DEBENHAM, Gilbert I (d.1481), of Little Wenham and Ipswich, Suff.

Quaintly labelled a ‘rascal’ by a historian writing in the late 1920s, W.I. Haward, ‘Gilbert Debenham’, TRHS, n.s. xiii. 300-14. Debenham is much better described as a ruffian. One of the most lawless gentry of East Anglia, his career epitomises the breakdown of law and order in that region in the mid fifteenth century. The fact that he was able to hold office under the Crown and gain election to no fewer than seven Parliaments is further testimony to the lack of good governance during the reign of the last Lancastrian King. He was the third of four successive Gilbert Debenhams, of whom the first was his grandfather, a lawyer who served the Black Prince. Gilbert the grandfather purchased a manor at Alburgh in south-east Norfolk, but the Debenhams’ principal holdings were at Great and Little Wenham a few miles south-west of Ipswich, a town with which they were closely associated and where they had relatives among the burgesses. The MP’s father, a servant of John Mowbray, earl of Norfolk, was probably another lawyer but he played little part in local government and appears as something of a nonentity. Following his death in the late summer or early autumn of 1417, his widow Ellen, the MP’s stepmother, married John Lancaster*, another Mowbray retainer. The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 760-1; iii. 548; A.R. Smith, ‘Sir John Fastolf’ (Oxf. Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1982), 184.

Initially, in spite of his family’s connexions with the Mowbrays, Debenham entered the household of Thomas Beaufort, duke of Exeter, a half-brother of Henry IV and another magnate with landed interests in East Anglia. William of Worcestre, Itins. ed. Harvey, 355. The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 761, suggests that he could have joined Beaufort’s service before his father’s death. If he did, it would have been at an extremely tender age. He may have crossed the Channel after entering the duke’s service, since his master participated in the French wars. Possibly it was on Beaufort’s recommendation that he was summoned to receive a knighthood at the Leicester Parliament of 1426. Foedera ed. Rymer (Hague edn.), iv (4), 121. In the event, he never gained the honour, although he was subsequently distrained for it on at least three other occasions. In his will Beaufort, who died at the end of 1426, released Debenham, to whom he referred as ‘my esquire’, from any financial claims on the part of himself or his executors. The executors subsequently paid Debenham £47 8s. 9d. in connexion with an obligation, but the circumstances of that security are unknown. Collection All Wills ed. Nichols, 263; E101/514/22. After Beaufort’s death several of his most prominent East Anglian retainers joined the affinity of William de la Pole, earl of Suffolk, but Debenham entered the service of the Mowbrays.

Within a year of Beaufort’s death Debenham and Sir Robert Wingfield*, another Mowbray man, were returned to the Parliament of 1427 as the knights of the shire for Suffolk. During the first session of this assembly the Crown appointed Debenham sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk, meaning that he combined the initial months of his shrievalty with a seat in the Commons. Given his lack of administrative experience and relative youth, it is tempting to assume that his patron, John Mowbray, by now duke of Norfolk, played a part in securing his election to Parliament and appointment as sheriff, even though the duke was apparently neither politically active at this date nor ever especially involved in East Anglian affairs. R.E. Archer, ‘The Mowbrays’ (Oxf. Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1984), 149, 207. His shrievalty brought him into dispute with both Wingfield and another Mowbray retainer, Edmund Wynter I*, who had sat for Norfolk in the Parliament of 1427, each of whom sued him in the Exchequer shortly after he had completed his term as sheriff. Wingfield complained that Debenham had paid him no more than £16 13s. 4d. of the wages of £25 8s. due to him for his time in the Commons. As for Wynter, he alleged that there was still £10 outstanding of his wages, also £25 8s. Wynter’s suit had the desired effect, for Debenham settled up with him in mid 1429. Presumably he likewise satisfied Wingfield, alongside whom he was again returned to the Commons in 1432 and 1437. E5/484, 485.

Within a year of these Exchequer lawsuits, Debenham was overseas, Smith, 189. possibly with Mowbray in France. He cannot have remained abroad for long, since he was occupied with further disputes at home for much of the 1430s. One of these concerned manors at Onehouse and Fritton in Suffolk, properties inherited by his brother-in-law, William Lawney. Lawney was the former ward of John Lancaster, who had married him to Eleanor Debenham, his stepdaughter and the MP’s sister. In May 1423, just before embarking for France, Lawney had conveyed the manors to a group of feoffees including Debenham and Lancaster’s son and namesake. Problems arose several years later when Lawney, who had failed to make his fortune in the wars and ran into serious financial difficulties, decided to sell the manors. In January 1430, he requested the feoffees to release their title to the properties, but Debenham and the younger Lancaster refused to comply. In spite of failing to gain the assent of all his feoffees, Lawney sold Onehouse to William Skrene and Fritton to the London vintner, John Pekker, in the following March. Soon afterwards, he filed two bills in the Chancery, one against Debenham and Lancaster for refusing to make a release and another against Pekker, to whom he now claimed to have conveyed Fritton for a term of years only. Such an unjustifiable claim is hard to understand, but it is likely that Lawney’s brother-in-law had prompted him to make it, in the light of an assize of novel disseisin that Debenham and Lancaster subsequently brought against Pekker. In this suit they claimed that Pekker, having drawn Lawney into a dissolute and profligate way of life in London, had bought Fritton from him without the consent or knowledge of all of his feoffees. There is no evidence that Debenham’s patron, the duke of Norfolk, took any interest in the quarrel at this stage. Rather, it was the earl of Suffolk who tried but failed to arbitrate between Debenham and Lancaster on the one hand and Pekker on the other in the following year. In 1434, by then finding Fritton more trouble than it was worth, Pekker sold the manor to Sir John Fastolf. Debenham responded to Fastolf’s purchase by persuading the malleable Lawney to release Fritton and Onehouse to him and Lancaster, so provoking a long-running quarrel with that prominent East Anglian knight. The quarrel with Sir John would come to a head in 1441. In February that year Lawney made a formal declaration upholding Debenham’s case against Pekker and Fastolf but, under even greater pressure from the latter, he contradicted it in an affidavit he gave the treasurer, Ralph, Lord Cromwell, a few weeks later. Not long afterwards Fastolf, who had retained physical possession of the manor since his purchase and had secured recognition of his title in the Chancery, selected a powerful group of feoffees (including Lord Cromwell) to hold Fritton on his behalf. He also enjoyed the support of the duke of Norfolk, who probably felt that Fastolf’s friendship was worth considerably more to him than that of a disorderly retainer and may have helped to impose a settlement in the knight’s favour. In the end both Fastolf and Skrene were able to retain their respective acquisitions but there was fresh controversy over Fritton after Fastolf’s death. Ibid. 182, 184-8; A.R. Smith, ‘Litigation and Politics’, in Property and Politics ed. Pollard, 61-62; Magdalen Coll. Oxf., Caldecotes 27-30, 51, 66; CCR, 1429-35, pp. 48-49, 312; 1435-41, pp. 463, 475-6; C140/50/42.

