ALLINGTON, William II

In landed terms one of the most considerable of the Cambridgeshire gentry of the mid fifteenth century, Allington owed his status to his father and namesake. The senior William Allington had used his standing as a prominent servant of the Lancastrian dynasty to contract valuable marriages for Allington and his younger brother, Robert, with the sisters Elizabeth and Joan Argentine, coheiresses of estates in Suffolk, Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire. The recognizance for 800 marks he gave in February 1423 to Margery, the widow of the girls’ grandfather, Sir William Argentine, was almost certainly a security for the marriage agreements. The division of the Argentine estates took place in November 1427, by which date Elizabeth, the elder sister, had borne her husband a son and heir, John. Unlike his elder brother, Robert did not enjoy his wife’s share of the Argentine lands for long, for Joan died, still a minor, in May 1429.8 CCR, 1422-9, pp. 68, 352; CFR, xv. 237; J.S. Roskell, ‘Wm. Allington of Horseheath’, Cambridge Antiq. Soc. Procs. lii. 32. Having not fathered any children by her, he could not claim any courtesy interest in her estate, and in the following July the King ordered the escheators concerned to give his brother and Elizabeth seisin of her lands, thereby augmenting their already substantial holdings.9 CFR, xv. 273.

The commissions for the subsidy of 1436 estimated that the younger William derived an income of £110 p.a. from his holdings in Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Norfolk. At the same date the value of Robert’s estates was put at £60, and those of their father at a comparatively meagre £26 p.a., most likely an undervaluation.10 E179/240/268. Allington was therefore in a position of considerable independence well before his parents’ deaths and, not surprisingly, he was distrained for knighthood in 1439. In his will, made a month before his death in October 1446, the elder William Allington settled his manors of Horseheath Hall, West Wickham and Streetly, along with all his other lands in Horseheath, Wickham, Balsham, Bartlow and Shudy Camps, on his namesake, with remainder to his second son, Robert, should the younger William die without legitimate issue.11 Cambridge Univ. Lib., Baker mss, Mm. 1. 42, p. 159. For the purposes of the subsidy of 1450, Allington’s estates were valued at 200 marks p.a.12 E179/81/103. By then he had created a park at Horseheath, having obtained a licence to impark 320 acres there in 1448, and he further consolidated his holdings in that parish by purchasing its manor of ‘Limburys’ in 1453.13 Add. 5834, f. 1; VCH Cambs. vi. 74. He did, however, dispose of interests elsewhere, for he and his first wife sold the Argentine manor at Weston Baldock, Hertfordshire, to Peter Paule* in 1440.14 CCR, 1435-41, pp. 436, 439; 1447-54, pp. 424-5; CP25(1)/91/114/104; Add. Ch. 35417.

While the exact date of her death is unknown, Elizabeth Argentine did not live much beyond that date, for Allington had married his second wife, Mary, by the end of the 1440s. According to manuscript notes made by the 18th-century Cambridgeshire antiquary, William Cole, she was the widow of one Henry Hayward, although she is identified as the former wife of the Essex esquire, John Tey, in a couple of bills that she and Allington presented to the chancellor in about 1451. Cole was not necessarily wrong, since it is possible that she had been widowed at least twice before marrying Allington. In both Chancery bills the defendants were Tey’s feoffees and executors. She and Allington accused them of breaching her former husband’s will by refusing her access to his manor at Ardleigh and to the dower assigned to her from the Tey estates in two other Essex parishes, Easthorpe and Copford.15 Add. 5823, ff. 219v, 226; C1/18/118; 19/296-8. This Chancery suit must have occurred late in Mary’s life, for Allington was to marry for a third time before his own death in 1459.

Allington spent part of his early adult years in France, for in December 1431 the Crown permitted five prisoners of war from St. Mâlo in Brittany to return home to collect the ransoms they owed him.16 DKR, xlviii. 284. This is the only known reference to his military career, and he was certainly back in England when he gained election as a knight of the shire in June 1433. The Parliament of 1433 took up 120 days of his time. He was allowed 4s. per day, meaning that his wages for the Parliament totalled £24, but in mid 1437 (by which date he had already sat in his second Parliament) he was suing Roger Hunt*, the former sheriff of Cambridgeshire, for 71s. of that sum that were in arrears.17 E13/140, rot. 41. His status as a landholder made him an eminently suitable person to stand as a knight of the shire within the lifetime of his father, who, in any case now played a reduced role in local affairs. Allington was particularly active in the later 1430s when he was successively escheator and sheriff in Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire, became a j.p. and entered his third Parliament.

