The pedigree of the Norris family of Berkshire before its sudden rise to prominence in the fifteenth century is extremely confused, and the heralds’ attempts to find links between them with the knightly Norrises of Lancashire lack conviction. What is certain is that as early as 1268 one of John’s ancestors, employed as cook to the queen, had been granted land at Ockholt in Bray, where John himself was later to build a house, and that he inherited property in the parish at some point after 1427.
The early part of Norris’s career remains obscure,
We are on much firmer ground regarding Norris’s place in the Household by the time of the King’s coronation at Westminster in November 1429, for as a yeoman of the royal chamber he was then granted keeping of woodland at Hurst and the hundred of Ashridge in Berkshire, and earned a salary of 6d. per day. This he was to continue to receive while accompanying Henry across the Channel in the following spring and attending on him throughout his two-year stay in his French kingdom.
Yet there can be no doubt of the King’s personal regard for him, or that Norris was made a rich man through Henry’s munificence. On occasion the gifts proved less valuable than originally intended. In September 1437 Norris was granted for life the manors and lordships of Wadley and Wicklesham in Berkshire, worth as much as £40 p.a., but the letters patent had to be modified two months later in view of the prior claim of the widow of Sir William Porter† to have a dower portion, and in 1441 Norris and his first wife relinquished their interest in the estate to Oriel College, Oxford, presumably in response to a royal request.
A potentially lucrative sinecure had come his way in November 1440 when he and five other courtiers were granted for term of their lives the office of packing and surveying all customable merchandise in the major ports of London, Southampton and Sandwich, which entitled them to half the forfeitures of any cargoes discovered to be un-customed. In June 1444 Norris was given further powers in the same three ports when he was commissioned to search all vessels arriving from the Mediterranean for smuggled goods, and examine merchants’ books covering the previous five years’ trading, the commissioners taking a moiety of all merchandise and money forfeited as a consequence. Needless to say, the grant of the office of packing, made entirely without precedent, met with considerable opposition, notably from the civic authorities of London, who protested that it had always belonged to the City. But the King stood firm, stating in October 1444 that only on the expiration of his life grants could the office once more be placed at the disposal of the corporation. Opposition from the men of Southampton, led by their mayor John Fleming*, eventually met with more success, and this may have led Norris to give up his share in the office four years later.
As a direct consequence of his position at Court in the 1430s Norris had come to the attention of the young King’s ‘governor’, Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, who at an unknown date before he died in April 1439 gave him for life the Berkshire manor of Broad Hinton.
Despite their importance, such concerns were always peripheral to Norris’s position in the royal household, where he long attracted the King’s attention and patronage. He spent much of his time with the court when it was at Windsor castle, conveniently near his home at Bray, and for an undetermined period he served as lieutenant to the constable of the castle, Edmund Beaufort, earl of Dorset and later duke of Somerset. Thus, in November and December 1439 he received assignments at the Exchequer on Beaufort’s behalf to pay for repairs to the fabric of the castle, and in the early 1440s he was himself allotted 100 marks p.a. for the same purpose. Presumably, he was expected to oversee the works. He was still acting for Beaufort in this regard in 1449.
Norris’s duties as keeper of the great wardrobe, an important post which he occupied for two years from October 1444, further necessitated his attendance at Court, and involved the handling of very large sums of money. His accounts reveal that in his first year in office he received from the Exchequer £5,527 in cash and assignments, but spent much more than this on purchases and the wages of members of the Household. Among the latter was his wife Alice, who was made a lady-in-waiting to Margaret of Anjou as soon as the queen arrived in England in the spring of 1445.
Despite his many duties at Court and elsewhere, Norris found time to further his own interests and to establish himself as a landowner of consequence. Most of his acquisitions were in Berkshire. In 1442 he purchased from Edward Langford* the feudal lordship of the manor of Yattendon (itself brought to him by his first wife), and then secured from the King in 1448 a charter to crenellate the manor-house and enclose 600 acres of land to make a park.
For one thing, it did not include the estates of Norris’s second wife. Eleanor, a grand-daughter of both Richard Clitheroe† (d.1420), the onetime admiral, and the heretic-traitor John, Lord Oldcastle, stood to inherit the Clitheroe manors in Kent (Goldstone, Polders and Nelmes in Ash) and Hertfordshire (Pirton and Jenningsbury), worth at least £57 p.a.
The increasing size of Norris’s landed holdings in Berkshire amply qualified him for election to Parliament for the county, but it was undoubtedly his role as a courtier which prompted the electors at the county court to return him so frequently. He sat in eight Parliaments for this or the neighbouring county of Oxfordshire in the years 1439 to 1453, that is, in every Parliament summoned in that period. For the electorate the advantages of choosing someone with direct access to the King are obvious, but, conversely, his presence in the Lower House would also have been useful for the government when certain matters of policy were under review. For instance, matters affecting the estates of the duchy of Lancaster (of which Norris was made a feoffee for the purposes of Henry VI’s will), needed ratification in Parliament, and as keeper of the great wardrobe he had a close interest in the parliamentary subsidies which were assigned to his department in the sessions of 1445-6. His appointment as joint keeper of abbatial estates at Leominster in 1448 was made by the authority of Parliament – presumably the one he had attended in the previous year.
