PENNINGTON, Sir John (c.1393-1470), of Muncaster, Cumb.

Sir John Pennington lived through dramatic years. At the end of his long life he could look back on battle honours that included the great English victory at Agincourt, the humiliating defeat by the Scots on the river Sark, the skirmish between the Nevilles and Percys at Heworth Moor, and, in all probability, more than one of the civil war battles of 1455-61. He could also pride himself on a loyal service to the great northern house of Percy, maintained in the face of that family’s vicissitudes. From the early 1440s, if not before, he was one of their highest-paid retainers, and it was his misfortune to serve them as they found themselves over-matched by the Nevilles. The isolated surviving Percy receivers’ acct. for 1453-4 shows that he was then in receipt of a large annual fee of £20: J.M.W. Bean, Estates Percy Fam. 96-97.

The Penningtons were one of the richest and most ancient of the north-western gentry. For their earlier hist.: VCH Lancs. vi. 338-9; J. Foster, Ped. of Sir Josslyn Pennington, 2-26; S. Jefferson, Cumb., ii. 228-30. Their longest-held estates lay at Muncaster and Pennington either side of the border between Cumberland and Furness; but our MP also inherited, through his mother, manors at Little Langdale (in Strickland Ketel) and Preston Richard in Westmorland, and through his long-lived paternal grandmother a manor (albeit a very poor one) at Great Givendale in Yorkshire. In the Cumberland subsidy returns of 1436 he was assessed on an annual income of £85, enough to number him among the wealthiest of the local gentry. Only three others were assigned larger incomes: E179/90/29. His father had not been so fortunate financially, having been kept out of a significant part of the family lands – including the manors of Muncaster and Pennington – by the long survival of Elizabeth Malton, the heiress of Great Givendale. DL25/467, 693. Although Sir Alan was partly compensated by the lands brought to him by his wife, his career was very much more modest than his son’s: he held no major office of county administration, and although he sat once in Parliament it was for Westmorland, where his wife’s lands lay, rather than Cumberland. Not until the end of his life did he act to secure control of the family’s principal estate, the castle and manor of Muncaster. If one may judge by a coincidence in timing, he may, in part, have been prompted to do so in order to improve his son’s marriage prospects. In February 1412 he agreed to pay his mother £12 p.a. for her lifetime in return for her surrender of Muncaster; two months later he secured a dispensation for our MP’s marriage to a bride from one of the leading gentry families of Lancashire, Katherine Tunstall. Reg. Langley, i (Surtees Soc. clxiv), 321; Foster, 26; Pennington-Ramsden mss, D/Pen 30/2.

John’s active career began in 1415. Both he and his father indented to serve in the retinue of the family’s neighbour, John, Lord Harington, in the campaign that ended in the battle of Agincourt. Harington returned ill to England before the battle, although his retinue no doubt remained to fight. E101/50/26; N.H. Nicolas, Agincourt, 341. When Pennington came back to England, he found himself master of his own financial destiny for his father did not survive the expedition. By this date his grandmother, Elizabeth Malton, was also dead, and so he found his inheritance almost entirely unencumbered. Her date of death is unknown, but, since Sir Alan was seised of the manor of Pennington at his death, he must have outlived her: Lancs. IPM (Chetham Soc. xcv), 121. Our MP had to wait only for her manor of Great Givendale, which remained in the hands of her 2nd husband, Hugh Standish, until his death in 1420. The manor was hardly worth the wait. In 1421 it was valued at only 20s. 8d. with its site ruinous: CIPM, xxi. 700. For an unknown reason he was not awarded formal seisin until 1431: CFR, xvi. 35. Now a wealthy man (at least by the standards of the far north), he chose to continue his military career, fighting not only in France but also, closer to home, defending England’s northern border. This latter role led him into an unexpected conflict. In a petition to John, duke of Bedford, as guardian of England, he complained that when he and 14 companions were on their way to garrison Berwick-upon-Tweed they were violently assaulted and despoiled of goods and harness, not by the Scots, but by a large band of English, headed by another of the principal local gentry, Sir Richard Musgrave*. There is no evidence to give this incident either context or precise date (beyond that it took place between 1418 and 1420); but the local enmities that underlay it may explain why Pennington resumed his career in France. On 21 June 1421, by which date he had received the knighthood to which his wealth and military experience entitled him, he mustered at Sandwich for Henry V’s last campaign, in command of a personal retinue of 13 men-at-arms (including his kinsman, William Pennington) and 42 archers, large enough to suggest he was of some military standing. SC8/65/3243; E101/50/1, m. 4d.