The Cambridgeshire election to the Parliament of 1439 was controversial, for it saw Allington, Laurence Cheyne* and William Cotton* side with Sir James Butler, the future earl of Wiltshire, against the interest of John, Lord Tiptoft†, the leading magnate in the shire. Later, Tiptoft’s supporters claimed that Butler and his allies had engaged in canvassing in the three weeks before the county court met, and that on the eve of the election they had come to Cambridge at the head of 50 men in harness. Their electioneering appears to have succeeded, for when the court opened the sheriff, Gilbert Hore*, who was linked to Tiptoft, refused to make a return. Subsequently, however, the King, with the consent of the Lords, sent out a new writ, and at another court held on 19 Nov. the electors chose Allington and Cotton. It is impossible to tell what motivated Allington to act as he did in this affair, but both discontent with Tiptoft’s dominance of the county and personal ambition may have played a part.18 R. Virgoe, ‘Cambs. Election of 1439’, Bull. IHR, lxvi. 95-101. In the early 1440s he and Cheyne sued Richard Forster I*, one of Tiptoft’s estate officers, and they themselves were sued by Tiptoft for debt,19 CP40/724, rots. 206, 410; 726, rot. 379d; 728, rot. 284d; 729, rot. 358d; 730, rot. 210. but there is no evidence to connect these actions with the Butler-Tiptoft feud.

Allington and his co-litigant had been associates since at least 1437, when they were feoffees for two of Cheyne’s female cousins and their husbands, but the links between them were strengthened by the marriage of Allington’s eldest son and heir, John, to one of Cheyne’s daughters. Allington became a feoffee of the settlements made in 1446, when another of Cheyne’s daughters married John Say II*, and in 1449, when Cheyne’s heir (John II*) married Elizabeth, the daughter of Sir Thomas Rempston†.20 CP, v. 80; CPR, 1436-41, pp. 50, 51; 1446-52, p. 259; CCR, 1441-7, p. 441. Allington and Cheyne were also associated together with the Cambridgeshire knight, Sir Thomas Fynderne*, for whom Allington’s father had acted as a feoffee. In January 1452 they were among those who joined Sir Thomas in entering a bond in statute staple at Westminster with Henry Langley and the Londoner John Bedham. The bond was to guarantee that by the following Christmas Fynderne and his associates would pay 50 marks to the two men, who took legal action against them nearly a decade later, for failing to honour that undertaking. In January 1462 the sheriff of Cambridgeshire held an inquiry into Fynderne’s estates in Cambridgeshire in connexion with that debt, indicating that Allington and Cheyne had entered the statute on behalf of the knight, by that date an attainted and fugitive Lancastrian.21 C131/71/3.

During the late 1440s Allington took the opportunity to look to his own interests. In July 1448 he received a grant of the Argentine manor of Chalgrave, Oxfordshire, from Margery, widow of his brother-in-law, John Argentine, who held a jointure interest in it. In return, he undertook to pay her an annuity of £10 for the rest of her life. In July 1455, however, he and his son, John, conveyed the manor to John Barantyn† and others – including Richard Quatermayns* and Richard Fowler† – who were apparently acting as Barantyn’s feoffees. It was in connexion with this transaction that the Allingtons were obliged to vest the title to the MP’s manor of ‘Lymburys’ in Horseheath upon the grantees. Barantyn and his fellows were thereby empowered to enter the Cambridgeshire manor, in case they should lose Chalgrave through a challenge at law. Possibly this was to secure them from any claim by Margery, the fate of whose annuity is not known.22 Magdalen Coll. Oxf., Chalgrave deeds, 2b, 6b, 24a.

During the politically unstable early 1450s, Allington served his second term as sheriff. He received an allowance of 50 marks against the farm of his bailiwick, partly because of outstanding debts that the Crown had owed his late father and partly in acknowledgement of the difficulties of exercising the office in such a ‘troblous seson’.23 W. Smith, ‘R. Finance and Politics, 1450-5’ (Manchester Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1998), 80. If it is impossible to discern his views on national politics, there can be no doubt about the political sympathies of his heir. A Cambridge jury indicted John Allington for taking part in a local conspiracy against Henry VI, just as the duke of York was conducting his armed demonstration of February 1452, although he was to receive a pardon in 1455.24 J.S. Roskell, ‘Wm. Allington of Bottisham’, Cambridge Antiq. Soc. Procs. lii. 45; KB9/7/1; C67/40, m. 3. The duke formally retained him for life in January 1456, with an annuity of ten marks,25 Private Indentures (Cam. Miscellany xxxii), 161-2. and later he was Edward IV’s first sheriff of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire.

