LEGH, Ralph (d.1471), of Macclesfield, Cheshire and Stockwell, Surr.

Ralph Legh, who was to prosper as a leading servant of Henry VI’s household and counsellor to Bishop Waynflete of Winchester, came from Cheshire, where his father, John, won a prominent place in the administration of the region. The father was a commissioner and justice in the palatinate of Chester in the early part of Henry VI’s reign and having been made escheator there in 1434, was confirmed in this office for life five years later. By then he had risen to be a serjeant-at-law. The date of John’s death is uncertain (he was still living in 1446, and may not have died until 1453), but long before it happened Ralph had made a career for himself in the south of England. DKR, xxxvii (2), 448-52; Surr. Arch. Collns. li. 85-89.

Probably a younger son of the serjeant, Ralph may have received his initial training in the law at his father’s side, but his earliest posts in the royal household were ones for which a knowledge of the law was not a prerequisite. An established member of the Household by the time the King attained his majority in 1437, he remained there for at least 18 years. His first appointment to local office, as escheator of Merioneth in north Wales, saw him taking on the same role as his father filled in Chester. Permitted to exercise his duties by a deputy (of English birth), he probably did so, for not only was he required to keep the books as under clerk of the royal kitchen (perhaps not such a lowly position as it sounds), but also to serve as chief remembrancer in the exchequer in Ireland, an office he was granted for life a few months later. (Although it should be noted that he was allowed to delegate the day-to-day business of this office, too.) CPR, 1436-41, pp. 34, 57. For his wages and rewards: Irish Exchequer Payments ed. Connolly, 579, 581. That Legh had won the young King’s favour is evident not only from these grants of office, but also from gifts bestowed on him, such as a corrody at Thorney abbey, pending his provision to a benefice (although there is no sign that he ever intended to enter the Church), and a lease of a messuage in the parish of St. Olave in Southwark. Grants of the offices of rhaglaw (or constable) and amobyr of Penllyn in Merioneth (which he shared with another royal servant, the yeoman of the bottles), and the post of chirographer of the court of common pleas, again held jointly, quickly followed. This last was a highly profitable position, entitling the holders to receive the substantial payments put down every time a final concord was issued by the court. CCR, 1435-41, p. 124; CPR, 1436-41, pp. 170, 197; CFR, xvii. 30-31. Then, in December 1439 Legh was appointed King’s attorney in the county of Chester. He had remained in close contact with men from the region, such as John Stanley I*, who had also become a member of the Household. Together they offered sureties of £400 that Richard Morton esquire would appear before the Council. CCR, 1435-41, p. 380. Nevertheless, it is difficult to see how Legh can have combined his duties in the north-west with those at the royal court, where, styled ‘King’s esquire’, he had risen to be serjeant of the great catery by November 1441. It was then that the escheatorship of Merioneth was granted him for life. CPR, 1441-6, pp. 22-23.

At this stage in his career, a mere five years after it had properly commenced, Legh secured election to his first Parliament, which assembled at Westminster on 25 Jan. 1442. He was returned for Downton, a borough pertaining to the bishop of Winchester, and although a personal link between him and the then bishop, Cardinal Beaufort, has not been discovered, it seems likely that some such connexion did exist. The key to their association may be found in the events of the previous autumn, which had seen the condemnation of Eleanor Cobham, duchess of Gloucester, for sorcery and treason. While the Parliament was in session, on 16 Feb., Legh received at the Exchequer the substantial sum of £100 which the King had ordered to be paid to cover costs and expenses he had incurred while escorting Eleanor to detention in the city of Chester. This he had done, together with other Household retainers, no doubt with Beaufort’s approval, for this blow to the cardinal’s long-term opponent, Duke Humphrey, can only have proved to his advantage. Meanwhile, on the second day of the Parliament Legh’s father had surrendered the patent appointing him escheator of Chester for life, so that the post might be granted jointly to him and Ralph in survivorship. DKR, xxxvii (2), 451; E404/58/108; Issues of the Exchequer ed. Devon, 441; R.A. Griffiths, King and Country, 248. The MP can be glimpsed in the journal kept by the King’s secretary, Thomas Bekynton, in the following summer, for he accompanied Bekynton when he set out from Windsor on 5 June on the first stage of his journey to Bordeaux, though returned to the King’s side a week later. Possibly, he himself was planning to travel to Ireland, for on 18 July he appointed a deputy to take his place in the royal kitchens, and a mandate was sent to the earl of Ormond, as lieutenant of Ireland, to admit him as chief remembrancer there for life. Corresp. Bekynton ed. Williams, ii. 177-8; CPR, 1441-6, p. 90. Yet if he did cross to the lordship at this time he did not stay long, and he formally surrendered his office just a year later. CPR, 1441-6, p. 190.

