. 1440, six days after the beginning of the second session, he won a royal pardon for his violent outburst of the previous summer. Ibid.; CFR, xvii. 144. On the same day he offered mainprise for his friend, Ralph Butler, now Lord Sudeley, and others when they were granted the keeping of the lands once of Isabel, widow of Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick. CFR, xvii. 122. It was probably at about this date that, along with Sudeley, Montgomery, Norbury and Wylde, he was named among the feoffees of another soldier, John, Lord Clinton, in a disputed manor in Hertfordshire. The feoffment appears to have been made shortly before Clinton’s capture by the French in 1441: CCR, 1447-54, p. 317; CP, iii. 315.

It may also have been during this stay in England that Cressy married. According to one of the inquisitions taken after the death of his son and heir, he had been single at the time he made the feoffment to Butler and others in 1435. This return may simply have been a legal fiction designed to protect the interests of his widow. None the less, it is consistent with the birth of a son to the couple in 1441 (and this makes it almost certain the marriage took place in the lifetime of the bride’s father, Lord Grey, who died in October 1440). The match, whatever its precise date, was a good one. The Greys were a baronial family with extensive landholdings in Northamptonshire, and this local connexion was no doubt significant in explaining the marriage. Significant also was the high military reputation of the bride’s older half-brother, Sir John Grey, nominated to the Garter in 1436. Their common experience in France must have meant that he and our MP were well known to each other. CIPM, xxvi. 345-8; C139/150/39; CP, vi. 158-9.

Married life and a place on a county bench were not sufficient to deter Cressy from further military adventures. The duke of York’s reappointment as lieutenant-general in June 1440 and the preparation of the force that was to accompany him provided Sir John with the opportunity to resume his career. He began his own preparations in the following December by purchasing in London a complete suit of Milanese armour for as much as £8 6s. 8d.; and two months later he put his domestic affairs in order, personally pleading his pardon in King’s bench to insure him against any further action in respect of the assault on Blacman. H. Bradley, Views of Hosts of Alien Merchants, 59; Archaeologia, lxxxvii. 320; KB27/719, rex rot. 26d. Then, on 26 Mar. 1441, he mustered with his large retinue of 19 men-at-arms and 116 archers. On the same day the King granted him the feudal profits pertaining to the lordship of Magor, where he himself held property, at an annual rent of £4 15s. 4d., a modest reward rendered the more so by the fact that he was to hold it only in reversion until 1452. E101/53/33; CPR, 1436-41, p. 518. Once in Normandy he took part in the unsuccessful defence of Pontoise, which fell on the following 19 Sept., and a few days later he was named as captain of the castle of Gisors, which lay between Pontoise and Rouen. Curry, ‘English Armies’, 66; pièces originales 929, Cressy 3.

Thereafter Cressy’s movements are unknown, but his appointment to two Hertfordshire commissions of the peace in 1443 indicates that he returned, albeit briefly, to England, perhaps moved to do so by a desire to see his son and heir, born in November 1441. CPR, 1441-6, p. 471; CIPM, xxvi. 345-8. However this may be, he was in Normandy early in 1444 when serving as captain of Lisieux, Orbec and Pont-l’Evêque, three garrisons lying in a 20 mile line to the south of Honfleur. As these were situated in the apanage granted to the duke of York at about this date, it was probably the duke who chose him. Curry, ‘English Armies’, 66; Quelques Actes Normands ed. Hunger, ii. 71-74. He was in Eng. as late as the octave of Hil. 1444 when he appeared in King’s bench: KB27/730, rot. 136d. The truce of Tours, sealed in May of that year, rendered these less pressing employments, and he joined the great embassy charged with escorting Henry VI’s betrothed, Margaret of Anjou, to England. The escort left Nancy in her father’s duchy of Lorraine on 2 Mar. 1445. Two days later it had reached Toul in Lorraine, and it was there, according to the inscription on his tomb, that Cressy died. The issue of the relevant writs of diem clausit extremum were delayed until early in April, when the embassy finally returned to England, perhaps bringing his body. R.A. Griffiths, Hen. VI, 487; CFR, xvii. 301-2.

Cressy was buried, or at least a tomb was erected in his remembrance, in the church of Dodford, where his monumental effigy survives. He is portrayed wearing the Lancastrian SS collar, and remembered in the inscription as captain of Lisieux, Orbec and Pont-l’Evêque and as a royal councillor in France. His tomb chest is finely decorated with weepers and angels, the latter bearing the armorial shields of Cressy, Keynes and Mortimer. VCH Northants. i. 410-11; Gardner, figs. 27, 73, 215.

