HARLESTON, John II (1403-57), of Shimpling and Bardwell, Suff.

The Harleston family’s fortunes were founded by John’s grandfather, Roger Harleston. A successful land dealer, Roger acquired holdings in Cambridge, as well as estates elsewhere in Cambridgeshire. After his death in the late 1380s or early 1390s, the bulk of his lands in the borough and county passed to his eldest son, Ivo, who also inherited the Bedfordshire and Essex properties of his maternal grandfather, Sir John Wauton. Still a minor at Roger’s death, Ivo became a ward of the Crown, attaining his majority at the turn of the century. VCH Cambs. iii. 123; vi. 117n; ix. 56; CFR, xii. 33, 57; CCR, 1399-1402, pp. 60-61; 1402-5, p. 7. His adult life was short, since he died in November 1403, five days after drawing up a short will. He was buried in the graveyard of St. Clement’s church in Cambridge. PCC 5 Marche (PROB11/2A, f. 33v). The estates he left his son comprised a manor on the outskirts of Cambridge, as well as others at Steeple Bumpstead, Wimbish and Roydon in Essex and Dunton in Bedfordshire. CIPM, xvii. 963-5. John, who was born at Wimbish and baptised in the parish church there, was just nine days old when he succeeded Ivo and the Crown granted his wardship to John Foljambe and John Pygot the younger, clerk. They were short-lived guardians, however, for Pygot (the rector of Lavenham, Suffolk) died in 1406 and Foljambe (of London and Derbyshire) the following year. CFR, xii. 235; CPR, 1401-5, p. 367; PCC 12, 14 Marche (PROB11/2A, ff. 88v-89, 107-8). It is not known who took over their responsibilities, although it is possible that John Wynter†, a prominent supporter of the Lancastrian dynasty in East Anglia who had married Ivo’s widow, Eleanor, became the boy’s new guardian. Eleanor died in 1416, when her son was still a minor, and was buried beside her first husband at St. Clement’s. CCR, 1402-5, p. 267; CPR, 1405-8, p. 290; CIPM, xx. 500-1; PCC 33 Marche (PROB11/2B, f. 35). It was probably through Wynter’s connexions that she was able to appoint none other than Henry V’s grandmother, Joan, countess of Hereford, as supervisor of her will. Following her death the Crown granted the share of the Harleston manor at Dunton which she had held as part of her dower to Margaret Rokell, one of her executors, to hold during the remaining eight years of John’s minority. CPR, 1416-22, pp. 44-45. John came of age in November 1424, and the following May the escheators in Essex and Bedfordshire were ordered to grant him seisin of his father’s lands. CIPM, xxii. 527; CCR, 1422-9, p. 171. According to the inquisitions post mortem held after Ivo Harleston’s death, these were worth some £40 p.a. (almost certainly an underestimate), CIPM, xviii. 963-6. meaning that John was qualified to support the status of knighthood, an honour for which he was distrained in 1430. By that date he had probably already married his first wife Alice, a daughter of William Clopton of Long Melford.

In December 1430 Harleston was returned as one of the knights of the shire for Suffolk, where he had taken up residence, to the Parliament that opened at Westminster early in the following year. There is no evidence to link him with any magnate this early in his career, but his success as a candidate probably owed much to the support of more established figures in the county. Within two months of the dissolution of Parliament on 20 Mar. 1431, Harleston became a commissioner of oyer and terminer. He later served on another such commission, as well as several of gaol delivery, and was appointed (albeit very briefly) to the quorum of the Suffolk bench, suggesting that he had trained as a lawyer. Named as ‘lately of London’ in the late 1440s, during lawsuits over debts he had contracted in the City, CP40/754, rot. 340; 756, rot. 306d. it is conceivable that he had spent time at an inn of court two decades earlier, when there is no information about his activities or whereabouts. In 1437 he received a royal pardon, but it is not known whether this was connected with any shortcomings in his exercise of an office or commission. C67/41, m. 12.

Whatever the case, in May the following year Harleston was appointed to his second commission of oyer and terminer, to hear and determine the complaint of a Dutch merchant, Clays Yandisson. According to a petition Yandisson had presented to the Crown, up to 80 armed men from Southwold had boarded his ship the previous December, while it lay in the town’s harbour. Having assaulted him and his sailors, they had sunk his vessel and its cargo by hacking a hole in the hold with an axe. Harleston and the other commissioners sat at Ipswich in July and at Henhowe in February 1439 to hear pleadings between Yandisson and his assailants, but the final outcome of the case is unknown. Sel. Cases Law Merchant, iii (Selden Soc. xlix), 164-8. In May 1439 Harleston joined the Suffolk bench, and in the following July he was one of those commissioned to inquire into the petition of Sir William Wolf and his servant, Maurice Lowell. They had complained that John Belsham, a notorious local criminal who had been indicted for the murder of Lowell’s pregnant wife and a royal constable at Hadleigh, had falsely accused them of high treason in the court of chivalry. It was probably as a result of Belsham’s charges that Wolf lost his place on the Suffolk bench and was never reinstated, even though no treason was ever proved against him. CPR, 1436-41, pp. 265, 316-17; E28/62, m. 70; P. Maddern, Violence and Social Order, 157-60. Later that year Harleston was elected to the Commons for a second time. The Suffolk return for the Parliament of 1439 has not survived, but the commission to distribute a local tax allowance to which he and Miles Stapleton* were appointed in April 1440 identifies them as the county’s representatives in that assembly. Harleston’s parliamentary career came to an end when the succeeding Parliament, in which he also sat, was dissolved in March 1442.