Overlapping the early stages of the Fritton controversy was Debenham’s quarrel with the Suffolk knight, Sir William Drury. The falling out with Drury also arose out of a property dispute. In the autumn of 1432 Drury came to the court of King’s bench to lay an information against Debenham, John French* of Ipswich, Thomas Predis, a husbandman from Copdock, and the men who had sat as jurors in a recent assize of novel disseisin. Drury had been the defendant in the assize, relating to holdings at Sproughton, and he accused Debenham, French and Predis of having corruptly influenced the jury in favour of the plaintiffs, Thomas Sampson and his wife. He alleged that Sampson had plied Debenham, French and Predis with money, food and drink at Brockford the previous September in order to buy their support, claiming that French had received 40s. and Debenham no less than £20. In response to these charges, the defendants obtained licence to treat with the knight out of court, where the case probably ended. KB27/686, rot. 94d; 687, rots. 64d, 65. Why Debenham should have acted against Drury’s interests is unexplained, although it is possible that he did so to assist a fellow Mowbray retainer, for a Thomas Sampson had accompanied Mowbray to France in 1423. Moye, 90n.

A few years after the dispute with Drury, Debenham turned against his erstwhile associate, John French, whom he sued in the two main common law courts at Westminster. First, in King’s bench, he alleged that French and others had transgressed a statute against those conspiring to defraud and destroy the possessions of the King’s lieges, and that French had been among those who had corrupted a jury empanelled for sessions of the peace at Ipswich. On 30 Nov. 1436 French and two of his co-defendants gave themselves up to the Marshalsea prison as a preliminary to obtaining bail. They were granted bail after John Andrew III* and others had stood surety that they would appear in court in the following Hilary term, but this case, like that brought by Sir William Drury, does not appear to have progressed any further. KB27/699, rot. 2; 702, rot. 77d. Secondly, in the court of common pleas, Debenham sued French for a debt of £40 arising from a bond of 1428. When the suit came to pleadings in Michaelmas term 1436, he alleged that the defendant had since failed to pay him that sum, save for a derisory 6d. Appearing in person (presumably shortly before or after entering the Marshalsea in relation to the King’s bench suit), French claimed that his opponent had released him from the debt, but a jury sitting at the Norwich Lammas assizes of 1437 found against him, obliging him to pay Debenham costs and damages as well as settle the debt. CP40/703, rot. 438d

Along with his private quarrels, Debenham participated in disputes between the Mowbray and de la Pole affinities. Such factionalism threatened to cause serious disorder in East Anglia, not least because it led to the murder of James Andrew†, a lawyer closely connected with the de la Poles. Among those implicated in the crime was Debenham, even though the victim had been one of his father’s friends. The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 761. That the trouble should have flared up after the death of the duke of Norfolk in October 1432 was no coincidence, since at that date Mowbray’s son and successor was still a minor and lacked authority. As it happened, he proved an inept lord after coming of age later that decade. While he played a much more active role in regional politics than his father, he was prone to lawlessness and to falling out with his own retainers. H.R. Castor, King, Crown and Duchy of Lancaster, 112-13, 116-17.

As late as November 1433 it was possible for Debenham to act as a feoffee for the earl of Suffolk’s retainer Sir Thomas Tuddenham*, CCR, 1429-36, p. 295. but by then dangerous rivalries were developing between the affinities of which they were respectively members. These rivalries came to the fore after James Andrew fell out with the Mowbray retainer, Richard Sterysacre†. Sterysacre enjoyed the support of other followers of the young duke of Norfolk, and in July 1434 a band of Mowbray’s men killed Andrew near Bury St. Edmunds. Following the murder, Sir Robert Wingfield, Debenham and several associates sheltered the culprits at Bury. Denied justice, the victim’s widow, her son John Andrew III and their friends sought help from the earl of Suffolk. Fearing serious clashes between the de la Pole and Mowbray affinities, the King’s council summoned Suffolk and the duke of Norfolk to appear before it. The Crown’s intervention ensured the peaceful laying of indictments and these, along with appeals for murder sued by Margery Andrew, led to lengthy proceedings in the court of King’s bench. In spite of the indictments, both Wingfield and Debenham successfully stood for election as knights of the shire for Suffolk to the Parliament of 1437, perhaps partly to secure protection from arrest or imprisonment as claimed by Members of the Commons. It is striking that the electorate were prepared to return two men facing such serious charges but there is no evidence of any controversy over their election. R. Virgoe, E. Anglian Soc. ed. Barron, Rawcliffe and Rosenthal, 109-15.