Besides attracting the attention of the King, Legh also came to the notice of the Earl Marshal, the duke of Norfolk, from whom he received annual fees of as much as £15 15s. 4d. as steward and parker of the duke’s lordship at Weston in Hertfordshire, posts he had been granted for life by the spring of 1444. CCR, 1441-7, p. 215. Nevertheless, he remained a prominent figure in the Household: in the following year he rose to be marshal of the hall, and obtained a pardon of any discrepancies in his accounts as serjeant of the catery. One of his kinsmen, a serjeant-at-arms named James Legh, had been keeper of the royal palace at Kennington, in Surrey, since 1438, CPR, 1436-41, pp. 152, 376. and in February 1446 Ralph was granted at the Exchequer the keeping of all the Crown’s demesne lands in the neighbourhood, to hold for as long as 30 years. He was also promised a 50-year-lease of the manor of Newport and hamlet of Birchanger in Essex, after the death of Sir John Robessart, although this second lease never took effect. CPR, 1441-6, p. 358; CFR, xviii. 25-26. Legh’s second election to Parliament should be attributed to his position at Court. The Parliament, summoned to meet at Bury St. Edmunds in February 1447, contained significant numbers of royal servants, and witnessed the death in custody of the duke of Gloucester and the confirmation in power of the King’s chief minister the duke of Suffolk. This time he represented the duchy of Lancaster borough of East Grinstead in Sussex, a place with which he had no known personal connexion. As before, he broke the statutory requirements for MPs to be resident in their constituencies.

Legh was not to be returned to the Commons again for six years, although meanwhile he gained exemption from the Act of Resumption passed in the Parliament of 1449-50, so long as his income from royal grants did not exceed £20 p.a. PROME, xii. 132. During this period he established friendly relations with others close to the monarch, notably Henry VI’s physician, Master John Somerset*, for whom he acted as a feoffee. CAD, ii. C2456. Furthermore, he kept the favour of the duke of Norfolk, by whose patronage he held the office of marshal of the Exchequer throughout the 1450s. The King himself continued to shower gifts on him, and in September 1450 instructed the abbot of Croyland abbey to grant him a corrody for life. CCR, 1447-54, p. 287. Despite the attempts of successive Parliaments to curb Henry VI’s profligacy, to many of his favourites the Acts of Resumption of this period merely proved an inconvenience. Legh’s lease of Kennington was revoked and given to someone else in the autumn of 1451, but after he protested he won it back in Chancery, as also happened with regard to his Welsh offices, which were restored to him after temporary disruption. CPR, 1446-52, p. 545; 1452-61, p. 109.

The Commons in Legh’s third Parliament, which assembled at Reading in March 1453, replicated that of 1447 with regard to the high proportion of its Members closely linked to the Court. He again represented Downton, now held by William Waynflete, Beaufort’s successor as bishop of Winchester, and he soon emerged as one of Waynflete’s most trusted retainders. His bailiffship of episcopal estates in Berkshire and Buckinghamshire, to which he was appointed that same year, carried an annual fee of £10. Another Crown office came his way too: a few days before the dissolution of the Parliament, in April 1454, he was made controller of customs in the port of London. Henry VI’s mental collapse of the previous summer and his continued incapacity to deal with affairs of state led to the introduction of ordinances reducing the size of the Household on the following 13 Nov. Yet Legh’s place was secure: he was to be one of two marshals kept on in the reduced establishment. The King’s recovery in the winter months enabled him to obtain a new lease of Kennington in March 1455, to last for 20 years. Not surprisingly, his privileged position excited envy. Immediately after the duke of York’s victory at the battle of St. Albans he was stripped of his lucrative post in the common pleas, PPC, vi. 232; CFR, xix. 156; CPR, 1452-61, p. 242. the controllership of the customs was lost soon afterwards, and it looks as if he was also forced to resign as marshal of the hall. Nevertheless, his parliamentary career continued, with his election for Taunton, another borough belonging to Bishop Waynflete, to the Parliament summoned for 9 July. Prudently, on 4 Oct., during the recess, he sued out a royal pardon, which specifically referred to his escheatorships in Merioneth and Chester, which he retained despite the ascendancy of the Yorkists. C67/41, m. 28.