Sir John may have continued to serve in France after the King’s death. If so, that service was clearly over by the mid 1420s when he became suddenly and energetically active in local administration. Between 1426 and 1435 he served a remarkable three terms as sheriff; was nominated to several important local commissions; sat as a gaol delivery juror in both Cumberland and Westmorland; and accompanied another of the leading local gentry, Sir Christopher Curwen* to the Parliament of 1432. JUST3/70/4, m. 3d; 11/4, m. 4; 11/7; C219/14/3. He also served himself, taking advantage of a journey to distant Westminster at the county’s expense: the sitting of Parliament coincided with the Easter law term, during which Sir John appeared personally in the court of common pleas to sue actions of debt totaling 290 marks and to secure writs of outlawry against various of his debtors. It is also interesting to observe that, only four days after Parliament’s dissolution, he was named to a special assize of novel disseisin sued by

William Dykes* against Sir William Leigh* concerning property at Blindcrake (Cumberland), and it may be that the commission was issued in response to a petition, now lost, presented in the Parliament. CP40/685, rots. 204, 239d, 240, 240d; C66/433, m. 28d. Yet, if on this occasion he found his own interests engaged by parliamentary service, it is noteworthy that this was his only election. Like his friends the Curwens, he could have secured further returns. Indeed, in 1447 the family stood well enough for his eldest son to be elected, and it seems fair to conclude that personal disinclination explains why he himself took only one seat. Other administrative burdens could not be so easily avoided. Some of these were no doubt welcome to him, like his belated nomination to the Cumberland bench in 1437, but others were not. Given the difficulty in collecting the shrieval farm, his repeated prickings as sheriff may have been irksome, although here the influence of the office was probably adequate compensation. Another of his appointments, however, was simply annoying. Early in 1438 he was nominated to collect in Lancashire the fifteenth and tenth granted by the previous Parliament. In most counties this task fell to lesser men, but the Lancashire commissions were often headed by knights. Our MP and some other of his fellow commissioners failed to account and this led to the royal seizure of various messuages in Pennington, property that was still in royal hands in 1442. PL1/5/37; E199/21/13.

The surviving records provide some indication of Pennington’s private interests in these busy years. He either made or extended a park at Birkby (in Muncaster) through a series of property exchanges with and releases of rights of common pasture from his tenants and lesser neighbours. On 20 Jan. 1437, for example, he gave his kinsman and tenant, John Kirkby, some 60 acres of land and pasture in the parish of Cornay in return for Kirkby’s land at Birkby ‘in augmentacionem parci sui’ there. Pennington-Ramsden mss, D/Pen 10/1/3, 28/12-14. He also came to an agreement with James Standish of Duxbury in Lancashire, with whom he shared a grandmother. By a final concord levied in 1438 Standish surrendered his right to over 300 acres in the neighbourhood of Wigton in Cumberland (over 30 miles to the north of Muncaster), then in the hands of his mother. The nature of their rival claims is uncertain, but the arrangement appears to have marked a victory for our MP. Ibid. D/Pen 47/18; CP25(1)/35/14/14.

The 1440s were a more controversial period in Pennington’s career. He became involved in a dispute with his neighbours, John Broughton* and Roland Kirkby, which was brought to an end by the award of William, Lord Harington, brother of the Lord Harington under whom he had served in 1415. Pennington was among Harington’s annuitants – by 1435-6 he was receiving five marks p.a. – and it is probable that Lord William was acting to end a quarrel in his own retinue. The award, made at Ulverston in Lancashire on 3 Oct. 1442, was of an unsophisticated type in that it did not address the original point at issue between the parties; it simply laid down compensation for those who had suffered injury during the dispute. To cite only the largest sum, our MP’s servant William Lowte was to pay six marks to Christopher Coupland, whom he had injured, and when Coupland next came to Furness he was to take Lowte by the hand in token of friendship. The dispute does not seem to have been a very serious one for it has left no other mark on the contemporary record. Pennington-Ramsden mss, D/Pen 47/19; E163/7/31/1.

