One of the most experienced fifteenth-century East Anglian knights of the shire, Inglose sat in no fewer than seven Parliaments. A prominent and successful soldier, he was a friend of his better-known contemporary and kinsman, Sir John Fastolf.
The Ingloses had resided at Loddon in south-east Norfolk since at least the mid 1340s,
More constructively, Inglose attested the returns of the knights of the shire for Norfolk to the Parliaments of 1410 and 1411 and served as a customs collector at Great Yarmouth in 1415. He relinquished the office in August that year when he accompanied Henry V to France. By then he had already seen military service, having campaigned in Gascony as a member of the retinue of Thomas, duke of Clarence, who held the lieutenancy of that duchy in 1412-13.
In August 1417 Inglose returned to France with the duke of Clarence, having taken out letters of protection the previous May.
During the second half of 1418 Inglose took part in the siege of Rouen, which finally fell in January the following year. While at the siege, he was one of the knights who lodged with Sir William Bowet, a Cumbrian who had acquired a landed interest in East Anglia in the right of his first wife, Joan, the daughter and heir of Sir Robert Ufford.
Despite the burden of raising Bowet’s ransom, Inglose had won enough wealth as a soldier to begin investing in the land market at home, and opportunities to do so soon arose. In 1423 his maternal uncle, Sir John Genney, died without any surviving children, having outlived his son, Roger. In his will Sir John had ordered his executors to sell his manor of Pickworth, Rutland, to his nephew for 1,000 marks, provided Inglose paid this sum within a year of his death. Genney also directed that he should have the opportunity to buy his manors of Dilham and Haveringland in Norfolk for £300 after the death of his wife, Alice, who had a life interest in these properties. In the event, Inglose acquired all of these lordships, as well as two other Genney manors at Lound, Suffolk, and Reedham, Norfolk. Furthermore, he managed to gain possession of Haveringland and Dilham by 1426, 12 years before the death of Alice, who moved to Norwich during her widowhood. Probably it was in return for yielding them to him at an earlier date that in 1427 he assigned Lound and Reedham to her for life, to hold at a symbolic annual rent of a rose.
Having acquired Dilham, Inglose made the castle there his home in preference to Loddon, and it was ‘of Dilham’ that he took out letters of protection in the autumn of 1426 prior to accompanying the duke of Bedford to France. He must have crossed back to England after just a few months, since he also obtained letters of attorney in May 1427, before returning to France.
At home, just as in France, Inglose remained close to Sir John Fastolf, his long-term friend and associate. A feoffee of Fastolf by as early as 1415, he frequently acted as such in subsequent years,
All of these friends and associates shared a connexion with East Anglia where Inglose, while still pursuing his military career, was increasingly active from the early 1420s. In 1423 he was returned to his first Parliament as a knight of the shire for Suffolk. His mainpernors at his election included the father of his first wife, Nicholas Wychyngham, for whom he was a trustee and who later appointed him the supervisor of his will.
In the mid 1420s Inglose had his own quarrels to attend to, since he was pursuing at least two actions in the court of King’s bench in Trinity term 1426. In one he and his second wife accused Alice, the widow of Henry Reppes of Herringfleet, Suffolk, of abducting their ward, John Reppes (Henry’s son and heir), from Dilham; in the other he sued John Bacon of Loddon, gentleman, and others for trespass.
Inglose was no stranger to the law courts because he was an enthusiastic litigant and aggressive in the defence of his rights. Between 1422 and 1442 he brought no fewer than 39 suits in King’s bench, more than any other person in the kingdom, 33 of which involved property matters. Most of the defendants were his social inferiors, including a dozen husbandmen he accused of having illegally cut turf on his manor of Dilham in 1433. Despite their relatively lowly status, the 12 had sufficient courage and resources to file a bill in Chancery (claiming the customary right to cut turf) just before a King’s bench jury found against them in Easter term 1435. The jurors awarded Inglose damages of £40 although eventually he dropped his claims against all bar one of these opponents. Another man of lesser social status, Thomas Kecham, a servant of Sir Richard de Vere, fell foul of Sir Henry some years later. De Vere was the brother of the earl of Oxford, and in about 1450 the earl asked John Paston* to speak with Inglose about a malicious and ‘wrongful suette’ he was pursuing against Kecham.
One of the main items of business of Inglose’s third Parliament was the preparations for the King’s coronation expedition to France. There is no evidence that Sir Henry participated in the expedition, which embarked for France in the spring of 1430. He was certainly in England the following December, when he attested the return of Norfolk’s knights of the shire to the Parliament of 1431, and in March and April 1431 when he was appointed a commissioner to raise loans for the Crown. He himself was returned to the Commons in 1432 when one of those who stood surety for him upon his election was his brother-in-law from his first marriage, Edmund Wychyngham.
Ten months later, Inglose witnessed the return of his former comrade-in-arms, Sir Robert Clifton, and Sir John Fastolf’s councillor, John Roys*, as Norfolk’s representatives to the succeeding Parliament. A major preoccupation for the Parliament of 1433 was the problem of lawlessness. In East Anglia Norwich was particularly disturbed, and late that year Sir Henry was placed on two commissions charged with investigating bad governance in the city, where an attempt to manipulate a mayoral election had led to a riot. There was also disorder in the county of Norfolk, where he was among the gentry required to swear a widely administered oath to keep the peace in 1434.
