DELVES, John (1374-1429), of Doddington, Cheshire and Apedale, Staffs.

The Delves family, greatly advanced by the efforts of our MP’s great-uncle, Sir John Delves (d.1369), a soldier-administrator in the service of the Black Prince, was one of the leading gentry families of Cheshire and Staffordshire. Soon after his coming of age, our MP inherited the family estates following the deaths in quick succession of his great-uncle’s widow, Isabel, his grandfather, Henry, and his father, John, MP for Staffordshire in four Parliaments between 1388 and 1393. On 18 Sept. 1395 the escheator of Staffordshire was ordered to give him seisin of his grandfather’s lands, and by the following spring he was also in possession of the family lands in Cheshire, which neither his father or grandfather had possessed because of Isabel’s life-interest. CFR, xi. 120, 160, 179, 180; CHES2/69, m. 6d. The family estate, at least in the form that it descended to our MP, consisted of several manors on either side of the border between these two counties – those of Apedale, Bucknall and Knutton in the former, and Doddington and Weston in the latter – with further Staffordshire manors at Hilderstone, near Stone, and Crakemarsh, near Uttoxeter, and property in North Wales at Flint and Prestatyn. A Chancery petition of the 1430s valued this estate at as much as 200 marks p.a., and this estimate is confirmed by various inquisition valuations. C1/39/87. In the inq. taken in 1396 on Isabel’s death, the family’s Cheshire lands were valued at 53 marks p.a.: CHES2/69, m. 6d. A later inq., taken on the death of our MP’s son, Richard, in 1446, valued the Staffs. lands at about £90: C139/122/39. Our MP’s income was diminished until 1409 by his mother’s dower and her life interest in the valuable manor of Crakemarsh, valued at £18 p.a. in 1446: Broughton, 23.

It was in recognition of Delves’s wealth that, on 12 Mar. 1402 Edmund Stafford, earl of Stafford, of whom he held his manor of Hilderstone, granted him, as his esquire, a large annuity of 20 marks from his Staffordshire manor of Norton-in-the-Moors. The connexion proved to be short-lived – the young Edmund fell at the battle of Shrewsbury in July 1403 – yet our MP long enjoyed the annuity, in which the Crown, to whom the wardship of Edmund’s son and heir came, confirmed him. CIPM, xviii. 829; CCR, 1402-5, p. 332; CPR, 1401-5, p. 385. Soon after the earl’s death Delves undertook to serve in the retinue of Sir Thomas Swinburne†, captain of Hammes castle, but for some unknown reason he did not travel to Picardy. On 13 Nov. 1403 the protection he had sued out was revoked. CPR, 1401-5, p. 307. Later evidence shows that our MP’s preference was for an administrative rather than a military career, although in this case there may have been a particular reason for his reluctance to leave England. Only a week before the revocation of his protection, the King had ordered his justices to proceed in a plea of significant concern to our MP. In 1390 his grandfather, Henry Delves, had been granted the manor of Walton-upon-Trent (Derbyshire) by the Crown in compensation for the loss of the manor of Aber in North Wales, but this grant contravened one made to Henry, Lord Ferrers of Groby, more than 60 years earlier. In 1402 Lord Henry’s great-grandson, William, Lord Ferrers, had sued for the manor, and the royal order to the justices brought an end to our MP’s attempts to impede this action. Ferrers recovered possession. CCR, 1402-5, pp. 207-9; SC8/107/5309; CP, v. 345; CIPM, xxvi. 325.

Delves soon began to play a part in county administration, serving as escheator in 1405-6 and being named as sheriff in November 1409. These nominations are significant in that they stood in opposition to the prevailing pattern of appointment to office in Staffordshire. Most of the officers were retainers of the duchy of Lancaster, partially, at least, because of the eclipse of the Staffords, the alternative focus of lordship, during the minority of Earl Edmund’s son, Humphrey. This dominance of duchy servants provoked an adverse reaction, manifest in a series of attacks on duchy retainers in the county late in Henry IV’s reign by a group of disaffected, headed by Hugh Erdeswyk*. Initially, our MP was actively involved on Erdeswyk’s part. According to a petition presented by the Commons to the King on 16 Feb. 1410 and cataloguing a long series of offences, he had been sent by Erdeswyk on the previous 27 Mar. to issue a challenge to combat to their rival, Sir John Blount of Barton Blount (Derbyshire). In response to this petition the King sent a writ to the sheriff of Staffordshire to make proclamation for the appearance of the accused on pain of forfeiture. The addressee as sheriff was not our MP but Sir Thomas Aston†, and it is clear that our MP’s pricking had been set aside, probably because of the support he had offered Erdeswyk. On 10 Feb. 1411 the proclamations were rendered largely nugatory when Delves was among several of the disaffected, including Erdeswyk, who had pardons enrolled on the patent roll for all treasons and offences save murder, rape and common larceny. E. Powell, Kingship, Law and Society, 208-16; PROME, viii. 471-6; CPR, 1408-13, pp. 275-6. He had quickly completed his reconciliation: he had been pricked as sheriff in the previous November, and, while in office, he was commissioned to arrest those of Erdeswyk’s adherents who remained outside the law. CPR, 1408-13, pp. 320-1, 376.