Soon after, however, Pennington became drawn into a much more consequential matter through his growing attachment to Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland. In 1443 he took up arms in the earl’s dispute with John Kemp, archbishop of York, over conflicting spheres of influence in Yorkshire. On 10 May Kemp complained to the King that large assemblies of rioters had attacked his manors and were now threatening his palace at Southwell. Sir John was identified, on his own confession made in Chancery, as one the principal malefactors, and at the meeting of the royal council on the following day he escaped committal to the Fleet only when the earl of Northumberland and Thomas, Lord Dacre, both present in the council chamber, offered surety in £3,000 that they would bring him into Chancery on 13 May. Further bonds followed, no doubt with the purpose of keeping Pennington away from the scene of the conflict: on 14 May he himself found surety in the ruinous sum of £1,000 for his continual appearance before the King on demand until dismissal; and on 7 June he and the earl posted bonds in 500 marks to the same effect. Not until the middle of July, when an award favouring Kemp was imposed on the Percys, was our MP freed from the threat of financial ruin. R.A. Griffiths, Hen. VI, 577-9; PPC, v. 271; CCR, 1441-7, pp. 134, 136, 144.

Pennington’s response to these humiliating difficulties was not to distance himself from the earl’s seemingly waning fortunes; rather he drew himself more closely into the Percy affinity. In the autumn of 1443 he contracted one of his daughters to Christopher, grandson and heir-apparent of Sir Christopher Curwen, his former parliamentary colleague and another important Percy man. Pennington-Ramsden mss, D/Pen 47/20. Our MP was one of Sir Christopher Curwen’s executors: CP40/761, rot. 21d. Such bonds strengthened an affinity that was coming to assume a clearer identity in Cumberland under the influence of the earl’s younger son, Thomas, Lord Egremont. Its influence may explain the election to Parliament of our MP’s son, John, and another Percy man, William Martindale*, at hustings conducted on 24 Jan. 1447 by our MP’s former adversary, John Broughton, who had also attached himself to the Percys. A conveyance of later in the same year provides a further instance of the affinity’s coherence: on 1 May Roland Kirkby, another of those with whom our MP had been at odds a few years before, granted all his goods to him, Sir Thomas Percy and Broughton. C219/15/4; WARD2/35/136/3. The Percy connexion also explains the marriage made before 1452 of Pennington’s grandson and heir, another John, to Broughton’s daughter, Isabel, widow of Hugh Salkeld of Rosgill in Westmorland. Pennington-Ramsden mss, D/Pen 32/18, 47/21a.

The late 1440s and the troubled 1450s provide several instances of Pennington acting as a leading member of the Percy connexion. On 23 Oct. 1448 he was one of the leaders of a raiding force into Scotland commanded by Henry Percy, Lord Poynings, which was surprisingly and humiliatingly defeated by the Scots at the river Sark. Poynings, Pennington and (Sir) Thomas Haryngton I* were the most prominent men made captive and presumably ransomed. Captivity was, however, brief. Our MP was back in Carlisle on 21 Jan. 1449 when he headed the attestors to the election of another Percy man, Thomas Curwen*. Griffiths, 410; H. Summerson, Carlisle, ii. 435; C219/15/6. Not long after, he was using his position as a j.p. to forward the interests of a fellow Percy servant, Thomas Crackenthorpe*, who was in dispute with William Tilliol alias Colville over the substantial inheritance of Sir Peter Tilliol*. On 3 Feb., under power vested in the j.p.s under the forcible entry statutes, he ordered Crackenthorpe, then serving as sheriff, to assemble a jury; when that jury met it indicted William Tilliol for disseising Crackenthorpe of Scaleby castle, the principle of the most important of the disputed properties. Four years later, on 7 Jan. 1453, our MP was present at an impressive gathering of the Percy affinity assembled to witness an award made by Lord Egremont in the dispute between Alice, widow of Sir Henry Threlkeld*, and her stepson, Lancelot Threlkeld. Here he had a personal interest: his younger son, Thomas, had married the widow, who named our MP as her attorney to receive certain tenements for her put-upon stepson. KB9/288/2-3; HMC Le Fleming, 3-4; Cumbria RO, Kendal, Le Fleming of Rydal mss, WDRY/92/93-4. Before too long, the affinity acted in a less peaceful manner as the rivalry between Percy and Neville became dangerously intense. On 10 Aug. 1453 Pennington was one of nine men, headed by Sir Ralph Percy, singled out by the Crown as a ‘greet sturrer and moever’ of riots in the north and ordered to obey royal commissioners. Two weeks later, entirely unabashed by this royal order, he was in the Percy army led by Egremont which confronted the Nevilles at Heworth Moor near York. His name appeared in the bill presented before jurors when Richard, duke of York, came to York at the head of a commission of oyer and terminer in the following June, and he was obliged to make fine. PPC, vi. 154-5; KB9/149/1/89. Thomas Pennington was indicted for involvement in Lord Egremont’s armed demonstration at the Percy manor of Spofforth (Yorks.) in May 1454: KB9/149/1/63.

