HEYDON, John (d.1479), of Baconsthorpe, Norf.

A prominent East Anglian lawyer, Heydon is one of the principal villains of the Paston Letters. The Letters are a partisan source but his bad reputation was far from undeserved. In ruthlessly pursuing his own interests he was not unique among members of his profession, but he was perhaps more prepared than most to flout the interests of others and at times to break the law itself. A self-made man, he was of lowly birth but when he died he was of sufficient wealth and status to be buried at Norwich cathedral, in a chapel he had built for himself there. There is no evidence of any Heydon coat of arms predating 1479, and like other Norfolk landed families of recent origin, the Heydons fabricated a pedigree for themselves. W. Rye, Norf. Fams. i. 339. John began this process after embarking on his professional rise, by adopting the surname Heydon, in preference to that of his non-gentle father, William. William bore the lowly patronymic, Baxter, a synonym of ‘baker’, and lived and worked the land as a tenant of the manor of Heydon. Yet he was of sufficient means and ambition to secure an education for his son and, indeed, to be buried at the Greyfriars in Norwich. A letter that Margaret Paston wrote to her husband just before the accession of Edward IV reveals the last resting place of William, for in it she referred to the MP as ‘the sone of William Baxter that lyth beryed in the Grey Freres’. Castor, 42-43; Paston Letters, i. 264. William was still alive in the autumn of 1422, when he and James More of Norwich received a bond for 20 marks from Thomas de Lye of East Ruston. C241/222/15. Although relatively prosperous, he cannot have left lands of any consequence to his son: as the Tudor antiquary John Leland noted, John Heydon’s estate was his own creation, bought with his legal earnings. J. Leland, Itin. ed. Toulmin Smith, ii. 11. John’s assessment for the subsidy of 1436 (£27 p.a. in lands) bears testimony to his humble beginnings. E159/212, recorda Hil. rot. 14 (iii)d. Contemporaries still knew him ‘of Heydon’ or ‘of Langham’ during the mid 1430s, presumably before he purchased the manor of Baconsthorpe. CFR, xvi. 113-14, 314, 337; CCR, 1435-41, p. 164; CP25(1)/169/187/100. In many respects, his career mirrored that of William Paston, the founder of the Paston family fortunes. Also of lowly origin and another member of the legal profession, William Paston rose even higher as a lawyer. Near neighbours, Heydon and the Pastons sought to expand their holdings in the same relatively small area, no doubt exacerbating the mutual dislike that grew up between them. Castor, 43.

There is no definite evidence for Heydon’s legal education, although it is said he spoke at a reading of the second statute of Westminster at his inn of court, probably the Middle Temple, which he appears to have joined by 1440. Like other lawyers, he spent a considerable amount of time at Westminster and London. The City’s Taylors’ Company retained him as a ‘man of law’ in 1442-3, and he is reported as speaking as an apprentice in the court of King’s bench from 1456. He must, like William Paston, have possessed the ability to attain the highest ranks of his profession since in 1442 he acquired an exemption for life from becoming a serjeant-at-law, probably because he wished to avoid the public duties, sometimes onerous, that serjeants and judges were obliged to perform. Readers and Readings, 14; J.H. Baker, Men of Ct. (Selden Soc. supp. ser. xviii), ii. 865-6; CPR, 1441-6, p. 138; E.W. Ives, ‘Promotion in the Legal Profession’, Law Quarterly Rev. lxxv. 355. He first comes into view in November 1428, as an attorney in a conveyance of properties near the New Temple and in Westminster, a transaction in which his father-in-law, Edmund Wynter, was one of the parties. CCR, 1429-1435, p. 450. The Wynters of Barningham Winter were a relatively well established family, although declining in fortune when Edmund was at its head. His struggles to regain the Wynters’ lost estates must have persuaded him to marry his daughter to a thrusting young lawyer of growing means who might help him in those endeavours, in spite of Heydon’s non-gentle origins. For his part, Heydon gained in respectability, if not in personal happiness, by marrying a woman of higher birth than himself. Whatever the motivations for the match, he enjoyed a good relationship with Wynter, on whose behalf he entered a recognizance in 1436, CCR, 1435-41, p. 164. and who appointed him the overseer of his will. In the will, drawn up shortly before his death in February 1448, Edmund left his son-in-law a book of chronicles, but neglected to mention his daughter, Eleanor, suggesting that he had taken against her after she had given birth to an illegitimate child. Norwich consist. ct., Reg. Wylbey, f. 147; C139/130/4. We know of her disgrace from a letter which Margaret Paston wrote to her husband, John Paston*, in July 1444. It is possible that Margaret reported the news with some relish, given that the Pastons counted both Eleanor’s father and her husband among their enemies:

Heydonnis wyffe had chyld on Sent Petyr Day. I herde seyne that here husbond wille nowt of here, nerre of here chyld that sche had last nowdyre I herd seyn that he seyd zyf sche come in hesse presence to make here exkewce that he xuld kyt of here nose to makyn here to be know wat sche is, and yf here chyld come in hesse presence he seyd he wyld kyllyn. He wolle nowt be intretit to haue here ayen in no wysse, os I herde seyn. Paston Letters, i. 220; Richmond, Endings, 104-5.

The marriage must have broken down completely, since the justice of King’s bench, John Markham, admonished Heydon some six years later, for ‘puttyng awey’ his wife (who was perhaps forced to enter a nunnery) and keeping another woman. He was said to have turned pale at Markham’s words but to have answered him that ‘he lyved not but as God was pleased with’. Paston Letters, ii. 50-51. Although a disaster in personal terms, Heydon’s unhappy marriage was far from a complete failure since his wife bore him an all important son and heir.

