TANFELD, Robert (d.1480), of Gayton, Northants.

The Tanfelds had been established at Ripon in Yorkshire since at least the early fourteenth century, when Richard Tanfield was a wealthy merchant there. Mems. Ripon, i (Surtees Soc. lxxiv), 141, 144, 217, 223; CP40/315, rot. 288; 353, rot. 277. Yet they were of little significance elsewhere until the advent of our MP’s putative uncle, another Robert. See the many references to the family as witnesses and jurors in Ripon: Mems. Ripon, i; Yorks. Deeds, viii (Yorks. Arch. Soc.. Rec. Ser. cii), 99-100. The latter took minor orders and pursued a career in the Exchequer, where he was one of the tellers in the reign of Henry IV. PRO List ‘Exchequer Offs.’, 226. Our MP’s putative father, William, had more modest horizons, appearing twice in the humble position of tax collector in the West Riding in 1421 and 1422, although he was not without connexions of his own. On 29 May 1417 Ralph Neville, earl of Westmorland, granted him for life a messuage and other property in Ripon. CFR, xiv. 417; xv. 7; CIPM, xxiii. 134. Our MP and his illegitimate half-brother, Thomas, built on the success of the family’s previous generation. In 1427 Thomas, who was probably the senior of the two, received a papal dispensation from the disability of illegitimacy with respect to taking holy orders and holding a benefice with cure of souls; and by 1442 he was dean of the chapel of Cardinal Kemp. For Thomas’s career: Test. Ebor. iii (Surtees Soc. xlv), 213-14; Biog. Reg. Univ. Oxon. ed. Emden, iii. 1848. Robert himself chose the law rather than the Church. He first appears in the records in Easter term 1432, when, described as ‘of Ripon’, he offered mainprise in the court of common pleas for William Bewley† of Thistlethwaite in Cumberland. CP40/685, rot. 123. Proof is lacking, but it is a fair speculation that he was then training at an inn of court. His later service to successive bishops of London suggests the further possibility that his early patron was Robert Fitzhugh, who had become bishop of that diocese in 1431. The Fitzhughs had significant landholdings in the vicinity of Ripon, and Tanfeld’s putative father had been a juror in an inquisition of 1428 held on the death of the future bishop’s mother, Elizabeth, Lady Fitzhugh. CIPM, xxiii. 89. It would not be surprising if the young Robert had attracted their patronage.

Tanfeld’s youth explains why he made little trace on the records over the next ten years. The few references to him are consistent with residence in London. On 10 June 1438 he was a witness at Brockhill in Kent along with the keeper of the Chancery rolls and a future judge, Nicholas Aysshton*. Three weeks later he was one of those to whom William Warter, a London skinner, granted all his property, and in Trinity term 1439 he was party to a final concord concerning property in Essex. CCR, 1435-41, pp. 192, 276; Essex Feet of Fines, iv. 26. Although, in the following July, he witnessed a Yorkshire deed in company with another lawyer, Robert Danby, with whom he was long to be closely connected, there are few signs in these years of his northern origins. Yet he certainly had lands in Yorkshire. In the subsidy returns of 1436 he was assessed on an annual income of as much as £14, derived in whole or in part from that county. His inheritance may, therefore, have been larger than implied by what is known of his family history. CCR, 1435-41, p. 279; E159/212, recorda Hil. rot. 14 (x).

