MANFELD, Robert (d.1459), of Taplow, Bucks.

For many years a member of the Lancastrian Household, Manfeld owed his advancement to this connexion with the Crown. Possibly from the north of England or Lincolnshire, he was of obscure, perhaps even humble, background. Although it is impossible to prove that the MP was related to the namesake who served in the reigns of Ric. II and Hen. IV as clerk of the common pleas and became provost of Beverley College in Yorks., or to the William Manfeld who died seised of the manor of Canwick, Lincs. in 1426. William was succeeded by his nephew John, son of his brother Thomas Manfeld. Another Robert Manfeld, clerk, also of Yorks., was alive in 1430: CCR, 1405-9, p. 428; 1429-35, p. 44; The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 750; PPC, ii. 169-70; N. Country Wills (Surtees Soc. cxvi), 20-25; CIPM, xxii. 733. During the reign of Elizabeth I the Manfelds would place a monumental inscription to ‘Sir Robert Manfeld’, purportedly a knight of the early fifteenth century, in Taplow parish church, VCH Bucks. iii. 245. but this was almost certainly an attempt to disguise their less than illustrious pedigree. In fact, they owed their connexion with Taplow to the MP, and not to a fictitious knightly ancestor. No evidence has been found to substantiate the suggestion (in VCH Bucks. iii. 243) that the MP was the son of an earlier Robert Manfeld of Taplow who died early in the reign of Hen. VI.

The first position Manfeld is known to have held during his long and wide-ranging career in the Household was that of a servant of the buttery, and it was as such that he received a grant of £4 6s. 8d. p.a. from the Crown in April 1416. For life, this annuity was drawn upon the estates forfeited by the late Henry Scrope, Lord Scrope of Masham, who had been executed for his part in the Cambridge plot of the previous year. CPR, 1416-22, pp. 9, 54. It would appear that Manfeld subsequently went to France with Henry V, who in April 1418 made a grant to him and John Hurlbatte of lands in Bayeux. DKR, xli. 735. Confirmed in his annuity at the accession of Henry VI, E159/200, brevia Trin. rot. 18d. Manfeld was a yeoman of the King’s chamber and hall at the beginning of that King’s reign, but a marshal of the hall by the early 1430s. It is not known if he was related to William Manfeld, yeoman of the poultry, one of his household contemporaries in the early 1420s (CPR, 1422-9, p. 93), or if this was the same William who attested the election of the knights of the shire for Bucks. in 1435. In the spring of 1430 he indented to accompany the young King on his coronation expedition to France, undertaking to contribute three archers to the royal army. E404/46/25; E403/693, m. 17.

In common with other members of Henry VI’s Household, Manfeld profited richly from royal grants of offices and fees, although he was already benefiting from such grants before the King – so profligate in his generosity to his servants – began his personal rule. In the spring of 1431, while in France, he was granted custody of the royal manor of Sheen, to hold during pleasure with daily wages of 6d., CPR, 1429-36, p. 110. and in mid 1432 he petitioned successfully for the position of keeper and surveyor of the Humber and other rivers in Yorkshire. It was perhaps about this time that he submitted another petition to the chancellor, claiming that he should succeed to the keepership of the ‘Stanke of Fosse’ near York: C1/10/276. In his bill he alleged that John Forest, to whom Hen. V had granted the office for life (in 1415: CPR, 1413-16, pp. 387-8), had reneged on an agreement to surrender the office to him, although what came of this suit is not known. In May 1436, before Henry assumed full control of his realm, Manfeld received letters patent making him keeper of the King’s lions and leopards in the Tower of London. Initially appointed during pleasure, he was entitled to 6d. per day and an allowance of 6d. per animal, but subsequently his appointment was declared invalid because there were then no lions in the Tower. It was superseded (after Henry asserted his rule) by further letters patent, first of September 1437, which granted him the position for life and provided for him to start receiving the allowance once the menagerie was restocked, and then of May 1438, which reaffirmed that he was to be allowed 6d. for each animal in his care. CPR, 1436-41, pp. 96-97, 159. In the meantime the King made him receiver of the two Welsh lordships of Chirk and Chirkland. The receivership was no more than a sinecure, for Manfeld entrusted its daily business to Robert Englefeld, constable of Chirk castle and seneschal of Chirk and Chirkland, whom he appointed his deputy in March 1438. E210/5576. As it happened, his time as receiver was brief, for he lost the office when Cardinal Beaufort purchased the lordships from the Crown soon afterwards. G.L. Harriss, Cardinal Beaufort, 288-91. In July 1438, however, the King granted him £15 p.a. for life from the issues of Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire, £10 of which sum was to compensate him for the receivership and the remainder for his annuity from the Scrope lands, relinquished some years earlier when Lord Scrope’s brother and heir had recovered these estates. CPR, 1436-41, p. 297; CP, xi. 566-8. That same July Henry VI rewarded him with yet another grant, by which he became joint verger of the company of the Garter in association with William Pope, previously the sole occupier of this office. Following Pope’s death in 1452 Manfeld enjoyed sole possession of this largely honorary but lucrative post, which came with a salary of 1s. per day and a house within the precincts of Windsor castle.

