LONGFORD, Ralph (1400-32), of Longford, Derbys. and Withington, Lancs.

The Longfords were long-serving servants of the house of Lancaster. Already possessed of significant landholdings in Derbyshire, Lancashire and Staffordshire, a further enhancement of their property was promised by the marriage, made within the great Lancastrian affinity, of Ralph’s grandparents, Sir Nicholas Longford (d.1401) and Margery, one of the two daughters and eventual coheiresses of Sir Alfred Sulney† of Newton Solney, some ten miles from Longford. G.A. Holmes, Estates of Higher Nobility, 135; S.K. Walker, Lancastrian Affinity, 115. Ralph was born in their lifetime at the family’s property at Calwich, and was baptized in the parish church of Ellastone on 27 Oct. 1400. Curiously, given his family’s high standing, his godparents – Ralph Weston and Mary Fulham – were obscure: C138/61/78. He inherited as a minor because his father died prematurely, falling, either to injury or disease, at the siege of Harfleur in the autumn of 1415. His date of death is variously given in his inqs. post mortem as 17 Sept. 1415, five days before the surrender of Harfleur, and the following 1 Oct.: Lancs. Inqs. i (Chetham Soc. xcv), 114-15, 119; CIPM, xx. 186.

There followed a dispute over Ralph’s wardship. In an inquisition held on 23 Nov. 1415 it was returned that his father had died seised, aside from the manor of Longford held of the bishopric of Coventry and Lichfield, of a moiety of a small manor at neighbouring Thurvaston held in chief. On the following day the Crown granted the wardship to the treasurer of the royal household, Sir Roger Leche†. There must be a strong possibility that Leche, a leading member of the Derbyshire gentry, engineered the findings of the inquisition to secure the grant, for subsequent events imply that the Longfords were not tenants-in-chief. CIPM, xx. 486; CFR, xiv. 105.

An inquisition held on the following 18 Jan. returned what was undoubtedly truth in respect of Sir Nicholas’s Lancashire lands, namely that he held the valuable manor of Withington of Thomas, Lord de la Warre and rector of Manchester. Yet this truth was soon set aside. On 21 Mar. another inquisition found that the manor was held of the King, and three days later the Crown, disregarding its earlier grant to Leche, entrusted the keeping of Ralph and the manor of Withington to Sir John Stanley†. Since this grant was made as a reward for Stanley’s ‘expenses and assiduous labours in surveying’ Withington, the probability is that Stanley had acted like Leche in manufacturing a royal right for his own benefit. De la Warre was thus put to the trouble of proving his own right. How he did so has left no trace on the records, but he succeeded. On the following 8 Nov. Stanley surrendered the wardship of the manor to him. Lancs. Inqs. i. 119; J. Booker, Didsbury (Chetham Soc. xlii), 110-11; DKR, xxxiii. 13.

The other Longford lands also fell into the hands of their overlords, and it is likely that the wardship of Ralph’s body, or at least the right to it, passed to John Catterick, bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, from whom the family held their lordship of Longford. The courts there were held in the bp.’s name from 1415 to 1419: John Rylands Univ. Lib., Manchester, Crutchley mss, CRU/218. None the less, part of the Longford property remained in royal wardship: the family’s manor of Ellastone was held of Humphrey, earl of Stafford, who was himself a royal ward. This explains why our MP was put to the trouble of proving his age, which he duly did on 7 Feb. 1422 and, two weeks later, the escheator of Staffordshire was ordered to give him seisin of Ellastone. C138/61/78; CCR, 1419-22, p. 185. Ralph entered into a depleted inheritance, for it was burdened by two dowagers, his own mother and his grandmother, whose long survival delayed that augmentation of the head of family’s resources promised by her marriage to Sir Nicholas. Little is known of the former, save that, by the spring of 1416, she married the Cheshire lawyer, William Chauntrell, who rose to be second justice in the palatinate of Lancaster in the late 1430s. DKR, xxxiii. 12; R. Somerville, Duchy, i. 472. Alice survived Chauntrell, who died in 1438: Test. Ebor. iv (Surtees Soc. liii), 32n. Much, however, is known of Ralph’s grandmother. Indeed, his career, as far as it was reflected in the surviving records, was dominated by his relationship with her. She was a significant heiress and had a colourful marital history. On the death of Ralph’s grandfather she had married an important Cheshire knight, Sir Robert Legh of Adlington, and after Legh’s demise in 1408 she took as her third husband, unwisely as it transpired, a more obscure man, Richard Clitheroe. For Legh: M.J. Bennett, Community, Class and Careerism, 214; G. Ormerod, Palatine and City of Chester ed. Helsby, iii (2), 655-6. She had married Clitheroe by 26 Feb. 1410: DKR, xxxvi. 113. Their relationship was soon in trouble, and their difficulties, at least according to one possible interpretation, both raised a threat to Ralph’s inheritance of the Sulney lands and provided him with the chance to acquire them before her death. The only point at issue between our MP and Margery was her lands. The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 623, wrongly identifies our MP as the petitioner who in Mar. 1422 asked the royal council for the restoration of goods and jewels deposited, in 1414, by Margery and Clitheroe with the prior of Guisborough, Yorks. This was our MP’s uncle and namesake: PPC, ii. 328-30.