The murder of James Andrew was not the only violent episode of the 1430s in which Debenham was implicated. In March 1438 he and other Mowbray retainers raided the estates of Ralph Garneys, a Norfolk esquire with whom their patron was in dispute, seizing his manor of Stockton, CPR, 1441-6, pp. 290, 337; KB9/249/108; KB27/734, rex rot. 22d; 738, rex rot. 4. C.F. Richmond, Paston Fam.: First Phase, 135, 138, mistakenly assumes that the attack on Garneys’s lands occurred in 1444. and in the following Michaelmas term Katherine, widow of John Clerk, accused the MP of murder. By means of an appeal in King’s bench, she charged him and several yeomen with having killed her late husband near Newmarket. According to her, Debenham had played a direct part in the murder, since she claimed that he had struck Clerk with a gisarme, a weapon resembling a halberd. In due course, the court referred the case to a jury but there was no trial because Katherine failed to pursue her suit. The exact circumstances of Clerk’s death are impossible to discern, but it is likely that the duke of Norfolk, who himself had recently fallen out with Debenham, was behind the appeal, for Katherine’s pledges were John Timperley I* and John Wymondham*, both Mowbray men. KB27/710, rot. 70d.

A suit that the duke brought in the court of common pleas in the same Michaelmas term is the evidence of the falling out between him and Debenham. Mowbray accused the latter of having disseminated falsehoods about him at Ipswich, in breach of a statute of 1378 against those who slandered any prelate, lay magnate or officer of the Crown, although it is likely that the supposed slander was a symptom rather than the cause of the quarrel. CP40/711, rot. 257d. To bring his unruly retainer under control, Mowbray was prepared to co-operate with the earl of Suffolk. In October 1438, the MP was obliged to give the two lords a bond for 1,000 marks, to guarantee that he would abide by their award with regard to his disputes with Norfolk and Katherine Clerk. CCR, 1435-41, p. 232. Such pressure, along with the continuing efforts of James Andrew’s son and widow to obtain justice for his murder, drove Debenham to seek a general pardon from the Crown. His pardon, granted to him in July 1439, is intriguingly worded, for it stated that he stood indicted of felonies of which he was innocent, in Lancashire, where he had never been, and in ‘divers other’ English counties. CPR, 1436-41, p. 289. Possibly some of these indictments arose out of his activities while travelling about the country in his capacity as surveyor general of the duke of Norfolk’s estates. Debenham was embroiled in yet further controversies not long after obtaining this pardon, being accused in Chancery of taking part in a wrongful lawsuit, C1/9/435. sued in the court of King’s bench for unlawful imprisonment and indicted for two assaults. KB27/718, rots. 40, 61; 722, rex rot. 5d. In the autumn of 1440 Sir William Drury, John Harleston II* and others received a commission to bring him to the Chancery to answer ‘certain charges’. The choice of Drury, no friend of the MP, to head this commission of arrest was perhaps deliberate. CPR, 1436-41, p. 501.

For lack of evidence about the state of his relations with the duke of Norfolk in the early 1440s, it is uncertain whether Debenham enjoyed Mowbray’s support when he stood for election to the Parliament of 1442. As in 1437, the protection offered by a seat in the Commons gave him some respite from the law, since shortly before the election he faced the prospect of appearing in King’s bench to answer indictments laid against him in the county. KB27/722, rex rot. 30. In returning him to the Commons the electorate of Suffolk displayed little respect for the upkeep of law and order, a disregard matched by the Crown, which admitted him to the royal household, continued to appoint him to commissions of the peace and granted him a pardon in November 1446. C67/39, m. 20. It is not clear exactly when he became one of the King’s esquires, although he had joined the Household by Michaelmas 1446 and was still a member of it six years later. E101/409/16; 410/9. Securing royal patronage did nothing to reform his character, for he was in detention in the Marshalsea prison in Southwark in the summer of 1447. While he was a prisoner, Sir John Fastolf’s friend Sir Henry Inglose* sued him for debt. Debenham was no longer in the Marshalsea in November 1447, when he filed a bill in King’s bench against his erstwhile associate, Sir Robert Wingfield. In the bill, he accused Wingfield, whom the authorities had committed to the same prison for his lawless activities, of having attacked his servant, Thomas Talbot, at Ipswich. KB27/746, rots. 4d, 115d.

