EGERTON, Ralph (c.1390-1452), of Wrinehill, Staffs.

Ralph Egerton represented a junior branch of a family anciently established at Egerton in Cheshire. In the early fourteenth century this branch acquired by marriage the manor of Caldecote in the same county. G. Ormerod, Palatine and City of Chester ed. Helsby, ii (2), 690. The marriage of our MP’s parents in about 1390 resulted in a significant addition to this estate. Ralph’s mother was not a notable heiress when the marriage was made but she subsequently became one, bringing the family the manors of Smallwood and Nether Astbury in Cheshire with those of Wrinehill and Cheddleton across the border in Staffordshire. These manors were in the family’s hands by the death of Ralph’s parents in 1420 – they appear to have died within a very short time of each other – and our MP, said, in his father’s inquisition post mortem, to be some 30 years old, was of an age to enter them. On 24 Oct. 1420 writs of diem clausit extremum were issued in respect of both his parents: DKR, xxxvii. 256. He was probably married by this date for one of his daughters was espoused as early as 1432. His daughter Margery is then said to have been contracted to his kinsman, William, son of Philip Egerton of Egerton: Ormerod, ii (2), 628. She later married John Lane of Bentley and the Hyde, Staffs., and was alive as late as 1486: CAD, vi. C4583. His wife hailed from the important Cheshire family of Mainwaring and he probably owed the match to his mother’s connexions. The bulk of her lands in Cheshire were held of Venables of Kinderton, the family of his wife’s mother. Ormerod, i (2), 481.

Egerton’s combined paternal and maternal inheritance was sufficient to support a place in the public affairs of the two counties in which he held property. When he came to enter into a contract for the marriage of his son and heir, Hugh, in 1443, his lands were valued for the purposes of the agreement at as much as 180 marks p.a. C147/112. Yet, despite this wealth, his public career was uninspiring, at least as far as it is reflected in the surviving records. His election for Staffordshire to the Parliament of September 1429 was its first significant event. His brother William’s election to the same assembly – for the borough of Newcastle-under-Lyme, not far from Wrinehill – implies that the family may have had some special motive for attendance. One motive suggests itself. A few days before his death in the previous April, their wealthy Staffordshire neighbour, John Delves*, had nominated our MP as one of his feoffees. Since his heir was a minor, the proximity of the settlement to the death gave grounds for the Crown to challenge the feoffment as fraudulently designed to deprive it of wardship. On 27 Aug., only two days after the county election, a jury sitting before the Staffordshire escheator had returned Egerton as one of Delves’s feoffees; our MP’s motive in going to Westminster may have been to protect these findings against royal challenge. If this was his aim it was successfully achieved: on 1 Dec., towards the end of the Parliament’s first session, a writ ordered the removal of the King’s hands from the enfeoffed manors. C219/14/1; CIPM, xxiii. 243; CCR, 1429-35, pp. 4-5. At first sight this purpose appears insufficient to move Egerton to seek election; a Chancery petition to be discussed below, however, shows his interest in the matter was not merely that of the disinterested feoffee.

By this date Egerton had developed links, although not yet intimate ones, with the local peerage: on 12 Oct. 1430, in company with the young Humphrey Stafford, earl of Stafford, of whom he held his manor of Wrinehill, he witnessed a conveyance made by James Tuchet, Lord Audley. E150/1025/2; CP40/680, cart. rot. 1. Two years later he was a well-qualified choice as the Staffordshire sheriff, and yet his absence from the county bench and from ad hoc commissions shows that he did not then number among the front rank of the county’s gentry. Not until early in the following decade, when by no means a young man, does he appear as a figure of greater weight. In September 1441, as the earl of Stafford expanded his retinue, he retained his tenant Egerton with a generous annual fee of ten marks, and this was no doubt a factor in enabling him to secure a second election to Parliament on the following 28 Dec. C. Rawcliffe, Staffords, 234; D.J. Clayton, Admin. County Palatine of Chester, 72; C219/15/2. He had difficulty in securing the payment of his parlty. wages. As late as Mich. term 1445 he had an action pending against the sheriff Richard Archer for wages of £14 8s.: CP40/739, rot. 416. He was an active member of the Stafford retinue. On 27 Sept. 1442 he was a witness when the earl granted the manor of Mere to Ralph Macclesfield, and five years later he was named as feoffee of the London property of John Virly in company with Stafford himself (then duke of Buckingham) and several prominent Stafford retainers, including William Hextall*. More interestingly, in Trinity term 1450, along with several leading Staffordshire gentry, Egerton was sued for maintenance by Sir Richard Vernon*: since other of the defendants were closely associated with the duke of Buckingham, it is probable that this action represents the ducal retinue acting as a body against Vernon, who appears to have forfeited the duke’s goodwill by pursuing a baseless property claim against Sir William Trussell†, another of the duke’s retainers. Staffs. RO, Stafford fam. mss, D(W)1721/1/1, f. 269v; Corp. London RO, hr 179/32; KB27/757, rot. 31. Nor was Buckingham the only peer with whom Egerton was associated in the latter part of his career: in 1439 he witnessed a charter for William, Lord Lovell, and, more significantly, in 1448 Lord Audley thought enough of him to name him as a feoffee. Add. Ch. 43505; Salop Archs. Sutherland colln., 972/221/1/3; CPR, 1446-52, p. 322.