Unlike Edmund Wynter, who became a councillor of John Mowbray, 2nd duke of Norfolk, Heydon did not enter the service of the Mowbray family. His best known lord is William de la Pole, earl of Suffolk, but he also served other nobles as a feoffee, estate officer or adviser, among them Humphrey Stafford, duke of Buckingham, Ralph, Lord Cromwell, Robert, Lord Willoughby of Eresby, Robert Hungerford, Lord Moleyns, and Thomas, Lord Scales. C1/28/290; CPR, 1446-52, p. 111; CFR, xviii. 183-4. Furthermore, he acted as a feoffee for the would-be peer Sir Edward Hastings of Elsing in the early 1430s, while that knight was a prisoner in the Marshalsea (as a result of his celebrated dispute with Reynold, Lord Grey of Ruthin) and again later in the same decade, not long after Hastings had finally gained his release. CP25(1)/292/67/132; 69/206 ; R.I. Jack, ‘Hastings Inheritance’, Bull. IHR, xxxviii. 1-19. Two of Heydon’s earliest patrons were the influential East Anglian knights, Sir William Phelip and Sir John Clifton. He was a mainpernor, feoffee and attorney for Phelip, who bore the title Lord Bardolf from 1437, and he held the position of Clifton’s chief steward. CFR, xvi. 59, 86, 314, 334, 336; L.E. James, ‘William de la Pole, 1st duke of Suffolk’ (Oxf. Univ. B.Litt. thesis, 1979), 21; CCR, 1429-35, p. 292; 1447-54, p. 120. He was also an executor for them both after their deaths, in 1441 and 1447, respectively. De Antiquis Legibus Liber (Cam. Soc. xxxiv), p. clxv; Reg. Wylbey, ff. 103-4. It would appear that he first entered the employment of the duchy of Lancaster through the former, under whom he officiated as deputy chief steward of its estates in southern England. During Phelip’s lifetime, he served as an attorney for the duchy and as a justice itinerant in its lordships in South Wales. Heydon became a follower of William de la Pole while Phelip and Clifton were still alive. Relations between Phelip and the earl, who had married Alice Chaucer, the widow of his younger brother, Sir John Phelip†, were not always especially good, but any conflict of loyalty faced by Heydon was resolved in the later 1430s when his two patrons settled the differences which had arisen between them in East Anglia earlier that decade. Somerville, 428; H.R. Castor, King, Crown and Duchy of Lancaster, 88-91. It is unlikely that Heydon was the ‘Magister Johannes Heydene’ who accompanied the dowager duchess of Clarence when she visited St. Albans abbey in the summer of 1429: J. Amundesham, Chron. S. Albani ed. Riley, i. 41. Having joined de la Pole’s affinity, Heydon frequently acted as a counsellor, steward and feoffee for the earl, his family and followers, among them Sir Andrew Ogard, the son-in-law of Sir John Clifton. CCR, 1435-41, p. 66; 1441-7, p. 443; 1447-54, pp. 38-39; CP25(1)/170/190/211, 212; 224/117/24; 293/73/412; CPR, 1452-61, pp. 199, 289; PCC 16 Godyn (PROB11/5, ff. 125-6). Ogard, who had entered the de la Pole circle late in life, followed Clifton’s example and employed Heydon as a steward. A letter he wrote to John Warner, his bailiff at Wymondham, in 1449 shows that he set great store by Heydon’s services. He instructed Warner to take ‘avyse of Heydon’ and expressed his concern that the latter had not received payment of a sum owing to him. Richmond, Endings, 177.

Some years before entering de la Pole’s service, Heydon found employment with the city of Norwich, which retained him as an attorney with a fee of two marks p.a. in 1430-1. At Michaelmas 1435, the city appointed him its recorder, an office for which he received an annual fee of £5, and the local guild of St. George admitted him to its ranks in 1436-7. NCR 18a, f. 177v, 190v, 213v; Norwich city recs., guild of St. George acct., NCR 8e. His involvement in Norwich’s affairs embroiled him in its turbulent internal politics, as an ally of the mercer Thomas Wetherby*. This meant that his time as recorder was relatively short-lived, since by the spring of 1437 a faction opposed to Wetherby had managed to secure his dismissal from that office. The factional infighting among the citizens coincided with a long-running jurisdictional dispute between the corporation and Norwich priory. Rightly or wrongly, Wetherby’s opponents alleged that he and his allies were secret supporters of the priory. Some years later it justified Heydon’s dismissal as recorder by claiming that he had disclosed to the prior the city’s evidence against the monks. Heydon’s links with the monks can only have made such allegations seem credible: he was a mainpernor for the prior on at least two subsequent occasions, and he served as steward of the priory’s estates. Maddern, 186; CFR, xvii. 246, 282-3. The date of the stewardship is unknown, but when Heydon’s son Henry became steward of the priory’s estates in the early 1460s Margaret Paston informed her husband that the prior had granted him ‘þe stewardchep þat hys fader had’: Paston Letters, i. 285. Wetherby’s opponents, a majority among the citizens, had additional reasons for disliking Heydon, since they deeply resented a settlement that his patron, the earl of Suffolk, imposed on the city in March 1437. This effort by the earl to resolve the ‘divyson and debate’ at Norwich failed, for a few weeks later there was a rowdy confrontation between the two factions at that year’s mayoral election. It is possible that the spark for the trouble, which prompted the Crown to revoke Norwich’s liberties, was an attempt by Heydon to attend the election in the capacity of recorder, since he afterwards pursued lawsuits at Westminster against William Ashwell*, Robert Toppe*, John Gerard II*, William Henstead* and other citizens for assaulting and menacing him on election day. He won damages of £200 and costs of 100 marks as a result of one of these suits, the jury for which included Sir Thomas Tuddenham, a fellow de la Pole retainer, and Robert Chaplain*, another ally of Thomas Wetherby. Maddern, 184-91; B.R. McRee, ‘Religious Gilds and Civic Order’, Speculum, lxvii. 855-6, 859-60; CFR, xvii. 246, 282-3; Recs. Norwich ed. Hudson and Tingey, i. p. lxxxv; KB9/229/1/106; KB27/706, rot. 116; 711, rex rot. 17d; 714, rex rot. 48; 715, rot. 62; CP40/712, rot. 124. There were further disturbances at Norwich, subsequently known as ‘Gladman’s Insurrection’, in 1443. Following this trouble, which Heydon and other East Anglian gentry helped to put down, PPC, v. 235. the Crown confiscated the city’s liberties for a second time. It was while the liberties were still in the King’s hands that Heydon was appointed a j.p. for the city.