By now Wingfield was embroiled in a steadily worsening quarrel with the duke of Norfolk with whom Debenham was now certainly back on good terms. In early 1448, Debenham was among the Suffolk j.p.s who took an indictment against one of Wingfield’s men, KB27/750, rex rot. 22d. and in the summer of that year he participated in an armed raid the duke led against Sir Robert’s manor at Letheringham. Following this incident, Wingfield complained to the King’s council that the raiders had ransacked his house, hunted his deer and stolen goods and money to the value of some £2,200 as well as three chests containing charters and other muniments. In response, the Crown imprisoned the duke in the Tower of London for several days and ordered him to pay Wingfield compensation of 3,500 marks, but is unclear whether those who had accompanied him on the raid escaped punishment. Moye, 89-90; CPR, 1446-52, p. 236. R.L. Storey, End of House of Lancaster, 226-7, links the assault on Letheringham to an earlier dispute between Mowbray and Wingfield, but Moye’s argument (pp. 90n-91n) that it occurred in 1448 is more convincing. In the following year, Debenham again gained election to Parliament as a knight of the shire for Suffolk, presumably with the backing of the duke of Norfolk. His fellow MP in the Parliament of February 1449 was Philip Wentworth*, a courtier and a retainer of William de la Pole, by then duke of Suffolk. Although Wentworth was a member of a rival affinity, he and Debenham shared an antipathy to Sir John Fastolf and became friends. The career of Wentworth’s patron was brought to an end by Suffolk’s impeachment in the second Parliament of 1449, and in October 1450 the Crown ordered Debenham and others to help the de la Pole receiver-general, Andrew Grygges*, levy a loan of 3,500 marks from his widowed duchess, Alice de la Pole. She had promised this sum towards funding the passage of a royal army to France but the loan was probably made under duress, since she was tried shortly afterwards for treason (although in due course acquitted) before her peers in Parliament. CPR, 1446-52, p. 431; Letters and Pprs. Illust. Wars of English ed. Stevenson, ii (2), 770.

In the same October Debenham gained election to the Commons for a sixth time, but he sat as a burgess for Ipswich rather than as a knight of the shire in the Parliament of 1450. In keeping with local custom, the borough had selected him and his fellow MP, John Smith II*, several weeks before the formal return was made. He was far from a gentleman carpet-bagger, since he had strong ties with the town, of which he became a freeman and where he took up residence in his later years. He owned a manor and other property there, and in 1455 he helped to arbitrate in a quarrel between its burgesses and the men of Bury St. Edmunds. N. Bacon, Annalls of Ipswiche ed. Richardson, 107, 113, 121, 153; C1/66/218; 91/36; KB27/809, rex rot. 28d; C140/81/48. His son and namesake also represented the borough in the Commons, as one of its burgesses in the Parliament of 1455. Debenham had commercial interests in Ipswich and elsewhere and was the part owner of a ship, Le George of Woodbridge. Characteristically, he broke the law by engaging in smuggling, although on one occasion in the early 1450s the earl of Oxford confiscated the wool, hides and cloths which he and his co-owner, Robert Bretland of Harwich, and the vessel’s master, John Suckling, were attempting to export without paying customs. Haward, 305-6. Debenham also had dealings with London and its citizens, including Richard Hervy, a vintner whom he sued for debt in the late 1440s, and Robert Clopton*, CP40/752, rots. 433, 465d; 753, rot 339; 827, rot. 440; 828, rot 155; C1/19/257. and traded as far away as Prussia, where he employed Thomas Cadon as his factor. On one occasion – the date is unknown – Cadon was taken prisoner in ‘Ducheland’. Upon his return to England, the unfortunate factor was re-imprisoned at the suit of Debenham, who claimed that he had failed properly to account with him. Cadon appealed to the chancellor for redress, as did several others whom Debenham, a regular plaintiff in the borough court at Ipswich, had sued there. In one such Chancery bill, William Bury of the Inner Temple accused Debenham of pursuing a malicious action of debt against him at Ipswich because he had given legal counsel to ‘divers poor men’ whom the latter had claimed were his villeins. Others submitting bills to the chancellor complained that they had no hope of justice in the borough court because he was a ‘myghty man and greetly frended’ in Ipswich who received favourable treatment by the bailiffs there. C1/11/516; 16/469; 29/306; 47/278; 66/218; 71/2; E13/151, rots. 26, 28d. It is not clear whether Bury was the man who sat for Ipswich in the Parlt. of 1423, but he was probably the William Bury whom Debenham is said to have assaulted at Ipswich in 1440: KB27/722, rex rot. 5d. Ipswich was not the only town with which Debenham was associated, since he also had interests in the nearby ports of Harwich and Colchester. Colchester was a market for his wool and he had dealings with John Trewe*, one of its merchants. As at Ipswich, he made use of its borough court, provoking similar complaints in Chancery from those he sued there. One complainant alleged that the town’s bailiffs, who owed ‘the seid Gylberd speciall fauour be cause they be in his daunger’, had unjustly imprisoned him on the MP’s behalf. Another claimed that Debenham’s unjust behaviour had provoked widespread outrage and a reprimand from the King’s councillor, (Sir) John Say II*. C1/29/404; 32/383; 46/332; Essex RO, Colchester bor. recs., ct. rolls 1447-8, 1473-4, D/B 5 Cr62, mm. 22d-23; 75, m. 25.

