A Yorkshireman by birth, Estfield was to become one of the wealthiest merchants of London and a leading financier of the Crown, who was accorded the special distinction of a ceremonial knighting by Henry VI. He grew up as a younger son at Tickhill, where a namesake, probably his father, held property abutting ‘Eastfield’ in 1381. His elder brother, who also shared his name, obtained a royal pardon in April 1417, and after inheriting the family lands was active in the property market in and around Tickhill in the 1420s, but evidently died childless, for in October 1435 his widow, Joan, quitclaimed to the MP her right in real estate in three counties in the north and Midlands. Further family holdings were to remain in her possession for her lifetime, before passing to him.
Estfield’s rise to prominence was founded initially on his dealings in mercery and other high-status wares, and from the early 1420s onwards he was regularly importing such goods from the continent. Most of these shipments appear to have come through the port of London where in 1425-6, for example, he imported alum and 108 pieces of broad-cloth. Later in his career his imports included goods that were more normally associated with grocers: thus, in 1445 he and a business partner, Richard Quatermayns*, imported pepper, cloves and sugar, as well as quantities of silk, in a Venetian galley.
There are some indications of the extent of his trading links outside the capital. Not surprisingly, he had retained ties with Yorkshire, notably with merchants from Kingston-upon-Hull. His business dealings appear to have been carried out through intermediaries, particularly chapmen who travelled to and from London buying and selling mercery and grocery wares. In 1420 a chapman from Gloucestershire was pardoned his outlawry, which had been imposed after Estfield had tried to recover a debt of £21 11s. 6d. through the courts; and ten years later another from Bodmin in Cornwall was bound in Chancery in the sum of £14 during the course of a dispute with him.
Estfield’s rise to prominence was helped enormously by his activities as a merchant of the Calais staple. This brought him into close contact with the Crown for which he became a valuable source of finance, and from which he benefited from a number of important grants. His career as a stapler had begun by 1424 when he took several shipments of wool across the Channel to Calais.
By the time he first entered the Commons, Estfield had established close personal ties with leading members of the government, some of them clearly born of friendship, not simply of mutual administrative and financial interests. These connexions can be traced to the last years of Henry V’s reign. His association with the sometime treasurer of England, William Kinwolmarsh (d.1422), dated back to at least 1419 when the two men were party to transactions concerning land in Kent, and their amicable relations were to be reflected in Estfield’s inclusion of Kinwolmarsh among those who should benefit from prayers offered in the chantry which he established 25 years later. Estfield was also well known to the chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, John Wodehouse* (d.1431), one of Kinwolmarsh’s executors. Wodehouse, long a retainer of Henry of Monmouth, had also taken on the executorship of that King’s will, and in 1423 was required to draw up an inventory of the late monarch’s moveable goods for submission to the scrutiny of the second Parliament of Henry VI’s reign. It appears from this that Estfield, perhaps at Wodehouse’s instigation, had been entrusted with some of the many items pending the formal conclusion of the administration process. In the years that followed he was appointed by Wodehouse as one of his feoffees, and then as his executor.
Connexions such as these had led to a series of Crown appointments, the earliest of which Estfield received in September 1420 when he was made collector of tunnage and poundage in the port of London, a post which he occupied for as long as nine years. For much of this period his fellow collector was the vintner Thomas Walsingham†, a colleague whom he was to name among his executors. Walsingham belonged to the circle of Cardinal Beaufort, the chief financier of Henry VI’s government, and it may well have been with his encouragement that Estfield started to make loans to the Crown. Besides the large sums, already mentioned, that he advanced as a member of the Calais staple, he proffered a number of loans in a personal capacity. In July 1426 the Exchequer recorded the receipt from him of 50 marks, perhaps in response to the general appeal for loans made at that time, and in April 1431 along with others, including Sir John Radcliffe*, Thomas Haseley† and William Flete*, he forwarded 4,000 marks. Another loan, of 1,000 marks in February 1434, came from Estfield alone, while in 1437 and 1439 respectively he lent further sums of £323 and £200.
Many of Estfield’s royal appointments during the 1430s were related to his mercantile activities, such as his commissions to hear appeals from the court of the Calais staple and the admiralty court, and in March 1433 he was chosen as a member of a delegation which was sent to negotiate a settlement to commercial disputes with envoys from the duchy of Brittany. Shortly afterwards he acted as an intermediary for the payment of 500 marks from the Exchequer to Richard Buckland*, treasurer of Calais, for men-at-arms and archers for the defence of the town.
While Estfield was shoring up the government’s finances by loans of money, he had been forging for himself a hugely successful career as an alderman in London. Early indication of his abilities was his appointment in July 1420, along with a fellow mercer John Abbot II*, to intervene in a dispute between the masters and wardens of the Cutlers’ Company and the freemen of their craft. In September 1422 he was elected as one of the sheriffs and would thus have officiated at the funeral procession of the late Henry V through London. On this occasion he was the choice of the commonalty of the city, but less than a month after relinquishing the office, on 6 Oct. 1423, he was sworn as the alderman for the ward of Cripplegate. A few days later, on 18 Oct., he attested the election of the city’s MPs for the first of six occasions. His skills as an arbiter in disputes brought before the court of the mayor were greatly appreciated, so that between 1424 and 1429 he was asked to arbitrate in at least 11 such cases.
An indisputable measure of the esteem in which Estfield was held by the King and his advisors was his knighting at Kennington on Whit Sunday 1439, in the illustrious company of sons of the earls of Huntingdon and Arundel and along with Lewis John*, the son-in-law of another earl. Like Estfield’s colleague Thomas Walsingham, Lewis John belonged to the circle of Cardinal Beaufort, who at this very same assembly at Kennington was sold substantial estates of the King’s inheritance, a matter which later provoked controversy.
