CLIFTON, John (d.1400), of Staffs.

John Clifton was a retainer of Hugh, 2nd earl of Stafford (d.1386) whose feoffees were still paying his annuity of 66s.8d. from the lordship of Stafford at Michaelmas 1395. His pension was evidently well deserved, for he continued to serve the earl’s sons as loyally as he had served their father. In 1391, for instance, the 3rd earl’s receiver-general paid him a reward of almost 50s. for the help he had given in a dispute over the Basset estates, and in the summer of 1400 the 5th earl gave a pasture worth 10s. a year in the manor of Stafford to him and his wife, rent free for the term of their lives.Staffs. RO, D1721/1/1 ff. 271-2; D641/1/2/4 m. 5, 36, 40B m. 2. Little else is known about Clifton’s career. The general pardon accorded to him in October 1398 by Richard II seems to have been no more than a formality, since there is no surviving evidence of any past crimes or misdemeanors on his part. He died in the late summer of 1400, having just completed a series of conveyances whereby the messuage in Stafford and the farmland in the neighbouring village of Tillingdon which he had acquired from Sir Nicholas Beck were settled upon Edmund, 5th earl of Stafford, as part of an enfeoffment-to-uses.C67/31 m. 13; Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. loc. cit.; Staffs. RO, D1721/1/1 ff. 45, 271-2; D641/1/2/40B m. 2. The John Clifton who, in July 1410, was indicted before a Stafford jury for murder, mayhem, robbery with menaces and other crimes may well have been the MP’s son (B.H. Putnam, Procs. J.P.s, 303).