HERTESHORN, William, of Caldecote and Ickwell, Beds.

It is difficult to establish with certainty William’s place in the pedigree of the Herteshorns, a well-established Bedfordshire family, if not of the first rank. Beds. Historical Rec. Soc. xxix. 48. The most prominent member of the family at the beginning of the fifteenth century was John Herteshorn, who held lands in Wootton, Ravensden and Caldecote, all parishes located within a few miles of Bedford. CCR, 1399-1402, pp. 446, 447; Feudal Aids, vi. 398. A feoffee, annuitant and executor of Sir John Trailly†, John also served Trailly’s son and heir, Reynold, the last of the Traillys in the direct line. Reynold died in October 1401 and some four years later Herteshorn helped to establish a college and chantry at Northill (in his own home parish of Caldecote) on behalf of both of his deceased patrons. CIPM, xviii. 100-1, 643-4; xix. 565; VCH Beds. i. 329, 403; iii. 211, 250; CPR, 1401-5, pp. 178, 479; 1405-9, p. 270. Among the other Trailly feoffees was Reynold, Lord Grey of Ruthin, whom John likewise came to serve as a counsellor and trustee. CCR, 1409-13, p. 434; CPR, 1413-16, p. 304. John was still alive in 1434, assuming that he was the John Herteshorn of Bedfordshire expected to swear the oath to keep the peace administered throughout the country that year. CPR, 1429-36, p. 373. It is unclear if he was the John Herteshorn who was a royal serjeant-at-arms in the late 14th and early 15th centuries. That John served as controller of the King’s works from 1414 to 1423 and died in the late 1430s: CPR, 1399-1401, p. 130; 1413-16, p. 126; 1436-41, pp. 220, 281; CCR, 1413-19, pp. 41, 44-45; 1435-41, pp. 419, 425; Hist. King’s Works ed. Brown, Colvin and Taylor, 998, 1046. Another retainer of the Greys of Ruthin was Thomas Herteshorn of Ickwell, perhaps the son of John and father of William the MP. Thomas was one of the followers of Lord Grey who confronted their lord’s rival, John Cornwall, Lord Fanhope, at the Bedford shire-house in January 1439, and a servant of his died in the ensuing fracas. CPR, 1436-41, pp. 282-3; E28/59, m. 50d.

Probably also associated with the Grey interest in the person of Reynold’s grandson and successor, Edmund Grey, CCR, 1447-54, p. 123; 1454-61, p. 143; CAD, iv. A8468. William Herteshorn is first heard of in January 1449, when he attested the election of Bedfordshire’s knights of the shire to the first Parliament of that year. Among his fellow electors were John and Thomas Herteshorn, although it is possible that they were younger namesakes of the previously mentioned men of that name. Thomas the elector was perhaps the man who came into an estate in Beds. and Norf. through his marriage to Elizabeth, coh. of William Butvelyn, and took up residence at Gissing in the latter county. There was also a Thomas Herteshorn who died in 1477, in possession of manors at Fleet Marston, Waddesdon and Pitstone, Bucks.: VCH Beds. iii. 84-85; F. Blomefield, Norf. i. 171; C139/145/4; CCR, 1454-61, p. 82; 1461-8, pp. 368-9; CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 634. William had yet to serve as an office-holder in the county when he himself took up his seat in the following Parliament, suggesting that he was still a young man at this date, or that he had spent a period away from home, perhaps as a soldier in France.

Whatever his military experience, Herteshorn was connected by marriage to the veteran soldier, Sir John Popham*, who sat as a knight of the shire for Hampshire in the same Parliament. Many soldiers were bitterly critical of the government’s failures in France, and Popham was well qualified to represent them, given his own experience of the wars and the loss of his estates across the Channel. A servant of Richard, duke of York, who was then in the process of assuming the leadership of the opposition to the government and the court, he was elected Speaker, although he was excused the office after pleading ill health. The Parliament of November 1449 was a dramatic one, because it brought down the King’s chief minister, William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, the figure most implicated in the government’s failures in France. It is likely that Herteshorn also identified with York and the opposition, not least because he was re-elected to the succeeding Parliament. The Parliament of 1450 was likewise strongly critical of the government and the court, and the duke canvassed on behalf of those of his supporters standing for election to the Commons. M. Keen, Eng. in the Later Middle Ages, 439.