The faction-fighting at Norwich overlapped another quarrel in which Heydon was involved, for during the late 1430s he, Tuddenham and Reynold Rous* supported Robert Lyston in a property dispute with Sir Robert Wingfield, a retainer of the 3rd duke of Norfolk. The quarrel proved the limitations of the duke’s lordship, since the machinations he employed on Wingfield’s behalf and the threats he made to Heydon earned him a period of imprisonment, first in Kenilworth castle and then in the Tower of London. In July 1440, probably on his release from confinement, Mowbray entered an enormous bond of 10,000 marks as a guarantee that he would remain within the King’s household until further notice and do Heydon no harm. In the following September Wingfield, who eventually lost the quarrel, was himself committed to the Tower. Castor, King, Crown and Duchy, 108-10; CCR, 1435-41, p. 381; R.L. Storey, End of House of Lancaster, 79; R.A. Griffiths, Hen. VI, 587. Not long afterwards, he himself fell out with the duke of Norfolk, a breach that became irreconcilable after Mowbray led an armed attack on his manor of Letheringham, Suffolk, in the summer of 1448. Thereafter, Wingfield identified firmly with the Court interest headed by William de la Pole, by now marquess of Suffolk, although he was to enter into bonds for the payment of £20 with Heydon and another de la Pole retainer, John Andrew III*, in unknown circumstances in February 1449. Heydon and Andrew would sue Wingfield’s widow over these securities in the mid 1450s: CP40/776, rot. 430. Andrew can have had little liking for Sir Robert, two of whose servants committed a serious assault on Thomas Andrew, probably his younger brother of that name, in 1447: KB27/746, rex. rot. 46. De la Pole, who had intervened in the Lyston-Wingfield dispute on the side of Lyston, was a far more effective patron than the frequently inept duke of Norfolk. A combination of his patronage and the offices they held in the duchy of Lancaster gave Tuddenham and Heydon considerable influence in East Anglia. Castor, King, Crown and Duchy, 181. From November 1443 until the accession of Edward IV, they jointly exercised the stewardship of the duchy’s lands in Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire and often arbitrated in disputes involving its tenants in those counties. This made them extremely influential in the region, and there is little doubt that they abused their positions in the duchy’s hierarchy, for personal gain and to trouble their opponents, among them the wealthy East Anglian knight Sir John Fastolf. DL37/12/100; 13/55, 76, 83, 106, 134; A.R. Smith, ‘Sir John Fastolf’ (Oxf. Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1982), 164. The two men also worked together for the duchy outside East Anglia, for Heydon was serving under de la Pole and Tuddenham in the stewardship of the duchy’s lands north of the Trent by 1444. The relationship between Tuddenham and Heydon extended beyond these official duties since each acted as the other’s feoffee and mainpernor. CP25(1)/169/188/137; 189/163; 170/190/215; 191/266; 224/117/24; F. Blomefield, Norf. vi. 373-4; CFR, xvi. 337. The fact that both were cuckolds (Tuddenham’s wife had also produced an illegitimate child) can only have enhanced a sense of aggrieved fellow feeling.

The association with de la Pole must have helped Heydon to gain election to the Parliament of 1445. His fellow knight of the shire, William Calthorpe*, was another of that peer’s retainers, as was Thomas Brewes*, one of the MPs for Suffolk. A statute enacted by the Parliament laid down that would be knights of the shire should be ‘notable Knyghtes of the same Shires for the which they shall so be chosen; other ellys such notable Squiers, Gentilmen of birth, of the same Shires as be able to be Knyghtes’. PROME, xi. 499-501. By this date, Heydon undoubtedly possessed the wealth and status to fulfil such criteria, had they applied when he stood for election. In December 1445, just before the end of the Parliament’s third session, the Crown awarded William de la Pole custody of the temporalities of the see of Norwich, a grant for which Heydon stood as one of his mainpernors. Heydon was in a good position to advise his patron about these estates since the see had become vacant through the death of Bishop Thomas Brouns, whom he had served as a chief steward. CFR, xviii. 12. Three months after the Parliament was dissolved, the King granted Heydon 40 oaks from Gimmingham, a duchy of Lancaster manor in north-east Norfolk. The grant was a reward for his service to Eton College. DL37/13/126. It does not specify what service he had performed, although it is possible he had helped it with the private bill it had presented to the Parliament. PROME, xi. 414-39.

During the later 1440s, the King continued to shower largesse on de la Pole, whom he created duke of Suffolk in 1448, but the failings of a government dominated by a Court clique made the peer and his fellow courtiers increasingly unpopular. To exacerbate matters, the Court’s hold on the government had encouraged individual members of the royal establishment to further their own regional interests at the expense of others. One such was Robert Hungerford, Lord Moleyns, whom Heydon served as a counsellor. It was Heydon’s discovery that an ancestor of Moleyns’s wife had once acquired an option to purchase the Norfolk manor of Gresham that prompted Moleyns to seize the property from its owner, John Paston, in February 1448. In reality, that option had long since lapsed and Moleyns’s claim was completely spurious. Paston succeeded in reoccupying Gresham some months later but Moleyns’s servants retook it in January 1449. Paston turned to the chancellor for redress in the following year. In his petition, he alleged that no fewer than 1,000 men had taken part in the second forcible entry by Moleyns’s servants and that Heydon had recruited them for the task. Heydon’s motives for acting against the Pastons are difficult precisely to discern, although it is likely that he had inherited a dislike of them from his father-in-law. Edmund Wynter had deeply resented the acquisition by Judge William Paston of the former Wynter manor of East Beckham in north-east Norfolk, a property that the financially-pressed Wynters had lost some three decades earlier. According to one authority, it was almost certainly Heydon, working for Wynter, who made it so difficult for the Pastons to make good their claim to East Beckham after William Paston’s death in 1444. Richmond, First Phase, 71ff; Castor, Blood and Roses, 42. Whether connected with the earlier Wynter-Paston feud or merely prompted by the hard-headed decision to connive in the unjust behaviour of the powerful Moleyns, Heydon’s role in the Gresham affair ensured for him the bitter enmity of the Pastons, who were never to regain that important manor. Paston Letters, i. 55-56, 233; ii. 29-30.

Episodes like the Gresham affair contributed to a backlash in East Anglia against those associated with the duke of Suffolk and the Court during the national political crisis of 1449-50. The foremost opponent of de la Pole’s followers in the region was Sir John Fastolf, who had suffered humiliating losses defending his interests against them. During the 1440s, Tuddenham and Heydon troubled him over a manor at Caister near Great Yarmouth, a property he had rented from the two daughters and coheirs of Thomas, Lord Bardolf, and was probably hoping to buy. The details of the quarrel, which began after the death of the younger daughter Joan (widow of Sir William Phelip) in 1447, are now obscure. It nevertheless appears that Heydon (involved in Joan’s affairs as one of her executors), along with Tuddenham (an overseer of her will) and other followers of the de la Poles, used the inquests on her properties to challenge the knight’s possession of the rented manor and possibly other Bardolf properties as well. De Antiquis Legibus Liber, p. clxxxviii; Smith, 156-7. Heydon further antagonized Fastolf in the later 1440s and during the 1450s. After the Crown had confiscated the knight’s manor of Titchwell, Norfolk, in 1448, Sir John held him partly responsible, accusing him of having counselled the escheator, Thomas Sharneburne*, to forge the inquisition that was the basis for the seizure. P.S. Lewis, ‘Sir John Fastolf’s lawsuit over Titchwell’, Historical Jnl. i. 1-20; A.R. Smith, ‘Litigation and Politics’, in Property and Politics ed. Pollard, 63. Heydon also gave advice to (Sir) Philip Wentworth*, who was making unjust claims to parts of Fastolf’s estate and competing with Sir John for the wardship of his relative, Thomas Fastolf†. Magdalen Coll. Oxf., Fastolf pprs. 42; Paston Letters, ii. 163. In April 1450, Sir John ordered his men to draw up full details of all the wrongs he had suffered at Heydon’s hands. Paston Letters ed. Davis, Beadle and Richmond, 81-82. Later that year, he instructed his servants to oppose any attempt by the likes of Tuddenham and Heydon to seek an acquittal from an indictment for maintenance he had secured against them in relation to the dispute over the Bardolf inheritance. He also rejected any idea of negotiating with them. Ibid. 93-94; Smith, ‘Sir John Fastolf’, 160-1. At the end of 1450 Fastolf expressed his frustration at the apparent reluctance of some of the counsellors of Ralph, Lord Cromwell, to defend that peer’s interests in East Anglia against Tuddenham and Heydon. Paston Letters ed. Davis, Beadle and Richmond, 112. If the latter was indeed working against those interests, he must only recently have fallen out with Cromwell, whom he had served as a chief steward for more than a decade.

