ALFRAY, Richard

Unlike his elder brother John, who became a yeoman in the royal household, Richard trained as a lawyer at Gray’s Inn;6 CP40/774, rot. 313; KB27/826, rot. 118, where he is described as a man ‘learned in the law’. hence his usual description as ‘gentleman’. He came of age soon after John, and evidently inherited some property in East Grinstead, being first recorded, in Hilary term 1446, bringing a suit in the court of common pleas in which he accused a local baker of breaking into his closes and taking crops worth £5.7 CP40/740, rot. 187d. A more serious dispute arose some seven years later when he challenged the claims made by Richard Forster III* in right of his wife Joan Cheyne to property at Houghton, near Arundel in west Sussex. What Alfray’s interest in the estate may have been is not made clear, but his determination to make good his claim led to his indictment at Battle in 1453 for illegally entering it on 26 Dec. 1452. He brought a counter petition against Forster in the following year, but Forster responded with a suit in the common pleas under the statute of maintenance, and Alfray’s arrest was ordered, first in Berkshire, and then in Middlesex.8 KB9/270A/81; KB27/773, rot. 22; CP40/770, rot. 88d.

For his clientele Alfray looked not only to Sussex landowners but also to the merchants of London, and one of his closest associates over a period of more than 30 years was a London mercer called Thomas Bryce. Together he and Bryce leased property in the city parish of St. Margaret Lothbury, and the two men were often linked as recipients of gifts of goods and chattels (probably indicating that they offered credit to tradesmen), and as co-plaintiffs in suits for debt.9 CCR, 1447-54, pp. 403-4; 1454-61, p. 76; CPR, 1452-61, p. 519; 1467-77, p. 255. The business affairs of Bryce led to Alfray being summoned to Chancery in the late 1470s: C1/66/327-31. Alfray became a participant in the business deals of members of the Grocers’ Company in particular, and through his near kinsman Peter Alfray, who was a draper, he formed contacts with the Drapers’ Company too.10 CCR, 1454-61, pp. 133, 119. In the mid 1470s he was subject to an action for debt as the supposed executor of Henry Sylver, a London citizen, but asserted that Sylver had died intestate: C1/48/157. At home in Sussex his most important client was (Sir) Roger Lewknor*, a leading landowner and knight of the shire in the Parliament of 1453-4, on whose behalf he delivered to the sheriff the writ for payment of his expenses in the Parliament, and for whom he stood pledge in Michaelmas term 1454 when Lewknor was fined in the King’s bench for trespass and contempt against the King and the archbishop of Canterbury, among others, in his dispute with his stepmother. Alfray was a feoffee in 1456 for the settlement of jointure in Somerset on Sir Roger’s daughter Elizabeth, following her marriage to John Wroth, and in the 1460s he regularly received a fee of 26s. 8d. p.a. from Lewknor for his counsel, this fee rising to as much as 53s. 4d. in 1475-6.11 E/535; KB27/774, fines rot. 1; CPR, 1452-61, p. 280; SC6/1120/3, 4. Lewknor’s stepmother accused Alfray of abetting Lewknor in an illegal entry into her property at Beddingham in Sept. 1454: KB27/776, rot. 36d.

Otherwise, Alfray acted as mainpernor in the Exchequer for other Sussex landowners, and as surety of the peace for Thomas Bellingham* in the common pleas in 1455.12 CFR, xix. 130; CP40/779, rot. 125. Meanwhile, the proceedings against him in the Forster case had continued in the central courts, and despite his attendance there on other business he failed to respond to summonses issued throughout the late 1450s.13 KB27/779, rex rot. 26; 789, rex rot. 34. In Hilary term 1460 his arrest was once more ordered, and he was in exigent until Michaelmas that year.14 KB27/795, rex rot. 15. It was at this stage in his career that Richard was elected to Parliament for the first time, to the assembly summoned for 7 Oct. His brother John, who had represented their home town in four earlier Parliaments (including the most recent one at Coventry), had been removed from the royal household in the immediate aftermath of the Yorkist victory at Northampton in July, and it is clear where his loyalties lay. Richard himself was probably much less firmly committed to the house of Lancaster, for it was apparently not until after the accession of Edward IV that he was appointed to offices in the duchy of Lancaster honour of Pevensey. Furthermore, even though process was still being taken against him in the King’s bench in Trinity term 1462, the new regime placed him on the Sussex bench as a member of the quorum.15 KB27/805, rex rot. 23.