A few weeks after the dissolution of the Parliament of 1435, Inglose and his fellow MP, Sir Thomas Tuddenham*, received a commission to distribute a tax allowance in Norfolk. A former follower of Thomas Beaufort, duke of Exeter, Tuddenham had become close to William de la Pole, earl of Suffolk, a peer with whom Inglose was also on good terms at this date. In 1435-6 Sir Henry attended courts on Suffolk’s manor at Costessey near Norwich with Tuddenham and other de la Pole councillors.
As it happened, Inglose’s friendship with Sir John Fastolf brought his association with de la Pole to an end before the 1430s were out. Fastolf had likewise enjoyed good terms with the earl of Suffolk, only to fall out with him over the wardship of Anne Harling, Sir John’s niece, in 1437. After the rift became serious, Inglose chose to forfeit his own relationship with the earl rather than lose the friendship of his fellow knight. A courageous step to take, his decision also demonstrated that he was a substantial figure in his own right and not dependant on the patronage of a great magnate.
Immediately prior to the breach with de la Pole, Inglose was re-elected to the Commons. No doubt the Norfolk electors regarded an experienced soldier like him as a suitable representative, since one of the reasons for calling the Parliament of 1437 was to discuss the defence of the realm and the keeping of the sea.
While Inglose ceased to hold public office after the Parliament dissolved in July 1449, he remained active until his death. By 1450 he was a feoffee for Humphrey Stafford, duke of Buckingham, having previously participated in a settlement, possibly made for the benefit of Stafford’s half-sister, Eleanor, duchess of Norfolk, in 1448.
By the end of his life, Inglose had taken up residence at Norwich, where he had gained admittance to the prestigious guild of St. George,
The directions relating to his estates are the most striking part of Inglose’s will. He left no more than four manors, Dilham, Loddon and Wassingford (in Loddon) in Norfolk and Ashby in Suffolk to his heir Henry, again stressing that he should not interfere with the performance of the will. His younger son, Robert, was to have a single manor at Haveringland, along with lands in Haveringland, Brandeston and Cawston and a messuage at Eccles by the Sea. Notwithstanding his apparent military service in France, it appears that Robert was originally intended for the Church, since it was as Robert Inglose, ‘clerk’, that he features as his father’s co-defendant in a lawsuit brought by John Lematon*. In 1435, having acquired the advowson of Filby in east Norfolk some years earlier, Sir Henry had agreed to allow Lematon, a retainer of the duke of Norfolk, to present to that living when it next fell vacant. Whatever the reason for this arrangement, he and Robert subsequently prevented John from exercising his right of presentation, prompting him to sue them in the common pleas. He won his case, since they were unable to contradict his claims in pleadings of 1437.
Within two weeks of making his will, Inglose died at Norwich on the night of 31 June. Margaret Paston, then staying in the city, informed her husband of his death when she wrote to him the following day. She told him that Sir Henry’s body had been taken to the priory at Horsham St. Faith at 9 o’clock that morning, acquisitively adding that ‘If ye desyer to bey any of hys stuff I pray you send me word ther-of in hast’, and she would speak to the executors.
It is hard to understand why Inglose left so little to his heir, so ensuring that his descendants could not occupy the position among the upper ranks of the gentry he himself had enjoyed. Personal dislike seems the only explanation, since he did not mention any serious debts in his will and there is no evidence that financial problems prompted him to dispose of much of his lands. If he had possessed property in France, he would have lost it in the latter stages of the Hundred Years’ War, but his estate at home must have provided him with a significant income. The £66 p.a. at which it was assessed for tax purposes in February 1451 was almost certainly a considerable underestimate.
