ASHBY, George

The poet George Ashby’s origins were humble. His family were tenants of the Catesbys’ manor of Lapworth in Warwickshire, and he is to be identified with the George Ashby, who, on 24 Sept. 1435, received a grant in fee tail from his elder brother, Paul, of land there called ‘Fowlersthyng’ and the reversion of those lands still held by their elderly mother.1 E40/10658. The obscurity of his early career, which his surviving writings do nothing to alleviate, is explained by this inferior birth. Nothing is known of his education or of the patronage that brought him his advancement. If one accepts his own claim in the early 1460s to have been in service ‘full fourty yere’, this advancement began in the early 1420s when he was appointed clerk of the signet to Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, whom he names as his first master.2 Anglia, xlv. 80. This is consistent with his first appearance in the records: on 26 May 1426 he was nominated by the royal council, presumably at the duke’s prompting, to receive the pension that the new bishop of London, William Gray, was bound by custom to give one of the royal clerks (to be paid until the recipient was provided with a benefice).3 CCR, 1422-9, p. 275.

Ashby may then have been in minor orders, but, like other civil servants at this date, he preferred marriage to higher orders. Such a preference was not the bar to a successful bureaucratic career that it had once been, and our MP was not disadvantaged although promotion and reward did not come quickly. It was not until well into the following decade that he began to make appearances in the records. By then he had become one of the King’s signet clerks. His entry into royal service was probably facilitated by a higher-ranking servant of Gloucester, namely Thomas Bekynton. Certainly Bekynton’s appointment as the King’s secretary corresponded with Ashby’s entry into the signet office.4 J. Otway-Ruthven, King’s Secretary, 120. This had occurred by 9 July 1437, when, for his ‘good and unpaid services’, Henry VI granted him a corrody in the priory of St. Bartholomew, Smithfield. This grant was quickly revoked when the priory proved exemption from providing for royal grantees, but Ashby soon won other rewards.5 CCR, 1435-41, p. 131; CPR, 1436-41, p. 150; E.A. Webb, Recs. St. Bartholomew’s Smithfield, i. 150. On 17 Jan. 1438, with the three other clerks of the King’s signet, he shared a royal gift of £20, ‘par voie de regard’.6 E404/54/149. More significantly, on the following 3 May, he was granted for life the offices of serjeant of Monmouth and constable of Skenfrith, to which was added a month later the constableship of Dynevor castle.7 DL42/18, f. 101; CPR, 1436-41, p. 177; R.A. Griffiths, Principality of Wales, i. 252. A signet clerk was hardly an ideal candidate for these offices in south Wales, and these grants reflect the over-generosity of the young King, newly emerged from conciliar restraint.

Ashby seems to have been anxious to bestow a visible sign of his success on his native Lapworth. On 1 Jan. 1439 he sued out a royal licence to alienate in mortmain lands worth four marks p.a. to Ralph Perot, parson of the church there, to maintain a light and carry out other works of piety. A further licence, granted on 24 May 1440 after the routine inquisition of ad quod damnum had been held, specified these lands as a messuage, some 100 acres of land, and a rent 8s. 6d. p.a. in Lapworth and neighbouring Nuthurst.8 CPR, 1436-41, pp. 242, 445-6; C143/448/36. Whether this property was drawn from the family inheritance or had been purchased by Ashby himself does not appear; in any event, this act of piety to his origins was not the prelude to our MP establishing a more substantial landed presence in Lapworth. Although, on 1 Mar. 1439, he leased property there with the modest rentable value of 15s. p.a. from Margaret, widow of John Catesby*, for the lives of himself, his wife and son John, when he eventually acquired a worthwhile property it was to be far away from his native county.9 E40/4494.

In any event, Ashby’s flourishing career at court left him little time for local matters. In the summer of 1439 he accompanied the King’s secretary, Bekynton, to the major peace conference held at Calais, receiving, on 19 June, a writ for the payment of ten marks in anticipation of his expenses. It may have been as a reward for this service that, on 10 Oct., the day on which the commissioners reported to the King at Kennington, he added to his royal offices that of clerk of the bills for aliens at Calais, which he presumably exercised by deputy.10 E404/55/301; DKR, xlviii. 330. More valuable was the grant made to him nearly two years later: on 9 July 1441, described as ‘King’s serjeant’, he was granted an annuity of £10 at the Exchequer until he should receive an office of the same value.11 CPR, 1436-41, p. 550. His place in the royal service also enabled him to win educational advantages for his children. In 1444 his eldest son, John, at the age of 14, was among the first scholars admitted to the royal foundation of Eton College; and from there he progressed to Henry VI’s other great foundation, King’s College, Cambridge. A few years later, Thomas Ashby, who was probably our MP’s second son, followed the same educational route.12 Biog. Reg. Univ. Cambridge to 1500 ed. Emden, 18. Henry VI’s belated marriage provided Ashby with another opportunity to further himself. He was among those who, between November 1444 and April 1445, accompanied William de la Pole, marquess of Suffolk, on the great embassy to bring the new queen to England from Nancy. On his return he entered the young queen’s service, taking office as clerk of her signet with an annual fee of ten marks.13 Add. 23938, ff. 5d, 14d; A.R. Myers, Crown, Household and Parl. 147. On 18 June 1446 she further rewarded him with a grant of the stewardship of Warwick during the minority of her ward, Anne, daughter and heiress of Henry Beauchamp, duke of Warwick.14 CPR, 1441-6, p. 433; R.A. Griffiths, Hen. VI, 258. The series of grants he had enjoyed since the late 1430s now put him into a position to acquire a worthwhile stake in landed society. His employment at court put a premium on its acquisition in the vicinity of London, and, by 1447, he had purchased an estate at Harefield in Middlesex. It was there that he and his descendants made their home.15 VCH Mdx. iii. 245.