Despite his son’s activities, Allington remained on the Cambridgeshire bench where his younger son and namesake, a future Speaker, joined him in July 1457. He spent part of his later years in Norfolk and Suffolk and in about 1454 he was one of those who informed the justices of King’s bench of the riotous behaviour of Robert Lethum in Norfolk.26 Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, ii. 307. Later in the same decade, William Roys and Jane his wife, the widow of Sir Richard Venter, sued him, William Calthorpe* and other feoffees in Chancery, for failing to release to her a manor in Cockthorpe in that county,27 C1/26/128. and he was appointed to several coastal watches and commissions of array in Suffolk. Part of the Argentine estate, including the manor of Halesworth, lay in Suffolk, but his third marriage was undoubtedly another reason for his having an administrative role there in his later years. Described as lord of Halesworth when he had obtained a papal indult to keep a portable altar in March 1447,28 CPL, x. 304. he may have lived there for a while since it was as of the counties of Norfolk and Suffolk that he was distrained for the second time in his career a decade later.

It is likely that Allington died in London, since he made his will there on 3 July 1459, just two days before his death.29 Wilshere mss, 63514; C139/177/42. In the will he requested burial in Wymondley priory, Hertfordshire, the foundation of one of his first wife’s Argentine ancestors,30 VCH Herts., iv. 440. and provided for immediate family. First, he assigned his manors at Horseheath and West Wickham in Cambridgeshire to his then spouse and third wife, Elizabeth, to hold for life, after which they were to pass to his eldest son John. His second son, William, was to have Bottisham, another manor in the same county. He had already secured a wife for the younger William, who had married Joan, the eldest daughter of his near neighbour, John Ansty*, in the previous year.31 Cambridge Univ. Lib., Ely Diocesan recs., G1/5 (Reg. Gray), f. 27v. Allington left his youngest son Richard a messuage in ‘Yernemouth’ (presumably Great Yarmouth) and the reversion of the manor of ‘Gyslam’ in Suffolk, a property that Margery, widow of John Argentine, held for life. As for Allington’s daughter Margery, who had married John Colville, she was no more than a contingent beneficiary of his estates, with a right to succeed to the Allington manors only in the unlikely event that all her brothers predeceased her without surviving issue. Allington appointed three executors: his widow, John Ansty and Thomas Lokton*.

Within months of the MP’s death, Elizabeth married John Wymondham*, in the face of strong opposition from John Heveningham, her son by her earlier marriage, who thought the match demeaned her. Wymondham, one of Allington’s fellow knights of the shire in 1439, won her hand after enlisting Alice de la Pole, dowager duchess of Suffolk, to intercede for him, and by promising to pay off the debts of her previous husband, Sir John Heveningham.32 Paston Letters, ed. Davis, i. 256; Norf. RO, Ketton-Cremer mss, WKC 3/1. Owing to the survival of his stepmother, John Allington (over 30 years of age at his father’s death) could not enter his full inheritance immediately and it is unclear how long he had to wait to come completely into his own, for the date of her death is unknown. He was, however, able to take possession of his own mother’s Argentine estates that the MP had held by the courtesy in the autumn of 1459, shortly before the total rift between his lord, the duke of York, and the government occurred.33 CFR, xix. 247-8. John’s younger brother enjoyed a more distinguished career than he, serving as Speaker in the consecutive Parliaments of 1472-5 and 1478. During the first of these assemblies, Thomas Daniell* presented a petition seeking to have his attainder by Edward IV’s first Parliament overturned, but Speaker Allington had no liking for the petitioner, a maverick figure with whom his father had once clashed. Daniell was therefore obliged to seek the assistance of the King’s attorney-general, William Hussey*, in advancing his petition – accepted on the last day of the penultimate session of the Parliament, 6 June 1474 – an illustration of the control that Speakers could exercise over the promotion of private bills. An indenture of agreement made between Daniell and Hussey reveals that the Speaker disliked the former because he held him responsible for a spell of imprisonment that the subject of this biography had suffered in London although, frustratingly, the indenture does not record the date or circumstances of this episode.34 CCR, 1468-76, no. 1474; J.S. Roskell, Speakers, 94-95.