Not until the early 1440s, perhaps at the time he gave the first of his readings, did Tanfeld emerge as a man of standing. As early as 1440 he was one of several lawyers paid for counsel by William, Lord Lovell of Titchmarsh in Northamptonshire. Northants. RO, Finch Hatton mss, FH3152. Soon after, he was employed by John Beaufort, earl (and, from August 1443, duke) of Somerset. In late 1442 and early 1443 he received assignments in the Exchequer on the earl’s behalf, and then acted as Beaufort’s attorney in the division of the Holand lands, to which the earl’s mother had been coheiress. E403/747, m. 8; 747, m. 12; 749, m. 5; CCR, 1441-7, pp. 100, 256, 258. One can only speculate as to how he came to Beaufort’s notice, but there are grounds for believing that it was through Beaufort’s wife, Margaret Beauchamp, widow of Sir Oliver St. John of Paulerspury in Northamptonshire. Tanfeld’s relationship with Margaret continued long after the duke’s death, and his entry into the Beaufort service corresponded with the marriage, which took place in about 1442. An attachment to her would explain one of the most puzzling aspects of his career, his decision to settle in Northamptonshire. The duke had lands there, but his main interests lay in the West Country; Margaret, on the other hand, had strong interests in the county. Tanfeld’s service to her seems a better explanation for his migration than the patronage of Lovell, with whom his relationship was seemingly only brief and formal. There is also the possibility that he came into Northamptonshire by marriage; again, however, the evidence fails us. Neither of his first two wives, the mothers of his children, can be certainly identified. The pedigrees describe them as daughters of ‘Lovell’ (not the baronial family) and ‘Lumley’, both minor gentry families of the locality, but there is no contemporary evidence to support these identifications. Neither, in any event, appears to have brought him property. G. Baker, Northants. ii. 275. The Lumleys lived at Harlestone near Northampton. Their well-established ped. gives no obvious candidate for Tanfeld’s wife: ibid. i. 167. By whatever route he came into Northamptonshire, he was established there by the summer of 1442, when he was serving the burgesses of Northampton as their recorder. Northampton Recs. ed. Markham and Cox, i. 276-7. Since borough authorities generally chose lawyers with local interests to exercise this function, it seems safer to assume that our MP was already locally established when chosen rather than that he came to Northants. through this choice. His addition to the quorum of the county bench late in the next year confirmed his place in local affairs.

In the mid 1440s Tanfeld’s career began to flourish. After Beaufort’s death in May 1444, he continued in the employ of his widow. In about 1445 she granted him for his life the annual rent of £11 1s. she drew from the abbey of Stratford in Essex, a clear indication of the high value she placed on his abilities. C1/74/21. By June 1452 this rent was in arrears by £32 2d. but Robert granted the abbot acquittance for the whole sum on payment of only £20 19s. 2d., having been falsely informed by the abbot that this was the sum involved. He sued to the chancellor for remedy. She may also have forwarded Tanfeld in a more important way by recommending him to the service of the queen. On 6 July 1446 Queen Margaret appointed him as her attorney-general at a fee of £10 p.a. His service to her is the probable explanation for the royal grant made to him at an unknown date in the late 1440s: he and the elderly royal surgeon, Thomas Morstead, were granted £40 p.a. from the profits of the Chancery hanaper. No letters patent were enrolled for this grant; it is known only from its partial exemption from the Act of Resumption of 1450: C49/63/20; PROME, xii. 142. On 20 Apr. 1450 Morstead named Tanfeld as one of his executors: PCC 12 Rous (PROB11/1, ff. 88-90); CP40/785, rot. 469. He also had a place in the service of the former dean of York, Robert Gilbert, who succeeded Fitzhugh as bishop of London in 1436. This, at least, is the implication of his nomination among the executors of the bishop’s will, drawn up on 14 July 1448. Lambeth Palace Lib., Reg. Stafford, f. 165; CP40/775, rot. 641. It would also explain another otherwise inexplicable aspect of his early career, the prominent role he played in the affairs of Middlesex even though there is no record that he ever held lands there. By 1458 he is known to have been in office as steward of the episcopal lands in Middlesex, Essex and Hertfordshire, and, since the accounts of the bishopric are lost for the preceding years, there is a strong possibility that he held the office under Gilbert (and perhaps even under Fitzhugh). SC6/1140/23. The preceding surviving accts., dated 1438-9 and 1442-3, do not name the steward: SC6/1140/21, 22. If this is the case, then it was as the bishop’s steward that he was named to a commission of sewers in Middlesex in July 1448 and, more significantly, that he was elected on the following 30 Jan. to represent that county in Parliament. C219/15/6.