The disorder of royal finances posed a threat to Ashby’s new prosperity. It was probably because he was having difficulty securing the payment of his Exchequer annuity that, on 18 Oct. 1446, he sued out a grant assigning this annuity on the fee farm of the hundred of Framland in Leicestershire. His fees for office were also in arrears. In the following month he claimed that he had not been paid for two years as constable of Skenfrith and serjeant of Monmouth, and he was given a royal writ to the receiver of Monmouth for payment.16 CPR, 1446-52, p. 20; DL37/15/43. Later, on 29 Dec. 1448, he won a privy seal writ to the Exchequer for the payment of £6 16s. 6d. due to him since June 1445 as wages for escorting the queen to England.17 E404/65/86; E403/773, m. 10. At about the same time Queen Margaret wrote to an unidentified noblewoman thanking her for her support for Ashby’s efforts to secure payment of the wages owed to him by the late duke of Gloucester.18 Letters Margaret of Anjou (Cam. Soc. lxxxvi), 114. Difficulty in securing payment thus seems to have been a constant theme in his career, and it seems to find an echo in his ‘De Activa Pollecia Principis’ written much later. Here he advised Prince Edward to ‘paie youre men theire wages and dutee, That thei may lyve withoute extortion’. His own experience finds further echo in his injunction to the prince to eschew the resumption of grants once made for, ‘it is nought a man to be cherisshed, And aftur for povertee perisshed’.19 George Ashby’s Poems ed. Bateson (EETS, extra ser. lxxvi), 22. He himself suffered from the Acts of Resumption of 1450 and 1451, seemingly saving only his duchy of Lancaster offices. On 26 Jan. 1452, ‘for good service on both sides the sea’, he was confirmed in the constableship of Dynevor with the fees since the resumption. The grant made to him on the following 8 Oct. was probably intended as compensation for his losses: he was given a corrody in the abbey of Glastonbury for his ‘good and unpaid service with the queen on either side the sea’.20 CPR, 1446-52, p. 515; CCR, 1447-54, p. 451. Yet, despite the confirmation of the Dynevor constableship, the payment of his fee of £5 was disallowed in 1457-8, because of the resumption and for the default of the relevant warrant: SC6/1224/2, m. 3.

Little is known of Ashby in the 1450s. Early in the decade he petitioned the chancellor over a minor matter. He claimed that, although he and one Thomas Prat held jointly a tenement called ‘Fowlers’ in Lapworth (presumably that granted to him by his brother in 1435), Prat had refused to partition it in the knowledge that Ashby, as purchaser rather than inheritor, could not sue out a common-law writ of partition. Later, on 3 Aug. 1454, he secured a papal indult to have a portable altar, another mark of his rising status.21 C1/22/24; CPL, x. 681. Although throughout his career he made very few appearances in the private transactions of others, in the following October (described as ‘de domo regia’) he was named as supervisor of the will of William Ederyth of East Geenwich, mariner and haberdasher of London, and a year later he was one of the recipients of the goods of another London citizen, Richard Ade, mason.22 PCC 1 Stockton (PROB11/4, f. 4); CCR, 1454-61, p. 128. Of more immediate concern to him was his acquisition in the late 1450s of further property in Harefield from Margaret, daughter of a London merchant, William Breakspear, and it seems that his acquisitions there were the result of the failure of the Breakspears in the male line.23 Trans. London and Mdx. Arch. Soc. n.s. x. 244. A single reference shows that he also found a place for his son John in the King’s signet office. Before the royal council in 1498, John, described as a former clerk of the signet, testified that he had been present in St. Edward’s chapel in Westminster Abbey when Henry VI had chosen a burial place, probably in the late 1450s.24 B.P. Wolffe, Hen. VI, 357.