Mean though he was towards his children, Inglose’s grotesque treatment of other family connexions during his lifetime caused the most trouble after his death. Soon after he had died, his stepdaughter, Sibyl, and her husband, Robert Osbern, filed a bill in Chancery against his executors. They informed the court that she and her elder half-sister, Elizabeth, were the daughters and heirs of Sir William Bowet, and that Bowet had sold Elizabeth’s wardship and marriage to Thomas, Lord Dacre of Gilsland, who had subsequently married her to his son and namesake. Having secured a future share of half of Sir William’s Cumberland estate (comprising the manors of Blackhall, Botcherby and Stainton) for his own family, Dacre had then persuaded Bowet to sell him Sibyl’s share in the same properties for 500 marks. According to the Osberns, Bowet had decided in a fit of conscience before he died that he and his wife, Anne, should compensate their daughter for her loss with goods worth 500 marks. They complained that she had never received these goods although Anne, who had acted as Bowet’s executor after his death, and Inglose, in his capacity as her third husband, should have ensured that they were handed over. Sibyl’s half-sister, Elizabeth, had also suffered at Inglose’s hands. Having obtained the evidences relating to the three Norfolk manors of Great Hautbois, Horsford and Burgh St. Margarets, all of which were part of her Ufford inheritance, he had asserted the right to hold them during his wife’s lifetime, despite the fact that Anne was not Elizabeth’s mother and had no title to them. After Anne’s death, he had even claimed that the manors were his to hold in fee simple. To head off such a preposterous claim, Elizabeth had allowed him to have Horsford and Burgh for life, in return for an annual rent of only 40 marks (although Burgh, the less valuable of these two properties, was alone worth that amount), and he had permitted her to take possession of Great Hautbois. He had also occupied the Suffolk part of her Ufford inheritance, having somehow managed to have had it settled on his wife, Anne, for life and ‘ten years over’, preventing Elizabeth and her husband, Sir Thomas Dacre, from taking possession before 1447. What is more, his treatment of Elizabeth and Sybil caused a quarrel between the two half-sisters. While on his deathbed, he had told Elizabeth that he had enfeoffed Great Hautbois on the cleric, Master Henry Bowet, to the use of her and her heirs, and after his death Elizabeth had had the manor settled on her own feoffees. Despite this, he had also arranged for the Osberns to take the issues and profits from the property during Sibyl’s lifetime, and for Elizabeth to pay them an additional £100 over a period of ten years (presumably as a way of compensating the Osberns for the loss of Sybil’s 500 marks at Elizabeth’s, rather than his own, expense). Not unreasonably, she resisted their claims when they came to seek these revenues. Litigation in Chancery was the result, and during the dispute Henry Bowet, whom Elizabeth asked to prove that she had an unencumbered right to the property, was murdered while riding to London. (Robert Osbern claimed his death resulted from a drunken fall off his horse. Whatever the truth of the matter, his was not the only sudden death, since one of Osbern’s men also died during the quarrel.) The Osberns tried to cast aspersions on Elizabeth’s character by suggesting that she and her husband no longer cohabited, perhaps a sign of desperation on their part, for Elizabeth appears successfully to have defeated their claims regarding Great Hautbois. If the Osberns had resorted to lying and defamation it was a scarcely surprising reaction to their plight, given that Sybil had lost both her inheritance and the 500 marks her father had intended for her.
Another person who had suffered at the hands of Inglose was his stepson, William Calthorpe. It appears that Sir Henry had also managed to acquire possession of some of William’s inheritance, for among the properties he had settled on his feoffees in May 1451 were the manors of ‘Roses’ in South Creake and Stalham Hall, both of which belonged to his stepson. Yet he did not attempt to dispose of the manors in his will and William was subsequently able to recover them. Some 20 years earlier Calthorpe had other grievances against his stepfather, which he had expressed in a letter to Inglose’s confessor. The first of these related to his marriage to Elizabeth, the daughter of Reynold, Lord Grey of Ruthin, to whom Sir Henry had sold his wardship. He claimed that his stepfather was denying him half of his marriage money (presumably he was referring to the 800 marks Grey had paid for the wardship), despite having promised to allow him this sum if he married according to his ‘ordenauns’. He also objected to the way that Inglose had managed part of his inheritance at Smallburgh. In the event, Sir Henry refused to accept either of these complaints, although he was conciliatory about another source of contention, William’s enclosure of lands in Dilham. Although the lands in fact pertained to the Calthorpe manor at Smallburgh, it is possible that the enclosure impeded the movement of livestock on the Inglose manor nearby.
Arguments about the respective jurisdictions of these manors are likely to have featured in a yet another quarrel that broke out after Inglose’s death, this time between his eldest son and Calthorpe. According to a Chancery bill the younger Henry filed against him in or shortly after the late 1460s, Calthorpe had broken into his fish house at Smallburgh in September 1459 and pulled it down. He also alleged that William had ousted him from lands in Smallburgh, Westwick and Dilham, entered his pasture at Loddon and taken legal action on a bond given to him when the two men had attempted to resolve their differences peaceably. Calthorpe’s side of the story is unknown, but it is likely that Henry was an equally aggressive participant in the quarrel. Quite probably embittered at having succeeded to so little of his father’s estate, he was certainly capable of countenancing violence, for he had clashed with the inhabitants of Tunstead, an encounter in which his servants had killed two men, some 18 months after Inglose’s death. As a very young man, Henry had entered the service of Thomas Montagu, earl of Salisbury, and he was a retainer of Montagu’s grandson, Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, when he filed his bill against Calthorpe.
There were yet other suits connected with Sir Henry Inglose’s estate after his death. In the mid 1450s his executors sued his heir for trespass in King’s bench, and late in the same decade they took action in Chancery against his son-in-law and feoffee, Sir John Colville, for refusing to release his title to properties they had sold in accordance with his will. In the same period Robert Danvers*, to whom the executors had sold the manor of Pickworth in Rutland, filed a bill against John Browe* for forcibly disputing his title to the property. Immediate responsibility for the quarrel lay with the younger Henry Inglose (against whom the MP’s executors had won a suit for unlawful entry on the manor heard before the Rutland justices of assize on 22 May 1456), who had made his own sale of the manor to Browe, in contradiction of his father’s will.