LEVESON, James, of Willenhall, Staffs.

Leveson hailed from a minor gentry family established since the late thirteenth century at Willenhall. By his time the family had long been divided into two branches, the one resident at nearby Wolverhampton, and the other at Willenhall. He was heir of the latter. S. Shaw, Staffs. ii. 169; Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. xvii. 150. His father played a small part in local affairs: in about 1400 he was retained at a fee of two marks p.a. by Edmund, earl of Stafford; he attested the Staffordshire election of 1407; and was considered important enough to be appointed to local inquiry commissions in 1410 and 1419. Of age by 1423, when he appears as a charter witness, our MP barely exceeded these modest achievements. CPR, 1401-5, p. 347; 1408-13, p. 223; 1416-22, p. 270; C219/10/4; Staffs. RO, Sutherland mss, D593/B/1/26/6/12/1. He did, however, marry above himself, and in so doing made himself a richer man than his father had been. His wife was the daughter of a prominent Cheshire gentleman and the widow of another. By virtue of her first marriage she had a jointure interest in the site of the manor of Manley near Chester with other lands nearby, an estate valued at £10 p.a. in the inquisition taken after her first husband’s death, together with a dower interest in a moiety of the manor of Wettenhall near Winsford. This property was in our MP’s possession by 10 Apr. 1431, when the couple appeared in the exchequer of Cheshire to compound for a fine of £5 for marrying without the necessary royal licence (her first husband had been a tenant of the earldom of Chester). Her lands must have more than doubled his income. CHES2/99, m. 2d; 101, m. 3; CHES3/33, 5 Hen. VI, no. 6.

Despite this new wealth, Leveson’s election to represent Newcastle-under-Lyme in Parliament is surprising. He had no earlier or later traceable connexion with the borough, which lay at the opposite end of the county to Willenhall. Nor is it possible firmly to identify a baronial patron who might have sponsored his return. Not until later in his career is there any evidence to suggest that he continued his father’s association with the powerful Staffords, and even then the evidence is very indirect. The most that can be said is that he did have some property in the vicinity of the borough. In 1431 he sued an action concerning close-breaking at Forde, a few miles to the east of Newcastle-under-Lyme, and his wife’s lands at Wettenhall were not much further away. Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. xvii. 131-2; KB27/691, rot. 64. Even so, he hardly qualified as a member of the gentry very local to the borough, from the ranks of whom the borough’s representatives were often drawn. His election may be an example of an MP seeking a constituency rather than a constituency seeking an MP, for he may have had a personal motive for wanting to sit in the 1432 Parliament. A dispute had arisen over his late father’s role as the last surviving feoffee of his neighbour, Robert Burgulon of Piry, and his subsequent disseisin by Sir Baldwin Strange. Robert’s son and heir, Thomas, claimed, in a petition to the chancellor, that our MP was colluding with Strange’s daughter, Elizabeth, and her husband, Robert Molyneux, to keep him out of the lands. This petition was presented after the Parliament, but the quarrel was in active agitation during the session. On 3 Oct. 1431 our MP had quitclaimed the disputed lands to the couple, giving substance to the later complaint against him. C1/38/267; CCR, 1447-54, pp. 486-7. Later, however, he fell out with Molyneux, who in 1439 won £3 against him for close-breaking at Piry: CP40/707, rot. 313. For want of a better explanation, Leveson may have sought election to defend his conduct and was thus, importantly from the electors’ point of view, willing to serve without wages.

Leveson may also have been ready to serve free for another reason. In the early 1430s he pursued in person several actions in the central courts, perhaps because he was then studying at one of the inns of court or Chancery, and later he was accused of an offence that was often the preserve of lawyers, namely that of distributing bribes to a jury. Further, in June 1444 he was appointed to the quorum of an inquiry commission alongside another minor Staffordshire lawyer, Thomas Everdon*. CP40/688, rot. 108d; KB27/689, rot. 64; 691, rot. 64; 738, rot. 34; CIPM, xxvi. 239. If, however, Leveson trained as a lawyer, that training never secured him a position of prominence. His early election to Parliament was the highlight of his documented career, and references to him in the records are sporadic. In 1434 he was prominent enough within Staffordshire to be named (in company with his kinsman, William Leveson) among those required to take the oath not to maintain breakers of the peace. Five years later he was commissioned with two of his kinsmen, William and Nicholas Leveson, to take and provide stone for the building of a royal free chapel at Wolverhampton, but this was one of only two tasks with which central government entrusted him. CPR, 1429-36, p. 400; 1436-41, p. 312.

