ISLE, William (d.1463), of Sundridge, Kent.

The Isles had lived at Sundridge since at least the reign of Edward II, probably occupying the property known as ‘Broke’s Place’, E. Hasted, Kent ed. Drake, iii. 129, 132-3. and the family’s fortunes were advanced by the marriage later in the fourteenth century between John Isle, our MP’s great-grandfather, and Joan de Freningham, a member of one of the leading gentry families of west Kent. Through this union the Isles were later connected in marriage to the Pympes of Nettlestead, who commemorated the ties of kinship by displaying the arms of Freningham and Isle alongside each other in their parish church. When John Freningham†, Joan’s great-nephew, died without issue in 1410, his heir was our MP’s father, Roger, but Freningham had earlier settled the bulk of his landed holdings on his nephew, John Pympe, so in the event Isle received only the manors of Sundridge and Farningham, and formally relinquished that of West Barming to Pympe. Roger died in 1429 and was buried in Sundridge church. Archeaologia Cantiana, xxviii. 218-19, 238-9; CPR, 1408-13, p. 324.

At that date William had probably come of age. At the end of his own life his estate included the manor of Sundridge and a moiety of that of Charton (inherited from Freningham), another manor in Sundridge, called Dreyhill, a moiety of that of ‘Slobbe’ in Sevenoaks, eight named messuages and some 370 acres of land. These were said by jurors at his inquisition post mortem to be worth about £25 10s. p.a., C140/14/34. yet he had earlier been thought to have an income of £40 or more, requiring him to take up knighthood. Any material gains from marriage were lost by the time of his death – perhaps his wife predeceased him. She, Isabel, the daughter of William Warner of Footscray, was a widow when Isle married her. Her father had previously contracted a match for her with a knightly family from Norfolk, but her husband Thomas Boys, the heir to the Boys’ estates, had died young and childless, and Isabel’s mother-in-law Sibyl had broken the contract. Warner’s suits against Sibyl on his daughter’s behalf early in 1435 were taken up by Isle in Michaelmas term that year, after he and Isabel married, alleging that her brother-in-law, Robert Boys, had disseised her of two parts of the Norfolk manor of Honing. The Isles went on to petition the chancellor saying that Sibyl had promised to settle the manor on Isabel and her first husband and their heirs as a marriage portion. Yet when Thomas died his brother and heir, Robert, had entered the manor, with his mother’s connivance, dispossessing Isabel ‘to here grete hindring and hurte’. The reciprocal bonds of £200 made on 5 July 1436 between Isle and Robert Boys suggest that the matter went to arbitration, CP40/697, rot. 415; 699, rot. 503; C1/72/3; CCR, 1435-41, p. 65. and it would appear that the Isles were compensated with some land at Honing. F. Blomefield, Norf. xi. 42-46.

Isle may have completed his training in the law by November 1432, when he was among a large group headed by John Martin, c.j.c.p. who were committed the keeping at the Exchequer of certain lands in Yalding and Brenchley in Kent which had been held by the recently deceased tenant-in-chief Thomas Enot. The presence of Henry Rowe, one of the wardens of Rochester bridge, and John Beaufitz, a leading bridge councillor, in the group suggests that the issues of this property may have been intended for the upkeep of the bridge, of which Isle’s kinsman John Freningham, had been one of the founding patrons. CFR, xvi. 120; E159/209, brevia, Easter rot. 15; 210, brevia, Mich. rot. 9. In 1434 Isle was among those who took the oath not to maintain law-breakers in Kent, and before long assumed a role in law-enforcement: for 12 years from the autumn of 1438 he served continuously on the commission of the peace in his county, often as a member of the quorum. In his first year as a j.p. he received payment for seven days attending the sessions. CPR, 1429-36, p. 288; E101/567/3/5. At the parliamentary elections held in December 1441 he was named as one of those attesting the indenture of the knights of the shire, even though he himself was returned alongside the experienced James Fiennes*. This short Parliament was notable chiefly for its attempts to restore the royal finances and the ratification of the King’s endowment of Eton College, but it also marked the ascendancy of the earl of Suffolk in the King’s counsels. Fiennes, of course, was a leading member of this Household circle and his election was testimony to his position both at court and in Kent. Quite how close Isle’s personal relationship with Fiennes was at this point remains unclear. Yet their families shared a connexion through the Pympes, Archaeologia Cantiana, xxviii. 214-18; C219/15/2. and before too long Isle had been brought into Fiennes’s circle. His property in Sundridge and Chevening lay adjacent to Fiennes’s lands around Sevenoaks and before October 1444 he acted with Fiennes in the acquisition of property in Hever. CAD, vi. 288.