Richard’s removal from the bench in 1466 was doubtless occasioned by the violent events at East Grinstead arising from his family’s quarrel with Sir Roger Lewknor’s half-brother Richard Lewknor*, whose wife had inherited the local manor of Brambletye. Whether it also owed something to continuing ill-feeling between the Lewknors themselves does not appear. The sequence of events may be pieced together from conflicting charges brought in the King’s bench in October 1467. They began on 2 Nov. 1465 when Richard Lewknor’s man John Bradbrigge was allegedly assaulted and imprisoned by members of the Alfray family, who contended that they had held him on the instruction of the town constable William Modyll, so that peace might be restored after Bradbrigge had assembled malefactors to murder John Alfray’s servant, Robert Johnson. This was followed by violent attacks on Modyll and John Alfray in February and March following, and matters came to a head on 11 Dec. 1466, when three of John Alfray’s men (including Johnson), having lain in ambush at East Grinstead with ‘longebilles, staffs and clubs’, brutally murdered Lewknor’s servant Thomas Brampton. Richard Alfray was allegedly present on this occasion, aiding and abetting the assailants, and John Alfray and their kinsman Peter Alfray, the London draper, subsequently harboured the three principals. The Alfrays were subject to an appeal by the dead man’s brother Henry Brampton, sued by writ of 12 Apr. 1467, and it was while this appeal was pending that Richard Alfray was returned for East Grinstead to the Parliament summoned for 3 June, while his opponent Lewknor secured election for another Sussex borough, New Shoreham. The cases proceeded following the prorogation of Parliament on 1 July. On 16 Oct., among the plethora of suits brought by each side in the affair, Richard Alfray accused Lewknor of illegally maintaining Henry Brampton, and sought damages of £200. Lewknor not only denied the charge, but filed a counter charge that the Alfrays had breached the same statute by maintaining Modyll, whom he claimed was his bondman. Richard Alfray responded that he had been engaged by Modyll as his legal counsel.16 KB27/826, rots. 34, 101, 110, 111-13, 118, rex rot. 16; Suss. Arch. Collns. xcv. 56-57; KB9/315/32, 33. Subsequently, Richard and John Alfray appeared regularly in court in successive law terms until Hilary 1469, when they were acquitted on the appeal for abetting the homicides.17 KB27/826, rot. 34. Peter Alfray, who failed to show up in court, eventually produced a royal pardon in 1472 to secure his acquittal.

It may have been in connexion with these lawsuits that in February 1469 Alfray and his friend Thomas Bryce entered recognizances in £100 to another lawyer, John Vavasour†.18 CCR, 1468-76, no. 141. At what stage Alfray returned to public service is unclear, but later on that same year (after his acquittal) he was acting as deputy to Richard Fiennes, Lord Dacre, the steward of the duchy of Lancaster estates in Sussex. How long he had been in office and how long he so remained is not known. In any event, although Fiennes was a loyal supporter of the Yorkist regime, Alfray appears not to have followed his lead when Edward IV was exiled. Under the government of the Readeption, he not only retained the post of controller of customs in Chichester (to which he had been appointed in the summer of 1470), but was named on two ad hoc commissions that October, and was reinstated on the Sussex quorum in the next month. His removal from both controllership and bench when Edward IV returned to power are clear signs that he was now considered untrustworthy, and although he obtained a pardon on 13 Dec. 1471 he never resumed the role of a j.p.19 C67/48, m. 24. However, he was placed on the quorum in a commission of gaol delivery in November 1477, and his last recorded election to Parliament took place shortly afterwards. This was to the brief Parliament of 1478, when his companion from East Grinstead was his erstwhile opponent in the law-courts, Richard Lewknor. In the 1460s he had held office on the duchy of Lancaster estates in Sussex, which the queen held as part of her dower, and it may be that he had latterly returned to her favour. Certainly, he received a fee as a forester in Ashdown forest at the end of the reign.20 M. Hicks, in False, Fleeting, Perjur’d Clarence, 200, places him as a supporter of the Wydevilles in this Parliament, but on what evidence is unclear.

Although the full extent of Alfray’s landed holdings is not known, some information about them survives. For a while from June 1465 he had an interest in the Sussex manor of Twineham Benfield and the advowson of the church there, but his title was not sound, or he may merely have been holding the property on behalf of the heiress Margery Austyn, to whom at some point in the next ten years he delivered a coffer containing evidences. An undated and perhaps never-executed deed records him putting the manor and advowson in the hands of a distinguished group of feoffees, headed by the earl of Arundel and the Lords Mautravers and Dacre and including his nephew Thomas Alfray.21 Cat. Wiston Archs. ed. Booker, 202-4, nos. 3018, 3025-8, 3030. Since 1457 he had had dealings in land at East Grinstead once belonging to John Morris and his wife Agnes, which he passed on to his brother John and then to Thomas Alfray in 1469. Subsequently, John Wody† claimed in a petition to the chancellor that Richard had only held the land in trust, and that the Morrisses had sold it to him. Richard made a quitclaim to part of it in November 1478, and he and his nephew made a release to Wody of other former Morris properties a few months later.22 CAD, iii. C3391; vi. C3775, 4407-8, 4436; C1/74/90. A few years earlier, before Michaelmas 1472, Richard’s brother John had died intestate: he took on the task of administering his estate.23 CP40/844, rot. 473d; Add. 39376, f. 208. Richard himself is last recorded in November 1484, once more associated with Bryce, in a quitclaim to Sir Humphrey Starkey and others of all legal actions,24 CCR, 1476-85, no. 1338. and died less than a year later, on 15 Oct. 1485. A memorial brass at East Grinstead no longer survives.25 A.G. Sadler, Lost Brasses of Suss. 114.