Members of the Clifford family had lived at Frampton-on-Severn since the Norman Conquest, but it was the main line (represented by James’s cousin John Clifford of Daneway) which held the manor of Frampton Court, and James himself inherited only small landed properties situated in the same area of Gloucestershire in the Severn valley. To these he added over the years the manor of Stowelle, Fretherne near Frampton and Hampnett as well as property in the suburbs of Gloucester, all of which, apart from Stowelle which he acquired through his first marriage, he seems to have purchased.
Clifford’s violent behaviour surpassed all previous bounds on 24 May 1396 when one of his supporters was indicted for murder at the sessions of the peace held at Gloucester. The courtroom brawl, in which Clifford assaulted John Browning and other officials, could not be tolerated, and he was promptly bound over by the justices to keep the peace on pain of a fine of £1,000, his four mainpernors having to guarantee his future good behaviour in additional bonds for 1,000 marks each. Only a month later Clifford had to make further undertakings, under a pain of 500 marks, that he would not harm John Wotton, who, he claimed, had joined with confederates to waylay him on 18 May and had wounded one of his servants. Wotton’s version was that, on the contrary, he had been making a legal distraint on the property of John Meone esquire (one of Clifford’s friends and a retainer of the duke of Gloucester), and that Clifford and his men had tried to prevent him from doing so by force. It was about this same time that several other complaints were made in Chancery concerning Clifford’s practice of maintenance and of his association with Hugh Bisley of Bisley in threatening behaviour and intimidation of local farmers. These led to his being fined 1,000 marks by the King’s Council, the money being granted to Sir Nicholas Hauberk, one of the ‘King’s knights’ in August 1397. (It was no doubt in connexion with the payment of the fine that two months later Clifford and his friends Anselm Guise of Elmore and William Rye entered into recognizances for 200 marks with Hauberk and Thomas Percy, earl of Worcester, the steward of the King’s household.)
A man of Clifford’s temperament might well make a good soldier, and, indeed, from early on in his career the Crown had found him useful for commissions of array. In July 1387 he had purchased at the Exchequer for £100 a ship called The Holygost, recently taken as a prize of war, and he may have offered this for service in September 1394 when he joined the royal expedition to Ireland. He received wages at the Wardrobe for staying in the province until 21 Apr. following, and from then until September 1396 he was in receipt of livery as an esquire in the Household.
This period of royal favour was to be abruptly curtailed, because of Clifford’s depredations in Gloucestershire. He had quarrelled with his former friend Hugh Bisley, and with the influential London merchant, Richard Whittington, over property once owned by his cousin John Clifford of Daneway, who had died in 1397. Bisley and Whittington, who had some claim to the wardship of John’s young daughters and heirs since certain of the lands in question were held of their respective manors of Bisley and Over Lyppiat, alleged in June 1399 that James Clifford had wrongfully evicted them; and several royal commissions were set up to investigate the affair, not only in 1399, but also in 1401, 1403 and 1404. More seriously, Clifford now allied himself with Anselm Guise in the persecution of a local couple, John and Alice atte Wode. Their ‘trespasses, oppressions, injuries and extortions’ extending over a period of seven years, and their securing of John atte Wode’s imprisonment under a false indictment for felony, which enabled them to seize his lands and goods, were recited in a petition to the Parliament of 1402, after a royal commission had accomplished nothing because the bailiff and jurors were in collusion with the culprits. Clifford and Guise were brought before the King’s Council where an award was made unreservedly in favour of the atte Wodes. During a deceptively peaceful period Clifford was returned to the Coventry Parliament of 1404, in the company of a fellow ‘King’s esquire’, Richard Mawarden. But his own most recent vendetta was not forgotten: on 28 Jan. following he caused atte Wode to be murdered by a hired assassin. Retribution followed soon after: he was convicted in the King’s bench of abettment and procurement to murder, and amerced £1,000 in accordance with his bond of 1396. It seems likely that he spent much of the next two years in prison, but on 14 Dec. 1406, in return for the payment of 200 marks, he was pardoned all his outlawries and debts, including the outstanding portion of the fine. Three of his mainpernors had already purchased at considerable cost release from their bonds, but the fourth had to wait until 1408. Evidently a condition of Clifford’s pardon was that he would formally renounce his claims to the various properties in dispute; this he now did, by quitclaiming to Richard Whittington the manor of Over Lypiatt, to Robert Whittington lands which had once belonged to his father in Frampton Mansell, and to James Sparsholt the Berkshire manor of Pusey. But Clifford’s sojourn in gaol had done nothing to reform his character, and it was not long before he was outlawed again, this time for a longstanding debt of 40 marks to John Forthey, the Worcestershire lawyer. Between 1410 and 1412 Clifford was engaged in lawsuits with the prior of Llanthony over tenements at Northleach which he had illegally acquired from the prior’s bondmen; and some seven years later Alice, one of the daughters of his late cousin John Clifford, and her husband William Test, complained that Clifford and his son William had forcibly ejected them from their land at Frampton.
It is surprising, in view of the large fines he had had to pay in 1397 and 1406, that Clifford was apparently still in possession of land in Gloucestershire worth £20 a year when assessments were made in 1412. He is last recorded in February 1419 as a witness to a conveyance made by Reynold Guise of Elmore, the husband of his daughter Katherine (afterwards the wife of
Giles Bridges
†, de jure Lord Chandos). He died before October 1426 when his widow exchanged with William Test certain lands at Pauntley for a pasture in Frampton. Clifford’s heir was his elder son, Henry.