During the 1450s, beyond his service to the queen and others, Tanfeld divided his attention between Northamptonshire and Middlesex. There is little to connect him with his native Yorkshire beyond his nomination in 1453 to a commission of oyer and terminer in the North Riding and the annual fee of one mark he drew from Fountains Abbey. CPR, 1452-61, p. 123; Mems. Fountains Abbey, iii (Surtees Soc. cxxx), 31, 74. In 1449 he was named as a feoffee of two Yorks. manors alongside Richard Neville, earl of Salisbury, but there is nothing else to connect him with the earl and he clearly did not, unlike several other Yorks. lawyers, owe anything to the earl’s patronage: CCR, 1447-54, p. 111. When, early in the decade, he wanted a groom for his daughter he looked to Middlesex rather the north. His choice fell upon Robert Shorditch of Chelsea, whose wife Alice, the daughter of another lawyer, Thomas Burgoyne*, had recently died. A Chancery petition shows that Burgoyne, who had been enfeoffed in the manor of Chelsea on Alice’s marriage, made difficulties over the new match. It had been agreed by Shorditch and Tanfeld that this manor should be put in the hands of trustees nominated by our MP, including Thomas Kirkby, master of the rolls, and the queen’s receiver-general, William Cotton*, who were to ensure that part of the marriage portion be repaid if Tanfeld’s daughter happened to die within three years of the marriage. Burgoyne, however, refused to surrender the manor to these feoffees, and Shorditch petitioned the chancellor, who ruled in his favour in February 1453. C1/22/105; CCR, 1485-1500, no. 116. If, however, Tanfeld looked to Middlesex to marry a child, it was in Northamptonshire that he made his first recorded purchases of property, the currency of social advancement. In the summer of 1452 he bought the manor and advowson of Harpole, a few miles to the west of Northampton, from Athelard Boys. CP25(1)/179/95/131. At about the same time he took advantage of his position as a royal commissioner to make an acquisition of a different sort: on 7 June 1452 at Northampton he sat on a commission to inquire into the lands and heir of John Parles of Watford, and then joined with another lawyer from the north, Robert Ingleton*, in purchasing from the Crown the wardship and marriage of Parles’s daughter, Joan, for 100 marks. C139/146/15; 178/56; Add. Ch. 17326. In 1454 they sold the wardship on to William Cumberford*.

These acquisitions are indicative of the wealth of a rising young lawyer, but it is unlikely that Tanfeld was rich enough to raise by himself the loan of £720 he is said to have made to the Crown late in 1451. This was paid directly to Sir John Cheyne II*, victualler of Calais, to be repaid out of the proceeds of the clerical subsidy. Our MP had probably acted as an agent for the raising of the loan from others, as he did again in March 1453 when he advanced the Crown £62 in company with others of Northamptonshire. CPR, 1446-52, pp. 518, 572-3; E403/793, m. 3: A. Steel, Receipt of Exchequer, 343. Several other loans are attributed to him in the Exchequer records. Between May 1455 and July 1458 he advanced a total of £410 in six separate payments; in addition he joined Hugh Wyche*, Thomas Pound* and John Powtrell in advancing another £800. E403/801, mm. 3, 4; 807, m. 9; 809, m. 4; 810, m. 10; 816, m. 1; E159/235, brevia Trin. rot. 13; E401/858, m. 20. Again, however, it must be doubted that these sums were drawn from his own resources; rather they probably represented advances from the London customs, of which, with Powtrell, he was a collector from the spring of 1455.

Tanfeld was clearly a man of energy and ability. In all probability, he was a double-reader and hence qualified for promotion to the higher reaches of the legal profession. That he did not do so might, at least in the 1450s, have been a matter of choice. His service to the queen probably held greater attractions for him. His office as her attorney-general was an exacting one – for example, between 14 Apr. 1453 and 14 Apr. 1454 he spent as many as 128 days attending to her affairs in various courts in London, including Parliament – but it was also a remunerative one. For his work in the same period he was paid, above his fee, £21 6s. 8d. (in other words, daily wages of 3s. 4d.), together with £29 7s. 2d. for expenses incurred. A.R. Myers, Crown, Household and Parl. 192, 199. Even more importantly, the queen’s service offered the promise of grants and promotion. On 28 Mar. 1455 it was she who nominated him as customs collector in London, and on the death of William Cotton at the first battle of St. Albans he succeeded him as her receiver-general. CFR, xix. 106, 109-10; E159/232, recorda Mich. rot. 3d.