No doubt Manfeld found his income from annuities and fees extremely useful when it came to investing in land, although the estate he created for himself was surprisingly modest for such a well regarded member of the Household. Even before becoming verger of the Garter, he must have spent much of his time attending the King at Windsor and other royal manors in the Thames valley. By the early 1430s he had begun to acquire property at Taplow, conveniently close to Windsor. This included the manor of Amerden, and the King augmented his rights of lordship there in January 1440, by granting to him and his heirs free warren in all their demesne lands and woods in Taplow, Hitcham and Hedsor. SC12/20/8, f. 26v; VCH Bucks. iii. 243; CChR, vi. 7. Manfeld added to his holdings in that part of Buckinghamshire in the early 1450s, when he acquired lands at nearby Burnham. CP25(1)/22/124/2. Outside Buckinghamshire, he obtained the farm of the royal manor of Kempton, Middlesex, and invested in property in Berkshire. His farm of Kempton, awarded in June 1441, was to have lasted for the life of Henry Somer*, keeper of the royal park there, but it ended when the King granted the manor to John Hampton II* and John Somerton six months later. (It is more than likely that Manfeld was happy to relinquish Kempton to Hampton, a fellow household man with whom he was on good terms.) CPR, 1436-41, p. 548; 1441-6, p. 30; CCR, 1447-54, pp. 170, 179, 371. In Berkshire Manfeld acquired the small manor of ‘Bear Place’ at Wargrave and a tenement in Reading. VCH Berks. iii. 174; Berks. RO, Reading recs., deeds R/AT1/149, 163, 169. His purchase of Wargrave, from Alice, widow and executrix of Robert Elleworth, was far from trouble-free, since it was challenged by William Mynors, who claimed a prior right to the property. Appealing to the chancellor, Mynors said he had bought the manor from Alice and Elleworth in August 1449, adding that he had handed over to the couple £27 2s. 4d., in part payment of the purchase price of 100 marks, before Elleworth’s death. He alleged that Alice, who had possessed jointure rights in Wargrave, had afterwards broken the contract by agreeing another sale with Manfeld. He also claimed that she had refused to return the instalment he had already paid, a grievance that formed the basis of a second bill he filed against her in the same court. To complicate matters, Alice and her new husband, John Harryes, began a Chancery suit of their own, although not in direct response to Mynors. They directed their bill against four of Elleworth’s feoffees, who had refused to comply with her sale to Manfeld by releasing their title in the manor to him. There is no record of the outcome of any of these suits, although Manfeld succeeded in retaining Wargrave, which passed to his heir after his death. C1/21/37 ; 22/45-46; CIPM Hen. VII, ii. 485.

Following his acquisition of Amerden, Manfeld took up residence in Buckinghamshire. Although a newcomer to the county, he rapidly became a j.p. there, and sheriff of that county and Bedfordshire. It is clear that he owed these appointments, as well the duchy of Lancaster stewardship in East Anglia bestowed on him in 1437, to his membership of the Household, for he was just one of a substantial number of royal servants entrusted with important local offices in the mid 1430s. Griffiths, 233. Of little significance in landed terms, and not a well established member of the local gentry, he must also have had his links with the Crown to thank for his career as a knight of the shire for Buckinghamshire. It was while a Member of his first Parliament that he obtained his rights of free warren at Taplow and elsewhere.

