Since the early twelfth century the knightly family of Fitzherbert had been tenants of the priory of Tutbury at Norbury, on the Derbyshire side of the county border with Staffordshire. Their ancient ancestry was a source of pride to them: in his will of 1517, John Fitzherbert, our MP’s grandson, cited the fact that the manors of Norbury and Roston had ‘contynued in my name this CCCC yeres and more or there aboute’ among the justifications for disinheriting his daughter in favour of his brother. The status of the family had received recognition as early as 1252 when they secured a charter of free warren in these manors and in their lands at nearby Ash. Indeed, as physical embodiments of this early importance, there remains the fine monument of Sir Henry Fitzherbert† in the church at Norbury and the manor-house he built there. He represented Derbyshire in the Parliaments of May 1298 and January 1307, but, curiously, his immediate successors appear not to have maintained his prominence.
At his father’s death Nicholas Fitzherbert was a minor. Arrangements for his wardship proved complex. His father had died seised of only that part of the family’s lands that lay in Staffordshire; the Derbyshire lands, including the manor of Norbury, were in the hands of feoffees headed by Sir John Cockayne* and Thomas Okeover†. On 20 Oct. 1416 a grant of the wardship of the Staffordshire lands and the marriage of the heir was enrolled in the records of the duchy of Lancaster, but the grantees, John de la Pole* and Henry Booth, were already exercising these rights a month earlier when they came to an arrangement with the feoffees. On 25 Sept. the latter had agreed that de la Pole and Booth should have a 15-year lease of the Derbyshire property of the family in return for a payment of £40 to the three sisters of the ward. Presumably this payment was the only remaining charge on these lands under the terms of the feoffment, and the feoffees were thus prepared to surrender their interest in return for its discharge. Since Nicholas was later to marry a daughter of Booth, it is likely that their readiness to do so was due to an agreement that this marriage would take place.
The length of the lease implies that Nicholas was only six years old when it was made. This is consistent with the fact that he does not reappear in the records until 1429, when, with his father-in-law, he won damages in an assize of novel disseisin.
Less happily, it was also at this time that Fitzherbert became involved in a serious dispute with two of his near neighbours, Ralph Basset of Blore and his father’s feoffee, Thomas Okeover. His earlier relations with the latter had been friendly for Okeover was one of his own feoffees in lands in Snelston near Norbury. These lands were to be one of the causes of the dispute, the other being the claims of Okeover, Basset and other local landholders to rights of common pasture in Norbury. Fitzherbert appears have been the first to court conflict by enclosing 150 acres there, thus creating a coalition of his neighbours against him. In May 1443 Basset and Okeover led a gang which cut down the hedges and levelled the ditch with which he had enclosed the disputed common. Fitzherbert replied by petitioning the chancellor and instigating an action for trespass in the court of King’s bench.
More significantly, Fitzherbert also presented a bill to the royal council. This is now lost, but among the fragmentary surviving conciliar records there is the text of the examination of Basset and Okeover in the Star Chamber on the following 29 June. They did not deny their presence with armed men or their intention to ‘drowe downe the ditch’, but implied that the fault lay with Fitzherbert for digging the ditch. They said that the ‘contrey was there that had interest in the commone’, naming Nicholas Montgomery, Joan, widow of Sir Thomas Clinton†, and others. The Council referred the matter to the judges and nothing further is heard of these deliberations, although it was no doubt at conciliar initiative that Basset and Okeover were required to find surety in Chancery to behave well towards our MP.
The apparent victory in this dispute marks Fitzherbert’s growing assertiveness in local affairs. In the late 1440s he no longer confined himself to the politics of his corner of Derbyshire but came to play a part in those of the county as a whole. On 19 Jan. 1447 he was elected to represent the shire in Parliament in what, judging from the relatively large number of attestors, was a disputed election. His return probably owed something to his Household connexion, as too did his appointment as sheriff in the following November even though he had no previous administrative experience.
It was at about this time that Fitzherbert’s career took a remarkable and unexpected turn. Through his second marriage, contracted at an unknown date, he had acquired interests in Shropshire. Little is known of his second wife, but she was either the daughter or the widow of one of the Ludlows of Hodnet and brought him a life interest in property significant enough to justify his distraint for knighthood in that county in 1458.
Fitzherbert’s mysterious interest in Shrewsbury was maintained alongside a continued involvement in Derbyshire politics. Like most of the leading gentry there, he was drawn into the disturbances which convulsed the county in the mid 1450s. As a near neighbour of the two leading protagonists, Sir Nicholas Longford and Walter Blount, he either had or was to form associations with both men. In January 1460 he was one of those in whom Longford enfeoffed his manor of Longford. Blount had been his parliamentary colleague in 1447, and the two of them had again been returned together at the Derbyshire election held on 8 Mar. 1453, when tensions among the shire elite were already apparent.