This pardon gave Legh’s home as Stockwell, in Surrey, so it is clear that, as had been the case with his three previous appearances in the Commons, he had blatantly ignored the statutory requirements for MPs to live in the places they represented. During his years in royal service and by making use of the profits of his many offices, he had been building up his interest in land in the south-east. Early on, he tried to purchase property in Essex at Moreton and Little Laver, only to encounter difficulties in gaining possession. C1/10/309. More successfully, his marriage into an Essex family led to valuable acquisitions in Kent in 1444, when his father-in-law Henry Langley settled on him and his wife Elizabeth the coveted manor of Knole near Sevenoaks. This was an estate which Henry’s uncle Thomas Langley, bishop of Durham, had bought for 200 marks in 1419, and had left to his family when he died in 1437. The Leghs did not keep it for long, however; at some point in the next six years they sold it to the King’s favourite James Fiennes*, Lord Saye and Sele, probably for a substantial profit for when Archbishop Bourgchier bought Knole from Lord Saye’s heirs in 1456 he paid as much as 400 marks. The price increase was partly a reflection of Bishop Langley’s enlargement of his original purchase, from which the Leghs were the beneficiaries. Cat. Lambeth Chs. ed. Owen, V 55; Archaeologia Cantiana, lxxxix. 6. This was all the more satisfying as Elizabeth was not an heiress. Her mother, Margaret Walden, had been coheir of the manors of Rickling and Matching Hall, besides other holdings in Essex, The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 131; iv. 739-40; Peds. Plea Rolls ed. Wrottesley, 305. but after Elizabeth’s father died in 1458 these passed to her brother Thomas. C139/174/35.

Legh’s association with Surrey, the county he was to represent in the Parliament of 1459, had begun in about 1441. CP25(1)/232/72/37, 43. His principal purchases there were concentrated on the neighbourhood of the royal manor of Kennington, which he held at farm. So, for example, in 1446 he acquired in reversion a messuage in North Lambeth along with parcels of land on the banks of the Thames, CCR, 1441-7, p. 368. and in 1452 he negotiated with the prior of Canterbury cathedral priory to secure an 80-year lease of the manor of Walworth. Canterbury Cathedral Archs., Dean and Chapter mss, CCA-DCc-ChAnt/W/148A. Although he bought tenements in Newington, an attempt to acquire a number of buildings in the city of London, north of the river in the parish of St. Matthew near West Cheap, proved more difficult, and he had to petition his lord the bishop of Winchester, as chancellor, to secure seisin – trusting, as he said, that Waynflete’s ‘gret wysdome’ would resolve the dispute with the vendor’s feoffees to his satisfaction. CCR, 1454-61, p. 394; C1/26/396. Legh’s most important acquisitions were the manors of Stockwell and Levehurst in Lambeth. Stockwell, bought with the profits of war amassed by the comrades-in-arms Nicholas Molyneux and John Winter, and worth some £40 p.a., was in his hands by about 1453. With it Legh seems to have agreed to take over an obligation, for on 24 May 1457 he and Bishop Waynflete obtained a royal licence to found ‘Wynters of Stokwell chauntre’ in the local parish church of St. Mary, to which they were ready to donate land worth £10 p.a. There, a chaplain and two poor men were to pray for Winter’s soul. VCH Surr. iv. 58; K.B. McFarlane, Eng. in the 15th Cent. 171; CPR, 1452-61, pp. 71-72, 343. Legh presented a chaplain on 31 Jan. 1461: O. Manning and W. Bray, Surr. iii. 520.

With property had come elevated standing for Legh, as esquire and landowner, a man able to be a recognitor in large sums of money, and to be called upon as a surety at the Exchequer. He had attested the shire elections to Parliament held at Guildford in 1449, and been appointed to the Surrey bench five years later. CCR, 1447-54, p. 511; CFR, xix. 186-7, 191-2. Besides his income from his many offices in the gift of the Crown, and the fees paid him by the duke of Norfolk and the bishops of Winchester and Salisbury, he also received payments for his services as a lawyer from various other sources. Sir Thomas Chetwode’s widow paid him five marks a year, and he received a further £4 p.a. for life as steward of Merton priory, where he was permanently accorded lodgings. CCR, 1454-61, pp. 189, 264, 270. Of fundamental importance in these years was his continuing association with Bishop Waynflete, especially during the latter’s chancellorship of 1456-60. He was described in legal records as a ‘servant’ of the chancellor in Michaelmas term 1457, and in a letter of 3 July 1459 Sir John Fastolf referred to the fee of 20s. a year he was paying ‘Rauff Alygh squyer wyth my lord chaunceller’, so that he would ‘be of my councell and supporter of my tenauntes yn Southwerk’. CP40/786, rot. 35d; KB27/790, rot. 80d; 793, rot. 106d (an alleged assault by William Kirton II*); Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 180-1.