Cressy’s death was soon followed by the dismemberment of the family’s disparate estate. Inquisitions taken after his death returned that he died without landed property; all was in the hands of feoffees, although the inquisition jurors returned no details. The wardship and marriage of his infant son and heir, John, was thus a less valuable commodity than it would otherwise have been, and on 8 May 1445 it was granted to Humphrey, duke of Gloucester. C139/120/48; CPR, 1441-6, p. 342. It is not known to whom the boy was entrusted on the duke’s death two years later, but his life was not to be a long one. His death in January 1453 raised a complex question: to whom were the various parts of his Cressy estate to descend? CFR, xix. 2, 55; C139/150/39; 163/7. There were manoeuverings even before his death. On 14 Oct. 1449 a writ had been sued out of Chancery, ordering the sheriff of Northamptonshire to seize the Cressy property there in execution of a statute of the staple entered into by our MP’s father to his kinsman, Thomas Cressy, a London ironmonger, as long before as 1405. C131/67/8. This was obviously an attempt to wrest the manor of Dodford out of the hands of the feoffees, but one can only speculate as to who sponsored it. With the boy’s death the dispute over his lands began in earnest. According to a later unreliable testimony, Sir John Cressy had told his brother-in-law, Robert Grey, that, should his issue fail, the right heir to his principal property, the manor of Dodford (and thus also the other properties that had come to him from the Keynes family), was his distant cousin, William Purefoy of Shalstone in Buckinghamshire, an alleged descendant of Lettice Keynes. In July 1453 Purefoy duly sued our MP’s feoffees for the manor as remainder-man (on a false descent) under the terms of a fine of 1306. G. Baker, Northants. i. 353; CP40/772, rot. 471. There were, however, better claimants. Had it not been for the machinations of William Brantingham in the 1370s, the Keynes lands would have been the property of John Hathwick of Harbury in Warwickshire as the heir of Hawise, sister and heir of Sir John Keynes. More remote were the claims of Isabel, wife of Sir Thomas Chaworth*, and Eleanor, widow of (Sir) Humphrey Stafford I*, daughters and heiresses of Sir Thomas Aylesbury†, and heiresses of another branch of the Keynes family, that of Milton Keynes in Buckinghamshire. The dispute between these rival claimants was long-running and was later complicated by Purefoy’s sale of the manor of Dodford to Jacquetta of Luxembourg, the mother of Edward IV’s queen. Ultimately, however, Dodford passed to Eleanor Stafford’s descendants, and the manor of Oxhill to John Hathwick. Payling, ‘Imposter Pilgrim’, 32-38.

This dispute was the most important controversy arising from the division of Sir John Cressy’s lands, but it was not the only one. There was also the question of his common-law heir, to whom should pass the manor of Wheathamstead, and the descent of the Mortimer lands. In the inquistions post mortem taken on the death of his son and heir, jurors in three counties named the boy’s second cousin once removed, another John Cressy, as the heir, but the Nottinghamshire jurors nominated his first cousin twice removed, Alice, wife of Thomas Raymond, a London tailor, and daughter and heir of our MP’s paternal grandfather, Thomas. The latter was chronologically impossible, and the majority was in the right. C139/150/39; 155/39. John optimistically sued our MP’s feoffees in Chancery for the manor of Dodford (to which he could have no claim because that manor had come into the family through the wife of his paternal grandfather’s brother), but he was successful in establishing a spurious title to the lands of the Mortimers which had come to the family in the same way. By a final concord levied in 1467 he conveyed his interest in the manor of Luton and hundred of Flitt (which our MP’s widow held for life) to John Wenlock*, Lord Wenlock. C1/24/51, 58; CP25(1)/6/82/7. The other less-valuable Mortimer lands did not descend in the same way. According to a later Chancery petition, our MP had verbally instructed the prominent Northamptonshire lawyer, Thomas Billing* (one of his feoffees), that, should his own issue fail, his manors at Magor and Redwick in south Wales were to be settled on his half-brother, Thomas Wylde, in tail, subject to the life interests of his widow and mother. The same petition alleges that the intervention of Sir William Herbert*, Lord Herbert, disturbed these plans. In the early 1460s he forcibly disseised the widows and Cressy feoffees, and a few years later sent for Wylde to come to his castle at Raglan on a false promise of restoration. There he threatened him that he would not return alive to England unless he agreed to sell the manors. A deed enrolled on the close roll gives some support to this account: in July 1462 Wylde and Matthew Cressy, our MP’s cousin, confirmed Herbert’s estate in the manors and quitclaimed his right in them with limited warranty. Later it seems a compromise was reached: on her death in 1486, Herbert’s son and heir, William, earl of Huntingdon, owed our MP’s widow £240, perhaps as compensation for the surrender of the manors. C1/39/18-19; CCR, 1461-8, pp. 149-50; CCR, 1485-1500, no. 106: CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 618. The result of all these transactions, as far as the Cressys were concerned, was the reduction of Sir John’s substantial estate to a single property at Wheathampstead, and this too was lost to them on their failure in the male line in 1525. VCH Herts. ii. 303.

Sir John’s widow survived him for more than 40 years, residing, at least in the last years of her life, in St. Albans. It was the chapel of St. Andrew in the monastery there, rather than alongside her late husband at Dodford, that she wanted to be buried. She did, however, remember Sir John, endowing prayers for his soul in the chapel of St. Andrew. St. Albans Wills ed. Flood, no. 172.