In conjunction with his career as an MP and local administrator, Harleston also acted as a feoffee on behalf of others. In December 1430 he, along with William Clopton and a connexion of the Clopton family, Robert Cavendish, serjeant-at-law, were among those to whom the collegiate church of St. John the Baptist in Stoke by Clare conveyed a messuage in Sudbury. Maddern, 169n; Order of Serjts. at Law (Selden Soc. supp. ser. v), 162; CCR, 1435-41, p. 51. Later that decade, he and Cavendish were nominated to arbitrate in a dispute over lands at Monks Eleigh, although in the event they and the other arbiters did not make an award. Canterbury Cath. Archs., Dean and Chapter archs., CCA-DCc-ChAnt/M/419. The association between Harleston and Cavendish was more than a passing one, since the former acted as a feoffee and executor for the latter, who died in 1439. CP25(1)/224/115/33; 116/20; CIPM, xxv. 171; C67/41, m. 12. Harleston was not the gds. of Robert Cavendish as claimed by HP Biogs. 427, since Cavendish d.s.p. Others for whom Harleston acted as a trustee in the 1430s included Sir Richard Waldegrave, the Essex esquire Thomas Bataill, Alice widow of John Strange of Thorpe Morieux, the Corbets of Little Dunham, Norfolk, and the Jerveys family, who held property in west Suffolk. He met with some controversy as a Jerveys feoffee, since in 1439 Joan, the widow of John Jerveys of Bildeston, filed a bill in Chancery against him and two others for refusing to make her a release of two manors which had belonged to her late husband. F. Blomefield, Norf. x. 466; CPR, 1429-36, p. 343; CCR, 1435-41, pp. 143-4, 335, 336; CP25(1)/169/187/83; C1/9/365.

Nearly two years later, Harleston and William Chapman acquired the keeping of a moiety of a manor in Cavendish and a tenement in Clare, both in Suffolk, from the Crown, in return for an annual rent of 43s. 4d. This grant was supposed to last during the minority of John Claveryng, the young heir to these properties, but it proved a short lived one, since in November 1442 the King committed the keeping of these properties to two other men who had offered to pay a higher rent. CFR, xvii. 184, 243. By now Alice Harleston had been dead for over two years, so it is possible that Harleston had already married again, but a royal pardon he and his new wife Elizabeth acquired at the end of June 1446 provides the earliest evidence for his second marriage. C67/39, m. 34. He had probably known Elizabeth for some time, since his Clopton in-laws had long been on amicable terms with the family of her first husband, William Bardwell. The match was a profitable one, because Harleston soon secured for his family permanent possession of the Bardwell properties in East Anglia that Elizabeth held for life as William Bardwell’s widow, by marrying his son and heir, John, to her daughter, Margery, the Bardwell heir. As a result the Harlestons acquired manors at Bardwell (which became a second residence for the MP), Norton, Thorpe by Ixworth, Ampton and Little Saxham in west Suffolk, and Belaugh in Norfolk. W.A. Copinger, Suff. Manors, i. 264, 267, 350, 381; vi. 245; vii. 100; The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 125; iii. 367.

