ASTON, Sir Roger

An Aston had first represented Staffordshire in 1333, and our MP’s father, Sir Thomas, sat for the county in six Parliaments between 1380 and 1406. The family’s distinguished parliamentary history was a function both of their long held and extensive estates in the county – these comprised the manors of Haywood and Brocton, both near Stafford, with other holdings lying between Stafford and Walsall – and close connexions with the local nobility. Sir Thomas had links with the Beauchamp earls of Warwick, and Ralph, the last Lord Basset of Drayton, but his closest ties were with the Staffords. He probably fought in the retinue of Edmund, earl of Stafford, at the battle of Shrewsbury in 1403, where the young earl met his death, and it is not surprising that he should have found his eldest son, Roger, a place in the inner circle of the Stafford retinue. By 1409, when still a young man (he can have been born no earlier than the mid 1380s), our MP was steward for the earl’s widow, Anne, who, as a grand-daughter of Edward III and coheiress of the Bohun earldom of Hereford, was one of the greatest women of the realm. At this date (or perhaps later) she awarded him a large annuity of 40 marks; and in 1410 he acted in the settlement of two manors on Anne and her third husband, Sir William Bourgchier, with whom he was to establish a close personal relationship.3 The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 80-82; L.S. Woodger, ‘Hen. Bourgchier’ (Oxf. Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1974), 291; C. Rawcliffe, Staffords, 196; CPR, 1408-13, p. 158. He was in receipt of the annuity by 1435 but it may have been granted much earlier: SC11/816, m. 2.

Sir Thomas was also responsible for his heir’s advancement in another way: he contracted for him what was to prove, judged in material terms, an excellent marriage to Joyce Freville. Even at the time it was made the match was a good one, in that the bride was from a prominent knightly family of even greater local weight than the Astons; in retrospect it proved even better. Joyce did not long survive the birth of her son on 6 Jan. 1414, but that son soon became heir to something more than the manor of Heywood and the other Aston lands. On the childless death of Joyce’s young brother, Baldwin Freville, on 3 April 1418, he fell coheir, in company with Joyce’s two sisters, to a substantial estate, including the castle and manor of Tamworth in the south-east corner of Staffordshire, and several manors in Warwickshire with outlying estates in Nottinghamshire, Surrey, Worcestershire and Herefordshire. It remains uncertain exactly how the Freville properties were partitioned; for some time each of the heirs enjoyed a third of each component manor with our MP having the custody of his son’s portion.4 C138/35/47. Since Joyce died before her brother (or, at least, before his inquisition post mortem was taken), our MP had no right to her lands by courtesy, yet he appears to have held her share of the inheritance. On 3 Feb. 1421, for example, he joined the husbands of the other coheirs in granting the chapel of ‘le Spytell’ near Tamworth to a chaplain to pray for Baldwin Freville’s soul: Nottingham Univ. Lib. Middleton mss, Mi D 3872. Aston seems to have been on good terms with Thomas Ferrers, younger son of William, Lord Ferrers of Groby, and Hugh Willoughby*, the husbands of the two other coheirs: in July 1419 he entered into bonds to the Crown on their behalf as they waited judgement as to whether their marriages to the sisters of a tenant-in-chief infringed the King’s feudal rights.5 CCR, 1419-22, p. 48. In 1435 he was named as a feoffee by both Willoughby and Ferrers: Middleton mss, Mi D 1611; Egerton Ch. 473.

By this date Roger was tenant of the Aston lands and a knight. His father last appears in the records in November 1412, at about the time of our MP’s marriage to Joyce, and his mother was probably already dead by this date. Given his prominent place in the Stafford retinue, it was natural that he should have undertaken to serve under Bourgchier for the campaign of 1415, and it is highly probable that he was knighted during its course, perhaps even on the field of Agincourt.6 N.H. Nicolas, Agincourt, 360. He was still an esquire in Dec. 1414, when named by Bourgchier and Anne as a feoffee for the surrender of her claim to the lordship of Oakham to Edward, duke of York, but he was a kt. by the following 18 Dec.: CPR, 1413-16, p. 270; E43/589. Bourgchier proved himself an enthusiastic and capable soldier, but Aston was not destined to follow him on further military adventures. He preferred instead to remain at home as his master’s deputy as constable of the Tower of London, to which Sir William had been appointed in succession to the duke of York, killed at Agincourt.7 Bourgchier was named to the office on 26 Nov., three days after the King’s return to London: CPR, 1413-16, p. 375. He was in office by 18 Dec. 1415 when he assumed responsibility for 17 French prisoners taken at Harfleur, and, on the following 28 Jan., King James I of Scotland (a prisoner since captured as a boy in 1406) was delivered into his keeping. Later he was entrusted with another important prisoner, the duke of Brittany’s brother, Arthur, count of Richmond, who had been captured at Agincourt.8 E43/589; PPC, ii. 274-5; E404/34/260A, B; 36/265.

