MANNERS, Robert (c.1408-61), of Etal, Northumb.

The Manners of Etal were a long-established Northumbrian family, having come to England at the time of the Norman Conquest and resided at Etal on the Scottish border since at least the mid twelfth century. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries successive heads of the family distinguished themselves in the wars with Scotland. Hedley, ii. 243-5. The career of Robert’s father, Sir John Manners, reflected the family’s important role on the border. Sheriff of Northumberland in 1413-14 and one of the county’s MPs in the Parliament of May 1421, he was appointed to treat with the Scots over breaches of the truce. The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 676-7. Less happily, the latter part of his career was dominated by his involvement in the violent death of his near-neighbour, William Heron of Ford. On 20 Jan. 1428 Heron led a group of armed men in an assault on Etal castle and he and one of his servants met their deaths in the ensuing fracas, allegedly at the hands of Manners himself. Indictments were taken before royal commissioners of inquiry in the following March against other members of the family, including John’s son, Robert, who was named as an accessory. Thereafter a lengthy period of negotiation followed, and in May 1431 Sir John Manners agreed to pay compensation to Heron’s widow and submitted to a humbling ceremony of reconciliation. KB27/672, rot. 60; 681, rex rot. 4; J.W. Armstrong, ‘Violence and Peacemaking in the English Marches towards Scotland’, The Fifteenth

This was not the most promising of beginnings to Robert’s career, but the so-called Causa de Heron had no long-term impact on the standing of the family in border society. Some of the family property must have been settled upon him in his father’s lifetime: in Easter term 1430 he had an action of trespass of pending in respect of his land at Howtel, a few miles from Etal. It is probable that the occasion of this settlement was his marriage to a daughter of Sir Robert Ogle, who had sided with his family in the Causa de Heron. CP40/677, rot. 220d. The date of the marriage is unknown, but it is likely to have occurred while Sir John Manners lived. In August 1436, when Ogle’s son, Sir Robert II, was granted the custody of Norham castle by Bp. Langley, Sir John and Robert both stood surety, implying that the marital connexion had already been made: Durham Univ. Lib., cathedral. muns., pontificalia, 3.3. Pont. 1. This would explain why Robert began to play a part in local affairs even before his father’s death. In August 1433 he was among those empanelled to sit on the jury that delivered the castle gaol in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and in May the following year he was one of those who took the parliamentary oath not to maintain lawbreakers. More significantly, in May 1438, he was named on Bishop Robert Neville’s first commission of the peace in Norhamshire and Islandshire, the bishop’s liberties on the northern border. JUST3/54/13; CPR, 1429-36, p. 396; DURH3/42, m. 7.

The death of his father a few months later made Robert lord of the manor of Etal, although, if his father’s inquisition post mortem is to be taken at face value, his inheritance was a depleted one. The capital messuage at Etal, namely the castle there built in the mid-fourteenth century, was said by the jurors to be ruinous and worth nothing, the 80 acres of demesne land were valued at a mere 2d. p.a., and 40 acres of meadow rendered no more than 4d. annually, a devaluation attributed both to the depredations of the Scots and the ‘barrenness of the land’. Further, the manor was said to be held of the Crown by the service of only a twentieth part of a knight’s fee, whereas, as recently as 1428, it had been held by that of a quarter, and in the late thirteenth century by that of half a knight’s fee. While the jurors, led by Manners’s friend Thomas Ilderton*, may have been overly pessimistic in their valuation of the estate, it is clear that Etal held no great prospect of wealth for its new lord. CIPM, xxv. 190; A. Emery, Greater Med. Houses, i. 91-92; Hist. Northumb. xi. 450.

