POYNINGS, Sir Richard

The Poynings family are recorded in the Domesday Book as already possessed of estates at Poynings, Pangdean and elsewhere in Sussex, at Foulden in Norfolk and at Wrentham in Suffolk, all of which they still retained 450 years later. Although the family was comparatively undistinguished, its head, Sir Michael Poynings, who fought at Crécy, was summoned to Parliament as Lord Poynings from 1348. His descendant, our MP’s father Robert, the fourth Lord Poynings, attended Parliaments from 1404 to 1445, and regularly served in the councils of the first two Lancastrian monarchs and during the minority of Henry VI.4 CP, x. 656-64. As heir through his mother to the Lords Fitzpayn and Bryan,5 Collectanea Topographica et Genealogica ed. Nichols, iii. 253, 255. Lord Robert had accumulated substantial landholdings to add to his patrimony, which over the centuries had grown to include several more manors in Sussex and Kent – the latter located in two clusters, one near the Surrey border around North Cray, the other in the hundred of Folkestone. In 1412 his estates in these two counties and Dorset were assessed for the purposes of taxation at just under £353 p.a., but his total income must have been greater than this as he also possessed manors in Somerset (worth more than £82 a year according to his inquisition post mortem). In 1436 he was said to receive over £500 p.a. clear. Even so, this put him on the same financial level as rich landed commoners like Sir Humphrey Stafford* of Hooke and Sir John Pelham* of Pevensey, rather than on a par with his peers among the lesser barons.6 Feudal Aids, vi. 525; C139/126/24; EHR, xlix. 617. The family background of Lord Poynings’s first wife, the mother of Richard and perhaps also of his younger brothers (William and the twins Robert and Edward), is obscure, although the twins’ mother was called Eleanor and in September 1416 she was granted an episcopal dispensation to have mass celebrated in her chamber as she was ‘gravida et impregnata’.7 C139/126/24; Reg. Chichele, iii. 455. There is no concrete evidence that his mother was Isabel or Elizabeth, a da. of Reynold, Lord Grey of Ruthin, as stated in Suss. Arch. Collns. xv. 16. Richard must have been born several years earlier and was perhaps her stepson, for there was a large gap in age between him and his siblings, and his daughter and eventual heir was scarcely five years younger than her uncles.

It might be expected that, as the eldest son and heir apparent of Lord Poynings, Richard would be married into a family equal in rank to his own. In fact, his first wife, Joan, was a daughter of a self-made man, Henry Somer, who had nevertheless amassed a fortune in Crown service, latterly as chancellor of the Exchequer. Had she not died young – in 1420, before the marriage had been consummated – she would have become a notable heiress. Evidently, for Lord Poynings the prospect of material gain for his family outweighed questions of social standing.8 Significantly, in the first two weeks of July 1423, very shortly after his marriage to Lady Mautravers, Poynings made a quitclaim to his former father-in-law Somer, while his father Lord Robert acknowledged two debts to the latter, each of 250 marks. Somer cleared him from the obligation in July 1429, a few weeks after Sir Richard’s death: E159/199, recogniciones Easter rot. 1, scripta recognita Trin. Richard may have come of age before June 1421 when he was mustered at Sandwich with his own contingent of six men-at-arms and 28 archers prior to embarkation in Henry V’s army,9 E101/50/1. and at home in December that year he acted as patron of the Poynings living at Ruxley in Kent.10 Reg. Chichele, i. 201; CCR, 1429-35, p. 363. He seems to have crossed to Normandy again soon afterwards, for he was knighted within 18 months, perhaps while serving under his father’s command, although if he fought alongside Lord Poynings at the battle of Cravant on 31 July 1423 he had only just returned to the field, since in the preceding month important matters had required his attention in England.