In his disputes with members of the de la Pole affinity Fastolf found two ready supporters in his protégé and confidant John Paston and William Yelverton*, j.KB, who had replaced Heydon as recorder of Norwich in 1437. Whatever the plausibility of the argument that Fastolf and Yelverton headed an ‘East Anglian movement’ against the followers of the duke of Suffolk, As posited by Smith, 168. they and their allies made determined efforts to break the power and influence of the de la Pole affinity in the region. The duke of Suffolk’s downfall and death in 1450 had left Tuddenham, Heydon and other de la Pole men in a vulnerable position, for their enemies turned to the leading opponent of the Court, Richard, duke of York, for redress of their grievances. In October that year, there were reports that Tuddenham and Heydon had felt driven to appeal to York for protection. According to one hostile witness, they even offered the duke’s chamberlain, Sir William Oldhall*, more than £2,000 for his ‘good lordshep’. It would seem that any efforts they made to ingratiate themselves with Sir William were short-lived, for in the following month Yelverton claimed that their servants were spreading ‘the falsest tales’ about both himself and Oldhall. Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 47-49, 53, 524.

During late 1450 and early 1451 Yelverton was an active member of a commission of oyer and terminer appointed to investigate wrongdoings committed in East Anglia. When the commissioners arrived at Norwich in the autumn of 1450, the citizens seized the opportunity to vent their grievances against the late duke of Suffolk and his affinity. According to the presenting juries, Tuddenham, Heydon, John Ulveston*, John Belley and others had confederated together at Norwich in the mid 1430s, in order to corrupt justice for their own profit, both in the city and in the counties of Norfolk and Suffolk. The juries alleged that de la Pole’s men had interfered in Norwich’s mayoral election of 1433 and extorted money from the citizens on many occasions. They also said that John Andrew III, Tuddenham and Heydon had forced Sir John Fastolf to pay them £105 in 1438, by threatening the lives and well-being of three of his servants. Furthermore, one of the juries accused Heydon and, another de la Pole retainer, John Wymondham*, of forging an inquisition which found that Gregory Draper* of Norwich and others had trespassed on Wymondham’s property at Gressenhall and Swanton Morley. In addition, the juries came up with several far-fetched charges not specific to Norwich. They said that the duke of Suffolk had conspired with the duke of Orléans to wage war against Henry VI (an accusation previously made in the Parliament of November 1449); that Heydon had tried to raise support for the French king; and that Suffolk’s followers had counselled him to have the late Humphey, duke of Gloucester, put to death. KB9/267/23-24; 272/2-5; Recs. Norwich, i. 346-7; Storey, 218. About this time, the corporation of Norwich took the opportunity to compose a memorandum detailing the wrongdoings Suffolk’s men had allegedly committed against the city. This specifically charged Heydon with having supported the prior of Norwich and others in their jurisdictional disputes with the citizens – even while the city employed him for his counsel – and alleged that one of the lawsuits he had brought in the wake of the mayoral election of 1437 had been invalid in law. The memorandum also included a bizarre story about a visit de la Pole’s wife, Alice, paid to Norwich, probably in the early 1440s. According to this account, Alice, then countess of Suffolk, had gone to the city dressed as a ‘huswife of the countre’, accompanied by Tuddenham and others in similar disguise. One evening during their stay they went to ‘take their disportes’ in nearby Lakenham wood, where they encountered Thomas Aylmer, a keeper of the city’s ditches. Not realising who they were, he tried to bar their way and he and Tuddenham quarrelled and exchanged blows. Following this incident, the mayor of Norwich arrested and imprisoned the ditcher and his associates but Alice, Tuddenham and Heydon afterwards complained to her husband that the city was misgoverned. The memorandum further alleged that it was these complaints, rather than Gladman’s Insurrection, which had led to the confiscation of the city’s liberties in 1443. It tried to represent the disorder of that year as nothing more than a boisterous street pageant and claimed that Tuddenham and Heydon had been behind the subsequent indictment of the mayor and other leading citizens. Norwich city recs., complaint of city against Tuddenham, Heydon and others, 1434-5, NCR 9c/2. The incident at Lakenham wood is discussed by R.E. Archer, ‘Women as Landholders and Administrators’, in Women in English Soc. ed. Goldberg, 154-5, but she accepts the citizens’ claim that the loss of their liberties was due to Alice and her associates. She also wrongly states that it was Tuddenham who was arrested after the fracas in the wood. This was manifest nonsense, a blatant attempt by the citizens to blame Suffolk and his men for the misfortune which they had brought upon themselves, but the charges they levelled against the duke and his followers in 1450 certainly demonstrate the resentment they had felt about de la Pole’s interventions in the city’s affairs. At least some of the alleged instances of extortion referred to occasions when members of the de la Pole affinity had collected fines the King had imposed on the corporation and individual citizens, although no doubt some of Suffolk’s followers had also taken the opportunity to peculate for their own gain.

In late 1450 the commissioners of oyer and terminer arrived at Beccles in Suffolk, where they took further indictments against Heydon and his associates. As at Norwich, the jury accused the indicted men of having formed a conspiracy dedicated towards the pursuit of their own profit. It also found that in the mid 1430s John Ulveston, along with his late stepfather, William Mekylffyld, and William’s brother, Robert, had unjustly disseised the three young daughters and heirs of Roger Chestan of their father’s manor at Westleton in east Suffolk. The Chestans had recovered possession but in July 1440 Ulveston and the Mekelffylds, supported by Tuddenham, Heydon and Belley, had again ejected the coheiresses from Westleton. The jury added that they had seized the children (all infants less than five years of age) and thrown them violently onto a dungpit (‘sterquilium’) lying outside the gates of the manor. The Beccles jurors also accused de la Pole’s men of having pursued false actions in his name against the Chestans’ lawyers, John Jenney, and his sons, William* and John*, and of maintaining a suit which the abbot of Leiston had brought against the Jenneys. The indictments taken at Beccles and Norwich led to further legal proceedings in the court of King’s bench, but in the end these came to nothing. KB27/766, rex rots. 6, 44d; 767, rex rot. 7; 793, rex rot. 6; 798, rex rot. 9.