At the end of the decade Ashby again emerged to prominence. He had held office briefly as steward of Warwick during the Beauchamp minority in the late 1440s, but this hardly serves to explain his election to represent the borough in the controversial Coventry Parliament of 1459. In the indenture witnessing his election ‘Assheby’ has been added in a different hand from the rest of the document and over an erasure of a longer name. This suggests that the return was tampered with, although, since ‘George’ is not an addition, it is improbable that our MP’s surname has been added over that of another. More probably, his name was unfamiliar to the scribe and was mis-spelt thus occasioning the erasure.25 C219/16/5; Griffiths, Hen. VI, 784-5. However this may be, there can be no doubt that he was elected as a Lancastrian partisan, sharing sympathies with the sheriff who conducted the election, Henry Filongley*, and the two MPs returned for the county, (Sir) Edmund Mountfort* and Henry Everingham*.

Ashby’s career came to an abrupt end with the accession of Edward IV. As an intimate servant of Queen Margaret, he did not escape unscathed from the change of regime. He was not attainted, but he was imprisoned. His poem ‘Prohemium unius prisonarii’, written between March 1463 and March 1464, tells us that he had then been incarcerated ‘a hoole yere and more’ in the Fleet. Since he dates his arrest to shortly before Michaelmas, it is a reasonable assumption that it occurred in 1462. His committal was, according to his own testimony, both ‘ageynst ryght and reason’ and ‘By a gret commaundment of a noble lord, To whom I must obey for hys gret myght’. Since there is no other source for his arrest and imprisonment, one can only speculate as to this lord’s identity; the obvious candidate is, however, Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, who may have held a grudge against him as MP for his borough in 1459. Predictably, Ashby’s poem emphasizes the great cost of his imprisonment, both material and psychological: his enemies took advantage, ‘Takyng awey myn hors, money and goodes, Pullyng myn houses downe and my gret woodes ... Nat leuyng me a dyssh neyther a cup’; he was thus ‘put to unpayable det, Lykly to be therfor a wrechyd thrall’; and his friends, ‘disdeyned me To vysyte ... forgetyng me and let me be’.26 Anglia, xlv. 78-79. Unfortunately the poem provides few other useful details, and it is not known when and why his imprisonment ended.

It is, however, fairly clear that it did end, for on 8 May 1469 Ashby was in a strong enough position to contract a good marriage for his son and heir, John, to Eleanor, a daughter of the Northamptonshire esquire, John Gage. In return for a payment of £100, he agreed to settle on the couple lands in Harefield worth ten marks a year in immediate possession with provision that the jointure would be later increased to 20 marks p.a.27 E. Suss. RO, Gage of Firle mss, SAS/G21/1. Aside from this reference, however, almost nothing is known of the last years of Ashby’s long life. None the less, it is probable that his most famous work, ‘De Activa’, a poem of political and moral advice for Henry VI’s son Prince Edward, is to be dated to this obscure period. He tells us that he compiled the work when ‘fallen in decrepit age Right nygh at mony yeres of foure score’, but there is no evidence to provide a precise date. It has been suggested that it is contemporary with ‘Prohemium unius prisonarii’, but it was probably written later. Although only a speculation it is not improbable that, after his release from the Fleet and the marriage of his son, he fled to join the exiled Lancastrian court at Koeur; that he was there entrusted with the schooling of the young prince; and that this explains the compilation of ‘De Activa’. Alternatively, he may have remained in England and composed the poem during the Readeption.28 R.J. Meyer-Lee, ‘Laureates and Beggars’, Speculum, lxxix. 709-11.

If Ashby benefited from the restoration of his old master and mistress and suffered from their removal, this has left no trace on the records. The headship of the family seems to have fallen to his eldest son, John, even before his death. On 9 July 1474 it was John who sold to (Sir) William Catesby* his ‘heddplase’ in Lapworth with other lands at the rate of 20 years’ purchase, with an additional agreement that Catesby should have those lands granted to the Ashbys in 1439 in return for 20s. to the making of a rood loft in Lapworth church.29 E163/29/8. This marked the end of the interest there of our MP’s family, or, at least, his branch of it. When he died on 20 Feb. 1475 it was at Harefield rather than Lapworth that he was buried. A memorial brass to him and his wife, Margaret, who had died a few months before, survives in the church there.30 Collectanea Topographia et Geneaologica ed. Nichols, v. 136. The family he had established at Harefield survived in the male line until as late as 1769. His grandson, George (b.c.1475) and great-grandson, Thomas, followed similar careers to his own: the former was clerk of the signet to Henry VII and Henry VIII and Thomas was clerk of the spicery to Elizabeth I.31 VCH Mdx. iii. 245; Biog. Reg. Univ. Oxf. ed. Emden, i. 55.