In the 1440s Isle established an association with others linked with Fiennes in Kent, notably Stephen Slegge* and Robert Berde*. In 1445 he was involved in litigation in the court of common pleas over a messuage in Maidstone in which he had been enfeoffed along with Slegge and others; in February 1446 he acted with Berde in the acquisition of rents from property in the London parish of St. Nicholas Cole Abbey, and on the following 25 Nov. all three of them were present to witness a charter by which Edmund Lenthall, the nephew of the late earl of Arundel, quitclaimed the manor of Mereworth to Fiennes and his son, William. CP40/738, rot. 378; 740, rot. 442; Corp. London RO, hr 174/25; CCR, 1441-7, p. 441. Shortly before this Isle had been pricked as sheriff of Kent, so that it was he who on 2 Jan. 1447 presided over the election held at Rochester, which saw the return of Fiennes and his son-in-law, William Cromer*, as knights of the shire in the Parliament at Bury St. Edmunds, during which Fiennes was elevated as Lord Saye and Sele. In January 1449 Isle witnessed the election, presided over by Slegge, of Cromer and Sir John Cheyne II*, and when later that year, in September, a second Parliament was summoned amidst a worsening situation in Normandy to meet at Westminster on 6 Nov. Slegge returned him in company with his brother-in-law John Warner*. C219/15/4, 6, 7. In 1458 for reasons unknown Warner quitclaimed his manor of Noke in Essex to Isle, who sold it two years later: CCR, 1454-61, p. 269; VCH Essex, vii. 187. Isle’s activities at this Parliament, which saw the impeachment of the duke of Suffolk and a concerted attack upon Lord Saye, the treasurer, are not documented. Saye himself seems not to have bothered about the attendance of his servants in the Commons, as during the first session, in December, he had sent Robert Berde (for whom he had successfully secured a seat for Rye) off on an errand to Dover, and Isle’s appointment to a commission of sewers in February 1450 may have meant that he missed some of the second session. The final session met at Leicester in late April, only to be dissolved in early June amidst news of the outbreak of popular disturbances throughout Kent.

The rebels under Cade sought to replace those false counsellors about the King who had lost Normandy and impoverished the Crown with the ‘lordys of his ryall blode’. Chief among their targets and representative of ‘all the false progeny and afynyte of the Duke of Southefolke’ was Saye who, along with his son-in-law, Cromer, was murdered in London in early July. The rebellion also had a local context and Saye’s friends and servants in Kent also found themselves accused of corruption and treachery. Cade’s third manifesto demanded justice against the ‘grete extorcioners beyng in Kent . . . that is to say, the traytours, Slegge, Crowmere, Ysele and Robert Est’. C.L. Kingsford, English Historical Literature, 362; I.M.W. Harvey, Jack Cade, 186-91. Quite how Isle gained this reputation is unclear; when, in August and September, royal commissioners sat in Kent to hear charges relating to the misgovernment of the shire during the previous decade, no specific charges were levelled against him, either as sheriff or as a j.p., and in any case he had taken the precaution of obtaining a pardon. CPR, 1446-52, p. 343. Yet his association with Saye made it prudent for the government to drop him from the bench when a new commission of the peace was named on 24 Dec.