Even in the short term, the sessions at Beccles and Norwich brought little immediate comfort to the opponents of Heydon and other members of the de la Pole affinity. In January 1451, one of the Pastons’ correspondents claimed that the Crown would have pardoned Tuddenham and Heydon certain sums they owed the Exchequer had not Simon Blake, bailiff of Swaffham, warned the chancellor and other lords of the consequences, namely that the men of Suffolk would refuse to pay any tax and the commons of Norfolk would rise. It was probably also in early 1451 that opponents of the pair drew up a list of all those that they were said ‘myschevely’ to have oppressed and wronged, and drew up a memorandum of their indictable offences, including Heydon’s illegal granting of liveries and riding ‘armyd a-yens the statute’. Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 60-62, 525-8. By now, however, the tide was beginning to turn in favour of the two men. Although both were no longer j.p.s, they had managed to retain their joint stewardship of the duchy of Lancaster’s lands in East Anglia and Heydon had continued to enjoy the patronage of Lord Moleyns. They had also found a significant protector in the person of Thomas, Lord Scales, and it was crucially to their advantage that he had a place on the oyer and terminer commission hearing complaints against them. After the commission reached west Norfolk in early 1451 Yelverton’s clerk, William Wayte, was afraid that it would be difficult to prevent Scales, whose main estates lay in that part of the county, from maintaining the two men and attempting to neutralize some of the opposition to them. Ibid. 60-63. By March that year the enemies of Tuddenham and Heydon were gloomily concluding that the pair had ‘as grett rewill as euer they hadde’ in Norfolk. By now servants of the pair were openly boasting that their masters, who had either gone into hiding or absented themselves from the county, Although Heydon is said to have slipped in to Norwich to visit the priory in early 1451: Paston Letters, ed. Davis, ii. 67-68. would soon return home ‘and be als well att ese as euer they were’. Previously the Pastons’ friend John Dam* had managed to have Heydon indicted for treason (‘for takyng down of þe quarter’ of an executed man), but now it was reported that the MP had secured Dam’s indictment (also for treason) in revenge and even that he was about to receive a knighthood. There were also rumours that a Kent jury had indicted the earl of Oxford, Yelverton, Paston and Dam for maintaining the oyer and terminer commission. Ibid. i. 238-9, 240-1; ii. 67-68, 524.

The worst fears of Fastolf and his friends were realized at another session of oyer and terminer held at Norwich on 29 Apr. This time John Prysote*, c.j.c.p., presided and, according to Fastolf’s servant, Thomas Howes, he was so biased in favour of Tuddenham and Heydon that he provoked protests from Yelverton, sitting alongside him as his fellow justice. Prysote adjourned proceedings to Walsingham, where the de la Pole men enjoyed particularly strong support, and when the session reopened there in May, no one except John Paston dared complain about them. Paston Letters ed. Davis, Beadle and Richmond, 126-7, 129-31. At the end of 1451 it was reported that Scales was attempting to bring about an accord between Tuddenham and Heydon on the one hand and Thomas Daniell*, then an opponent of the de la Pole affinity in East Anglia, on the other. Heydon had clashed with Daniell in September the previous year, raising a force of 26 armed men in support of Osbert Mountford against Daniell in a quarrel over the manor of Bradeston. In doing so, he had found himself in agreement with John Paston, another of Mountford’s supporters. They had nevertheless remained at odds, and when Heydon subsequently stood accused of riot for his actions Paston had helped to frame the indictments taken against him. Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 76-77; Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, ii. 145; Castor, Blood and Roses, 66, 73. As it happened, a change in regional alliances later in the decade found Daniell associating with Scales and the de la Pole affinity, and there were claims in about 1460 that he was benefiting from the counsel of Heydon, Tuddenham and John Wymondham. KB27/783, rot. 56; Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 205-6. Notwithstanding the assistance provided by the likes of Scales, the ability of the de la Pole affinity (which had rallied round the widowed duchess of Suffolk) to weather the storms of 1450-1 says much for its innate strength. Even in October 1450, when the affinity’s fortunes were at a particularly low ebb, William Wayte had felt it necessary to warn John Paston, ‘Syr, be ware of Heydon, for he wold destroyed yow, be my feyth’. Castor, King, Crown and Duchy, 157-8, 189; Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 48.

In February 1452, the government once again appointed Tuddenham and Heydon to an ad hoc commission in Norfolk, but they could not yet feel completely secure. In the following April, the duke of Norfolk proclaimed his intention to inquire into the ‘gret riotts, extorcyons, oryble wrongis and hurts’ which they, (Sir) Miles Stapleton* and Lord Scales had committed in Norfolk. Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, ii. 258-9. Furthermore, at the beginning of 1453 the court of King’s bench was ordered to act upon the indictments against Tuddenham, Heydon and other de la Pole men taken at Norwich. KB27/767, rex rot. 7. By now, however, events were running strongly in favour of the de la Pole affinity since its friends at Court were regaining the initiative in national politics. The political shifts which allowed the duke of York twice to assume the role of Protector of England in the mid 1450s, proved far less of a threat to Heydon and other de la Pole men than the crisis of 1450-1. York conducted a policy of moderation towards his opponents, M.H. Keen, Eng. in the Later Middle Ages, 442-3, 444-5. meaning that Heydon, only recently restored to the bench, was allowed to remain a j.p. following the Yorkist victory at the battle of St. Albans in May 1455. Shortly after the Parliament called by the victorious Yorkists opened in the following July, it was rumoured that Yelverton, John Paston and ‘Mayster Alyngton’ were scheming to present a bill of ‘diuers tresons’ committed by Heydon, Tuddenham and the bishop of Norwich to that assembly. Paston reacted by angrily dismissing the rumour, which he suspected might have emanated from ‘Heydon and his dyscyplis’, as a ‘slawnderus noyse’. Paston Letters ed. Davis, i. 84-85; ii. 124. Allington was probably either the future Speaker, William Allington†, or his elder brother, John. Heydon again lost his place on the bench for a few months in 1457 but it is unlikely that this second dismissal was politically inspired, since now a hard-line Court faction, against any compromise with the Yorkists, dominated the government. Presumably, it was this change in political fortune that had prompted Sir William Oldhall to appoint Tuddenham and Heydon as feoffees to the use of his will within a year of York’s second protectorate having ended. CAD, i. B1244. In November 1458 Heydon was one of a mixed band of Household men and Court supporters who clashed with York’s ally, Richard, earl of Warwick at Westminster Hall. Forced to take flight to his barge on the Thames, Warwick came to view the disturbance, which probably emanated from an exchange of words between one of his retainers and a royal servant, as an assassination attempt. M. Hicks, Warwick, 152-3.

