INGOLDISTHORPE, Edmund (1421-56), of Swaffham Bulbeck and Sawston, Cambs.

In terms of his connexions and landed wealth, Ingoldisthorpe ranked among the upper gentry. Through his father, Thomas, he inherited the estates of his grandfather, Sir John Ingoldisthorpe†, as well as the Burgh estates in East Anglia and Yorkshire which had come to Sir John by marriage. Through his mother, he was the heir to the estates of his other grandfather, Sir Walter de la Pole, along with the Bradestone estates in the south and west of England which were the inheritance of his grandmother, Sir Walter’s first wife. Thomas Ingoldisthorpe died just short of his majority in January 1422, and his widow Margaret survived him by less than five years, dying near the end of 1426. Upon his father’s death, Edmund, then only a few months old, became a royal ward. CIPM, xxi. 895; xxii. 159; The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 476; CFR, xv. 33, 137, 159, 161. From 1423 onwards, however, the Crown granted out parts of his inheritance to the keeping of Sir John, later Lord, Tiptoft, and others. In July 1428, in return for 500 marks paid into the Exchequer, Tiptoft secured the custody and marriage of the child, for whose sustenance during the minority he obtained a royal grant of £10 p.a. four months later. Afterwards, probably in the second half of 1435, he married his ward to his second daughter, Joan. C139/165/20. While still a ward, Edmund succeeded to the estates of Sir Walter de la Pole, who died in July 1434. The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 105. Tiptoft was not among those who subsequently received the keeping of a part of de la Pole’s estates, but one of those who did was Richard Forster I*. Entrusted with the keeping of the Bradestone lands in Essex, Gloucestershire and southern England that Sir Walter had held by the courtesy after the death in 1428 of his first wife, Elizabeth, Forster had close connexions with Tiptoft and was perhaps acting on his behalf. CFR, xv. 33-34, 39-40, 112-13, 159, 161, 233, 277; xvi. 230; CPR, 1422-9, pp. 520-1. Tiptoft had nevertheless received a royal grant of the keeping of one of Elizabeth’s manors, Luckington, Wilts., in Sept. 1429, despite the interest of the then still alive Sir Walter de la Pole: CIPM, xxiii. 286; CFR, xv. 277.

Ingoldisthorpe attained his majority on 15 Aug. 1442, but, owing to ‘divers’ inquisitions ‘taken of malice’ which found he would not come of age until a year later, he was not licensed to enter his lands until the following June. CPR, 1441-6, p. 176. What lay behind these malicious inquisitions is unknown, but in any case he was unlikely to have enjoyed complete freedom of action before the death of his father-in-law in January 1443. Moreover, owing to the longevity of Margaret, the second wife and widow of Sir Walter de la Pole, he was never to obtain possession of all his inheritance. The following year he acknowledged Margaret’s life estate in the de la Pole manors in Sawston, Dernford and Trumpington, which she held until her death in 1472 or 1473. CCR, 1441-7, p. 225; CIPM, xxiv. 212; PCC 12 Wattys (PROB11/6, f. 90). He also made to her a general release of all legal actions; but, after her death, his widow would sue her nephew and executor, Sir John Heveningham, in Chancery for failing to amend the wastes she had committed upon the manors. C1/48/540. Margaret, the daughter of Sir John Heveningham†, also outlived her 2nd husband, John Golafre* (d. 1442): The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 199, 368-9, iv. 105. The estates which did come into his hands were, nevertheless, extremely substantial. By his death, he possessed lands in five counties besides Norfolk and Cambridgeshire and held the advowson of St Mary Somerset in London. C139/165/20. These were valued at £200 p.a. for tax purposes in 1451, a sum considerably more than the assessments of the landed wealth of his fellow Cambridgeshire gentry but even then probably an underestimate. E179/81/103.