Thereafter Pennington’s fortunes fluctuated with those of the two great rival families, which in turned mirrored those of York and Lancaster as the Nevilles committed themselves to the former and the Percys to the latter. On 16 Apr. 1455 he was summoned for Cumberland, along with another Percy man, (Sir) Henry Fenwick*, to the controversial great council, the call of which provoked the Yorkist lords into rebellion, and it must be assumed that, five weeks later, he fought at the first battle of St. Albans, where the earl of Northumberland met his death. PPC, vi. 340. Later, in the wake of the rout of the Yorkist lords at Ludford Bridge in 1459, he was an obvious choice to serve as sheriff in Cumberland, an office he had not held for nearly 25 years. As sheriff he was ex officio responsible for the conduct of the important election held at Carlisle six days after his appointment. He did not, however, himself convene the hustings, the task was left to the under sheriff, Richard Orser. The probability is that he had not yet received his patent of appointment and that Orser acted as the under sheriff of Fenwick, who had died as serving sheriff in the previous summer. In any event, neither the Percys nor the Crown had reason to be discontented with the election result: two Percy men, (Sir) Thomas Curwen and Willam Leigh* were returned. C219/16/5.

With Lancaster and the Percys in the ascendant, Pennington gained reward for his loyalty. On 23 May 1460 he was granted for the term of 12 years the keeping of a third part of the lordship of Egremont, forfeited by Richard Neville, earl of Salisbury. As he held his manor of Muncaster of the lordship, this grant was well placed to increase his local influence, but his tenure was brief as fortune quickly changed against the cause he supported. CPR, 1452-61, p. 587. For the Penningtons as tenants of Egremont: CIPM, xi. 499. There is no direct evidence to show what part he played in the decisive campaign of 1460-1 – although he was probably in the Percy retinue at both Wakefield and Towton – but there is a curious family legend that he played host to the fleeing Henry VI in the wake of the latter battle. According to a lost monumental inscription in the church of Muncaster, Henry VI came to Muncaster in 1461 and gave Sir John, ‘a brauve workyd Glasse Cuppe, with his Rod before that whyllys the familye shold keep hit unbreken thei sholde gretely thrif whyche Cuppe is Kalled the lucke of Molcastre’. Unfortunately the inscription was not contemporary and contained clear errors. None the less, there is nothing intrinsically unlikely about the defeated Henry VI having come to Muncaster either after Towton or else after the battle of Hexham in 1464. Jefferson, ii. 224. The glass cup, allegedly presented, survives at Muncaster: Cumb. and Westmld. Antiq. and Arch. Soc. extra ser. xv. 167.

Whatever Pennington’s personal role in 1461, the change of regime brought what were for him very unwelcome changes in both national and local politics. The Yorkist victory and the death of the earl of Northumberland at Towton completed the eclipse of the Percys by the Nevilles in the politics of the north. Pennington and his fellow Percy men faced exclusion from local government. The new government was practical and sensible enough not to impose a much greater penalty upon them: although the Percy earl was attainted (posthumously) in the first Parliament of the new reign, even the leading members of his retinue, our MP among them, were spared forfeiture. S.J. Payling, ‘Edw. IV and the Politics of Conciliation’, in The Yorkist Age ed. Kleineke and Steer, 86-88. And yet his family escaped very far from unscathed for their support for Percy. Its younger members, perhaps sons or grandsons of Sir John, suffered grievously for remaining in arms in the Lancastrian cause: in June 1461 a commission was issued for the arrest of Gamaliel Pennington and, much worse, in May 1464 William Pennington was among the Lancastrians executed after capture at the battle of Hexham. CPR, 1461-7, p. 34; Three 15th Cent. Chrons. (Cam. Soc. n.s. xxviii), 178-9. In the following year, our MP’s son, Thomas, found himself appealed of murder, and in 1466 a commission was issued for the arrest of two other Penningtons. KB27/816, rot. 48; CPR, 1461-7, p. 492.