In about 1417 Margery, concerned about the implications of the breakdown of her marriage, summoned to her assistance the ubiquitous Derbyshire lawyer, Henry Booth*, her son-in-law, Sir Henry Pierrepont*, and two friends of the Longfords, Robert, prior of Calwich, and William Hondford. She told them that she feared that Clitheroe, with whom she had joint estate in her lands, would take the profits. Booth advised her to resort to what amounted to subterfuge, to forge and publish a deed predating the conveyance of joint estate (so invalidating it) and so pressure her husband into making a favourable agreement with her. The prior, however, raised the objection that such a feigned deed might compromise the rights of the heir, namely our MP. The meeting concluded on the prior’s agreement to ride to London both to forward the divorce a mensa et thoro and to offer Clitheroe terms, conceding him, at most, lands worth £40 p.a. This story was told in Chancery by Booth and the prior on 24 May 1425, while Booth was sitting as an MP. C1/6/318-21. The divorce was still pending in Feb. 1419, when Margery was excommunicated for refusal to restore conjugal rights to Clitheroe: Reg. Chichele, i. 185. There is no reason to suppose that it is untrue.

What followed, however, is open to more than one interpretation: it can be read either as a genuine dispute between Margery and our MP, anxious to get his hands on her property prematurely, or else as a contrived contest designed to put the lands out of the reach of Clitheroe. She appears to have followed Booth’s advice. She forged a deed, predating her unfortunate marriage to Clitheroe, by which she gave all her Sulney lands to Bartholomew Brokesby*, John Kirkeby, a clerk, and Thomas Chelleston, parson of the Sulney church of Normanton, in fee. She then, according to her own complaint to the chancellor, found stronger protection by having these feoffees convey to three men of high rank, namely Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester, Master John Stafford (chancellor and treasurer at the time she made her complaint, if not at the time of the feoffment), and William Babington, c.j.c.p. As the prior had predicted, our MP chose (or, at least purported to choose) to interpret these conveyances as an attempt by his grandmother to disinherit him, and on 28 June 1424 he made entry into both her lands and the manor of Boythorpe (near Chesterfield), which had been settled on his uncle and namesake. C1/6/151, 324.

Litigation was then opened on two fronts. Margery sued for redress to the chancellor, then, conveniently, Beaufort, as did the elder Ralph. Both petitions were drafted by the same hand, for they both end with the same words, namely that they could secure no redress because our MP ‘est cy fort en la dit paiis a cause de sez cosyns et allies’. Ibid. The younger Ralph, for his own part, took measures to secure his possession. On the day assigned to his entry in this petition, 28 June 1424, he took conveyance of his grandmother’s Sulney property from Richard Radcliffe, rector of Longford, and two others. Derbys. Chs. ed. Jeayes, 1874. There are two possible explanations for this coincidence of dates: either Longford was guilty of coming to the lands violently and on the same day made arrangements for this fraudulent conveyance, or, more probably, no violence was involved and the plaintiffs simply assigned the date of the deed to his supposed act merely for the purpose of bringing the dispute to the chancellor. Less than a year later, on 12 June 1425, soon after Booth and the prior had been examined in Chancery, he brought a legal action of his own, suing an assize of novel disseisin for the Sulney lands in Derbyshire against Margery, his uncle Ralph and Chelleston. This assize was not taken until 24 July 1426, when both Margery and our MP troubled to appear personally. The delay may have been to allow the disputants to come to an informal agreement, and the probability is that the jury simply repeated a narrative put to them by both plaintiff and defendant. It returned that, after the divorce between Clitheroe and Margery, the divorced husband gave his estate in the Sulney lands to her; she then drew up a deed, predating her failed marriage, conveying her inheritance to Brokesby and the others; our MP, as heir, entered on the grounds that this feoffment was to his disinheritance; and he was then disseised by the defendants non vi nec armis. JUST1/1537, rot. 21. The jurors also gave him the verdict in respect of a third of a third of the manor of Boythorpe on the grounds that Margery had alienated it to the elder Ralph even though her title was only in dower.