In the spring of 1451, shortly before the dissolution of the Parliament of 1450, Debenham was among those of Mowbray’s inner circle who advised John Paston* in his dispute with Robert Hungerford, Lord Moleyns. In May that year Paston’s servant John Osbern, hoping to speak with either him, John Timperley I or ‘Berry’, travelled to Framlingham, the duke of Norfolk’s seat in east Suffolk, only to discover upon his arrival that all of them were out. Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 71, 73-74. A Chancery suit, also of 1451, provides further evidence of the influence that Debenham then enjoyed in Mowbray’s household. The plaintiff, John Thurston, parson of Waldringfield, Suffolk, complained that the MP had failed to honour an undertaking to secure for him the position of chancellor of the duke of Norfolk. Debenham riposted that he had agreed to help Thurstan become one of the duke’s chaplains (which he duly did) but not his chancellor. C1/18/192. In 1452, however, Mowbray dismissed Debenham, Timperley and William Lee‡ from his council and a band of his servants forcibly entered lands belonging to Timperley at Hintlesham, in which the MP had an interest as one of Timperley’s feoffees. Paston Letters, ii. 72; KB9/118/1/25. Whatever the cause of this new quarrel with Mowbray, Debenham reacted by associating with members of the de la Pole affinity, which had held together after the death of its patron and rallied around Alice, duchess of Suffolk. His third wife Agnes may have encouraged him to do so, given the close friendship which had existed between her former husband, (Sir) Thomas Haseley, and the duchess’s father, Thomas Chaucer*. In February 1453 Debenham was associated with the duchess in providing sureties of the peace to Mowbray’s retainer and relative, John Howard*, and with several de la Pole servants (including his former opponent, John Andrew) in obtaining like sureties from Howard and other Mowbray followers. Debenham also stood as a mainpernor for a group of leading de la Pole men, to guarantee that they would keep the peace towards Howard, and was a member of the grand jury which indicted two dozen Mowbray retainers for plotting to kill the de la Pole servant, John Ulveston*. KB9/118/1/36; 2/23, 25, 30, 351.

The rivalry between the Mowbray and de la Pole affinities affected the return of Suffolk’s MPs to the Parliament of 1453. In the end, the men elected were Debenham and Philip Wentworth, by now a knight, but only after considerable controversy. The government summoned the Parliament in a favourable political climate for the court and the de la Pole following, but the duke of Norfolk, who had allied himself with the court’s leading opponent, Richard, duke of York, made a determined attempt to influence the result of the election in Suffolk. The sheriff, Thomas Sharneburne*, afterwards complained that before election day John Howard and many other Mowbray servants had threatened his under sheriff, Thomas Grys, and his clerk, William Peyntor. He claimed that they had forcibly brought Peyntor before the duke who, it was implied, had pressured him to return his nominees to the Commons. Sharneburne further alleged that on election day, 12 Feb., a large number of Mowbray men had come in armed force to the county court at Ipswich, where they had returned Thomas Daniell*, who held no lands in Suffolk, and John Wingfield†, who did not reside there. Sharneburne, a courtier, was far from non-partisan, but the election, which neither he nor Grys had attended, was clearly irregular. It was afterwards declared invalid, and Wentworth and Debenham were returned at a new election held on the following 12 Mar. Virgoe, 54-57; Castor, 178; KB27/775, rot. 20d; PPC, vi. 183. While still estranged from the duke of Norfolk when he stood for election, Debenham was reconciled with Mowbray not long afterwards. In 1454-5, he received £24 from the Mowbray manor at Bosham, Sussex, in part payment of his annual fee of £40 as surveyor general of the duke’s estates. W. Suss. RO, Iveagh mss, Bosham Manor/II/A/19. Presumably he had lost this valuable office when Mowbray dismissed him from his council in 1452, so a desire to regain it may well have prompted his subsequent reconciliation with his patron. He maintained his friendship with Sir Philip Wentworth after returning to the Mowbray circle (although in later years he quarrelled with the knight’s mother, Margery, Lady Roos, and his son and successor, Henry Wentworth†) and in June 1455 it was said that he and others of the duke’s retainers were supporting Wentworth in his long-running quarrel with Sir John Fastolf. CP40/841, rot. 463; 865, rot. 141d; Paston Letters, ii. 118.

In the previous month Wentworth had fought for Henry VI at the battle of St. Albans. It is possible that Debenham had accompanied the duke of Norfolk to St. Albans, but Mowbray (no doubt too circumspect to commit himself to either side) and his retinue had not arrived there until a day after the battle. G.H. Ryan and L.J. Redstone, Timperley of Hintlesham, 8n. Later in the same year, the MP had his own affairs to attend to, for John, 12th earl of Oxford, laid claim to one of the Debenham manors at Wenham, on the basis that it had once belonged to a 14th-century ancestor. Over two decades earlier, Debenham had associated with de Vere’s stepfather, Sir Nicholas Thorley, with whom he had entered into a bond to William Cantelowe* and two other London mercers in 1433, C241/229/8. but there is no evidence of any friendship between him and the earl himself. In 1458, Oxford sued Debenham, his son Gilbert and servant John Gravener for assaulting and wounding one of his tenants at East Bergholt, a de Vere manor neighbouring the Debenhams’ property in the Wenhams. CP40/779, rot. 493; KB27/789, rot. 100d. The manor to which the earl had laid claim was probably ‘Vaux’ in Little Wenham. When the Parliament of 1463 reversed the Act of Attainder passed against Robert de Vere, 9th earl of Oxford and duke of Ireland, in Richard II’s reign, Debenham felt it necessary to secure an exemption in order to safeguard his possession of that property. PROME, xiii. 204-7. By then Earl John was dead, for Edward IV had executed him for treason, but relations between the Debenhams and de Veres failed to improve in the years that followed.