Most of Egerton’s public career was played out in Staffordshire, but he was also a man of standing in Cheshire. A Chancery petition of the late 1430s complained of his ‘grete myght and power’ and ‘kyne and alliance’ there. On 28 May 1442 he was named as sole arbiter in a dispute between two rival groups of local gentry, headed by William Troutbeck on the one part and Richard Aston on the other. When, in 1446, he made a jointure settlement on the marriage of his son and heir, Hugh, he was able to call on a remarkably prominent body of Cheshire witnesses, headed by four knights, including his brother-in-law, Sir John Mainwaring, and William Stanley. C1/39/87; Add. Ch. 51162; CAD, vi. C4680. His high standing there is made yet plainer at the end of the decade. When royal commissions were issued for the levy in Cheshire of the subsidy voted by the Parliament of November 1449, a contravention of the county’s ancient exemption from parliamentary taxation, he was one of six men entrusted by the ‘commonalty’ of the shire with the task of presenting a petition to the King asking for a confirmation of this exemption. His nomination is partly to be explained by his kinship to the influential Mainwaring family, for four of the other five were Sir John Mainwaring, the husbands of Sir John’s sisters, John Needham* and John Davenport, and the son of another sister, Robert Fouleshurst. Archaeologia, lvii. 75-78; Clayton, 64n.; Ormerod, i (2), 481.

Egerton’s private affairs are better documented than his public career. A large number of charters concerning the family are now among the public records. The marriages of his children are particularly well documented. In January 1435 he entered into an indenture with his Cheshire neighbour, Richard Vernon of Haslington, for the marriage of Vernon’s son and heir, John, to his daughter, Cecily. This was a respectable, if unspectacular match: Egerton gave Cecily a portion of 100 marks, a little less than might be expected for a man of his wealth, and in return Cecily received a jointure of 12 marks p.a. from her new father-in-law. Add. Ch. 5231; CAD, i. C1044. Egerton had more ambitious plans for another of his daughters, Ellen, whom he intended to marry to the heir of John Delves, one of the leading gentry of Staffordshire with lands worth some 200 marks p.a. This scheme was to lead to great contention, seemingly because our MP was less than scrupulous in the methods he employed to win what was a highly desirable marriage. He was clearly a friend of Delves: very shortly before his death in April 1429 the latter had named him as one of his feoffees to the uses of an unusual settlement. This singularity arose out of a debt Delves owed to his second wife, Margaret, widow of Thomas Massey (d.1420) of Tatton, Cheshire. Before he married her she had paid him 300 marks to marry her infant daughter, Elizabeth, to his young son and heir, Richard (b.c.1416). One of the purposes of the enfeoffment was to secure the repayment to her of this sum. Egerton, however, had other ideas both in respect to this repayment and the marriage for which the debt was incurred. This, at least, is the charge made against him in a petition presented to the chancellor by Margaret and her fourth husband, Sir John Gresley*. They claimed that, when Egerton was sheriff in 1433, he forcibly abducted Richard from their custody and persuaded him to disavow his young wife; then, in the early spring of either 1438 or 1439, he and Richard, with ‘grete multitude of people unknowen in riote wyse arraied’, disseised them of the Delves manor of Doddington, which was to have been settled on Richard and Elizabeth in jointure, plundering goods worth as much as £100. CIPM, xxiii. 243; C1/39/87. Next, in May 1439, Egerton secured a dispensation for the marriage of his own daughter Ellen to Richard’s younger brother and heir-presumptive, John Delves†.