With the accession of Henry V Delves became yet more active. He was named to the Staffordshire bench, appointed one of the keepers of the temporalities of the bishopric of Coventry and Lichfield (vacant by the death of John Burghill) and again pricked as sheriff in 1415. CPR, 1413-16, p. 191. He appears to have taken no part in the King’s military adventures, proving his value instead by undertaking the tasks at home that would otherwise have fallen to the militarily active. He was again sheriff in 1420, for a third term in only ten years, and served on several ad hoc commissions, notably two of array. He was also briefly appointed to the quorum of the peace, although there is no other evidence to identify him as a lawyer. His apparent administrative skills were attractive to others beyond the Crown and by the end of Henry V’s reign he was Lord Audley’s steward at Tunstall (he held his own manor of Apedale from Audley). Cheshire and Chester Archs., Toler mss, DTO/7. It is not surprising that so active an administrator should have been returned to Parliament, and he was duly elected on 12 Apr. 1425. C219/13/3. While an MP he appeared personally in the ct. of c.p. to concede the claim of the prior of All Saints, Trentham, to the wardship of the land and heir of Richard Colclough† of Newcastle-under-Lyme: CP40/657, rot. 302d. Although this is his only recorded election, it is unlikely to have been his first. Returns are missing for Staffordshire in respect of three of Henry V’s Parliaments – 1415, 1416 (Oct.) and 1417 – when, given the absence of many of the county’s leading gentry in France, he would have been an obvious candidate.

On 11 Sept. 1419, in the midst of his busy administrative career, Delves had drawn up a long and detailed will, perhaps prompted to do so by his first wife’s death. He made numerous religious bequests, with provision for more than 1,000 memorial masses to be said by a variety of local religious institutions, including the Cistercian abbey of Hulton and the Augustinian priories of Stone and Trentham (Staffordshire), and a series of small bequests to the fabrics of 15 local churches and chapels. Specially favoured were the churches of Audley and nearby Wybunbury. Each were provided with a valuable vestment, worth as much as £10, and in a codicil added at an unknown date he provided for the roofing in lead of the chapel in Audley church and for the erection of memorials there for his parents and grandparents and at Wybunbury for his first wife. The testator also took great care to reward his servants. Many are listed by name, each receiving a few shillings, including 5s. to Roger Glover, the kitchen boy. Unsurprisingly, the largest personal bequests were reserved for men of greater import: he bequeathed ten marks each to his brother, Henry, William Lee* and John Biddulph†. Broughton, 29-31 (the will is known only from a later transcript).

Although Delves’s administrative career was played out in Staffordshire, his will shows that Cheshire was at least equally a focus of his interests. Indeed, his main residence, the castle of Doddington built by Sir John Delves in the 1360s, lay in that county, and our MP may have carried out his own building there, suing out, on 23 Feb. 1404, a license to crenellate. On 24 Apr. 1412, he was among the 60 gentry of that county who assembled in Macclesfield church to witness the settlement of a land dispute between Sir Thomas Grosvenor and Robert Legh. A. Emery, Greater Med. Houses, ii. 472, 530-1; CHES2/77, m. 10d; M.J. Bennett, Community, Class and Careerism, 22, 23n. It was also in Cheshire that he found a bride for his eldest son, Thomas, who, in the spring or early summer of 1413, was contracted to Anne, one of the daughters of Hugh Huls of Raby, j.KB. The contract’s terms are partly revealed in a licence for alienation enrolled on the patent roll on 25 June. Delves undertook to settle his manor of Bucknall and an annual rent of £4 6s. in neighbouring Fenton (Staffordshire) on the groom’s father, to hold for a long term of 20 years, presumably because of the couple’s youth, with remainder to them and their issue, or, if that marriage should not be consummated, then to Thomas and Philippa, another of Sir Hugh’s daughters. CPR, 1413-16, p. 60.