During the later 1450s Debenham continued to serve as a commissioner in Suffolk, although he took the precaution of securing a royal pardon in October 1455. C67/41, m. 26. He was dropped as a j.p. in July 1458 but it is hard to ascribe a political reason for his removal from the commission of the peace, to which he was reappointed in May 1460. Notwithstanding his attachment to the duke of Norfolk, he remained on good terms with individual members of the de la Pole affinity in this period, among them the former Mowbray follower, John Wymondham. In 1459, for example, he was both a feoffee of the settlement that Wymondham made for his second wife, and a trustee of his will. Norf. RO, Ketton-Cremer mss, WKC 3/1, 399 x 4. Debenham suffered no hiatus in his career as a public office-holder when Edward IV seized the throne, for he was quick to align himself with the new regime. A few weeks after Edward’s accession he was one of those ordered to arrest two recalcitrant Lancastrians, Sir Thomas Tuddenham and Robert Halyday, and he retained his position on the bench. A place was found for his son and namesake in the household of the new King, who knighted the younger Gilbert in the early 1460s. During 1461 and 1462, he was among those in East Anglia who helped to raise a royal fleet, and he was responsible for provisioning the Mary Talbot, a ship from Bishop’s Lynn commandeered for the King’s service. In July 1461, the Crown appointed him to a commission instructed to seize Buckenham Castle into the King’s hands. Formerly part of the estate of the late Sir John Clifton, it was now in dispute between Clifton’s grandson, Henry Ogard, and his nephew, John Knyvet. According to a certificate which they subsequently returned to Chancery, Debenham and two of his fellow commissioners, Richard Southwell* and John Twyer, entered the outer ward of the castle on 15 Sept. but were unable to proceed any further because Knyvet’s wife, Alice, who was keeping possession with a garrison of 50 men, had raised the drawbridge. In the face of her defiance, the commissioners admitted defeat. On 20 Oct. Debenham was placed on a new commission, which this time included the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, but Knyvet was able to convince the King that he had a just title to the Clifton lands before it could take effect. CPR, 1461-7, pp. 8, 67, 135; Paston Letters, ii. 278-9. The commission was one of the last to which the duke of Norfolk was appointed, for he died shortly afterwards. Both Debenham and the younger Gilbert remained in the service of the Mowbrays after the death of their patron, whose son and heir was the last Mowbray duke of Norfolk.

The initial months of Edward IV’s reign also saw Debenham become embroiled in a quarrel with John Paston. An executor of Sir John Fastolf, who had died in late 1459, Paston claimed that the knight had left him his extensive East Anglian estates, but by the second half of 1461 (Sir) William Yelverton* (another of Fastolf’s executors) and William Jenney* were challenging this claim. On 4 Sept., they entered the Fastolf manor at Cotton in Suffolk, and two days later Debenham, John Timperley II* and John Wymondham met with Yelverton, prompting one of the Pastons’ servants to fear that the three were condoning the entry. Such fears appeared justified, for shortly afterwards there was a report to the effect that Jenney had sold Cotton to Debenham, who intended it as a residence for his son. Over the next few years the Pastons on the one hand and the Debenhams and Jenney on the other disputed possession of Cotton by entering and re-entering the manor, holding courts there and collecting rents from the unfortunate tenants. Paston Letters, ii. 248, 255-7, 370. In the midst of the quarrel Debenham and Paston happened to be thrown together in the capacity as arbitrators trying to resolve another dispute, between Jenney’s brother, John Jenney*, on the one hand and John Selot, master of the hospital of St. Giles, Norwich, on the other. Suff. RO (Ipswich), Phillips mss, Phi/99 577 x 1. It must have been a very uneasy association, given the rift that now existed between the Debenhams and the Pastons. In the summer of 1462 the younger Gilbert and Paston’s eldest son, Sir John†, who were competing with each other for the captaincy of a vessel in the King’s fleet, The Barge of Yarmouth, ran into each other in London. According to an account of this encounter, they exchanged ‘wordes’ and the younger Gilbert would have struck his opponent had not John Howard intervened. Paston Letters, ii. 278-9, 371-2; CPR, 1461-7, p. 206. Later that year or in early 1463, Paston petitioned the new duke of Norfolk, in whose service he had placed another son, John Paston† the youngest. He prayed that Mowbray would support his claim to Cotton and order Debenham and Jenney to release the Paston servant, Richard Calle, whom Jenney had arrested after he had tried to collect rents from the manor. Paston Letters, i. 114-16.

The dispute soon widened to encompass Caldecote Hall at Fritton, which had come to the Pastons with the rest of the Fastolf estate. Just as he had done against Fastolf, Debenham challenged the Pastons’ title to the manor, and both he and Jenney made entries on to the property to collect rents and to distrain livestock. Ibid. 285-6. In the mid 1460s the government excluded Debenham from the Suffolk bench for several months and both he and his son spent some time in the Marshalsea, although it is not clear whether these setbacks were connected with the quarrel or with other, unrelated misdemeanours. While the Debenhams were in prison John Paston and several of his tenants and farmers took the opportunity to file bills against them in King’s bench. In one of these bills, Paston alleged that they had forcibly entered Fritton and assaulted him there in September 1462. In another, John Rysyng, to whom the Pastons had leased the manor, claimed that in August 1463 the Debenhams and ‘many malefactors and disturbers of the King’s peace’ had attacked and chased him, forcing him to take refuge in the bell tower of Fritton parish church for two days. In a third, Thomas Wesenham accused them of attacking him and taking his cattle at Belton, just to the north-east of Fritton, in October 1464. Debenham also went to law, claiming that the Pastons and their servants had assaulted him in Herringfleet, another neighbouring parish of Fritton, in the spring of 1463. KB27/806, rex rot. 32d; 815, rot. 84; 816, rots. 36, 82d; CP40/813, rot. 153, 153d.