In the meantime, Heydon remained a thorn in the side for Sir John Fastolf and his allies in East Anglia. For example, he supported John Andrew in his quarrels with Thomas Howes and sued William Paston† for an alleged trespass on his property at Thursford. Paston Letters ed. Davis, Beadle and Richmond, 168; KB27/790, rot. 58; 796, rot. 36. Furthermore, in about 1456, the Pastons’ correspondent, the Franciscan John Brackley, feared that a ‘cursyd covy’ of the MP, Andrew, Tuddenham and others were about to complain about him to his religious order. Appealing to the Pastons for help, he asked for a list of all those who had indicted Tuddenham and Heydon at the oyer and terminer sessions of 1450-1. With such a list he could ‘schew to my ordre lyk a kalendere a legende of here lyvys and here rewlyng of the cuntré in destruccyon and gret myschef of the cuntré in here dayes’. Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 154. In another letter that he wrote to John Paston in late 1459, Brackley reported that Tuddenham and Heydon had received commissions to arrest supporters of the duke of York. Ibid. 184-5. In fact, neither appears to have received any such commission although both served on several anti-Yorkist commissions at the end of Henry VI’s reign. It is possible that Heydon sat in the Parliament of 1459, the assembly that attainted the Yorkist lords and their supporters, as a burgess for Great Yarmouth. Even if he did not find a seat, he played an important role in the Parliament because he was among the select group of lawyers that drafted the bill of attainder. This committee was probably responsible for the detailed provisions of the bill and the extremely partisan tone of its preamble and, no doubt, its members hoped for significant reward for their work. According to one report, within a year of the Parliament, one of the committee, Dr John Aleyn, regretted that those who had called the assembly had not remained in power. Had they done so, he and his fellow committee members (who besides Heydon also included (Sir) John Fortescue*, c.j.KB, and the distinguished civil lawyer John Morton) would have been ‘made for evir’. Ibid. 221; Griffiths, 824. Heydon’s membership of the cttee. is the basis for the suggestion (for which see HP Biogs. ed. Wedgwood and Holt, 453) that he was an MP in 1459. If he did sit, it was not for the county of Norf., the city of Norwich or the borough of Bishop’s Lynn. The return for Great Yarmouth has not survived.

After the Yorkists regained control of the government in the summer of 1460, Tuddenham, Heydon and others associated with the Court again faced the possibility of retribution from their enemies. Fortunately for the pair, the Yorkist lords ordered the authorities in Norfolk to ensure that no harm came to them because they wished to have any accusations against them referred to the due processes of the law. Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, iii. 221-2. It was probably about this time that Tuddenham and Heydon made approaches to Yelverton and John Paston, to see if there was a chance of coming to terms with them. In the following October, however, Friar Brackley advised Paston to seek a commission for the arrest of them and their associates from the chancellor. Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 200-1, 212-14. In the same month Brackley heard that Heydon was ‘for Barkschire in the Comon Hows’, Ibid. 210. but this proved a false rumour since those returned to the Parliament of 1460 for that county were Sir Robert Harcourt* and Thomas Roger*, both of whom had Yorkist sympathies. Although his patron, the dowager duchess of Suffolk, possessed estates in Berkshire, Heydon did not hold lands there and would have made an unlikely candidate to represent the county in any Parliament, let alone one called by the very Yorkist lords whom he had helped to attaint.

Shortly after the Parliament opened, Heydon lost his place on the commission of the peace for Norfolk and during its first session he found himself at the receiving end of litigation on the part of the earl of Warwick, who sued him, Sir Thomas Tuddenham, Thomas Daniell and others in the common pleas over the fracas at Westminster Hall two years earlier. CP40/799, rot. 490. Yet, if Heydon’s enemies hoped to take immediate advantage of the accession of Edward IV a few months later, the new government’s sensible reluctance to take every complaint against him and Tuddenham at face value would have disappointed them. In the meantime, the pair continued to trouble their opponents, who remained ever ready to blame them as the cause of most of their problems. In June 1461 there were rumours at Norwich (wrong as it turned out) that they would receive royal pardons and even that they would accompany the duchess of Suffolk to Edward’s coronation. In July William Lomnor advised John Paston to ‘take good awayte to your person, for the word [world] is right wilde’ and had been since Heydon’s ‘sauffe gard’ was proclaimed at Walsyngham. Lomnour also asserted that ‘the countré’ would rise and ‘doo moche harme’ if Heydon were not punished. It is possible that the authorities briefly took the MP into custody, since about this time another of Paston’s correspondents reported that ‘Haydon hath payed ccccc. marc. and is delyuered’. At the beginning of August Paston, perhaps despairing of ever bringing his enemy to book, asked his wife to try to recover ‘diuers billes of extorcion don be Heydon and other’ that the late coroner for Norfolk, Thomas Denys, had ordered his wife to bury, even though the bills were ‘ny roten’. Ibid. i. 97; ii. 234, 237, 240, 242, 245. During the same summer, there was an acrimonious dispute (in which Paston was one of the principals) over the election of Norfolk’s knights of the shire to Edward IV’s first Parliament. The county was still in a very unsettled state in the autumn, prompting the King to appoint his household knight, Sir Thomas Montgomery†, sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk. When Montgomery departed for East Anglia, the recently knighted William Yelverton accompanied him and, upon arriving at Norwich, he and the judge proclaimed their intention to administer impartial justice to any who sought it. More significant for the opponents of Tuddenham and Heydon, they also promised the King’s protection to those who wished to present grievances against them. Ibid. i. 276-8; ii. 262-3. Among those who complained about Heydon’s behaviour in this period were Richard Fiennes, Lord Dacre, and his wife Joan. At some stage before November 1461, the couple won a Chancery suit against the MP and other feoffees of her recently deceased mother for denying them possession of three Norfolk manors that were part of Joan’s inheritance. C1/27/501; 29/351-4; Richmond, First Phase, 222n.