On 8 Apr. that year Lord Poynings had sealed a contract with Sir John Berkeley and the latter’s friend Sir Thomas Stawell† for his son and heir to marry Berkeley’s daughter Eleanor, the widowed Lady Arundel and Mautravers. He agreed to settle on the couple his manors of Okeford Fitzpayn and Durweston in Dorset and Slagham and Pangdean in Sussex, together with a reversionary interest in 16 other manorial estates (to fall in after the deaths of himself and his wife), and entered bonds in £5,000 to complete the transfer within six months of the wedding. This took place before 16 June, and at the end of the month Sir Richard appointed attorneys to receive seisin from his father’s feoffees. According to inquisitions held after Eleanor’s death the jointure was worth at least £40 p.a.11 Hengrave mss, 449/2/648, 663; Collectanea Topographica et Genealogica, iii. 257-8; Suss. Arch. Colls. lxxvii. 256; C139/159/35; CCR, 1429-35, p. 363. Eleanor was not an heiress in her own right, for although her father was very wealthy she came from a large family of at least 17 children;12 The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 197-9. rather, the size of the bonds reflected her status as the widow of Lord Mautravers, the cousin and male heir of Thomas Fitzalan, earl of Arundel (d.1415). To Poynings the attraction lay in her dowager’s portion of the Arundel estates, but this portion was not to be secured without difficulty. Mautravers had died in April 1421,13 CP, i. 247. but when his widow married Sir Richard two years later she had still not been assigned her dower lands, and this process took an inordinately long time. Although escheators had been ordered to complete the arrangements in March 1422, they had failed to execute the writs before Henry V’s death. Now, quite likely in an attempt to hasten proceedings, Poynings stood for election to the Parliament summoned to meet on 20 Oct. 1423, and just ten days after the Commons assembled fresh orders went out to the escheators to do their duty. Yet even then Eleanor still did not receive her due, and further writs had to be issued in January 1425. An assignment of dower in Norfolk was eventually made in August 1426 (more than five years after Mautravers’ death), in the presence of Sir John Cornwall (afterwards Lord Fanhope) and William Ryman*, the royally-appointed farmers of the Arundel estates during the minority of the heir, Eleanor’s son John.14 CCR, 1422-9, pp. 82, 157; C139/20/54.

Whether she and Poynings successfully obtained possession of all of the lands to which she was entitled before the MP’s death in 1429 remains uncertain, although returns for the subsidy of 1428 do show Sir Richard in possession of some of the former Arundel estates in Wiltshire and Dorset, as well as of property in Surrey and the Poynings lands which formed their jointure.15 Feudal Aids, ii. 63, 64, 71, 75; v. 121, 230, 242, 243, 244, 257. Meanwhile, Poynings had assisted his wife in the task of settling the affairs of her former husband. In the summer of 1425, together with her co-executors of Arundel’s will – Ryman and John Burnell of Arundel – they had been sued for a debt of £96 13s. 4d. which the testator had run up with a London mercer for costly fabrics embroidered with his coat of arms; but they later fell out with Burnell, who (or so they claimed in the court of common pleas in Michaelmas term 1428), had failed to render account for sums of money he had received on Eleanor’s behalf during her widowhood. They demanded that Burnell should account for £217 levied from her estates in Sussex in the years 1421-3, and sued for £100 in damages.16 CP40/658, rot. 311; 671, rot. 537d.

So far as the records reveal, Sir Richard took no part in local administration at home, but nor is it certain that he engaged in military activity abroad between 1423 and 1428. If he did join his father in the successful expedition for the recovery of Le Crotoy in early February 1424 he would have been absent from the second session of his Parliament; and while Lord Robert is known to have shared in the duke of Bedford’s victory at Verneuil in the following August, it is not recorded whether Sir Richard was in his company.17 E404/40/155; E403/666, 8 June. There is no doubt, however, that he crossed the Channel again in the summer of 1428. While making preparations to do so, he drew up an indenture dated 13 July for the disposition of his lands in the event of his death. His ‘most worshipfull wife, lady of Arundel and Mautravers’ was to have for life the manors settled on her in jointure when they married and of which he had enfeoffed his ‘cosyn’ Sir Roger Fiennes* and Sir Thomas Lewknor* together with others including Walter Urry*. Their three children were to be brought up with the advice of these feoffees, so the youngsters might be ‘founde as jentilmen and jentilwomen and after here birth et degree’, and that suitable marriages might be arranged for them. One of the Poynings’ female servants, who was responsible for looking after their daughter, was to have a fee of four marks, which Sir Richard’s stepson John, Lord Arundel and Mautravers, should confirm to her for life, as well as an annuity of £2. While at Sandwich awaiting embarkation a week later, Sir Richard made his will. He asked to be buried in the graveyard of the parish church at Poynings in Sussex, next to the north door, with a marble tombstone with his image sculpted upon it, and decorated with the arms of himself and his parents and wife. The churches to which he left bequests included that of Lytchett Mautravers in Dorset, the seat of his wife’s former husband. He asked his ‘dear and faithful wife’ to distribute 20 marks among his servants, and his executors to ensure that two chaplains would celebrate masses for his soul for two years after his death. The executors were William Russell, rector of the parish church at Durweston, John Bolney esquire, and Walter Urry, each of whom were rewarded with £5. Sir Richard’s widow was to keep all his moveable goods, at home or abroad, and in particular a cross containing a substantial section of the True Cross. This precious relic was to be sawed up, so that each of his children and his younger stepson, William Arundel, might have a small piece, although the largest part was to be kept by his widow for her lifetime and then donated to the church of Stogursey in Somerset.18 Collectanea Topographica et Genealogica, iii. 259-60; PCC 14 Luffenham (PROB11/3, f. 110v).