While this verdict was entirely favourable to Longford, it was probably also collusive. Not only did he remit the modest 40s. damages awarded him, but on the following 28 Sept. he granted all the Sulney lands to Margery to hold for the term of her life. Crutchley mss, CRU/580. It may, therefore, be that the whole dispute was contrived to destroy the interest of Clitheroe, for Margery’s title, as the grantee of our MP, now post-dated the end of her marriage. The close correspondence between the findings of the assize and the scheme outlined by Booth for the undermining of Clitheroe’s title is suggestive here, as also is Booth’s appearance among the witnesses to our MP’s conveyance of 28 June 1424.

This dispute, real or contrived, aside, little is known of Ralph’s brief adult career. On 13 Oct. 1423 he had headed the attestors to the Lancashire parliamentary election, and at the next election on 2 Apr. 1425 he himself was returned for the county. Lancs. Knights of the Shire (Chetham Soc. xcvi), 213. His desire for election may have been connected with the dispute over the Sulney lands: it was, at all events, during the Parliament that Booth and the prior were examined and that Longford sued his assize of novel disseisin. Longford was also involved, albeit tangentially, in the business of the next Parliament: at Leicester on 19 May 1426, while Parliament was in session there, he was one of those knighted on the occasion of the boy King Henry VI’s own dubbing. That he should have been singled out for this honour suggests some military experience, and it may be that, like some others of those honoured with him, he had been present at the victory at Verneuil on 17 Aug. 1424. W.C. Metcalfe, Bk. of Knights, 1.

Longford appeared to be a young man at the beginning of a successful career, but, as in the case of his father, that career was to be cut short. He died at the age of only 31 on 26 Feb. 1432. Notts. IPM (Thoroton Soc. xii), 193-4. His date of death is wrongly given as 26 Sept. 1431 in Lancs. Inqs. ii (Chetham Soc. xcix), 29, where the feast of St. Mathias is confused with that of St. Mattheus. Over two years earlier, in June 1429, he had conveyed all his lands, together with his remainder interest in his grandmother’s property, to feoffees, headed by Thomas Langley, bishop of Durham, Sir Ralph Shirley†, Sir Nicholas Montgomery† (the husband of his aunt, Joan), Sir Richard Radcliffe (the sheriff who had conducted his election to Parliament), and a local parson. Derbys. Chs. 1588-9. His grandmother was alive as late as June 1430 but dead by Trin. term 1432, when the Sulney lands were in the hands of our MP’s feoffees: Derbys. RO, Every mss, D5236/9/20; CP40/686, rots. 110d, 112. Since he left a minor – a son Nicholas born in about 1419 – as his heir, this proved a sensible precaution for the feoffees proved active enough to keep the bulk of the Longford estate out of the hands of its various overlords. They did not do so, however, without a struggle. Interestingly, on 12 Jan. 1433 they granted the family’s caput honoris to our MP’s brother, Thomas, to hold until the heir’s majority as compensation for his charges ‘circa prosecutionem et defensionem’ of the manor and other enfeoffed lands, presumably against its overlords. They also faced a legal challenge from our MP’s widow, although this was probably collusive. In Trinity term 1432 she sued them for dower in the Longford lands, and they immediately conceded her claim. Derbys. Chs. 1592; Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. xvii. 140. The young heir may have been brought up in the wardship of the earl of Stafford (from 1444, duke of Buckingham). Suggestively, the manor of Ellastone, the only property the Longfords held of the earl, was in his hands in 1433-4, and in 1444 he granted Nicholas, by then of age, an annuity of ten marks. Staffs. RO, Stafford family mss, D641/1/2/53, m. 6; C. Rawcliffe, Staffords, 233.

The history of the family in the aftermath of our MP’s death was a violent one. On 1 Jan. 1434 his uncle, Henry Longford, was murdered in Chesterfield church by Thomas Foljambe of Walton (Derbyshire), an episode in the violent quarrel between Foljambe and Sir Henry Pierrepont; and in the 1450s Nicholas, by then a knight, took a leading part in a series of violent offences against Walter Blount*. S.M. Wright, Derbys. Gentry (Derbys. Rec. Soc. viii), 128, 134-5; R.L. Storey, End of House of Lancaster, 152-5, 158. Our MP’s grandson, another Sir Nicholas†, represented Derbyshire in the Parliament of 1472. CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 151. Both Nicholases found themselves compromised by the long survival of our MP’s widow, who was still alive in the 1470s. C1/74/69. She married the Lancs. esquire, Seth Worsley, as her 2nd husband and was the mother of William Worsley, dean of St. Paul’s cathedral from 1479 to 1497: William Worsley ed. Kleineke and Hovland, 3. The family survived in the main male line until 1610, but did not thrive. All their property, save for their caput honoris at Longford, had been sold by 1580. Lancs. and Cheshire Hist. Soc. lxxxvi. 66-71.