By Michaelmas 1443, not long after he had come of age, Ingoldisthorpe had joined the royal household as an esquire, probably through the connexions and influence of Tiptoft, a former steward of the Household. His time there was brief, for he had left the royal establishment by the following Michaelmas. E101/409/11, f. 38. Whatever his role in his former ward’s brief household career, Tiptoft cannot have had a part in the young man’s election to the Parliament of 1445 since by that date he was dead. In any case, there is no reason to suppose that Ingoldisthorpe owed his seat to any external influences. He easily fulfilled the conditions of the well known Act of the same Parliament, namely that in future shire knights 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. The circumstances of his own knighthood, an honour he received before the third session of the Parliament, are unknown, but he may have been dubbed on the eve of the coronation of Queen Margaret on 30 May. During the Parliament, Ingoldisthorpe was obliged to answer a suit in the court of common pleas. In pleadings of Michaelmas term 1445, four men from Swaffham Bulbeck accused him of taking away their goods and chattels; in return, he claimed that they were his villeins and therefore barred from pleading. A jury at the Cambridge assizes the following summer found for the plaintiffs but they, perhaps wisely, waived their damages. CP40/739, rot. 401. The plea roll refers to Ingoldisthorpe as ‘lately’ of Swaffham Bulbeck (one of his principal manors) although it was ‘of Sawston’, where he would appear to have resided for the rest of his life, that he received a royal pardon in July 1446. C67/39, m. 27.

As in 1445, Ingoldisthorpe must have owed his Membership of the Parliaments of February 1449 and 1453 to his personal standing in Cambridgeshire. By contrast, his fellow MPs (John Say II* in 1449 and William Cotton* in 1453, both of humbler origin) are very likely to have been candidates supported by the Court. After commencing his parliamentary career, he began also to play a part in the local administration of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire, as an ad hoc commissioner and j.p. His motives for obtaining an exemption for life from all local offices in November 1448 are unknown but, since he was the son of short-lived parents and died himself at the early age of 35, he may have suffered from ill health at that time. CPR, 1446-52, p. 201. Whatever the case, the exemption did not end his career as an office-holder and he served continuously as a j.p. until his death, after joining the commission of the peace in Cambridgeshire. Some of his activities at a local level had political connotations. In September 1450, for example, he received an appointment to a commission of oyer and terminer charged with inquiring into the treasons of Thomas Hylles of Fordham, a Cambridgeshire parish situated just a few miles north-east of Swaffham Bulbeck. Whether Hylles’s treasons were in any way connected with the subsequent conspiracy in support of the duke of York across the county boundary at Royston in Hertfordshire in the following November is unknown, but Cambridgeshire was a troubled county in the early 1450s. In October 1452 Ingoldisthorpe was on a grand jury that indicted several local men, among them the son of William Allington II*, for conspiring earlier in the year to support York against the King. KB9/7/1. In the following month, however, he went to the trouble of securing another royal pardon for himself, a purchase perhaps reflecting the uncertainty of the times. C67/40, m. 12 (15 Nov.).

At about the time that he acquired his exemption from office of 1448, Ingoldisthorpe presented John Bateman as the chaplain to a chantry in the parish church at Burrough Green. When Bateman, the rector of Burrough, had founded the chantry a few years earlier he had granted the right of presentation to Ingoldisthorpe and his heirs, so relations between the two men were evidently close. One of the purposes of the chantry was to offer prayers for the souls of Ingoldisthorpe’s parents and, after his death, of the MP himself, for whom Bateman acted as a feoffee and executor. Add. 5826, ff. 10, 16; CPR, 1441-6, p. 329; PCC 7 Stokton (PROB11/4, ff. 53-54). Bateman resigned the rectory of Burrough before 6 Jan. 1449, when his successor, presented by Ingoldisthorpe, was admitted to the living by the bp. of Ely: Cambridge Univ. Lib., Ely Diocesan recs., G1/4 (Reg. Bourgchier), f. 20. Of the other feoffees of Ingoldisthorpe’s East Anglian estates, most of those who acted for him during his minority were, not surprisingly, closely linked to Tiptoft. Later, when he was able to choose his own, they were almost all gentry with local connexions. These feoffees included the likes of Laurence Cheyne*, Gilbert Hore* and (Sir) Thomas Fynderne*, for each of whom he in turn performed like services, as well as the humbler Thomas Lokton*, another resident of Sawston and a servant of his brother-in-law, the earl of Worcester, the son and heir of his former guardian. C139/165/20; CCR, 1441-7, p. 441; CPR, 1446-52, pp. 258-9; E326/4458; Add. Ch. 34003; CAD, ii. B3031; C131/71/3. Feoffees during his minority included Sir William Asenhill* (his great-uncle), Sir Nicholas Styuecle* and Roger Hunt*, all of whom had close relations with Tiptoft.