Thomas Delves did not long survive the marriage: he was dead by May 1424, when Anne married John Browe*. T. Madox, Formulare Anglicanum, no. clxxix. And it was again to Cheshire that Delves looked for a bride for his new heir, Thomas’s brother, Richard (b.c.1416). In doing so, he also found a second wife of his own. In about 1426 he contracted Richard to Elizabeth, the infant daughter of his Cheshire neighbour, Robert Winnington. Her father was dead and the marriage was negotiated with her mother, Margaret Norwood, who paid as much as 300 marks, largely raised by borrowing, for the match. Soon after, however, our MP himself married his son’s mother-in-law, and the terms on which the children had been contracted were revised, or at least so it was claimed in a later Chancery petition. C1/39/87; Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. n.s. vii. 263-5. Delves married Margaret by 18 Dec. 1428, when the couple entered into various undertakings, in the Exchequer at Chester, in respect of a lease they had made of his lands in Northwich and elsewhere in Cheshire: CHES2/99, rot. 3. At our MP’s death, she was pregnant: Broughton, 31. Delves agreed to repay her 260 marks she had already paid and to pardon her the remaining 40 marks. More importantly, to ensure the young Elizabeth of her jointure and his new wife of her dower, he provided for the settlement of his manor of Doddington and lands in Weston (together valued at £10 p.a.) upon himself and Margaret for a term of six years from 14 Mar. 1429, with remainder to Richard and Elizabeth and their male issue. The rest of the Delves inheritance (with the exception of the manor of Crakemarsh) was settled on Ralph Egerton*, William Lee and Margaret herself to the intent that she should receive both her reasonable dower and repayment of any moneys owed to her from her daughter’s marriage portion. These arrangements were eminently reasonable, for they did not, as contracts for second marriages often did, sacrifice the interests of the heir to those of the new wife. Further, by putting his lands into the hands of feoffees, Delves, a tenant of the duchy of Lancaster, secured an insurance against wardship for his heir. Indeed, this may have been as strong a motive as a desire to provide for his new wife. It was not until 19 Apr. 1429, only a week before Delves died, that the feoffment was made to Egerton and the others.

This feoffment was rehearsed by the jurors in Delves’s inquisition post mortem, not taken, for reasons that are unknown, until four months after his death. There is some confusion over his precise death of death. Writs of diem clausit extremum issued out of Chancery on 26 Apr. 1429, the date given for his death by the jurors in his inquisition post mortem: C139/40/49. The jurors returned that he died seised jointly with his new wife, Egerton and Lee, of the manors of Apedale, Knutton and Hilderstone by a conveyance made on 19 Apr. by Thomas Hunt the elder, a burgess of Newcastle-under-Lyme and one of the executors of Delves’s will of ten years’ earlier. They then cited the feoffment he made of his manor of Crakemarsh to John Bulkeley of Wore (another of the executors) and William Wall, chaplain. Chancery accepted these findings, and on 1 Dec. 1429 the escheator of Staffordshire was ordered to deliver the manors of Apedale, Knutton and Hilderstone to the feoffees. CCR, 1429-35, pp. 4-5. The authorities of the duchy of Lancaster, however, were not so ready to relinquish a claim to wardship. A commission was issued to Sir Nicholas Montgomery† and Hugh Erdeswyk to inquire into the fact and validity of the feoffment to Bulkeley and Wall. Not until February 1433 did the duchy relinquish its claim. DL42/18, ff. 28, 31.

By this date, however, another threat had emerged to Delves’s careful arrangements to provide for his wife and keep his young son out of wardship. A dispute arose between his widow and her fourth husband, the wealthy knight, Sir John Gresley*, on the one hand, and one of the feoffees, Ralph Egerton, on the other. If the narrative of that dispute, presented to the chancellor by the widow and Gresley is to be credited, the cause of the rift lay in Egerton’s self-interested machinations. They claimed that, in 1433, he abducted Richard Delves from their custody and persuaded him to disavow his young wife. Such a disavowal was possible because the couple had been married when Richard was not yet ten and Elizabeth under four years old. Later, Egerton and Richard ‘with great multitude of people unknown in riotewyse arrayed’ disseised the Gresleys of the manor of Doddington and took goods worth as much as £100. C1/39/87; Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. n.s. vii. 263-5. Egerton’s aim in all this appears to have been to secure Richard’s marriage for his own daughter, Ellen, but in this he was to fail. On 8 July 1439, before the bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, Elizabeth formally consented to the marriage she had contracted within age (although Richard continued to repudiate it), and it was probably as part of a compromise settlement that Ellen was contracted to Richard’s younger brother, John. By 1441 the disputing parties were seemingly back on friendly terms: Gresley and Margaret quitclaimed to Egerton and William Lee their right to the Delves lands in Staffordshire, probably in return for Egerton’s recognition of her rights in Delves lands in Cheshire. Broughton, 34-35; Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. n.s. iii. 170; CHES29/143, rots. 15, 27d. In the event, Egerton was to secure what he sought by natural means. Richard died without issue in 1446 and his son-in-law, John, thus fell heir to our MP’s lands. C139/122/39.