Following York’s victory at St. Albans in 1455, Herteshorn became a j.p. in Huntingdonshire, where he subsequently served as an ad hoc commissioner as well. Presumably he owed his connexion with that county to his marriage to Alice Malyns, since he appears not to have inherited any lands of his own there. It was not until 1459 that the childless Sir John Popham made a settlement by which Alice Herteshorn, possibly his niece, was to succeed to his Huntingdonshire manor of Little Paxton after his death, but it is possible that he had already allowed her and her husband to take possession of another at nearby Eynesbury. CP25(1)/293/73/443; VCH Hunts. ii. 274. There is no evidence that Alice had succeeded to any property in Hunts. from her own family.

Even if a Yorkist sympathiser, it is unlikely that Herteshorn was an out and out political partisan. Although he went to the trouble of securing a pardon from the Crown in January 1458, this was probably no more than a sensible precaution at a time of great uncertainty. C67/42, m. 39. He lost his place on the commission of the peace in Huntingdonshire during the tense summer of 1459, yet he became a member of an anti-Yorkist commission of array in the same county just a few months later. The loyalties of his probable patron, Edmund Grey, were still uncertain at this date, for it was not until the battle of Northampton in the following July that Grey deserted Henry VI and threw in his lot with York.

Following the accession of Edward IV, Herteshorn became a j.p. in Bedfordshire. In May 1462 he obtained another royal pardon, in which ‘of London’ was one of his place-name aliases, C67/45, m. 30. and three years later he, along with the lawyer, John Eltenhed†, and Thomas Trebolance, a grocer from the City, acted as trustees for Richard Rede. CCR, 1461-8, p. 308. Given his connexion with London, his service on several commissions of gaol delivery and his appointment as a j.p. (albeit not of the quorum), it is possible that Herteshorn was himself a lawyer. Also in the early years of Edward IV’s reign, Herteshorn and his wife came into possession of the estates Sir John Popham had settled on her, for the knight died in April 1463. Included with Little Paxton in the settlement were the manors of South Charford in Hampshire and Chinnor in Oxfordshire and an annual rent of 15s. from lands in Dorset. C140/9/7; CP25(1)/293/73/443. It is possible that Alice’s very obscure father was a member of the Malyns family of Chinnor, although there was a John Malyns of Ravensden, Beds. in the early 15th cent.: VCH Oxon. viii. 61-62; Oxon. Arch. Soc. Rep. xii. 19; JUST1/1539, rot. 14; VCH Beds. iii. 212. Although not especially significant in itself, the rent gave Herteshorn an interest in Dorset, and he became controller of customs at Poole, a port situated near Popham’s property at Little Canford, in July 1463.

Later that decade, Robert Rufford* and other executors of John Fitzgeffrey* sued Herteshorn in the court of common pleas, asserting that he owed 26 marks to Fitzgeffrey’s estate. CP40/817 rot. 178d. Herteshorn was again a plaintiff in the same court in a case that reached pleadings in Easter term 1470. He and a co-plaintiff, Richard Haynowe, alleged that the defendant, Robert Chalers* of Cambridgeshire, owed them £10. According to them, the debt arose from a bond that Chalers and two associates from Kirby Bedon, Norfolk, had entered into with them at Biggleswade, Bedfordshire, as far back as July 1449. In response, Chalers asserted that Herteshorn had issued a quitclaim of all suits and demands to his Norfolk associates in 1454, a release that he evidently believed extended to him, but the plaintiffs riposted that Herteshorn had not put his name to any such document. The pleadings do not reveal the circumstances in which Chalers had entered into the bond in the first place, or the nature and extent of the dealings between him and the MP. CP40/835, rot. 118.

Removed from the commission of the peace at the Readeption of Henry VI and restored as a j.p. after Edward had recovered his throne, Herteshorn was still alive in the spring of 1472 but probably died shortly afterwards. He had outlived his wife, who had died in 1469. Alice Herteshorn’s heir was her 12-year-old grandson John Bulkeley, the son of her deceased daughter Elizabeth by Charles Bulkeley of Nether Burgate, Hampshire. The Bulkeleys also succeeded to the manors of South Charford and Eynesbury. C140/36/14; VCH Hants. iv. 562; VCH Hunts. ii. 274. It is not possible to tell if Elizabeth was Alice’s daughter by the MP or a previous husband.