It was at about the time that he succeeded Cotton that Tanfeld made the most important of his property acquisitions, namely the valuable manor of Gayton, a few miles to the south-west of Northampton. This acquisition almost certainly took place in 1455. On 4 Feb. of that year two feoffees, John de la Bere, bishop of the Isle of Man, and Thomas Billing*, quitclaimed their right in the manor to their co-feoffees, John Merbury and Robert Wesenham, who, at an unknown date but presumably soon afterwards, made conveyance to our MP and his brother, Master Thomas. CP40/827, rot. 340. The manor had a tangled recent history: it had been the property of Sir John Trussell† (d.1424), whose turbulent career had led him to sell a part of his extensive estate, although not Gayton, where he had made his home. This passed to his widow Margaret for the term of her life, with the remainder, by a settlement made in 1428, in the hands of feoffees, headed by William, Lord Zouche, and Sir Thomas Green*. There can be little doubt that these feoffees were intended to sell the manor despite the fact that it was entailed to Trussell’s issue. On 24 Oct. 1436 a release to these feoffees from Joan Boson, mother-in-law of Trussell’s daughter and heiress, Philippa, raised a warranty collateral to Philippa’s issue and thus served to bar the entail. In 1442 Margaret died, and the jurors in her inquisition post mortem were careful to note the release. C139/110/43. All was now prepared for the sale, and one can only speculate why it was delayed until the mid 1450s.

In February 1458 Tanfeld contracted his son and heir, another Robert, in marriage to Elizabeth, daughter of Edward Brooke*, Lord Cobham. The marriage had taken place by 3 Sept. 1458: Harl. Ch. 56 H 7. It is likely that this marriage was determined by political considerations on Cobham’s side at least: Cobham was a committed Yorkist who had fought against Lancaster at the first battle of St. Albans, and it was natural, in the fraught circumstances of the late 1450s, that he should have tried to establish a connexion with a leading servant of the queen. For our MP the match was also important: to marry his heir to the daughter of a peer, albeit a discredited one, was a mark of the great advancement his legal skills and service to the queen had brought him. For these reasons both parties were ready to invest heavily in the match. Instead of asking for a portion, our MP gave one, paying Cobham as much as 700 marks; in return, Cobham, even though the bride was not his heiress, settled several of his manors in Northamptonshire, Huntingdonshire, Bedfordshire and Somerset upon her and the younger Robert. J. Bridges, Northants. i. 533-4; ii. 273; VCH Hunts. ii. 371; CP40/832, rot. 124; VCH Beds. ii. 227; VCH Som. vi. 115; Some Som. Manors (Som. Rec. Soc. extra ser. 1931), 302. This suggests that his problems were financial as well as political, and Tanfeld was able to exploit them in the enhancement of his own son’s expectations. These expectations were further increased by some more conventional property acquisitions. In Trinity term 1459 our MP bought the ‘Merston maner’ in Cransley and Broughton, some miles to the north of Northampton, from Sir John Merston and Rose, his wife, subject to the payment of an annual rent of 20 marks for the lives of the grantees. This purchase came about through connexions made in the queen’s household, for Rose was or had been one of her ladies-in-waiting. CP25(1)/179/95/147.