Early in the following year, the new King’s most powerful supporter, Richard, earl of Warwick, began a lawsuit in King’s bench against Heydon, Sir Thomas Tuddenham, John Wymondham and Robert Durant (‘late of Westminster, yeoman’) for a trespass committed in Middlesex. The brief entry in the plea roll provides no information about the supposed trespass, and the case, perhaps connected with the disturbance at Westminster Hall in the autumn of 1458, appears not to have progressed to pleadings. KB27/803, rots. 4d, 35d. Whatever the case, it was soon irrelevant as far as Sir Thomas was concerned since he died on the scaffold on 23 Feb. 1462, for his alleged involvement in a plot against Edward IV. One chronicler mistakenly recorded that Heydon was another of the plotters arrested with Tuddenham; Three 15th Cent. Chrons. (Cam. Soc. ser. 2, xxviii), 162. in fact, he succeeded in adapting to the change of dynasty. A couple of months after the knight’s execution, he managed to obtain a general pardon. Dated 23 Apr. 1462, this secured him from all legal proceedings that the Crown had pending against him, including those arising from the indictments of 1450. CPR, 1461-7, p. 182; KB27/798, rex rot. 9. In spite of the pardon, and another that he received in October 1468, C67/46, m. 16. the Yorkist government appears to have viewed him with suspicion, never appointing him to any commissions or other offices. Denied public office, except during the brief Readeption of Henry VI, He was appointed to several ad hoc commissions during the Readeption but was not, as incorrectly stated in M. Sayer, ‘Norf. Involvement in Dynastic Conflict’, Norf. Archaeology, xxxvi. 312, restored to the Norf. bench. he kept himself busy working for private individuals. While retaining his links with the de la Poles in the persons of William de la Pole’s son and widow, he also served Isabel, Lady Morley (a de la Pole by birth), as a councillor and chief steward, and Edmund Grey, earl of Kent, as a councillor, and remained in general demand as a feoffee and executor. KB27/826, rex rot 105; CAD, v. A10953, 10956-7; Grey of Ruthin Valor ed. Jack, 52, 139; CCR, 1468-76, no. 189; CPR, 1461-7, p. 471; CP25(1)/170/193/59; Norwich consist. ct., Reg. Jekkys, ff. 97-99.

Heydon seems to have spent a considerable amount of time in Norwich in his later years, prompting Margaret Paston to remark that he visited the city ‘ner eury wek’. Paston Letters ed. Davis, i. 273. He was able to resolve his differences with one of his former opponents there, since in 1467 Robert Toppe, once a member of the anti-Wetherby faction, appointed him the overseer of his will. Reg. Jekkys, ff. 97-99. He was likewise on good terms with Walter Lyhert, bishop of Norwich, who bequeathed him a silver cup in his will of 1472, Blomefield, iii. 358. and a long-standing friend of John Selot, master of the city’s hospital of St. Giles. The friendship between Heydon and Selot, a cleric closely linked with the de la Poles, had survived a dispute in which they had found themselves on opposing sides. During the late 1450s and early 1460s, Selot had quarrelled with John Jenney over lands at Cringleford just outside Norwich, a controversy in which Heydon had become involved as a trustee of the lands in question, which had once belonged to Thomas Wetherby. It was as a Wetherby feoffee that he had found himself in the ironic position of taking the side of his erstwhile enemy, Jenney, who had married one of Wetherby’s daughters and coheirs. The dispute’s eventual outcome – comprehensive defeat for Jenney – can only have helped Heydon to renew his friendship with Selot, who subsequently provided for the holding of an obit for him in the hospital’s church after his death, an annual service still celebrated in 1535. C. Rawcliffe, Medicine for the Soul, 114, 147-50, 257.

Although capable of associating with former enemies, Heydon was never reconciled with the Pastons, who continued to regard with him with considerable distrust. It therefore seems likely that the John Heydon whom the Pastons allegedly tried to bribe to act as a witness on their behalf during the disputes over Sir John Fastolf’s will (Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, iv. 238-9) was a namesake of the MP. In June 1465, just as they faced losing the Norfolk manor of Drayton to John de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, Margaret Paston would not discount the possibility that Heydon was supporting the duke in his claim to the property, even if she could not prove it:

I canne not haue no knowlych that Haydon mellyth in the matere of Drayton. Yf he do oght therin, he doyth it closely, as he ys wont to doo, and wayshyth hys hondys therof as Pylate dyde. Paston Letters ed. Davis, i. 307.

The rivalry between Heydon and the Pastons is evident at the Readeption of Henry VI, even though both he and they supported the restoration of the Lancastrian King. During Henry’s short second reign, the most influential magnate in East Anglia was John de Vere, 13th earl of Oxford, and in the autumn of 1470 the Pastons and their friends vied with Heydon and his ‘parte’ for his ‘gode lordshyp’. The animosity between the Pastons and the MP was as strong as ever in the summer of 1477, when John Paston† was seeking the hand of Margery, the daughter of Sir Thomas Brewes. It happened that Heydon was visiting the Brewes manor at Salle when Margery’s mother Elizabeth discussed the proposed match with her husband. She was in considerable discomfort when she did so, since she was suffering a bad bout of ill health, although Paston ascribed Heydon’s presence as the principal reason for her ‘gret peyn’. Ibid. 432-4, 609-10.

The Pastons had no greater liking for the MP’s son and heir. In 1463 Margaret Paston, observing that the young Henry Heydon had taken to riding around the countryside in some style, with ‘iiij or v men wyth hym in a clothyng’, claimed that he had ‘but lytyll fafore in þis contré’. Tutored by Henry Spilman†, Henry was another lawyer and in due course he was sufficiently trusted by the Yorkist government for it to select him for service on local commissions and the Norfolk bench. In 1472 he dismayed the Pastons, then struggling to make good their claim to the late Sir John Fastolf’s estate, by buying the former Fastolf manor of ‘Loundhall’ in Saxthorpe from William Waynflete, bishop of Winchester, who by that date was the sole administrator of the knight’s will. The purchase price was 600 marks but Waynflete agreed to forgo two thirds of this sum because Henry and his father had undertaken to give him their advice and service in all matters relating to Magdalen, the college he was founding at Oxford. Ibid. 285, 364. There is no evidence to prove the suggestion in HP Biogs. 451-2 that Henry sat for Great Yarmouth in several later 15th-cent. Parls. Just as the sale of Loundhall was taking place, the Pastons heard that Lady Boleyn was to acquire Guton Hall in Brandiston, another manor from the Fastolf estate, but they had been misinformed, since it was one of the properties Waynflete settled on Magdalen College. Paston Letters ed. Davis, i. 574; C.F. Richmond, Paston Fam.: Fastolf’s Will, 238. It was also reported that Henry Heydon had acquired the Fastolf manor at Titchwell, but this likewise went to Magdalen. Lady Boleyn was Henry’s mother-in-law, since he had married Anne, one of her daughters by her late husband, (Sir) Geoffrey Boleyn*, a wealthy London mercer of Norfolk origin. The date of this marriage is unknown, although the links between the Heydons and Boleyns dated back some time: when Geoffrey Boleyn was negotiating the purchase of the manor of Blickling from Sir John Fastolf in the early 1450s, it was rumoured that he was actually acting for Heydon rather than himself. It is possible that Henry spent his boyhood in the Boleyn household, since ‘of Blickling’ was one of the place name aliases given to him in a royal pardon he received in 1468. Paston Letters ed. Davis, i. 246-7; C76/46, m. 16. The MP acted as a feoffee for the Boleyns, just as he had for Lady Boleyn’s father, Thomas Hoo, Lord Hoo and Hastings, a fellow retainer of William de la Pole. CFR, xix. 251; KB27/796, rex rot. 6. Following Hoo’s death in February 1455, there were many years of disputes over his estates and the performance of his will. In the later 1450s the administrator of the will (Hoo’s stepbrother Richard Lewknor*) had sued Heydon and other feoffees over their supposed refusal to sell the rape of Hastings in accordance with the instructions they had received. During the late 1470s, the MP responded to a Chancery suit concerning three of the Hoo manors in Sussex by disavowing any personal interest in the matter and declaring his willingness to act as the court saw fit to direct. C1/26/117-19; Procs. Chancery Eliz. ed. Caley and Bayley, ii. 51-53. It is possible that this Chancery case was collusive, since one of the plaintiffs was his friend Lady Boleyn.

