LEVENTHORPE, Robert (d.1426), of Sawbridgeworth, Herts.

One of several sons of John Leventhorpe, who brought his family to prominence in the early fifteenth century as receiver-general of the duchy of Lancaster and executor of the first two Lancastrian Kings, Robert was named after his grandfather. His elder brother John was destined to follow their father as a professional administrator in the service of the duchy, but Robert himself was apparently intended for a military career – at least initially. Perhaps through the auspices of his father’s friend Robert Southwell he came to the attention of John Mowbray, earl of Norfolk and Earl Marshal, and in 1415 enlisted in the earl’s retinue for Henry V’s invasion of Normandy. He fought at Agincourt in Mowbray’s company. Two years later, on 30 Sept. 1417, the earl granted him and his wife Elizabeth (whose parentage is not known) an annuity of 20 marks for term of their lives. Robert went on to serve under the same magnate in the garrison at Pontoise in the summer of 1422, but did not return to France again after the King’s death. Rather than joining his lord on the expedition of 1423, he stayed behind at Sandwich, attending on the countess of Norfolk, when the earl set sail in May that year. N.H. Nicolas, Agincourt, 338; L.E. Moye, ‘Estates and Finances of the Mowbray Fam.’ (Duke Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1985), 327, 403, 431. Before too long, and doubtless through his father’s influence, he was accorded the office of steward of the manor of the Savoy in London, which pertained to the duchy of Lancaster.

Robert’s second marriage, to Joan Waleys, probably came about through his family’s connexions with the gentry of Hertfordshire, for Joan’s mother was an heiress with substantial estates in that county. Joan herself was one of four daughters of John Waleys of Glynde, who following the deaths of their father and only brother John (a minor) fell heir not only to the Sussex estates of the Waleys family but also to those of their maternal grandparents, the wealthy Sir Robert Turk and Beatrice Kendale, in Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Hampshire and London. The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 673-5; Cat. Glynde Place Archs. p. xii. Clearly, the Leventhorpes hoped to gain much from the match. The eldest girl, Beatrice, had already been snatched up by John Cockayne, j.c.p. for his son and heir Reynold, and the Leventhorpe match had been contracted by Michaelmas term 1423, not long after her brother’s death. The four girls (Beatrice Cockayne, Joan Leventhorpe and their unmarried sisters Agnes and a younger Joan), then brought a suit in the common pleas against the widow of their grandfather, Sir William Waleys†, for possession of the manors of ‘Thameys More’ and Wakeley in Hertfordshire which had formed part of their mother’s inheritance. Although the widow, Margaret, and her new husband Thomas Chitterne, claimed that she had received the Hertfordshire manors in exchange with her stepson John Waleys for her dowager’s interest in four manors in Sussex, the coheiresses were able to recover seisin. CP40/651, rot. 128; VCH Herts. iv. 21 (where the two sisters named Joan are confused).

A more serious dispute focused on the wardship of the next male heir to the valuable manor of Glynde, the girls’ cousin William Waleys, later held to be mentally unsound (and called ‘the idiot’ in the family pedigree). On this matter our MP’s father John Leventhorpe fell out with Robert, 4th Lord Poynings, and the two men were summoned to appear before the Council in the Star Chamber on 24 Feb. 1425. There they were required to accept the award of the bishops of Winchester (the chancellor), Durham and Worcester and Lord Scrope in their dispute over custody of the heir, whom Poynings asserted had been unjustly detained by his opponent. It would seem that a compromise was reached, for a few days later, on 1 Mar., our MP and William Holgrave were committed keeping of the lands formerly held by his late mother-in-law and her son John Waleys for as long as these remained in the King’s hands, together with the marriages of the two younger coheiresses, for which keeping and marriages they agreed to pay a flat sum of £100. If the lands proved to exceed the sum of £54 p.a. in value they were to answer to the Crown for any surplus revenues. PPC, iii. 165-6; CFR, xv. 97. This arrangement preceded inquisitions held later that month in Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire concerning the four girls’ inheritance from their mother, which showed that the Cockaynes were in possession of the most valuable manor, Wodecroft, worth £24 p.a., in accordance with a settlement made at the time of their marriage. Robert and his wife had had to be content with lesser properties. C260/133/24. While there may not have been too much of a problem regarding the girls’ maternal inheritance (save perhaps in its division), the dispute with the male heir to the Sussex estates remained unresolved and in this regard Lord Poynings appears to have secured William’s wardship and to have occupied the principal manor of Glynde by agreement with the archbishop of Canterbury. Cat. Glynde Place Archs. pp. xii-xiii.

Leventhorpe had attested the Hertfordshire electoral returns to Parliament at Hertford on 23 Sept. 1423, and successfully sought election as a knight of the shire himself some 18 months later, on 5 Apr. 1425, shortly after he obtained his grant at the Exchequer. Perhaps the difficulties he and his father had encountered in this regard prompted him to do so. His father was the first to witness the parliamentary indenture. But Robert did not long survive after his appearance in the Commons. He was present again at the Hertfordshire hustings on 7 Feb. 1426, C219/13/2, 3. but died on the following 29 Apr. Trans. E. Herts. Arch. Soc. ix. 132, from a cal. of obits now Trin. Coll. Cambridge mss, B.11.3. At that time a suit was pending in Chancery after Reynold and Beatrice Cockayne had demanded the revocation of the grant of wardship of the former Waleys and Turk estates and the removal of the King’s hand from the manor of Wodecroft and property in Luton, so they could be restored to possession. On 18 May William Holgrave, Leventhorpe’s fellow custodian of the estates, was summoned to answer. Cal. P. and M. London, 1413-37, p. 197. Leventhorpe’s widow married Robert Lee of Fittleworth, Sussex (who had stood surety for him at the Exchequer in the previous year). In June 1430 Lee undertook to pay Joan’s former father-in-law John Leventhorpe the sum of £100, and when he failed to do so lands he held in right of his wife in Sussex, Hampshire and Bedfordshire were eventually seized by the sheriffs to satisfy his creditor. C241/226/9; C131/63/16, 19, 26. The debt was not paid off before John died. In his will on 29 Jan. 1435 he left the £100 to his young grand-daughters, Beatrice and Agnes (Robert’s only children), who were also to receive 25 marks each from his goods if they married with the consent of their grandmother and uncle John. Reg. Chichele, ii. 528. In the event, neither of them inherited their mother’s property, for Joan produced male issue by her second husband, Lee. The long-running dispute over the Waleys inheritance at Glynde went to arbitration in 1436, when the arbiters found for the four Waleys coheiresses, and Lord Poynings was ordered to surrender the manor to them. The Waleys estates were then partitioned, and Lee and his wife shared Glynde with her sister Joan and the latter’s husband Nicholas Morley*. This too caused much contention, and debate over the estates continued throughout the 1450s and 1460s. Joan Lee outlived our MP by nearly 50 years, being last recorded alive in April 1475. Cat. Glynde Place Archs. pp. xii-xiii, 11-14, 16-18, 96.