LEYBOURNE, Nicholas (b.c.1401), of Longsleddale and Cunswick, Westld.

Nicholas Leybourne was from one of the leading gentry families of Westmorland, and for the last 20 years or so of his life he was the head of that family, yet his long career is only very sporadically documented. In one sense he lived his career in reverse: it was one of diminishing rather than mounting activity and distinction. As a very young man, he joined the retinue of Sir John Neville, son and heir-apparent of Ralph, earl of Westmorland, to fight in Henry V’s campaign of 1417. E101/51/2, m. 22. In his twenties, despite his father’s survival, he took a prominent part in local affairs. In June 1422 he sat on the high-powered Westmorland jury assembled for John, Lord Clifford’s inquisition post mortem; and on 7 Feb. 1426 he was elected to Parliament for that county by attestors including his kinsman, John Leybourne. Not long after this Parliament he was named as escheator in succession to his father; and between 1427 and 1431 he was nominated to five local commissions. C138/64/37; C219/13/4; CPR, 1422-9, p. 405; 1429-36, pp. 40, 41, 71, 131. He was also active as an arbiter and attestor of county elections. In 1430 he was one of four arbiters named to settle a disagreement between (Sir) Thomas Strickland* and Richard Redmayne (uncle of the MP) over a tenement in Hincaster in Kendal; two years later he joined his father, Strickland and Thomas Bethom*, as arbiters in a minor local dispute; and he attested the Westmorland elections of 1433 and 1435. Recs. Kendale, ed. Farrer and Curwen, ii. 174; CAD, v. A11392; C219/14/4, 5. By this date he had lands of his own, sufficient to sustain him in this role: in the subsidy returns of 1435-6 he was assessed on an annual income of £13 p.a. (compared with his father’s £53), presumably from property settled on him at the time of his marriage to an unidentified bride. E179/195/32. His son, James, was a gaol delivery juror with his fa. in 1453, so our MP must have been married by c.1431: JUST3/70/23. All seemed in place for a flourishing career that would become even more intensive once he had inherited the family estates.

Yet this expectation was not to be realized. After heading the jurors at the inquisition post mortem of John, duke of Bedford, at Kendal on 4 Nov. 1437, he entered a period of virtual retirement that did not end with his father’s death in the early 1440s. CIPM, xxiv. 424. The survival of his stepmother, Katherine, who was alive at least as late as 1447, no doubt served to burden his inheritance for a period, but, given his earlier administrative involvement, this hardly explains his apparent inactivity. She may have been alive as late as 1459: Recs. Kendale, i. 362. It is tempting to seek the explanation in some debilitating malady, although, to be set against this, is the fact that he did not withdraw completely from the position in local affairs to which he was born. Between 1437 and 1453 he regularly served as a juror when justices of gaol delivery made their annual visit to Appleby; and in the 1450s he twice troubled to attend parliamentary elections at Appleby. JUST3/70/4, m. 3d; 8, m. 4; 10, m. 2; 11; 13; 16; 18; 23; C219/16/1, 3. His failure to play any more significant role was probably a matter of choice.

The records provide occasional glimpses of Leybourne’s private activities. His readiness to cross swords with two of the minor local peerage implies that he had a proper sense of his family’s standing. In 1442 George Neville, Lord Latimer, sued him for close-breaking and depasturing grass worth as much as £40 at Heversham, and in 1444 he brought actions against him and Sir Thomas Strickland for debts of £21 13s. 4d. each. A decade later Leybourne was in dispute with Ralph, Lord Greystoke, who, in 1456, secured a writ of outlawry against him for the alleged abduction of his ward, William, grandson and heir of William Laton*. CP40/727, rot. 537; 734, rot. 469d; 780, rot. 295; 781, rot. 62; 782, rot. 172. Another impression of his standing, however, is created by the very modest marriage he contracted, on 24 Aug. 1447, for his daughter, Mary. Her husband, William, son and heir-apparent of the Leybournes’ near-neighbour, John Wesshington of Strickland Ketel, was from the county’s lesser gentry: John had been assessed on an income of a mere £6 p.a. in the Westmorland subsidy returns of 1435-6. The terms on which the marriage was contracted reflected this disparity in social rank. The bride was to have a portion of 40 marks, comparatively paltry for the daughter of a leading county family (even in an impoverished county like Westmorland) together with an annual rent of 9s. payable during the life of Dame Katherine, the portion to be paid on the easiest terms, namely at a rate of only five marks p.a. In return, the groom’s father undertook to settle immediately lands worth five marks p.a. on the couple and their issue, with the reversion, expectant on his death, of the rest of his lands on the same terms. In other words, the bride was to have jointure in all the Wesshington lands, and the bargain was an uneven one. Recs. Kendale, i. 361-2.

The few other surviving references to Leybourne show him in a more natural social milieu. On 9 Nov. 1447, within months of making his daughter’s marriage, he was one of the leading gentry of the shire who gathered to witness an award made by (Sir) Thomas Haryngton I* in the dispute between the Threlkelds and Thornburghs. More tantalisingly, a few months later he joined Sir John Pennington* and Henry Bellingham, in entering into mutual bonds in £200 to (Sir) Thomas Parr*, Sir Richard Musgrave*, Sir Thomas Strickland and John Broughton*, bonds then delivered to Haryngton. This looks like an arrangement to abide arbitration, the bonds delivered to Haryngton as escrows pending the arbiters’ award. Unfortunately, no evidence has been found to provide further illumination, yet, from a later perspective, it is interesting to find Leybourne acting as an apparent ally of Pennington and Bellingham, adherents of Percy and Lancaster. CP40/759, rot. 399d. Bellingham is said, in a modern ped., to have been the husband of our MP’s sis. Katherine, but no proof of such a match has been found: Cumb. and Westmld. Antiq. and Arch. Soc. x, facing p. 124; Hist. Northumb. vii. 193. His own political sympathies, judging from the timing of the brief resumption of his administrative career, probably lay in the opposite camp. His long absence from commissions ended in November 1460, when the duke of York and his Neville allies were in control of government, and early in the new reign he was nominated among those to detain local Lancastrians. CPR, 1452-61, pp. 651-2; 1461-7, p. 34.

This did not, however, betoken any sustained period of activity. Leybourne again disappears from the commissions, perhaps, on this occasion, because of death. He was succeeded by his son James, but it was not until this James’s grandson, another James†, inherited the family estates in 1510 that the lord of Cunswick resumed his proper place in local affairs. In the interim, however, Robert Leybourne, perhaps our MP’s grandson, made a successful ecclesiastical career, serving as bishop of Carlisle between 1504 and his death in 1507. Test. Ebor. iv (Surtees Soc. liii), 262-4. For the later hist. of the fam.: Cumb. and Westmld. Antiq. and Arch. Soc. x. 124-57.