Away from East Anglia, Ingoldisthorpe lost some of his estates, for he formally relinquished part of his Bradestone inheritance (three manors at Bredon and elsewhere in Worcestershire) to John, Lord Beauchamp of Powick, a powerful and influential peer who had lately been treasurer of England, during 1452-3. In the 1330s Beauchamp’s great-grandfather, Giles Beauchamp, had been ejected from these manors by his brother Sir William Beauchamp, who had settled them on himself for life with reversion to Thomas, Lord Bradestone, and his heirs. VCH Worcs. iii. 287-8; CCR, 1447-54, p. 445; CP, ii. 47. During Ingoldisthorpe’s minority Beauchamp had temporarily gained the keeping of one of these manors, Kinsham, by grant from the Crown: CFR, xvi. 218, 236. Conceivably, Powick agreed to pay Ingoldisthorpe a sum of money in return for this release. Any such agreement might explain why the MP sued the peer and John Cassy* in 1454, for failing to pay him 200 marks in 50 mark instalments. CP40/775, rots. 593d, 597d. The loss of the Worcestershire manors must have given Ingoldisthorpe an incentive to seek and win in April 1454 the right to an extremely large Exchequer annuity of 500 marks which Edward III had granted in perpetuity to Bradestone and his heirs in 1339. Gaining the annuity was no mean achievement at a time when the Exchequer was very short of money, but it is probably significant that his brother-in-law, the earl of Worcester, was then treasurer of England. CP, ii. 273; CFR, xix. 84. The issue rolls show that Ingoldisthorpe received five payments, totalling £259 15s. 2d., between early 1454 and his death: E403/797-807.

The suit against Powick and Cassy was not the only litigation in which Ingoldisthorpe was engaged in 1454. In the autumn of that year and again in early 1456 there were pleadings at Westminster between him on the one hand and the Suffolk knight, Sir Richard Waldegrave, and his wife on the other. At issue was Westley Waterless, a Cambridgeshire manor that Waldegrave’s father had obtained from John Hore* and his wife in the early 1420s. As plaintiff, Ingoldisthorpe claimed it by descent from one of his early fourteenth century de Burgh ancestors; in riposte, the Waldegraves cited a fine of 1443, whereby the manor had been settled on them for life with remainder to their eldest son. As it happened, Ingoldisthorpe died while the suit was still pending. CP40/775, rot. 320; 776, rot. 459; 781, rots. 423, 423d; The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 417.

Late in life Ingoldisthorpe, along with other substantial gentry from around the country well regarded by the Court, received a summons to a great council that was to meet at Leicester in May 1455. PPC, vi. 340. He was the sole nominee for Cambridgeshire, a further reflection of his local status. The council was called in an atmosphere of crisis, since by then the duke of York and his allies had become dangerously alienated from the government and were preparing to march on London. In the event it never met, because the King and his retinue encountered York and his army at St. Albans while travelling northwards towards Leicester. In the wake of the first battle of St. Albans, Ingoldisthorpe attended the election of the knights of the shire for Cambridgeshire to the Parliament of 1455, heading the list of attestors. Early in the following year, he witnessed a grant in favour of Henry VI’s foundation, King’s College, Cambridge, CCR, 1454-61, p. 141. and he received his final royal pardon in early 1456. C67/41, m. 9 (14 Feb.). He died in the following September and was buried in a large tomb, since disappeared, in the centre of the chancel of the parish church at Burrough Green. C139/165/20; VCH Cambs. vi. 147.

The bequests Ingoldisthorpe made in his will of the previous 19 Aug. PCC 7 Stokton. included sums he left to the church at Burrough, to Queen’s College, Cambridge, and to Thomas Lokton, to whom he assigned an annuity for life of five marks out of the issues of his manor of Melreth in Cambridgeshire and appointed one of his executors. Besides Lokton and John Bateman, he named two other executors, John Prysote*, c.j.c.p. and Laurence Cheyne, and he appointed his brother-in-law, the earl of Worcester, to act as supervisor. He must have enjoyed a good relationship with the earl, for whom at one stage – the date is unknown – he had entered into an obligation with John Sutton, Lord Dudley. C1/52/222. The witnesses to the will included the testator’s servant, Henry Chevele, about whom the MP had once received a letter of complaint from Queen Margaret. Letters Margaret of Anjou (Cam. Soc. lxxxvi), 150-1.