At about the time of the dissolution of the Parliament of 1439, the Crown retained Manfeld to serve in France. E159/216, brevia Easter rot. 16. During the early 1440s, he travelled to and fro across the Channel as a messenger between the King and the garrison at Calais. It was for his efforts in this regard that he received a reward of £10, along with a further £30 for his expenses, in the autumn of 1441. E403/741, m. 11; 743, mm. 3, 10, 15; PPC, v. 154; Foedera ed. Rymer (Hague edn.), v (1), 110. It is likely that it was the diligence with which Manfeld, by now an usher of chamber, performed these duties, along with the knowledge he must have acquired of Calais and its affairs, that prompted the King to consider him for the office of victualler of the town. After consulting the chancellor, John Stafford, bishop of Bath and Wells, the King appointed his servant to that position on 1 Jan. 1442. Manfeld, then in England, did not cross the Channel immediately after his appointment since he was re-elected to the Commons just two days later, but during the Parliament, which sat until 27 Mar., he was commissioned to find building materials and livestock for the garrisons of Calais and its marches. The office of victualler was an important one, since meeting the needs of Calais and its supporting castles was a recurring problem for the authorities at Westminster and in the Calais pale. SC1/45/235; CPR, 1441-6, p. 33; Griffiths, 470. Manfeld did not sail to Calais solely in the capacity as victualler, for the Crown also appointed him to a commission instructed to inquire into the state of the town’s fortifications. The government had seriously neglected the upkeep of these defences for a number of years, but the inquiry laid most of the blame on the shoulders of the former treasurer of Calais, Robert Whittingham I*, for deliberately economizing on repairs and embezzling cash and supplies for his own personal use. E159/219, recorda Mich. rots. 23, 24, 27, brevia Mich. rot. 1d; 221, recorda Easter rots. 15, 16. For his work on the commission, which ran for 148 days, Manfeld was awarded expenses totalling £74, of which sum he had received nearly £30 by mid 1442. Unlike Whittingham, Manfeld would appear generally to have conducted himself well during his time at Calais, where he disposed of those arms and munitions deemed useless for the defence of the town and supervised the making of new artillery and other items of military equipment. DKR, xlviii. 356; E159/227, brevia Trin. rot. 3.

In the spring of 1450 the King commissioned Manfeld, Giles St. Loe and Richard Wytherton to take the musters in England of those men-at-arms that the newly appointed wardens of Calais were providing for the town’s defence. DKR, xlviii. 383. Among the wardens was Ralph Butler, Lord Sudeley, whom Manfeld appears to have accompanied back across the Channel. E159/227, brevia Trin. rot. 4. Sudeley was also chief butler of England, and it was in this capacity that he appointed Manfeld his deputy butler at Sandwich later in the same year. In spite of the importance of keeping Calais safe, the government was still prepared to draw upon the town’s resources for use elsewhere, since it was from its revenues that Manfeld made the royal household two separate loans of £1,000, in December 1450 and April 1451. E403/785, mm. 3, 15. Given the perilous position of the English in France at this date, such loans were hardly a wise expedient, even if subsequently repaid. The sums involved were certainly significantly larger than the £400 the King granted Manfeld out of clerical taxation for the safe-keeping of Calais in the summer of 1451. CPR, 1446-52, pp. 466-7. The government did nevertheless raise a substantial force to augment the town’s defences. In August 1451 Manfeld, by then an esquire for the body, was among those commissioned to take the musters (at Dover, Sandwich and Calais) of the retinue of Gervase Clifton*, the newly appointed treasurer of Calais, and of the troops which the city of London had agreed to send to the beleaguered English outpost. Ibid. 479-80. By now his time as victualler was nearing its end, for he relinquished the office to Sir John Cheyne II* in the autumn of 1451.

While victualler, Manfeld was by no means completely tied to Calais. During his time in that office, he spent weeks, if not months, in Ireland and took on the additional responsibilities of master of the royal mint. The King sent him to the lordship in the spring or early summer of 1444. Perennially troubled by the rebellious Gaelic Irish, the colony also suffered from a long-running feud between James Butler, earl of Ormond, and the Talbot family. Having taken office as lieutenant of Ireland in February 1442, Ormond had made strenuous efforts to remove the Irish treasurer and chancellor, both of whom were hostile to him, and serious concerns in England about his conduct prompted the MP’s mission. New Hist. Ire. ii. ed. Cosgrove, 547-8, 551. Manfeld carried a privy seal letter summoning the lieutenant to England, although it was countermanded by a subsequent signet letter ordering Ormond to remain in Ireland until further notice, so that he could take measures to ensure the safety of the colony during his absence. In the meantime, Ormond summoned a great council to meet at Drogheda while Manfeld was still in Ireland, so that the latter could inform the King of the true state of affairs in Ireland. On 21 June, five days before this assembly opened, Manfeld attended a meeting of the King’s Irish council in Drogheda, at which Giles Thorndon, until recently treasurer of Ireland, stood accused of having sought to stir up opposition to Ormond, and of expressing the wish to cut off the lieutenant’s head. At the great council, those attending spoke out in defence of Ormond, and they suggested that Manfeld and others should travel to England to ask the King to permit the lieutenant to remain in Ireland until after Michaelmas. Procs. King’s Council in Ire. ed. Graves (Rolls Ser. lxix), pp. xlviii-l, 304-13. As it happened, Ormond was obliged to take ship for England in August, to face charges of treason and maladministration, and he was not allowed to return to the lordship for several years. Oxf. DNB, ‘Butler, James, fourth earl of Ormond’. It is unclear whether Manfeld, who was awarded £20 to cover the costs of his mission, E403/753, m. 2. preceded him across the Irish Sea or accompanied him to the King’s presence.