Such was Legh’s position when he was elected to his fifth Parliament, summoned to Coventry in November 1459. For the first and only time he sat as a knight of the shire. He took his seat in the Commons wearing the livery accorded to important members of the Household, for although he was no longer marshal of the hall he had been specially granted in the previous year a robe similar to that worn by esquires retained by the King. CPR, 1452-61, p. 481. His master Waynflete, as chancellor, opened the Parliament with a sermon about peace, but with the intention of proscribing the Yorkist lords after their rout at Ludford Bridge. From Legh’s personal point of view, matters were entirely satisfactory: it was agreed in the Parliament that no act or ordinance should prejudice him in respect to his offices as escheator of Chester and Merioneth, PROME, xii. 498-9. and at the dissolution he was appointed to commissions of array to resist the rebel forces. Not surprisingly, when the tables were turned at Northampton in July following and the Yorkist earls grasped the reins of government, Legh’s fortunes plummeted. He immediately lost his escheatorship of Chester and his place on the Surrey bench; and it is indicative of the precariousness of his position after the Lancastrian defeat that his tenure of the manor of Stockwell also came under serious threat. In an opportunistic move, John Copeland of Calais, a servant of the now triumphant earl of Warwick, crossed over to England to claim the manor by virtue of inheritance, and according to Legh’s version of events (presented later in Chancery), forced his way into the property at the head of a band of 100 men ‘having upon them the badge of the ragged staff’. C1/20/30; 32/327. Following the accession of Edward IV, Legh clung on to his post in the Exchequer (which he still retained in July 1461), but when the duke of Norfolk died a few months later the King granted it to Richard Southwell*, who subsequently sued his predecessor for detinue of £14 and a bag of court rolls. Edward’s first Parliament passed another Act of Resumption, but this time only Legh’s corrody from Croyland abbey gained exemption: he could expect nothing more from royal patronage. CP40/815, rot. 97; PROME, xiii. 37. He held the corrody until his death: CCR, 1468-76, no. 773. Not surprisingly, the farm of the manor of Kennington was removed from his keeping at some point early in the reign, Certainly before the spring of 1465: CPR, 1461-7, p. 435. and in an attempt to limit the damage to his position he sued out a pardon in September 1463. Described as ‘late of Macclesfield, gentleman, alias late of Stockwell, esquire’: C67/45, m. 10.

Yet Legh was by no means beaten. A resilient character, in 1465 he brought pleas against the prior of St. Mary’s, Southwark, for breach of the terms of a lease he had contracted with the prior’s predecessor, and two years later he alleged that the prior of Merton owed him £20 (perhaps for arrears of his fee as steward). CP40/815, rot. 295; 825, rot. 546d. Furthermore, he managed to recover Stockwell from Copeland. When, in about February 1467, the latter arrived in London from Calais to sue for his right (bearing letters from the earl of Warwick asking Cardinal Bourgchier, Lord Berners and Bishop Waynflete all to be good lords to him), Legh had him arrested, and started an action against him in King’s bench for forging title deeds. Without Copeland’s knowledge, he arranged for an inquest to be empanelled in Surrey, secured his condemnation in £22, and had him imprisoned for 15 weeks (even though he was sick and on point of death, or so Copeland had it). Legh not only sued a London scrivener who had come to his opponent’s support, but also began a suit for maintenance against him in the name of Bishop Waynflete. Copeland petitioned Warwick’s brother, Archbishop Neville, for help, C1/32/329. but none was forthcoming, perhaps because his plea coincided with Neville’s removal from the chancellorship. This happened on 8 June, five days after Parliament had opened at Westminster. Legh, who attested the Surrey elections to the Parliament, had himself been returned to the Commons once more as a representative of Waynflete’s borough of Downton. Owing to the bishop’s record of commitment to Henry VI, his relations with King Edward were still uneasy, perhaps with justification. A year later, shortly after the dissolution on 7 June 1468, a number of Waynflete’s associates were arrested and put on trial for treason following the discovery of correspondence between them and the Lancastrian court in exile. It seems that Legh, unlike his fellow MP Thomas Danvers*, was not directly implicated, yet although he hastened to procure another pardon, on 26 Oct., C67/46, m. 25. he was too closely linked to Waynflete ever to be fully acceptable to the Yorkist regime. This identification with the bishop stands revealed in various ways. A letter sent to Waynflete in March 1470 referred to ‘your councell Rauff Alygh’; and he appeared as a pledge for Waynflete in a petition the latter sent to Chancery concerning the Fastolf estate, as a feoffee of the disputed Fastolf manors from December 1470 (when the duke of Norfolk and his nominees finally relinquished them), and as a trustee of property in Southwark on Waynflete’s behalf in the summer of 1471. Paston Letters ed. Davis, Beadle and Richmond, iii. 183; C1/42/104; CCR, 1468-76, no. 622; CP25(1)/232/75/19.