Tanfeld was at the height of his career when all was threatened by the deteriorating climate in national politics and the undisciplined conduct of his newly-married son and heir. In August 1460 he was replaced as one of the London customs collectors, and a month later removed from the bench in Northamptonshire, both a product of the Yorkist victory at the battle of Northampton. On the following 29 Oct. a commission was issued for his son’s arrest. It is tempting to suggest a political motive for this order, but it seems rather to have arisen from the younger Robert’s campaign of intimidation against another Northamptonshire lawyer, Robert Isham, who had replaced his father on the county bench. E159/238, recorda Trin. rot. 9; CPR, 1452-61, p. 649. For a graphic description of the yr. Robert’s violence against Isham: C1/28/313. It was this, rather than support for Lancaster, that produced the further two comms. for his arrest on 18 June and 17 July 1461: CPR, 1461-7, p. 37. The Lancastrian defeat at the battle of Towton left our MP further exposed. As a prominent servant of Queen Margaret he was an obvious candidate to share her exile, and on 18 May 1461 he was duly named alongside higher-ranking Lancastrians whose estates were to be seized in Northamptonshire and Rutland. CPR, 1461-7, p. 35. He managed, however, to wriggle off the hook. One reason was no doubt his Yorkist friends and associates, among them Cobham, Ingleton, the escheator who had been ordered to seize his estates, and another Yorkshire lawyer, Robert Danby. The last had acted as one of Tanfeld’s feoffees in the purchases of the manors of Harpole and Cransley. As a friend of the Nevilles, the change of regime brought Danby a knighthood and office as chief justice of the common pleas; it would not be remarkable if he used his influence on behalf of a disadvantaged friend. For Danby’s career: A.J. Pollard, North-Eastern Eng. 133-4. However this may be, Tanfeld escaped the attainders of the first Parliament of the new reign, and there is no evidence that his lands came into royal hands. There is no mention of any seized lands, whether of our MP or anyone else, in Ingleton’s acct. as escheator: E357/97, mm. 1-3. On 5 Feb. 1462 he sued out a general pardon, described as ‘of Gayton, esquire, alias of London, gentleman, alias late customs collector in London’; C67/45, m. 39. and thereafter, despite his eldest son’s persistent involvement in local disorder, he quickly re-established himself. On 7 July 1463 the new regime named him as customs controller in London with the proviso that he executed the office in person, and in the following April he was restored to the Northamptonshire bench. CPR, 1461-7, p. 295.

At about this time Tanfeld also added to his landed wealth by marriage. His new bride was, seemingly as he was also, taking her third spouse, and she brought him dower lands in Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Northamptonshire. In Easter term 1463 the couple brought what appears to have been a collusive action against the feoffees of her second husband, headed by Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, for her dower in a sizeable estate in the town of Northampton, where Tanfeld was probably still in office as recorder. They also sued John, Lord Dudley, for the custody and marriage of her second husband’s great-grandson and heir, John Longville, which Dudley had been granted by the Crown in July 1459. This latter claim met with a partial success. On the following 15 Nov. Dudley, in company with William Cantelowe* and Ralph Wolseley*, entered into bonds for four payments of £20 to Tanfeld and his wife, almost certainly to buy out their claim to the wardship. CP40/808, rot. 368; 810, cart. rot.; CPR, 1452-61, p. 508. Tanfeld enjoyed more complete success in defeating a claim to a part of the manor of Gayton by Nicholas Ovy, a gentleman of nearby Flore, in right of his wife, Anne, grand-daughter and coheiress of Sir John Trussell and heir-in-tail to the manor. A jury, sitting at Towcester on 11 Aug. 1468, accepted that the property claimed and forcibly entered by the Ovys was parcel of the manor of Gayton, to which Anne’s claim was barred by collateral warranty of her paternal grandmother, not, as the Ovys asserted, of their manor of Flore. CP40/827, rot. 340.

In the late 1460s Tanfeld continued to be involved in the affairs of some of those who had employed him from early in his career. He held courts for the bishopric of London and remained close to his old mistress, Margaret, dowager duchess of Somerset. In the autumn of 1466 John, Lord Scrope of Bolton, conveyed various manors in Yorkshire to Tanfeld and others as provision for his new wife, the duchess’s daughter by Sir Oliver St. John, Elizabeth, widow of William, Lord Zouche (d.1462); and early in 1468 Tanfeld and his younger son, William, acted as joint grantees with the duchess when she was given an annual rent of 140 marks as her dower from the estates of her third husband, the late Lionel, Lord Welles. CP40/824, cart. rot. 3; CCR, 1461-8, p. 465. Tanfeld was also becoming increasingly involved in the affairs of his Northamptonshire neighbours. In the early 1460s he acted as a feoffee for (Sir) William Catesby* and Thomas Seyton*. CAD, iv. A8449; Add. Ch. 22292. On 12 Mar. 1467 a prominent merchant of Northampton, William Rushden*, named him as executor, and on the following 9 Apr. he made his first recorded appearance as an attestor to a parliamentary election in the county. Northants. RO, Northampton Archdeaconry, Probate Reg. 1, f. 6; C219/17/1. Soon after, Henry Green*, who had employed him as a feoffee as early as 1453, nominated him again for the settlements contingent on the marriage of his stepson, Robert Wittlebury, to Catesby’s daughter, Anne; and by Michaelmas 1467 he was in receipt of an annuity of 40s. from Edmund Grey, earl of Kent, assigned on the earl’s Northamptonshire manor of Yardley Hastings. CP25(1)/179/96/17; Northants. RO, Fitzwilliam mss, F(M)/1376, 1416; Grey of Ruthin Valor ed. Jack, 75.