The electors of Berkshire were no doubt aware that Norris enjoyed amicable relations with a number of highly influential people close to the King. Norris often called upon Sir Edmund Hungerford*, one of the King’s carvers, to assist him in his private transactions; the royal physician Master John Somerset* asked him alone to make an award in a dispute he was having with a gentleman from Buckinghamshire; and in 1442 the King’s secretary Master Thomas Bekynton, about to depart overseas on an embassy, wrote to say that he would keep Norris specially informed of events. Bekynton referred to Norris’s ‘good love, which I have ever before this tyme founde stedfast, stable and redy, to my wele and worship’, and promised to pray for him as his chaplain ‘as I am greetly bounde to do, whil I live’.
Needless to say, the circle in which Norris moved meant that he would never be retained by Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, the King’s uncle, despite the duke’s tenure of the lordships of Cookham and Bray where Norris owed him feudal dues. In May 1445 the duke sued him in the court of the Exchequer for unjust detinue of the sum of £30, alleging that he had failed to honour a tally issued in his name as sheriff of Oxfordshire and Berkshire, by deliberately disregarding personal representations made by his servants.
Curiously, to the Parliament of 1453, in which those attached to the Court heavily predominated in the Lower House, Norris got himself returned not only for Berkshire but also for the distant Cornish borough of Truro. Although he had earlier had an interest in the Bodrugan estates near the town this had long since come to an end, and the case of external interference in Truro’s representation is compelling. The names of both of the borough’s chosen MPs were erased from the sheriff’s schedule and replaced instead with those of Norris and Roger Thorpe*, the son and heir of the man who within a few weeks would be elected Speaker. Yet why the double return of Norris had been thought necessary is impossible to discover; his seat for Berkshire must surely have been safe. Yet irregularities also attached to the return for the county. The sheriff, John Roger I*, chose to conduct the elections at his own place of residence, Lambourn, where the county court had never met before, and, furthermore, he returned as one of the shire knights his own son Thomas*, a young man completely lacking experience of local government. Perhaps it was the unpredictability of what might happen in Berkshire that prompted Norris to make sure of a place in the Commons by looking elsewhere.
Thereafter, Norris’s position became less secure, as power at the centre shifted to those favoured by the queen. In February 1457 he was ignominiously put in the Marshalsea prison for a breach of the peace, and pending his appearance in King’s bench in the Michaelmas term he had to offer guarantees of £100 that he would do no harm to his accuser, a tanner from Newbury called Stephen Wyard.
The Berkshire returns to the Parliament of 1455 have not survived, so it is not known if Norris had sat in a ninth consecutive assembly. To the Parliament summoned to meet at Coventry in November 1459 the county electorate returned his son William in his place. Norris made a loan of 50 marks to the Crown in the following April,
Now detached from affairs of state, Norris devoted his last years to more private matters. In the late 1450s he had married for the third time, taking as his wife Margaret, the widow of a wealthy London alderman and onetime mayor, Nicholas Wyfold, who in his will of 1456 had left her £1,000 in cash and plate worth £100 more, together with all the contents of their house. Wyfold’s only child, Isabel, to whom he bequeathed 500 marks and plate to the same value, was placed in her mother’s care until she came of age or married, and it is not surprising that as soon as he could Norris wed her to the younger of his two sons named John – the Clitheroe heir. He offered Margaret a handsome jointure. In February 1459 he enfeoffed her kinsman, John Chedworth, bishop of Lincoln, and others of a substantial part of his landed holdings, and seven months later she received in jointure seven Berkshire manors and sizeable tracts of land. After she gave Norris a son, another William, this life interest was increased by two more manorial estates.
The last years of his life also saw Norris engaged in a flurry of litigation in the court of common pleas, suing his own debtors as well as those of Nicholas Wyfold for whom his wife was executrix.
Norris took as the model for his will, made on 4 Apr. 1465, that of his wife’s former husband Wyfold, in several instances copying its provisions word for word. Perhaps Margaret took a part in drafting it. He asked to be buried in the north aisle of St. Michael’s church at Bray, where 1,000 masses were to be said for his soul ‘in as hasty time as it may goodely be doone’ and by the ‘moost devoute and vertuous preestes as well religious as seculers’ as could be found in London or elsewhere. The church bells were to be rung continually for 24 hours after his burial, and then the loudest bell was to chime for an hour before dawn and at sunset every day for a month, marking special services in his memory. Indeed, for ‘stering peiple to more devocion in praying for my soule’ he left £50 to buy a great bell for the steeple of the church. Similar services were to be conducted at Yattendon by 30 devout priests. Norris had started ‘new making and edifying’ a chantry chapel at Bray, to which he now bequeathed goods worth £100 as well as the sum of £100 for the salary of a priest to pray there for himself and his wives long into the future, and 40 marks more for ornaments and his tomb.
The MP left four surviving sons by his different wives. To the eldest, his heir Sir William, he left all the contents of the house at Yattendon and plate worth £40; to John ‘the elder’ 100 marks in money and plate; to John ‘the younger’ (the Clitheroe heir) £40 in money and plate; and to William ‘my youngest sonne’ (the child of his third marriage) 100 marks. In his will he also remembered two daughters: Anne, who was to received £100, and Lettice, the beneficiary of 200 marks in money and 50 marks-worth of plate. Both were apparently still unmarried.
It is an indication of the size and value of Margaret’s jointure and dower that within five months of Norris’s death, and even before his will had been proved, she attracted the attention of (Sir) John Howard*, shortly to be made Lord Howard and later duke of Norfolk, whom she married.