Poynings joined the army commanded by Thomas Montagu, earl of Salisbury, at the siege of Orléans, where he held musters of various of the English companies that October. On 17 Feb. 1429 he obtained three papal indults, permitting him to have a portable altar, receive plenary indulgence at the hour of death, and choose a confessor who might grant him absolution.19 Add. Ch. 11601; CPL, viii. 126, 128, 129. He did not have long to live. The siege was broken by Joan of Arc in May, and on 10 June in a ‘jornaye’ near Orléans he and the earl of Suffolk’s brother were both slain.20 Historical Collns. Citizen of London (Cam. Soc. ser. 2, xvii), 164.

Although Sir Richard had two sons living when he made his will in 1428, both had died by June 1434, when his sole surviving child (now also the heir presumptive to his father Lord Poynings) was his daughter, named Eleanor after his wife. The child was then contracted in marriage by her grandfather to Henry Percy, the son and heir of the earl of Northumberland, to whom was promised the bulk of the Poynings estates on Lord Poynings’s death. Eleanor was duly found to be the heir in 1446 when Lord Poynings died, and her husband was summoned to Parliament as Lord Poynings from then until he inherited the earldom in 1455.21 CPR, 1429-36, pp. 368, 414; CP, ix. 716; x. 664-5; CCR, 1429-35, p. 363; C139/126/24. Escalating disputes over the Poynings estates played a major part in civil disturbances in south-east England in the late 1440s and throughout the next decade, as Sir Richard’s younger brother, Robert, took up arms in a challenge to the title of his niece and her Percy husband.22 R.M. Jeffs, ‘The Poynings-Percy Dispute’, Bull. IHR, xxxiv. 148-64.

Sir Richard’s widow, the dowager countess of Arundel, survived him for 26 years. In the tax assessments of 1436 she was said to be receiving as much as £466 13s. 4d p.a. from her Arundel dower and Poynings jointure in 11 counties, and during the 1440s the annual revenues from these estates amounted to nearer £700.23 E163/7/31/1; EHR, xlix. 615; C139/159/35; 162/29; J.L. Kirby, ‘Hungerford Fam.’ (London Univ. M.A. thesis, 1939), 123-4. Such a wealthy widow would not stay single for long. By May 1439 she had taken as her third husband Sir Walter Hungerford†, Lord Hungerford, the distinguished royal councillor and former treasurer of England, whom she also outlived. In her will made on 20 July 1455 (27 years to the day after Sir Richard had made his), she requested burial next to her first husband ‘the earl of Arundel’, in the church of the Holy Trinity at Arundel, where her brother-in-law Edward Poynings was master of the college. Her executors were directed to spend 200 marks on religious services. To her daughter Eleanor Percy, now countess of Northumberland, she left 100 marks and heirlooms decorated with the arms of Lord Poynings and her own father Berkeley.24 The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 446-53; PCC 3 Stokton (PROB11/4, f. 23v); C139/159/35. The four Poynings manors in Sussex and Dorset which she had held in jointure with Sir Richard now passed to her daughter, while the former Arundel and Mautravers estates which she had long held in dower passed to her second son William, who had succeeded to the earldom of Arundel in 1438.25 CCR, 1454-61, pp. 87-90, 98.