Once more established as a prominent local lawyer, Tanfeld can hardly have welcomed the problem of loyalty occasioned by the crisis of 1469-71. Some lingering distrust of him on the part of Edward IV seems to be implied by his removal from the Northamptonshire bench in July 1470 in company with Catesby, another reconciled Lancastrian. Nevertheless, there is nothing to show that he welcomed Henry VI’s restoration in the following October; his approach appears rather to have been cautious. Although he was named to the only Northamptonshire commission of the peace issued during the Readeption, he received no marks of favour as one of the queen’s former servants. He probably did not seek them, compromised by his reconciliation with the Yorkists and content merely to sue out a general pardon and wait upon events. Such caution meant he was untroubled by Edward IV’s restoration, remaining on the county bench and securing a further general pardon. Thereafter he played a diminishing role in local affairs, but this was the product of advancing age rather than political disfavour. Beyond his attestation of the Northamptonshire election in 1472 and continued nomination to the bench, he did little. C67/48, m. 6; C219/17/2. His sons, Robert and William, were already beginning to assume his place. Thomas Tanfeld, who, by Mich. 1469, was the husband of Alice, wid. of John Ditton of Bradden, Northants., was probably also his son: CP40/833, rot. 365. The younger Robert had sat in Parliament as early as 1467 – for Lostwithiel – and was named to the Huntingdonshire bench in 1474; William, another lawyer, joined his father on the Northamptonshire bench in 1477 and in 1478 sat as MP for Northampton.

Most of what is known of Tanfeld’s last years concerned the arrangements for the transfer of his property to these two sons. On 24 May 1474 he gave all his goods to Billing, then chief justice of the King’s bench, John Morton, keeper of the rolls of Chancery, Catesby and Richard Pygot, a King’s serjeant from his native Ripon. On the following 10 Sept. he granted ‘Merston maner’ in Cransley to feoffees, headed by Thomas Rotherham, bishop of Lincoln, Guy Wolston†, usher of the royal chamber, whose election he had attested in 1472, and another Yorkshire lawyer, Edward Goldsburgh; these feoffees were to hold to the use of his younger son, William. CCR, 1468-76, no. 1267; CIPM Hen. VII, i. 429. Later he entrusted the rest of his lands to two other bodies of feoffees. On 4 Aug. 1478 he granted his manor of Harpole to Catesby, Catesby’s son, William†, and other lesser men, including his putative youngest son, Thomas; and on 8 Feb. 1480 his feoffee, another Yorkshireman, Brian Roucliffe, baron of the Exchequer, settled the manor of Gayton, in which the Catesbys gave way to Bishop Rotherham of Lincoln, then chancellor, John Morton, now bishop of Ely, and Billing. He died on the following 18 Nov., and on 12 Apr. 1481 these feoffees settled the same on his middle-aged son and heir, Robert, and his wife, Elizabeth, and Robert’s heirs. C140/80/39; C141/2/18. Our MP’s long career had taken the Tanfelds from Ripon to Gayton, and from the parochial to the county gentry. The family he thus advanced long survived in the male line. Its most distinguished later member was another lawyer, Sir Lawrence Tanfeld†, justice of King’s bench and chief baron of the Exchequer early in the seventeenth century. The Commons 1558-1603, iii. 475-6.