That same summer saw Legh busily tidying up his own private affairs, perhaps in the realization that he did not have long to live. An area of woodland on the manor of Leigham in Streatham, which seems to have been of considerable value, was the subject of a suit in Chancery brought by him as its tenant against the abbot of Bermondsey at this time. C1/39/254; VCH Surr. iv. 97. To secure his title to his Surrey estates, in June he obtained from Nicholas Molyneux’s son William a formal release of his right in the manors of Stockwell and Levehurst and lands in Lambeth, Clapham and Camberwell. This was duly made to Legh and his distinguished group of feoffees, headed by the bishops of Winchester and Durham (William Booth) and John, Lord Berners. John Copeland, the claimant to Stockwell who had caused Legh so much trouble, now, on 14 July, made a quitclaim to him and Bishop Booth of all legal actions, and made a disclaimer to Legh and both bishops of his title to the manor and any profits arising from it. CCR, 1468-76, nos. 730, 761. This was timely: Legh died on 22 Aug. C140/36/4. As his lands were all in the hands of feoffees, no details about them were supplied at his inquisition post mortem. His eldest son, John, may well have still been under age, although was said to be aged 22 when the inquisition was eventually held 15 months later in November 1472. The MP’s widow was later to be buried in Lambeth church, along with other members of his family, but he himself had chosen to rest in the church of the Benedictine abbey of St. Mary, Winchester. Miscellanea Genealogica et Heraldica, i. 163, where Ralph’s death date is wrongly given as 1470. The tombs at Lambeth no longer survive, but their monumental brasses apparently depicted Ralph and Elizabeth with 13 children. One of their daughters, Margaret, m. Henry Frowyk (d.1505), the s. of Thomas Frowyk II*: CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 444, but this match might not have been contracted in her father’s lifetime. There, his kinswoman (perhaps even daughter), Joan Legh, was to serve as abbess for over 30 years from 1486. Ralph’s sons had dealings in Winchester in the early 16th cent.: D. Keene, Surv. Winchester (Winchester Studies 2), ii. 848.

After Legh’s death, monks from the priory of Canterbury cathedral entered the manor of Walworth, held courts there and intimidated the tenants in contravention of the 80-year-lease the MP had contracted. His widow produced a well-substantiated case, arguing on behalf of her children that the lease still had 59 years left to run, and expressing a willingness to submit to arbitration, but the new prior would not agree, fearing that the decision would not go in his favour. The outcome of their dispute is unclear. Canterbury Dean and Chapter mss, CCA-DCc-ChAnt/W/148A. John Legh, who inherited Stockwell, soon followed his father into the service of Bishop Waynflete, who in 1478 granted him for life the offices our MP had held on the episcopal estates in Berkshire and Buckinghamshire, and five years later appointed him constable of Farnham castle, again for life. Reg. Common Seal (Hants Rec. Ser. ii), nos. 328, 436-7. John was knighted on the occasion of the marriage of Prince Arthur in 1501. He was childless. In his will of 1523 he left certain manors as contained in an indenture (and worth as much as £200 p.a.) to his nephew John (his brother Ralph’s son and heir), who was to be ‘well contented for it is a cli more than my father left me’. The value of the entire estate even then is uncertain, although a partial list of other manors and lands, not included in this indenture, gave them a valuation of over £50 p.a., Surr. Arch. Collns. xxix. 122-4; li. 85-89; C142/40/12 (2). and while Sir John evidently increased the valuable legacy left him by his father, the wealth and status of the Leghs of Stockwell owed much more to the man who had left Cheshire to join Henry VI’s court some 90 years before.