Upon Ingoldisthorpe’s death the Crown granted the wardship of his daughter and heir Isabel, born in 1441, to the queen. CPR, 1452-61, pp. 325, 359; C139/165/20. Notwithstanding the queen’s interest, William Worcestre recorded that it was the girl’s uncle, John Tiptoft, earl of Worcester, who brought about her marriage to Sir John Neville, the younger brother of the earl of Warwick and subsequently earl of Northumberland and Marquess Montagu, on 25 Apr. 1457. Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 172. In July 1459 the King licensed Neville and his wife to enter all of her lands, without suing livery, and to receive the issues from the time of Ingoldisthorpe’s death. CPR, 1452-61, p. 507. These holdings did not however include a couple of manors at Fring, Norf. The MP had held them in tail male through a settlement made by Sir John Colville, formerly the executor of Sir John Ingoldisthorpe, in 1443, and they now reverted to Colville’s son and heir: CCR, 1454-61, p. 156; C139/165/20; F. Blomefield, Norf. x. 305. Two months later, however, Neville fell into the hands of the Lancastrians after the battle of Blore Heath, even though he had fought on the victorious Yorkist side. His life was spared but he was among those attainted by the Coventry Parliament of the following November. After the recovery of political power by York and his allies, however, the Parliament of 1460 annulled all acts of the Coventry assembly and Neville and his wife petitioned for the return of her lands. CP, ix. 89; PPOME, xii. 461-4, 514-15, 542-5.

According to their petition, the queen had prevented their entering Ingoldisthorpe’s estates after their marriage, although in common law they had the right to take possession, as Isabel had been over the age of 14 when her father died and therefore ipso facto no longer a ward. The case was discussed at length in Exchequer chamber and a majority of the judges who attended decided that an heiress in Isabel’s situation was not a ward (an opinion which became the accepted norm before the reign of Elizabeth I). PROME, xii. 542-5; SC8/28/1398; Sel. Cases in Exchequer Chamber, i (Selden Soc. li.), 132-43; J. Hurstfield, Queen’s Wards, 137. In the end the petition was granted. Two weeks after the dissolution of the Parliament of 1460, the Lancastrians captured Neville at the second battle of St Albans; surprisingly, his life was again spared. He and his wife had further trouble with Isabel’s inheritance in the later 1460s, when they sued Thomas Lokton in the Chancery for refusing to allow them seisin of her father’s manor in Tilney, Norfolk, of which he was the surviving feoffee. C1/33/180.

Following Neville’s death at Barnet in 1471, Isabel married (Sir) William Norris*. During her second marriage, she was in effect obliged to mortgage a substantial part of the estate she had inherited from her father, including the Ingoldisthorpe and de la Pole manors in Cambridgeshire. This was to enable her to settle a striking debt of no less than £1,000 which she had contracted with William Parker, a London tailor, before her marriage to Norris. CCR, 1468-76, no. 1204. Isabel, who died in 1476, was comfortably outlived by her mother, who had found a new husband, Thomas Grey, Lord Richemount Grey, within two years of the MP’s death. E159/234, brevia Hil. rot. 11d; 235, brevia Mich. rot. 16. The marriage is not noted in CP, x. 777-8. As Sir Edmund’s widow, Joan held a share of his lands, as well as one third of the Bradestone annuity of 500 marks, as her dower until her own death in 1494. CCR, 1476-85, no. 175; CFR, xxi. no. 328; CIPM Hen.VII, i. 1085-8, 1091-2, 1111, 1130, 1133, 1141; C139/165/20; CPR, 1461-7, p. 219. These dower estates, along with the lands she brought to her marriage, were among the holdings partitioned in 1502 between Isabel’s surviving descendants by her first marriage. T.F. Teversham, Sawston, 35-36; CFR, xxii. no. 544. For Isabel’s children by Neville, see CP, ix. 92-93.