MACKERELL, Ralph

More may be added to the earlier biography.2 The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 663-5.

Mackerell was from a family that had been settled for several generations at Breaston in south-east Derbyshire, but it was not until the career of our MP that they made a significant impact on local affairs. His father’s office-holding was confined to service in the modest capacity of tax collector in Derbyshire between 1383 and 1393 and, as late as June 1414, on a Derbyshire grand jury. None the less, the father was a man of more extensive landholdings than so modest a career might imply, holding small manors in Lincolnshire, Derbyshire and north Nottinghamshire. If, however, our MP inherited something more than a very minor gentry inheritance, it was his own energy and ambition, combined with an excellent second marriage, that advanced him to the forefront of local society. His first wife was a modest local heiress through whom the family extended their holdings in Breaston and into neighbouring Wilsthorpe. Her early death, however, enabled him to make a far better match to a widow who not only had a dower interest in the lands of the wealthy Cliftons of Clifton but also an hereditary interest in a moiety of the substantial Cressy of Hodsock inheritance. These lands were the foundation of a public career which began long before the death of his elderly father in the early 1420s. The latter’s long survival is a potential source of confusion. In November 1420 Ralph Mackerell ‘junior’ is said to have been returned to Parliament by his namesake as sheriff. There are two possible explanations: either our MP’s father was sheriff or the addition of ‘junior’ was made next to our MP’s name to disguise the fact that he had contravened statute by returning himself to Parliament.3 S.J. Payling, Political Society in Lancastrian Eng. 113n. If the former is correct then we are not justified in attributing the offices and appointments in the cursus to one man; however, the latter explanation is far more likely, not least because an anonymous figure like the elderly Mackerell was a very unlikely appointee as sheriff.

The death of Mackerell’s wealthy second wife in the early 1420s did not seriously damage his fortunes. He enjoyed the right of courtesy in her extensive inheritance (although their issue did not survive to his death nor perhaps to hers) and lost only her dower in the Clifton estates. In the mid 1420s he was involved in some important litigation. In Michaelmas term 1425 he sued a writ of formedon in the descender against the abbot of Barlings for his father’s manor of Middle Carlton near Lincoln, a continuation, in a different guise, of an action his mother had begun shortly before her death. Before the justices of assize at Lincoln on 9 Apr. 1426 a jury found in Mackerell’s favour, attesting to the truth of his claim that the manor had been entailed on his parents and their issue. While this case was pending, our MP, in contravention of electoral statute, attested both the Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire elections (held on 14 Jan. and 10 Feb. respectively) to the Parliament which met on 18 Feb. 1426. This is unlikely to have been coincidental: the election of his stepson, Sir Gervase Clifton*, for the latter county, and the appearance of four of those who later served as jurors among his fellow attestors in the former, both imply a connexion, as does the fact that Mackerell only appears once as a Lincolnshire attestor.4 CP40/650, rot. 132d; 682, rot. 424; C219/13/4. Perhaps he feared that the abbot was intending to petition against him in Parliament.

However this may be, in the following year there was certainly a connexion between his own return to Parliament and an action pending in the court of common pleas. His third marriage had brought him into a damaging dispute with the redoubtable widow, Margaret, once wife of Sir Thomas Rempston†. In Easter term 1424 she had brought an action of waste against the couple in respect of property at Whatton in south Nottinghamshire, claiming the massive sum of £2,000 in damages. After the customary delays, a jury was summoned to appear at the octave of Michaelmas 1427.5 CP40/653, rot. 7d. Margaret Rempston held the legal remainder of these lands expectant on the death of Mackerell’s 3rd wife under the terms of a fine levied in 1412 but not recorded until 1424: CP25(1)/186/39/1. In the meantime, at an election held on 25 Aug., Mackerell had, by irregular means, secured his return to the Parliament convened to meet on 13 Oct. In this assembly he presented a petition to the Commons complaining that the jury had been packed with supporters of the plaintiff. This seems to have produced the desired result for the case was still pending in 1431.6 CP40/660, rot. 215; 678, rot. 203d; SC8/125/6242.