An old man when this suit took place, Heydon made his own will in the spring of 1477. In this document, dated 24 Mar. that year, he requested burial in the chapel (long since vanished) that he had built for himself on the west side of Norwich cathedral. Reg. Caston, ff. 49-50; Blomefield, iv. 26; vi. 505. He directed that the prior of the cathedral priory should receive 20s. for attending his funeral, left lesser sums to the sub prior, monks and lay brothers and made bequests of money to a number of other religious institutions, including St. Giles’s hospital, and to the prisoners of Norwich and Norfolk. Evidently feeling qualms of conscience and perhaps even fearing for his soul, he also directed his executors, feoffees and heirs to make restitution to any whose lands or rents he had wrongly occupied and to ensure that all those who had obtained land from him, whether by purchase or exchange, possessed a legal estate in their acquisitions. He chose as his executors his son Henry, the chaplain Thomas Cosyne and Edward Calwe. He also appointed Dr. John Morton, with whom he had worked on the bill of attainder of 1459, to act as overseer of the will, directing that he should have a jewel worth no less £10 for his trouble. Not mentioned in the will is Heydon’s disgraced wife, or any other members of his immediate family save Henry, to whom he left all his lands, although he left 10s. to each son and daughter of an obscure ‘cousin’, Edmund More, and asked that Lady Boleyn and other ‘special friends’ should receive something from his estate. It is likely that these friends included two other East Anglian ladies, Elizabeth Clere and Anne Wingfield. As far back as the mid 1440s, Heydon had helped Elizabeth’s late husband, Robert Clere of Ormesby, to make his will. A Clere feoffee, in the spring of 1478 he took part in a transaction by which Elizabeth gave a rent of £5 p.a. to Norwich cathedral priory. CAD, iv. A7758, 7774, 7778; Paston Letters ed. Davis, i. 233; CPR, 1476-85, p. 96. Anne was on good terms with Heydon in spite of having married the son and namesake of one of his past enemies, Sir Robert Wingfield. In a will she made in March 1478, she included him among those to whom she awarded a powerful say in the settlement of her lands after her death. CCR, 1476-85, no. 479.

As it happened, Heydon predeceased Anne, who outlived him by nearly 20 years. He died on 22 Sept. 1479, perhaps simply of old age or quite possibly of the plague that swept through the country that year. His inquisition post mortem, held on the following 4 Nov., found that he had died seised of Wood Hall in Baconsthorpe and 15 other manors in Norfolk. C140/72/72; Castor, Blood and Roses, 297-8. Wood Hall provided the site for the Heydons’ castle at Baconsthorpe, the construction of which the MP may have begun. Richmond, First Phase, 11n; Norf. Archaeology, xxiv. p. lx; xxxiii. 492. Like Wood Hall, most of the 15 other manors lay in north Norfolk, although three of them lay situated near Wymondham in the south of the county. The inquisition was not a comprehensive inquiry into Heydon’s lands, for it did not include several other properties that he had acquired. These included Pattesley, a manor he had bought in the late 1460s, CP25(1)/170/192/31; Blomefield, vi. 505; x. 27, 405, 406, 412. and lands near Bishop’s Lynn that he had sold to John Guybon, probably in the mid 1450s. C1/26/340, 624. Heydon had also augmented his estate with temporary acquisitions of lands in Norfolk. In November 1442 he had obtained a ten-year farm of the duchy of Lancaster manor of Beeston, DL37/53/9. and a few years later his patron, William de la Pole, had granted him the wardship of Elizabeth, the daughter and heir of Thomas Lucas, so giving him possession of the Lucas manor of Kipton, Norfolk. In January 1457, William Rookwood and Thomas Page had abducted her at Norwich, although subsequently Heydon had won very substantial damages against them in King’s bench for the loss of her wardship and marriage. KB27/784, rot. 61d; 785, rot. 44. It is likely that Heydon supplemented his income from land and the law through trade. On at least one occasion in the early 1440s, he acquired a licence to export grain to the Low Countries and his son was a shipowner who traded on his own account. DKR, xlviii. 342; G.E. Morey, ‘East Anglian Soc. in 15th Cent.’ (London Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1951), 328.

No doubt Henry Heydon invested at least some of the income he derived from trading activities in the lands he bought during his father’s lifetime. Loundhall was not his only purchase, for in the late 1460s he bought West Wickham and two other manors in west Kent, perhaps with the encouragement of his Boleyn in-laws who were landowners in that county. Heading the list of his feoffees for those properties was Henry Stafford, duke of Buckingham, whose father, Humphrey, the MP had served as a steward. CCR, 1468-76, no. 324; 1476-85, no. 42. Having come into his own, Henry threw off his father’s Lancastrian associations to the extent that he became steward of the household of Cecily, duchess of York, who left him ‘a tablett’ garnished with precious stones and 30 pearls in her will. PCC 25 Vox (PROB11/10, f. 196). Knighted at the coronation of Henry VII, W.A. Shaw, Knights of Eng. i. 142. he was one of the leading gentry in Norfolk by the end of the fifteenth century. Following his death in 1504 he was buried beside the MP in the family chapel at Norwich cathedral. In his will he left Sir John Paston his best horse, indicating that he and Paston had finally managed to overcome the decades of animosity between their two families. PCC 23 Holgrave (PROB11/14, ff. 181-3); CFR, xxii. no. 789.