The difficult political circumstances and disruption in Kent prompted Isle to concentrate on his legal practice in the capital. Perhaps he also had personal reasons to do so: on 2 Jan. 1451 John Bocking wrote to William Wayte ‘Ulveston is styward of þe Mydill Inne, and Isley of the Inner Inne, be cause thei wold have officz for excuse for dwellyng this tyme from her wyves’. Paston Letters, iii. 118. He was back in Kent in 1452, acting with the serjeant-at-law Walter Moyle* and William Manston* as a feoffee of property in Elham and Barham near Dover, later the subject of litigation, and in the following year he was readmitted to the Kentish bench, serving once more on the quorum and sitting regularly at the sessions. CP25(1)/115/323/750; CP40/782, rot. 187; E101/567/3/8, 9. In 1454 he and Thomas Brown II* were summoned to the King’s bench to give evidence at the trial of Robert Poynings*, and the sheriff of Kent made distraint on their lands for failing to attend. This, however, was deemed to be contrary to the law, and the issues were returned to them. E404/70/1/81. Isle purchased a pardon as former sheriff of Kent in January 1458, C67/42, m. 42. and his appointments to commissions of array directed against the Yorkists in 1459-60 are a clear sign that although by then he had been omitted from the bench the Lancastrian regime did not question his loyalty.

Within days of the accession of Edward IV Isle’s fortunes took a turn for the worse. Seemingly, his perceived his property at Sundridge to be under threat, and to pre-empt an attempt to evict him on 20 Mar. 1461 he broke the close of John Brampton there, and stole wood and other goods to the value of £20. Then, on 15 Dec., a commission headed by Lord Abergavenney was appointed to investigate alleged extortions carried out by Isle, an old associate, Robert Dreylond of Selling, and four others. Isle was summoned to answer Brampton in the court of common pleas the following Hilary term, when he thought it wise to purchase the new King’s pardon. CP40/803, rot. 128; C67/45, m. 49; CPR, 1461-7, p. 133. The commissioners evidently failed to reach any conclusions about his criminal activities, for in July 1463 a second commission was set up, with a remit extending into Surrey and Middlesex. CPR, 1461-7, p. 301. A clue to Isle’s behaviour may be found in a Chancery petition presented after his death by John Harneys, heir to the manor of Chevening, which had belonged to William and Elizabeth Chevening. Harneys claimed that Isle ‘sumtyme by manace sumtyme by cohercion & sumtyme for fere of emprisonment & and by other subtile ymagyned meanes compelled your said besecher to make estate unto John Rowe of the said maner’, as a feoffee to Isle’s use, but that in his will Isle, perhaps mindful of his wrongdoings, had instructed Rowe to make recompense. C1/33/234. Yet the veracity of these claims is open to doubt, for John Isle, William’s nephew and heir, was of the opinion that the manor had been settled on him by the terms of his uncle’s will. C1/31/338.

Before the second commission into Isle’s alleged misdoings could get underway, it was overtaken by events. In June 1463 his manor at Sundridge had been broken into and cattle stolen; further raids took place in August and September. The perpetrators, a group of his lesser neighbours and possibly his own tenants, soon went a step further. To avoid their hostility, Isle appears to have taken refuge with the vicar of Farningham, some ten miles from Sundridge, but they caught up with him. At one o’clock in the morning on 14 Dec., a gang of 80 men, led by Edward Tawke, a gentleman of Sundridge, and William Wodeward, a yeoman from nearby Bierling, murdered Isle and his servant, John Stokton, in the vicar’s chamber, leaving them decapitated. KB9/50/12, 20-22, 26, 27, 34-36, 38; Harvey, 178-9. The serious nature of the crime excited the personal attention of Edward IV. In April 1464 Clement Paston reported that ‘The kyng hathe ben in Kent and ther ben endityd many for Isleis dethe’, those indicted for the murders being tried before the King’s uncle the earl of Essex at Dartford. Wodeward was convicted and hanged. Paston Letters ed. Davies, i. 204; KB9/50/53, 54. Later, Stokton’s heir attempted to sue seven others, kinsmen of those hanged, for damages, claiming that they had been accessories to the deaths of Isle and Stokton: KB27/817, rot. 71; 850, rot. 21d.

Isle was buried at Sundridge, his tomb bearing a brass with an inscription, now lost, describing him as ‘legis peritus’. Baker, i. 933. The jurors at the inquisition post mortem held in October stated that his heir, his nephew John Isle, was then aged 22, C140/14/34. but this may well have been incorrect, for that same Michaelmas term Richard Drayton* was suing the young man in a plea concerning his marriage, which Drayton had held by reason of John’s minority. CP40/813, rot. 238.