The great irony of Mackerell’s career is that, although he was made by his second marriage, his family was destroyed by this third one. As the coheiress of a wealthy merchant of Nottingham and twice a widow, his third wife brought him a further, albeit temporary, addition to his landholdings.7 Shortly after the marriage the couple sued the feoffees of her 2nd husband, Peter Saltby, for tenements in the city of Lincoln: C1/69/7. But what he gave her was out of proportion to what she brought him. He settled upon her all those lands he held in fee in three counties: as specified in a later fine, eight small manors in Stanton, Breaston, Wilsthorpe (Derbyshire), Hayton, Misterton, Sturton le Steeple, Carlton in Lindrick (Nottinghamshire), and Middle Carlton (Lincolnshire).8 CP25(1)/293/70/293; CIPM, xxiv. 454-5. Further, on 28 Nov. 1435, he entered into an important agreement with his stepson, Sir Gervase Clifton, with the aim of making a further settlement in his wife’s favour. He conceded that Clifton should have possession of the lands he held by law of England at an annual rent of 100 marks, significantly less than their real value, in return for Clifton’s agreement to pay Margery an annual rent of 40 marks for term of her life after his death. But this irregular agreement was soon undone: on 30 Dec. 1435, only a fortnight before his death, Mackerell released to Clifton all actions real and personal so (either by accident or design) preventing his wife from successfully suing on the bond Clifton had entered into for the payment of the annuity.9 CP40/705, rots. 118, 304.

By this date Mackerell had already made his brief will, dated at Hodsock on 20 Jan. 1435. He wished to be buried in the abbey of Dale next to his parents and nominated as his executors his wife, his eldest son Hugh, and Thomas Barett. It was proved more than a year later on 5 Feb. 1436.10 Borthwick Inst., Univ. of York, York registry wills, prob. reg. 3, f. 445. The earlier biography is in error in identifying Cardinal Beaufort, Archbishop Chichele and Thomas Langley, bishop of Durham, as numbering among his feoffees: they were rather feoffees of the duchy of Lancaster honour of Tickhill of which he held the manor of Hodsock and other properties. His widow was assessed on a handsome income of £80 p.a. in the year of his death.11 E179/240/266. She, who survived him by nearly 40 years, took Nicholas Fitzwilliam* as her fourth husband. He ruined the family by a blatant act of disinheritance, resettling the Mackerell inheritance on his issue by Margery, who, despite her three earlier marriages, was remarkably still of child-bearing age. Only on the failure of this issue were the lands to return to the Mackerells. This seems to have occurred in 1515, with the death of Nicholas’s great-great-grand-daughter, when the Mackerell inheritance passed to Richard Flore, the great-great-grandson of our MP’s daughter Agnes by Thomas Flore*. This, at least, is the story told by a Nottinghamshire jury sitting before royal commissioners of inquiry in 1530, but the situation was more complex.12 CP25(1)/293/70/293; C142/51/33. The disinheritance of Hugh Mackerell had also been that of the common-law heirs of our MP’s first wife. Her estates had been retained by our MP after her death – presumably by the courtesy – and then quite improperly added to his own in the jointure settled on his third wife. In 1499 a Derbyshire gentleman, John Poutrell, laid claim to these lands as Katherine Duffield’s second cousin thrice removed, with what success is unknown.13 C1/220/33. More confusing is the successful recovery by one Henry Rede in 1488 of the manor of Stanton by virtue of an entail made to our MP’s parents. His claim as heir-in-tail appears to have been completely spurious.14 In the confused pleadings he claimed as gt.-gds. of Joan, described as both sister and aunt of Hugh Mackerell: CP40/906, rot. 318.

Ralph Mackerell’s younger son and namesake had a notable, if somewhat unfortunate, career. A doctor of civil and canon law, he was among those Lancastrians attainted in the first of Edward IV’s Parliaments and went on to serve Queen Margaret as her chancellor in exile. Not until after the Readeption did he reconcile himself to the Yorkist government. Even more unfortunate was Matthew Mackerell, the last abbot of Barlings. His relationship to our MP is unknown but he was clearly of the same family. He was executed in March 1537 for alleged complicity in the Lincolnshire rising of the previous year.15 M.L. Kekewich, ‘The Mysterious Dr. Makerell’, in Much Heaving and Shoving ed. Aston and Horrox, 45-54; G. Bernard, King’s Reformation, 316-18.