The choice of Manfeld as master of the Mint broke with precedent in as much as he was a royal servant rather than an independent goldsmith like previous holders of that position. A general scarcity of bullion in Europe (which had prompted the Parliament of 1445 to propose striking 33s. worth of halfpennies and pennies from every pound of silver instead of 30s. as in the past) probably lay behind his appointment. The scheme was adopted, but probably against the wishes of the then master, John Paddesley, the man whom Mansfeld replaced. Manfeld was reappointed master in December 1451, when the King granted him the office for a further 12 years after he had completed his present term, and he was still master when he died. New Hist. R. Mint, 176-7; PROME, xi. 484-5; CCR, 1441-7, pp. 405-9; 1447-54, pp. 368-71; CFR, xviii. 267-8. Manfeld exercised his responsibilities at the Mint in more difficult circumstances than in the past. As a result, the office was far less lucrative for him than it had been for some of his goldsmith predecessors, New Hist. R. Mint, 177. but the other appointments and grants he received in the mid 1440s were more than adequate compensation. A year before he became master, the Crown issued him with letters patent by which the keepership of the King’s lions was re-granted to him and his eldest son Richard, then still a child, in survivorship. In June 1446 he and a fellow Household man, John Trevelyan*, were awarded lands which the recently deceased Henry Beauchamp, duke of Warwick, had held at Calais, and in the following January he and John Hampton II received a joint grant of certain sums of money which a Genoese merchant and his sureties had forfeited to the Crown. DKR, xlviii. 370; CPR, 1446-52, p. 33. Just a few weeks later, the King appointed him steward for life of the castle and lordship of Colchester and hundred of Tendring, Essex, with a fee of £10 p.a. and other profits, and in March the same year he received a grant, again for life, of £11 p.a. from the fee farm of Colchester, backdated to the previous Michaelmas. CPR, 1446-52, p. 35. As it happened, the stewardship proved extremely short-lived, for he was obliged to surrender it within a matter of weeks. In compensation, he obtained fresh letters patent of 6 Apr. 1447, granting him the reversion of £10 p.a. from the subsidy and alnage of cloth in London, an annuity for life that would vest after the death of its then recipient, William Pope, his co-verger at Windsor. Ibid. 72.

The Act of Resumption passed in the Parliament of 1449-50 posed a serious threat to such grants, and the extent to which the Act affected Manfeld is not entirely clear. He and his son Richard were permitted to retain the keepership of the lions, but at one point it looked as if he would have to surrender various grants worth a total of £40 p.a. He certainly lost the annuity of £15 he received from the issues of Oxfordshire and Berkshire, along with a yearly pipe of Gascon wine from the port of London that the King had granted to him and his first wife, Katherine, in survivorship in April 1440. PROME, xii. 125; E163/8/14; CPR, 1436-41, p. 395; 1452-61, p. 113. During the next Parliament, in the autumn of 1450, the Commons sought the removal from the King’s presence of 29 named courtiers, of whom most were indicted at Rochester in the summer of 1451. Neither the Commons nor the Kentish jurors named Manfeld, but some of the government’s opponents believed that he was one of those indicted. Griffiths, 308; R. Virgoe, ‘Ancient Indictments in K.B.’, in Med. Kentish Soc. ed. du Boulay (Kent Rec. Ser. xviii), 220-9; C.L. Kingsford, English Historical Literature, 365. Although mistaken, this belief suggests that he had not escaped the general opprobrium felt towards those who had prospered from the King’s misguided largesse. As it happened, he lost nothing of his £15 annuity, since the letters patent that restored it to him in June 1452, after the Court had regained the political initiative against Richard, duke of York, backdated it to the beginning of the Parliament of 1450. CPR, 1446-52, pp. 550-1. A few years earlier Manfeld had been associated with York, in so far as he received a tally at the Exchequer on the duke’s behalf in Feb. 1449 (E403/773, m. 12), but this does not suggest a wavering in his loyalty to the Lancastrian establishment, from which the duke was far from completely estranged at that date: Oxf. DNB, ‘Richard of York’. In the same June he received an exemption for life from having to serve the Crown in any administrative office at a local level, CPR, 1446-52, p. 563. while remaining a j.p., presumably for reasons of local prestige.