The intervention of Alice de la Pole, the dowager duchess of Suffolk, further complicated the dispute between the Pastons and Debenhams. In June 1465 John Paston the youngest received the news that she intended to take possession of Fritton and to hold it until she knew who would be her tenant, Paston or Debenham. By the autumn of 1465, the dispute was threatening to get dangerously out of hand. In September three of the Pastons’ servants entered Fritton with 60 men and stayed overnight there, prompting the Debenhams, Jenney and their supporters, who included Debenham’s son-in-law (Sir) Thomas Brewes*, to approach the neighbourhood in similar force. In early October the duke of Norfolk summoned Debenham’s son and John Paston the youngest to Framlingham to prevent another confrontation between them at Cotton, after Margaret Paston had entered the manor there. Paston Letters, i. 319-20, 526-8, 529-31. In spite of this intervention, Mowbray was, like his father before him, quite prepared to ride roughshod over the law when it suited his own interests. In June 1469, he breached a recently enacted statute by issuing liveries to the MP and other retainers, and later that summer he turned against the Pastons by laying siege to Caister, their castle near Great Yarmouth. Apart from Debenham and his eldest son, now Sir Gilbert Debenham, the besieging force of retainers and tenants included three other Debenhams, possibly all younger sons of the MP. No doubt they needed little persuading to join the siege, which ended when the Pastons surrendered the castle to the duke on 26 Sept., even though their own quarrel with the family had now become pointless. Earlier that year the de la Poles had taken possession of Cotton and in the previous October Mowbray had bought Fritton and several other manors formerly owned by Sir John Fastolf from four of his executors, William Worcestre, Thomas Howes and the abbot of Langley. After the final settlement of the knight’s estate in 1470, Fritton passed from the duke to Magdalen College, Oxford, but Cotton remained in the hands of the de la Poles, from whom Fastolf had bought it in 1434. KB27/839, rex rots. 31, 31d; Worcestre, 189; Sayer, 309; C.F. Richmond, Paston Fam.: Fastolf’s Will, 120-3.

The Readeption of Henry VI, which permitted the Pastons temporarily to recover Caister, marked a reversal in fortune for the Debenhams. Sir Gilbert went into exile with Edward IV, while his father lost his place on the Suffolk bench and became the prisoner of the 13th earl of Oxford, a leading supporter of Henry VI and a patron of the Pastons. Sayer, 310; C1/71/2. It is likely that he fell into the earl’s hands at Wenham, where Oxford had sent his men to seize his goods and chattels. (Presumably, he had regained his freedom by January 1471, for later Alice de la Pole would sue him for breaking into her close at Little Wenham at the beginning of that month.) KB27/844, rot. 91; 845, rot. 62. In the following spring Debenham’s son and the other Yorkist exiles returned to England, Edward IV recovered his throne and Oxford fled abroad. Debenham regained his place on the commission of the peace, although before long he was among those named for having illegally received livery from the duke of Norfolk. KB27/841, rex rot. 49. In April 1472 the Crown granted him and his son Sir Gilbert the keeping of several manors in the West Country, part of the inheritance of the latter’s stepson, John Zouche, son and heir of William Zouche*, Lord Zouche of Harringworth. CPR, 1467-77, pp. 152, 373; C140/30/53; 33/38c; 38/40; CCR, 1468-76, no. 202. By the beginning of 1473 Debenham was acting as a feoffee of the dowager countess of Oxford, mother of the now attainted 13th earl. CCR, 1476-76, no. 1214. It is unlikely that she had freely chosen him for the role, since he and five of his fellow feoffees agreed to convey her lands to the King’s brother, Richard, duke of Gloucester, who had coerced her into selling them to him. Gloucester, who had already received a grant of her exiled son’s estates, appears to have rewarded Debenham for his part in this shabby affair by permitting him to receive the income from Tattingstone and Stutton, two of the de Vere manors in Suffolk. CPR, 1476-85, pp. 434-5; Procs. Chancery Eliz. ed. Caley and Bayley, i, pp. xc-xci; M. Hicks, ‘Last Days of Elizabeth Countess of Oxford’, EHR, ciii. 76-95; C145/327. Debenham gained further revenge on the de Veres in April 1476 when the Crown granted Tattingstone and its appurtenant advowsons to him and his heirs, in consideration of the ‘divers losses’ he had sustained on behalf of Edward IV and in return for a payment of 260 marks, a tenth of which sum was assigned to the queen. CPR, 1467-77, p. 590. In 1480 the queen would complain that she had yet to receive most of the 26 marks due to her: E13/165, rot. 13d. In the previous decade Sir Gilbert Debenham had gained possession of the manor but he had subsequently lost it to the earl of Oxford. It had once belonged to the Holbrooks, the family of the MP’s first wife, but the lawyer, Thomas Fulthorpe, was in possession by the 1440s. Presumably using his own descent from the Holbrooks to make a spurious claim to the property, Sir Gilbert had sued Fulthorpe’s son, also Thomas, for making an entry on to Tattingstone in November 1464, but subsequently Fulthorpe had cut his losses by selling it to the earl. J. Ross, John de Vere, 13th Earl of Oxford, 54-56. In the early 1470s the manor was the subject of another quarrel, this time between the MP and Sir Thomas Wingfield, who in Sept. 1470 bound himself in £1,000 to keep the peace towards the former: C1/47/278; CCR, 1468-76, no. 572. The dispute over Tattingstone may have lain behind an assault on the MP at Ipswich in the spring of 1468, for four of the five assailants came from Tattingstone and the fifth from the neighbouring parish of Bentley. Suff. RO (Ipswich), Ipswich bor. recs., sessions roll 1468, C/2/9/1/1/1/9. This incident is wrongly attributed to 1475 by V.B. Redstone, ‘Eng. during Wars of Roses’, TRHS, n.s. xvi. 187, and Haward, 311.