After Parliament was dissolved Estfield wasted no time in returning to civic duties in the capital. He served on several committees during 1440 and even returned briefly to the mayoral chair on 14 and 18 July as deputy to Robert Large, who had fallen ill.
By the end of 1443 Estfield may have been feeling the strain of almost continuous service to city and Crown, for on 9 Oct. he asked the aldermen in writing to be exonerated from his place on the bench. Three of his fellow aldermen took on the task of trying to persuade him to continue, a mission which seems to have been successful. The aldermen were not alone in seeking his continuing service. On the day of the mayoral election in the autumn of 1444, the King himself wrote to the outgoing mayor, explicitly asking for Estfield’s election to a third term, ‘consideryng thordre and worshippe that he standeth in and thapproved sadd wisdome and discrecion that he is of, the whiche shulde mowe do us the more worshippe and gretter pleasure in suche thinges as oure lord shall lust gide this yeere’. The royal request no doubt reflected Estfield’s long service to the Crown, but may also have been an implied reference to his first mayoralty, when he had served at the King’s coronation. Henry may have seen him as the perfect choice to be mayor at the coronation of his consort, Margaret of Anjou, which was due to take place the following spring. In the event, however, the aldermen respectfully declined to be told whom to elect as mayor, citing an ordinance of 1424 which specified that no one should serve again within seven years of being elected and another of 1435 which forbade anyone from serving more than twice in the office.
Estfield’s successes as a merchant enabled him to acquire a substantial amount of property, both in London and elsewhere, so that in 1436 his landed wealth could be assessed at £90 p.a., derived from holdings in the capital, Middlesex, Hertfordshire and Yorkshire.
Beyond London, over the years Estfield had acquired landed interests in nine counties all told, although not all of them were mentioned in the 1436 assessments. In the previous year, as already noted, he inherited the possessions in Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire that had belonged to his putative elder brother, while the manor of Stansall and land at Wadworth and Wolsyke fell to him later after the death of the widowed Joan Estfield.
It was in southern England, too, that the astute mercer found a worthy husband for his only child, Margaret, and by doing so promoted his own social standing. He, Humphrey Bohun (1418-68), was the son and heir of Sir John Bohun, the head of a distinguished Sussex family possessed of sizeable estates in that county and Essex. The match may have been planned as early as the 1420s, for Estfield was one of Sir John’s feoffees from 1426. Furthermore, just a few days before Sir John’s death in January 1433 he was named among those entrusted with one of the Bohun manors in Buckinghamshire, and in all probability Sir John’s young heir was brought up in the Estfield household in London. To the MP’s daughter the marriage brought enhanced status; to the Bohuns the mercer’s considerable wealth.
In July 1444 Estfield and Bishop Alnwick were enfeoffed by Ralph, Lord Cromwell, the former treasurer of England, to facilitate his purchase of the valuable lordship of Ampthill in Bedfordshire,
On 15 Mar. 1446 Estfield made his will in which he asked to be buried in the western part of the church of St. Mary Aldermanbury. Among his charitable bequests were donations to the poor of the parish of Tickhill, and he also left a sum of money to the chaplain of the castle in that town. Legacies to religious houses and hospitals reflected the scope of his activities outside London, and among them were houses of nuns at Burnham near Windsor, Huntingdon and Faversham in Kent. Casks of Gascon red wine were assigned to each of the prestigious establishments (St. Albans abbey, the Charterhouse, and Christ Church priory, Canterbury) that had admitted the testator to their confraternities. The large sum of £100 was set aside for improving the highway between Hunsdon and London, while the Mercers’ Company was left £20 for its almsmen, with an additional amount to provide a breakfast every year for the apprentices. Among the personal items which he bequeathed was the gold cup which he received when he attended the King’s coronation. This he left to his grandson, John Bohun, son of his late daughter Margaret and her husband Humphrey Bohun, who himself was to have a gold collar, also given to Estfield by the King, and silver plate worth 100 marks. Another collar of gold set with precious stones and pearls was to be offered at the shrine of St. Mary at Walsingham, and an ‘ouche’ of gold similarly adorned was to be presented to that of St. Thomas at Canterbury. Estfield drew up two codicils. In the first, dated 16 Mar., he instructed his executors, Bishop Alnwick, John Middleton, John Fray, Richard Rich, Thomas Walsingham and three others, one of whom was the lawyer Roger Byrkes, to complete the water conduit in Aldermanbury, enlarge the belfry of the church of St. Mary and hang five new bells there. He also left Middleton a large ‘legend’ of the saints, a porteous [breviary], and a vestment of gold decorated with popinjays. In the second, undated, he left his inn Le Three Coupes on the Hoop, as well as other property in the parish of St. Giles Cripplegate to the Mercers’ Company, in order to fund a second chantry in the church of St. Mary Aldermanbury.
Estfield’s death on 10 May was recorded in the staple court at Westminster, where he had served as mayor to the end. Three days later a writ of diem clausit extremum was sent to the escheator of Hertfordshire, and the will itself was proved on 21 June.
In other respects, Middleton appears to have adhered more closely to his former master’s wishes. In October 1453, after protracted negotiations, an indenture was drawn up between the executors and the civic authorities in which it was agreed that the existing conduit from Paddington to Tyburn should be extended into the city itself. Another pipe from Marylebone to Charing Cross was also to run further into London. This was in fact a far more ambitious project than that originally set out in Estfield’s will, and was doubtless undertaken on the understanding that there was still plenty of money available from Estfield’s estate with which to finish the task. The project proceeded slowly and was still not completed in 1478, by which time Middleton himself was dead. Nevertheless, progress continued to be made and by the late sixteenth century had become Estfield’s most enduring legacy to the city.