The Court’s recovery meant that the Commons of the following Parliament contained a significant number of royal servants, including Manfeld and his fellow knight of the shire for Buckinghamshire, Robert Whittingham II*. A Parliament that opened in such favourable circumstances for the Crown was unlikely to demand another Act of Resumption, although Manfeld went to the trouble of acquiring immunity from any Act it might pass. PROME, xii. 250-1. He also obtained letters patent, issued in June 1453, restoring to him the annual pipe of wine granted to him and his late first wife in 1440. CPR, 1452-61, p. 113. It is impossible to say whether Manfeld was unusually prescient in taking these precautions, but his privileged access to the King may have given him some warning that all was not well with the monarch. Whatever the case, the King’s descent into mental illness in the late summer of 1453 resulted in a dramatic change in political fortunes for Richard, duke of York, who assumed the role of Protector of England before the Parliament ended in the following April. In spite of this development, it is likely that family concerns were uppermost in Manfeld’s mind when he left the Commons for the last time. He and Sir William Peyto‡ (a retainer of York’s enemy, Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset) had agreed that his daughter Eleanor should marry Peyto’s son John, and within two months of the Parliament’s dissolution Peyto was arranging to have his manors of Sowe, Warwickshire, and Great Wyrley, Staffordshire, settled on the couple. Ibid. 159.

Manfeld must have fathered Eleanor relatively late in life, since by now he was of advanced years. In January 1457 he secured a renewal of his exemption from local office, in case the Act of Resumption passed by the Parliament of 1455 had rendered his previous letters patent invalid, Ibid. 334. but he remained keeper of the lions and master of the Mint. In spite of the exemption, he was appointed to two more ad hoc commissions in Buckinghamshire and continued to serve as a j.p. In the late 1450s he began actions in the court of common pleas against Sir William Plumpton* over debts totalling £60, but it would appear that these suits never came to pleadings and the circumstances in which the debts were contracted are unknown. CP40/786, rot. 369d; 787, rots. 3d, 246; 788, rot. 349d; 791, rot. 312d. In July 1458 the King awarded the reversion of Manfeld’s office of verger of the Garter to John Penycoke*, CPR, 1452-61, p. 432. a grant which may have prompted the MP to safeguard the office of keeper of the King’s lions for Robert, his second son by his first marriage. Since the death of Robert’s elder brother in the spring of 1455 he had held the keepership alone, Add. 32490, V 14 (rubbing of a brass at Taplow recording that Richard had died, aged 19, on 6 Apr. that year). but now, in October 1458, he secured a new grant, to him and Robert in survivorship. CPR, 1452-61, p. 467. In the meantime, Manfeld retained his place in the Household, acting as a feoffee for a fellow royal servant, William Norton, and receiving a royal pardon, in which he was described as an esquire for the body, in January 1459. CCR, 1454-61, p. 349; C67/42, m. 1. It is also possible that he was commissioned to deliver the gaol of Windsor castle in Feb. 1459. One of the justices in question was ‘Richard Manfeld’, but presumably this was a mistake since by that date the MP’s son of that name was dead: CPR, 1452-61, p. 493.

Manfeld did not live to see the overthrow of the King whom he had served so faithfully for so long, for he was dead by the following April when the escheators in Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Middlesex were ordered to inquire into his lands. CFR, xix. 213. For want of an extant inquisition post mortem, there is no evidence for any properties he may have held in the latter county at his death. His will likewise no longer survives, although he is known to have appointed his second wife Joan as his executor. C67/45, m. 2. She outlived him by a little over five years, dying in the summer of 1464. CFR, xx. 126. The heir to the Manfeld estates was Robert, the MP’s eldest surviving son, who died in 1500. The manor at Taplow remained in the hands of the MP’s descendants until the late seventeenth century. CIPM Hen. VII, ii. 485; VCH Bucks. iii. 243.