Sir John himself steered a more cautious course. On 3 May 1462 he secured a general pardon, and the personal penalty he paid extended no further than exclusion from local government and the confiscation of a few acres in Lassell Hall (part of the property acquired from Standish in 1438) for failure to account as sheriff. C67/45, m. 30; E159/239, brevia Easter rot. 1d; E364/98, m. 36. Indeed, despite the activities of his younger kin, Pennington was able to go some way to regaining his place in local affairs in the 1460s. Along with other Percy servants, he was troubled by actions of trespass sued by William Tilliol alias Colville for close-breaking at one of the disputed Tilliol properties in May 1460, but he was able to avoid trial. KB27/804, rot. 37d; 807, rot. 40. With more potential damage, he came into dispute with his kinsman Sir Thomas Lamplugh of Lamplugh, who had prospered in the wake of Edward IV’s accession. Given the disputants contrasting political fortunes, it is a tribute to the equilibrium of Cumberland society that a balanced award was returned at a time when Lamplugh had the additional advantage of serving as sheriff. On 12 Mar. 1465 a panel of seven arbiters, which included Neville men, principally Sir John Huddleston†, alongside Percy men, headed by Sir William Martindale*, decreed that the rivals were to be ‘full freendes’. To achieve this desirable end, Sir Thomas was to pay one of Pennington’s tenants the sum of 40s. as compensation for personal injury and restore to him a purse with its contents of 2s. 2d. The root of the dispute – a ‘lath stone’ at Preston Richard placed by Lamplugh on ground claimed as his own by Pennington (the two men had inherited property there through their mutual grandmother, Katherine Preston) – was put to the rule of 12 of the oldest tenants of the manor. In respect of another point of dispute, Huddleston was to hold the 33s. Lamplugh had levied as sheriff from our MP’s confiscated property at Lassell Hall, pending decision on whether that sum or a lesser one was due at the Exchequer. Pennington-Ramsden mss, D/Pen 47/22. The lack of rivalry in Cumberland society apparent from this award is also evidenced by the parliamentary election held at Carlisle on 21 Apr. 1467. The two men returned, Huddleston and Richard Salkeld†, were leading supporters of the Nevilles; yet the attestors were headed by our MP and his kinsman by marriage and fellow Percy loyalist, Sir Thomas Curwen. C219/17/1.

Pennington did not live long enough for the restoration of the Percy earl in March 1470 to have any impact upon his career. He last appears in the records in an active role late in 1469 when he joined Sir Edward Bethom in arbitrating a dispute between Sir Thomas Broughton, the brother of his grandson’s wife, and Roland Kirkby, both of whom had served Percy. E40/8794. His date of death – 6 July 1470 – is known only from an inquisition taken as late as 1504 under a commission of concealments, but there is no reason to doubt its accuracy. A surviving rental of the Pennington estate is dated to the same day, probably to coincide with his grandson’s inheritance of the estate. This grandson, John, soon resumed the family’s service to the Percys. In 1470 the restored earl named the new head of the Penningtons as his bailiff of the barony of Copeland. CIPM Hen. VII, ii. 733; Pennington-Ramsden mss, D/Pen rental 167, bdle. A/3. His high standing is expressed by his 2nd marriage, in 1472, to Joan, da. of Sir William Euer* and wid. of Sir Robert Ogle, son and heir of Sir Robert Ogle II*, Lord Ogle: CP, x. 30-31. The family long continued to flourish. Our MP’s great-grandson, John, died in 1516 leaving only a daughter, but the inheritance was diverted to the heir male. William Pennington was created a baronet in 1686 and Sir John Pennington† was raised to the Irish peerage as Baron Muncaster in 1783. The latter may have been responsible for popularizing, if not inventing, the legend of his ancestor’s meeting with Henry VI, for he placed several inscriptions in the church of Muncaster, one of which recorded the story. Foster, 39-40; C1/435/1; The Commons 1790-1820, iv. 760-1.