It may be that these dangerous disturbances in his native county prompted Fitzherbert to find a new focus for his energies in Shrewsbury, but, if so, the distraction was a brief one. Soon after he had ended his term as a bailiff there, he was named to an office more appropriate to his rank. In November 1458 he was pricked for a second term as sheriff of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. His appointment is explicable in terms of his Household connexion; and, as sheriff, he was responsible for conducting the Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire elections to the controversial Parliament of 1459, extending his term of office by a day to hold the latter as he had been empowered to do by a writ of privy seal.
Nonetheless, his Lancastrian associations did not prevent Fitzherbert from adapting to the change of regime. His first appointment to the county bench came in December 1460, when the Yorkists were in control of government. The trust placed in him by Edward IV is evident in his appointment to four commissions of arrest and one of array in the early 1460s. For his service he had some modest reward: on 6 Mar. 1463 he was granted the keepership of the park of Maunsell in the honour of Tutbury (to hold for life from Michaelmas 1461), and on the following 27 June he was granted that of the duchy park at nearby Shottle. His sons also benefited: in August 1461 his eldest son, Ralph, was appointed bailiff of the New Liberty in Derbyshire; four months later, Robert and John were granted the ten-year farm of the duchy of Lancaster’s lead mines in the soke of Wirksworth at the favourable annual rent of only £5 10s.; and Walter was joined with his father in the keepership of Shottle.
There can be little doubt that the Fitzherberts found this favour with the new regime because they had joined themselves to the rising star of Blount, the leading Yorkist in their native county who was raised to the peerage as Lord Mountjoy in June 1465. On 29 Nov. 1464 our MP’s son John gained the first official appointment of what was to be a highly successful career in the Exchequer when Blount, as the newly-appointed treasurer, named him as clerk of the estreats. In the following November not only did John replace William Vernon* and his son, Henry†, as steward of the young John Mowbray, duke of Norfolk, at Bretby, but our MP was appointed to his third term as sheriff. He had been in office for less than a month when he secured a pardon of account in the sum of £100, a mark of favour which Mountjoy as treasurer was well placed to provide. Evidence of our MP’s connexion with Mountjoy at the local level comes in the will of their mutual neighbour, Nicholas Montgomery, drawn up at the end of 1465. The two men were jointly named as guardians of the testator’s son and heir, another Nicholas. Earlier, in June 1462, Fitzherbert had acted alongside Mountjoy’s eldest son William† as an arbiter.
These strong Yorkist affiliations ensured that Fitzherbert remained heavily involved in administrative affairs. On the same day as his office as sheriff came to an end, he was, rather curiously, appointed to the lesser office of escheator in Shropshire. This did not, however, prevent him continuing his active role in the affairs of his native county. On 13 Jan. 1467 he sat as a j.p. at Derby with Mountjoy and (Sir) John Gresley*, and four months later he attested the election of Mountjoy’s eldest son to represent the county in Parliament.
Despite his advancing years, Fitzherbert continued to be active in the early 1470s as an arbiter and feoffee for his near-neighbours in the south-west corner of Derbyshire.
Fitzherbert died soon after. A writ of diem clausit extremum was issued on 20 July 1476 in respect of his property in Derbyshire, but no consequent inquisition survives. His monumental effigy in the church of Norbury represents him in plate armour with a collar of suns and roses. At the west side of his tomb chest are two female figures representing his two wives, and on the north and south sides the figures of his ten sons and seven daughters (their names were originally painted but none can now be read). Both his tomb and that of his son and heir Ralph were commissioned by his grandson John, probably in the 1490s.
It is a measure of the rise of the Fitzherberts during the second half of the fifteenth century that, in a marriage contract of 1501, their estates were valued at as much as £120. This compares with our MP’s tax assessments of £20 p.a. in both 1435-6 and 1450-1 (his father had been assessed on the same sum in 1412), and, while these assessments are certainly underestimates, there can be little doubt that the resources of the family were significantly expanded in the time of our MP and his sons. This rise occurred despite what must have been the considerable burden of his very large family.
Nicholas’s career and, more particularly, that of his son, John, who advanced to be King’s remembrancer in the Exchequer, demonstrate that the family had a talent for something more than self-perpetuation. This became even more apparent in the generation after John. Our MP’s two grandsons by his eldest son, Ralph, were men of considerable intellectual ability. The elder, another John (d.1531), has been identified as the author of the Boke of Surveying and the Boke of Husbandry, both published in 1523, and the younger, Sir Anthony (d.1538), j.c.p. from 1522, compiled an even more notable work, the Graunde Abridgment, an authoritative digest of common law. Less happily, in the next generation the family suffered grievously at the hands of the Crown for their adherence to the Roman Church: Sir Anthony’s son Sir Thomas† died a prisoner in the Tower of London in 1591.