For the remainder of his career Robert’s fortunes were closely tied to those of his brother-in-law, Sir Robert Ogle II*. In February 1447, along with Ogle, he was named to a commission to inquire into repairs made at Roxburgh castle by William Neville, Lord Fauconberg, possibly as a prelude to Ogle once more taking custody of the castle; and in the following year it is likely that he took part in the raid into Scotland led by Ogle and Henry Percy, Lord Poynings, which culminated in the burning of Dunbar. More curiously, in February 1449 he and Poynings, ‘for good service in the marches towards Scotland’, were granted the keeping of Ogle’s goods and the issues of his lands for as long as Ogle should labour under the disability of outlawry. It is not known why Ogle was outlawed, but it is safe to assume that the grantees were acting as his trustees. R.A. Griffiths, Hen. VI, 409; CPR, 1446-52, p. 214. In the following August Manners received a more straightforward reward, a payment of £40 from the Exchequer for his services on the border. E403/775, m. 12. In October 1450 he was present alongside Ogle, now presumably back on the right side of the law, at Newcastle-upon-Tyne to witness the election to Parliament of Ogle’s brother, John*, and cousin, William Bertram*; and later, in September 1454, he witnessed Sir Robert’s grant of the manor of North Middleton to his brother. Ogle, app. xiii. 83.

Soon afterwards, on 4 Nov., Manners was pricked as sheriff. His term of office saw him actively engaged in the defence of the marches against the Scots. In the early summer of 1455 the Scottish king, James II, laid siege to Berwick-upon-Tweed. The defence of the town was ostensibly in the hands of the warden of the east march, Lord Poynings (now earl of Northumberland following the death of his father at the battle of St. Albans in May), but, as a letter from the King’s council dated 9 July makes clear, the actual defence of the town was overseen by Manners and John Heron* (the man whose father Sir John Manners had been accused of murdering in 1428). The council offered them ‘as speciall thank as can be thought’ and trusted that if the Scots ‘retourne to oure grevaunce that ye wol manfully resiste theym as ye have doo at this tyme in encresing of your said honour and commendation.’ Griffiths, 753-4; PPC, vi. 247-50. Peace soon returned to the borders, however, and in the late 1450s Manners was both appointed as one of the conservators of the truce between the two nations, and, in October 1459, to an embassy to negotiate with the Scots for its extension. Rot. Scot. ii. 383, 392, 397-8.

It was almost certainly through his kinship to Sir Robert Ogle II, a retainer of the Yorkist earl of Salisbury, that Manners, despite his connexion with the Lancastrian Percys, came to support the Yorkist cause in 1459-60. He appears to have been committed to that cause by 23 Sept. 1460 when, at an election presided over by Ogle’s close friend, (Sir) Ralph Gray II*, he was returned with the Neville servant, Thomas Weltden*, to represent Northumberland in the Yorkist assembly summoned in the aftermath of battle of Northampton. C219/16/6. Election to Parliament, however, was both the culmination and almost the end of his career. Whether he was present at any of the battles of the civil war of 1459-61 is unknown, but, given his military experience, it is likely that he was. All, however, that can be said with certainty is that he died before 20 Sept. 1461 when a writ of diem clausit extremum was issued by the Durham chancery to the escheator of Norhamshire. No inquisition post mortem survives. DURH3/50, m. 4.

Manners’s son and heir, also Robert (d.1495), followed his father and uncle into Yorkist service. Early in 1462 the family’s support for the Yorkist cause received a double recognition: on 6 Feb. our MP’s widow was granted life annuity of 20 marks assigned upon forfeited Percy manors; and two days later her son was granted the same specifically in recognition of ‘his good service to the King and the King’s father’. CPR, 1461-7, pp. 117-18. The younger Robert was knighted soon afterward, probably for assisting in the suppression of the remaining Lancastrian strongholds in the north-east, and he was appointed as sheriff of Northumberland in November 1463. In 1469 he made a marriage that was to have a dramatic impact on the family’s later fortunes. His bride was Eleanor, daughter of Thomas, Lord Roos, who had been executed after the Lancastrian defeat at the battle of Hedgley Moor in 1464. At the time of the marriage the Roos barony was still under attainder but, if that attainder were to be reversed, then only the life of her mentally-incapacitated brother, Edmund, would stand between her and at least a share of the estates of a baronial family. As it transpired, the attainder was reversed in 1485 and Edmund died childless in 1508. The eldest son of the marriage, George, who had forged a successful career under Henry VII, thus succeeded to the title of Lord Roos in 1512. Further promotion followed: in 1525 George’s son, Thomas, was elevated to the earldom of Rutland. Hedley, ii. 246-7; CP, xi. 106-8, 253-5.