Of advanced years by the time he received his grant of Tattingstone, Debenham was caught up in yet more disputes in his old age. In August 1476 he, the prior of Ipswich and others entered into a bond for £100, payable at the following Michaelmas, with the then sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk, (Sir) William Calthorpe*. On the strength of this security, the reason for which is unknown, Calthorpe sued Debenham in the Exchequer in Easter term 1477. Later that year, the matter came before the Lammas assizes at Ipswich, at which Calthorpe won his case by default because his opponent failed to appear. E13/162, rot. 2d. In the meantime, John Timperley II* successfully sued the MP in the common pleas for a wrongful disseisin at Reydon, a parish neighbouring the Wenhams, while Margery, Lady Roos, won another lawsuit against him in the same court before 1478, over a debt of £100. CP40/863, rot. 306; 865, rot. 141d. A Chancery bill that a prisoner at Ipswich, Richard Clerk of Wenham, brought against the bailiffs of that town in 1480 also called Debenham’s behaviour into question. Formerly the farmer of the MP’s manor of ‘Vaux’ in Little Wenham, Clerk complained that Debenham and his eldest son had refused to acknowledge that he had paid all of his rent and sent one of their servants to apprehend him. Having held him there for 24 hours, they had brought him to Ipswich where Debenham had wrongfully sued him for a debt of £20 in the borough court and the bailiffs had committed him to the town’s gaol. C1/64/661.

This Chancery case came late in Debenham’s life, since he died on 10 May 1481. The inquisitions post mortem held in Norfolk and Suffolk after his death calculated that his estates in those counties, including Tattingstone and its advowsons, were worth some £60 p.a., almost certainly an underestimate. Apart from Tattingstone, Alburgh and his manors at Little Wenham, he had also held a couple of manors near Alburgh (at Flixton, Suffolk, and Earsham, Norfolk), another at Ipswich and three others lying in parishes a few miles to the north of that town. C140/81/48. The inquisitions also give the very approximate estimate of ‘40 years and more’ for the age of his son and heir Sir Gilbert. There is no doubt that he had considerably augmented his inheritance, probably mainly by purchase since he was said to have invested £500 in land. His already dead last wife, Agnes, had possessed jointure rights in two of her previous husband’s manors in Middlesex but she had leased them out before he had married her. C1/91/36; VCH Mdx. v. 59; CCR, 1447-54, pp. 134-5, 285-6. She nevertheless appears to have retained other property in Fulham and Chelsea. Sometimes known as ‘of Chelsea’ following their marriage, Debenham had on one occasion in July 1451 seized a cartload of hay and four horses (the property of the local parson) that he had found on a plot of land he held in Fulham, evidently in Agnes’s right. CP40/765, rot. 438. Later, in 1454, he had sued a resident of the same parish for breaking into ‘his’ close there. In the same year, as ‘of Chelsea’, he had been obliged to answer another suit, arising from a large bill that Agnes had run up with a London tailor shortly before their marriage. CP40/775, rots. 523d, 616d.

After his death, Debenham was buried beside his previous wife, Margaret Hastings, in the Lady chapel in the Carmelite friary at Ipswich, rather than with his father and grandfather at Little Wenham. J. Weever, Funeral Mons. 750. His choice of burial place was perhaps dictated by a particular fondness for the relatively high-born Margaret, probably the mother of his eldest son and heir. In spite of her social status, it is unlikely that she had brought Debenham much in the way of lands or goods since she had married him while her father was in the Marshalsea. A distant heir male of John Hastings, earl of Pembroke (d.1389), Sir Edward Hastings had spent 20 years in that prison after refusing to pay the costs of Reynold, Lord Grey of Ruthin, with whom he had engaged in an expensive and ultimately futile dispute over the right to bear the Hastings title and arms. CP, vi. 358-9; K.B. McFarlane, Nobility of Med. Eng. 74. Debenham’s will has not survived but he is known to have appointed at least three executors, his son and heir Sir Gilbert, Benet Caldwell† of Ipswich and John Moss. C1/91/36-37; C67/51, mm. 5, 9. The executors had yet to complete their task when Caldwell died in the late 1480s (having in his own will provided for masses at Ipswich for Debenham and Margaret), Norf. RO, Norwich consist. ct., Reg. A Caston, ff. 320-1. and it is unlikely that his associates were able completely to fulfil the will’s conditions. In a Chancery case of about 1490, Sir Gilbert claimed that Caldwell had not accounted for sales of some of the MP’s properties in Ipswich, Harwich and elsewhere and had misappropriated the income from one of his manors. The defendant, Caldwell’s widow and executrix, Elizabeth, countered that Sir Gilbert had failed in an undertaking to dispose of £500 for the good of his father’s soul. According to her, Sir Gilbert had possession of the greater part of Debenham’s moveable goods, including a sizeable collection of plate worth some £126, and owed over £100 to his father’s estate for the farm of a salthouse in Ipswich. C1/91/36-38.