A few months after he and Elizabeth had acquired their pardon of mid 1446, Harleston was one of those who appeared in the court of King’s bench to file a bill against John Sturgeon, a prisoner in the Marshalsea. He and his fellow plaintiffs, who included the marquess of Suffolk’s retainer, Sir Thomas Tuddenham*, accused him of breaking into their property at Whepstead in west Suffolk and depasturing the soil there on 5 Oct. 1446. Sturgeon was found guilty when tried at nisi prius two months later, but it is not clear to whom the property, for which Harleston was evidently a feoffee, actually belonged. KB27/742, rot. 33d. This was not the first time he had been associated with Tuddenham, for he and Sir Thomas were among those who had given the earl of Stafford a recognizance for 1,000 marks ten years earlier, in connexion with the wardship of the daughter and heir of Sir Robert Harling. CCR, 1435-41, p. 102. It was also not the last occasion Tuddenham had dealings with the Harlestons, since Margery Harleston (the MP’s stepdaughter and daughter-in-law) would appoint Sir Thomas one of her executors when she made her will in 1459. Add. 19134, f. 178. It seems likely, therefore, that Harleston enjoyed a cordial relationship with the knight, although whether, like Tuddenham, he was a de la Pole follower is unclear. H.R. Castor, King, Crown and Duchy of Lancaster, 99, and C.F. Richmond, John Hopton, 108, assume, but do not prove, that he was a de la Pole man. Harleston and his son John did enter a recognizance for £200 with the widowed duchess of Suff. in 1453, but this does not mean that the MP was one of her retainers or that he had had a connexion with the duke in the past. The Harlestons of Denham (represented by successive William Harlestons during the 15th cent.), on the other hand, were certainly followers of the de la Poles although it is not known how (if at all) they were related to the MP’s family: CCR, 1447-54, p. 431; Add. 19134, ff. 172v-173; CPR, 1413-16, pp. 402-3; 1422-9, p. 163; CFR, xviii. 27-28; C.F. Richmond, Paston Fam.: First Phase, 240n; Egerton Roll 8779. A magnate with whom he was certainly connected was Richard, duke of York. He witnessed a grant of lands the duke made to the Franciscans at Bury St. Edmunds in February 1447 and acted as a feoffee for Sir William Oldhall*, one of his leading retainers, later in the same year. CPR, 1446-52, p. 231; CCR, 1454-61, p. 390. There is little doubt that he was the John ‘Hurleston’ who served York as a receiver in the 1440s and early 1450s. For a brief period before assuming responsibility for the honour of Clare he had acted as receiver-general of all York’s estates, an office which had no regular place in the ducal administration but to which appointments were sometimes made. Rosenthal, 169.

Apart from his place on the commission of the peace, Harleston’s last significant royal office was that of sheriff of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire. He left office under a cloud, however, for he failed to render a full account when his term as sheriff finished. He did appear in the Exchequer in the person of his attorney, Roger Philpot, to begin the accounting process, but Philpot left the court without licence before it was completed. As a consequence Harleston’s estate, extended at a surprisingly low sum of some £20 p.a., and comprising manors and lands at Chesterton and West Wickham, Cambridgeshire, Stanton, Walsham, Shimpling and Bardwell, Suffolk, and Belaugh, Norfolk, was seized into the King’s hands in 1451-2. E364/84, rot. F; 87, rot. M; 88, rot. K; 89, rot. H. He took out a royal pardon in November 1452, C67/40, m. 12. but it is not clear when he recovered the confiscated properties. The following April, the Crown granted John Yerman* a ten-year lease of West Wickham, although the manor returned to the Harleston family before the end of that term. CFR, xix. 30. Harleston was also obliged to appear at the Exchequer in 1456, to answer a suit filed by John Plummer, clerk of the King’s chapel. As clerk, Plummer was entitled to 40 marks p.a. from the issues of the two counties and he alleged that Harleston had paid him no more than half of this fee while he was sheriff. The parties obtained licence to imparl, after which no further process is recorded on the plea roll, so the suit might have ended in an out of court settlement. E13/146, rot. 47d. It is, however, possible that Harleston did not live long enough to see a settlement reached, for he died, at Shimpling, on 8 Mar. 1457. He was succeeded by his eldest son, John, then in his mid twenties. C139/167/13. The inqs. post mortem held in Suff., Beds., Essex and Cambs. after the MP’s death returned that he had not possessed any property in these counties, no doubt a consequence of the way his estate had been settled. Harleston’s will has not survived, but a royal pardon granted to his heir in April 1458 shows that the latter acted as his executor. C67/42, m. 12. The younger John did not long survive the MP, since he made his own will (a short nuncupative document), a month before receiving this pardon, and died on the following 1 June. PCC 26 Stokton (PROB11/4, f. 203v); C139/167/13. As a result the Harleston estate was inherited for a third time in the fifteenth century by a minor, John Harleston, the MP’s grandson. By the end of July 1458 Thomas Urswyk II* and Ralph Gray I* had put in a bid for, and apparently secured, the wardship of the child (then about six years of age), only for the Crown to re-grant it to Thomas Drury of Hawstead and William Chapman (perhaps the MP’s former associate) the following October. CPR, 1452-61, pp. 434, 459. The young ward was still alive when Elizabeth Harleston, who had held a life interest in the former Bardwell properties, died in 1464, C140/13/23. but he himself died not long afterwards. Following his death, the Harleston manor at West Wickham (by then back in the family’s hands) passed to his uncle Robert (presumably because it was entailed on the male line), rather than to his two sisters and coheirs. VCH Cambs. iii. 123. Despite his father’s ties with the house of York, Robert, the MP’s second son, adhered to the Lancastrian cause, for which he died at the battle of Barnet in April 1471. Three 15th Cent. Chrons. (Cam. Soc. ser. 2, xxviii), 162; PROME, xiv. 299-301; xv. 119-22.