Most of the references to Leveson from the 1440s and 1450s involve his stepson, Thomas Manley, with whom his relations appear to have been close, perhaps because he had no son of his own. Manley named his own eldest son James, probably because our MP stood godfather: G. Ormerod, Palatine and City of Chester, ed. Helsby, ii (1), 103. Manley was involved in frequent episodes of disorder, and Leveson sometimes acted with him. On at least one occasion his role was to protect Manley from conviction in a private action. In 1445 John Sutton, Lord Dudley, accused him of distributing bribes to a jury headed by three of the leading Staffordshire gentry, Sir John Gresley*, Hugh Wrottesley and Thomas Astley*, in an action of trespass Sutton had brought against Manley. There is much that is implausible in the details of Sutton’s claim: the bribes were said to have been given at Mansfield in Nottinghamshire and to have totalled the improbably high sum of £135, exclusive of the value of various horses the jurors supposedly received and a further £40 that Leveson is said to have taken for himself. None the less, the close connexion between our MP and the defendant gives the complaint substance. KB27/738, rot. 34. Sutton claimed that Manley, said to be resident at Willenhall, had taken deer from nearby Sedgley park on 22 Jan. 1440: Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. n.s. iii. 167. A few years later the two men acted together in a more violent matter. In Michaelmas term 1453 a Shropshire gentleman, Thomas Banaster of Hadnall, sued an appeal of robbery and an action of conspiracy against them; a term later, in what was clearly a related matter, they were appealed as accessories, in company with two other Cheshire esquires, Ralph Grosvenor and Richard Cholmeley, to the murder of one Thomas Gery. Further, at a session of the peace held at Shrewsbury in January 1454, our MP was indicted as procurantes to Manley in the theft of livestock worth £40 from Banaster at Hadnall. He replied by bringing actions of his own against Banaster for close-breaking and conspiracy. KB27/770, rot. 29; 771, rots. 2, 52; 774, rot.41; 795, rex rot. 27d; CP40/773, rot. 19; 775, rot. 97. The dispute was clearly a serious one, but there is nothing to show for certain whether Leveson was here forwarding a quarrel of his stepson or whether the quarrel was his own. There is only one clue: in Michaelmas term 1454 he had an action pending against a large group of men from Hadnall and its environs for breaking his close at nearby Smethcott. Perhaps it was this property that was at the heart of a dispute between Banaster and our MP, who was able to call on the support of his stepson and other Cheshire gentry. CP40/775, rot. 240.

The disorders inherent in this intense but seemingly short-lived dispute explain why Leveson sued out a general pardon in November 1455. If the return made into King’s bench by the Staffordshire sheriff is to be taken literally, he was then (or had been shortly before) languishing in the gaol of Stafford, too infirm to be brought into the court to answer the appeals against him. C67/41, m. 13; KB27/774, rots. 41, 80; Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. n.s. iii. 218-19. This was, however, no more than a convenient fiction, designed to forestall further process, presumably pending the settlement of the dispute at a local level. There is no other evidence of his imprisonment, and he did not trouble to plead his pardon against the indictment of 1454 until Hilary term 1460, by which time the appeals had long disappeared from the rolls. KB27/795, rex 27d. From this date, perhaps because of advancing age, his appearances in the records become even more sporadic, even though he was alive as late as February 1479 when he acquired added pasture and meadowland to his property at Willenhall. Sutherland mss, D593/B/1/26/6/13/5. He was involved in very few legal actions in the last 25 years of his life, although, interestingly, in 1460 he sued a shearman of Wolverhampton for the negligent fulling of woollen cloth: CP40/797, rot. 80. He may have had an otherwise undocumented interest in the cloth trade.

None the less, a little further flesh can be put on the bones of Leveson’s career because his family left an archive. Much of this relates to the sixteenth century and beyond, when the Levesons enjoyed a real prominence. For the family’s later history: Trans. Salop Arch. Soc. lxxvi. 54-75; The Commons 1558-1603, ii. 464-6; 1660-90, ii. 735-6. There is, however, some earlier material, including several letters of confraternity procured by our MP and his wife, Elizabeth. On 6 Apr. 1448 the couple were received into the fraternity of the hospital of Holy Trinity and St. Thomas the Martyr at Rome, perhaps during the course of a pilgrimage made there; and in the 1470s they had similar letters from religious institutions closer to home, namely the hospital of Burton Lazars in Leicestershire and the house of Dominican friars in Shrewsbury. Sutherland mss, D593/A/1/32/1, 14, 20; C/1. The archive shows that our MP had no son, and that, by the end of the 1450s, he had largely given up hope that he would ever have one. On 27 Jan. 1459 he entered into an indenture with his neighbour, John Bailly of Walsall, for the marriage of his ‘cousin’ (and heiress-presumptive), Maud, daughter of Henry Samon, to Bailly’s son, Roger. Its terms were straightforward: he undertook that his patrimony should pass to the couple and their issue in the event of his death without issue (saving a life interest to his widow), and that they would enjoy a rent charge of 100s. p.a. In return the groom’s father agreed to enfeoff the couple and their issue of lands with an annual value of the same sum and to settle the rest of his property, valued at £8 6s. 8d. p.a., on himself for life with remainder to them in fee tail. A deed, implementing our MP’s part of the bargain and executed in the following autumn, shows that his feoffees were headed by William Hextall* and Hextall’s son-in-law, Richard Petit. Hextall was an influential figure in the last years of Lancastrian rule, an intimate servant of Humphrey Stafford, duke of Buckingham, and an Exchequer official. Ibid. D593/B/1/26/6/12/26-28.

This connexion, albeit an indirect one, with the duke of Buckingham may have led our MP to favour Henry VI’s cause in the civil war that followed Maud Samon’s marriage. One of his close kinsmen certainly did: Nicholas Leveson, one of the witnesses to the marriage deed, was rewarded with £20 by the Crown for, among other services, fighting in Lord Dudley’s retinue at the battle of Blore Heath, and he was also the local steward of another Lancastrian lord, John, Lord Lovell. James’s stepson, Manley, may also have actively supported Lancaster, for, in December 1461, he was required to find surety in 500 marks to be a true liege man of the new King. CPR, 1452-61, p. 595; Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. n.s. iv. 113; DKR, xxxvii. 508. Nothing, however, is known of our MP’s part in the civil war of 1459-61.