If this is a true account, then Egerton’s aim in urging Richard to repudiate his wife was to secure the Delves inheritance for John. Such a plan could only be effective if Richard died young, and the fact that he did so implies that the disputants knew he was ailing. In the short term the plan was to be thwarted: in July 1439, before the bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, Margaret’s daughter, Elizabeth, formally consented to the marriage she had contracted within age and she appears as Richard’s wife in actions collusively sued by the Gresleys in the palatinate court of Chester. Egerton had failed in the first part of his scheme. In November 1441 the Gresleys quitclaimed to him, as a feoffee of the elder John Delves, their right to lands in Staffordshire, an indication that the dispute between them was over. Ormerod, ii (2), 692; iii (1), 522; Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. n.s. iii. 170. And yet our MP’s scheming was not destined to come to naught. Richard Delves died in 1446, without producing issue by the wife of whom Egerton had sought to rid him; the Delves inheritance thus came to our MP’s son-in-law, the younger John Delves, whose marriage he had no doubt obtained cheaply as he was heir-presumptive rather than heir-apparent when it was made. After Richard Delves’ death Egerton had the problems he seems to have anticipated in 1429. Two inqs. found that Richard died seised of the lands enfeoffed by his father in 1429. The Crown refused to give Egerton seisin as the last surviving feoffee until a jury found in his favour in Feb. 1448: CIPM, xxvi. 422-4; Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. n.s. iii. 170.

Much more straightforward were the arrangements Egerton made for the marriage of his own son and heir-apparent, Hugh. On 18 June 1443 he contracted Hugh to Margaret, daughter of the Cheshire esquire, John Dutton of Dutton, some 25 miles to the north-west of Wrinehill. Dutton had, like Egerton, been retained by Stafford in the autumn of 1441 and this mutual service, rather than a tie of neighbourhood, was the context for the match. Egerton agreed to settle upon the couple a jointure of 20 marks p.a. and undertook that lands worth 180 marks p.a., inclusive of this jointure, would descend to Hugh on his death, reserving the interests of his own wife and issues of 160 marks to be taken over four years for the implementation of his will. In return, Dutton agreed to pay him a portion of as much as 290 marks with a further payment of 20 marks to the groom’s mother over a term of seven years. C147/112. These arrangements were confirmed in a second contract made with the bride’s brother, Thomas, on 12 June 1446 and the jointure was settled ten weeks later: CAD, vi. C4680, 6166. As a bargain this favoured the Egertons: the portion was a very generous one judged against either of the main determining variables, namely the size of the jointure and the value of the groom’s expectations. Clearly Dutton wanted the match more than Egerton, who was at the height of his career at this date. These matches suggest that Egerton was a more than capable manager of his family’s affairs. This capability is also evidenced by the number of property purchases he made in the near vicinity of Wrinehill. These are poorly documented, but at his death he held purchased lands in 17 vills, all lying at the conjunction of the three counties of Cheshire, Staffordshire and Shropshire. Only one of these acquisitions was a significant property (in the late 1430s he bought a moiety of the manor of Wistaston near Crewe with the advowson of the church) and they are insufficient to explain why, in a marriage contact of 1478, the family lands were valued at 100 marks p.a. more than they had been in 1443. Ormerod, iii. 331-2; C147/117. None the less, they are indicative of the determination to advance himself and his family apparent from the marriages of his children.

Egerton’s careful management is also reflected in the arrangements he made for his death. On 22 Feb. 1452 he made a new feoffment of his lands to three clerics, headed by William Wore, dean of Stafford, and two days later he gave them detailed instructions. This feoffment superseded earlier conveyances to local clerics in 1426 and 1430: CAD, iii. C3570; CCR, 1429-25, p. 38. These largely concerned the fulfilment of obligations that he had entered into on his heir’s marriage. After his wife Elizabeth had been assigned her lawful dower, the feoffees were to convey nearly all his lands to Hugh in tail-male with successive remainders in tail-male to Hugh’s brothers, Ralph and Urian, and then our MP’s own brothers, William and Philip. The feoffees were to retain lands worth 40 marks p.a., again in accordance with the agreement of 1443, to raise 160 marks to pay Egerton’s debts and to perform his last will. Having fulfilled his obligations and ensured his heir an immediate competence, he was free to bestow his purchased lands in the interests of wider family provision. These were to be retained by his feoffees to provide, first, funds for his daughter Elizabeth’s marriage and the further discharge of his debts, and, second, annuities of £5 each for his two younger sons. His brother William was also remembered with a life interest in purchased lands in Betley near Wrinehill, and his son Ralph was to have additionally lands in Audlem and Marchamley in tail-male. C146/4197. Urian is probably to be identified with the later parson of Heswall in Cheshire. Both he and Ralph were alive as late as 1496: C147/266. Our MP’s children were remarkable for their longevity.

Egerton did not long survive the making of his will. He last appears in the records in an active role in June 1452, when he sued out a general pardon, and he died on the following 1 Nov., having done much to advance his family’s interests. His branch of the Egertons survived at Wrinehill until the early seventeenth century when Edward Egerton sold his lands to the head of the senior branch of the family, Sir John Egerton† of Egerton. C67/40, m. 16; CHES3/43, 31 Hen. VI, no. 2; Ormerod, ii (2), 692.