The death of Bourgchier on 28 May 1420 brought Aston further advancement. A month later, described as a King’s knight, he succeeded to the constableship of the Tower with its handsome fee of £100 p.a. On the following 20 Nov., in another mark of favour incident upon Bourgchier’s death, he and a Staffordshire lawyer, John Bedulf, were granted the custody of the lands of Sir Hugh Stafford, Lord Bourgchier, the husband of Bourgchier’s cousin, Elizabeth, during the short period that remained of the minority of the heir, Countess Anne’s son, Humphrey, earl of Stafford. Soon after he may have briefly returned to France, for, on 8 June 1421, he sued out letters of attorney as going abroad.9 CPR, 1416-22, p. 294; Woodger, 260; CFR, xiv. 362-3; DKR, xliv. 626. Yet this period of apparent prominence quickly came to an end. On 20 Aug. 1420, just two months after Aston’s appointment as constable, John Holland, earl of Huntingdon, secured letters patent of appointment to the office. These were not enrolled and appear not to have taken immediate effect for, in the following October, our MP twice secured letters of privy seal to the Exchequer ordering payment of his fee as constable. None the less, by February 1421 his term in office was over, for William Yerde* was appointed as the earl’s lieutenant as constable.10 CPR, 1422-9, p. 41; E404/36/144, 161.

From this point Aston’s career took on a very different pattern: no longer directly employed by the Crown he took instead his family’s customary place in Staffordshire affairs. In September 1423 he was elected to represent his native shire in Parliament, and in 1426 he was pricked for the first of his two terms as the sheriff.11 C219/13/2; CFR, xv. 156. For the loss of income represented by this change of direction he was compensated by the lands of his twice-widowed second wife. Aside from the lesser properties Elizabeth held as a widow, as one of the four daughters and coheiress of Sir Ralph Meynell she had an hereditary interest in the manor of Langley Meynell with other lands in Derbyshire, Staffordshire and Worcestershire, and, by a fine levied in 1424, these lands were settled jointly on her and our MP.12 CP25(1)/291/65/32. According to a later tradition preserved by the Tudor antiquary, John Leland, the Meynell coheiresses divided a very considerable estate: ‘evrey one of them had a 100 markes by yere and a manor place’: J. Leland, Itin. ed. Toulmin Smith, ii. 14. This was clearly an overestimate. With his patrimony and share of the Freville lands, not to mention his fee of 40 marks p.a. from the dowager countess of Stafford, this made him a very rich man. Probably, among the Staffordshire gentry only Sir Richard Vernon* was wealthier.

Aston did not neglect his place in Countess Anne’s service. In 1428 he stood pledge when she was fined in King’s bench, and, more importantly, in July 1429 she nominated him, alongside John Stafford, bishop of Bath and Wells, as custodian of the Bohun lands (her maternal inheritance) in dispute between her and the Crown.13 KB27/668, fines rot. 2d; CPR, 1422-9, p. 542. If it was with the intention of forwarding her suit in this matter that, a few weeks later, he won a second election to Parliament, the only evidence is the coincidence in timing, yet two of his own matters he does appear to have effectively forwarded in this assembly. On 28 Feb. 1430, five days after its end, the Crown granted the ‘good men’ of the town of Wolseley (adjoining Haywood) pontage for the term of three years, the money raised to be spent under our MP’s supervision, perhaps because it was he who had lobbied for the grant. Of more direct importance to him was his belated addition to the Staffordshire bench a month later, and again it is not fanciful to suppose that he had used his time at Westminster to secure what should have come to him some time before.14 C219/14/1; CPR, 1429-36, pp. 34, 624.

Aston took no part in the King’s coronation expedition of 1430-2, even though he would have been a natural recruit for the retinue taken by Anne’s son, Earl Humphrey. Instead, he remained at home, busying himself in local administration. On 11 Jan. 1431 he headed the attestors to the Staffordshire election, and, at the next election, on 1 May 1432, he presided over the hustings as sheriff.15 C219/14/2, 3. To this period is also to be assigned his third marriage to a bride who, although her identity is not absolutely certain, was probably the widow of a Cheshire knight, Sir Laurence Merbury, chancellor of Ireland and brother of John Merbury*. The match was made by 5 Mar. 1431, when she was granted a life interest in the manor of Marbury and other lands in Cheshire by Sir Laurence’s and perhaps her own son and heir, James.16 CCR, 1435-41, p. 167. These lands compensated Aston in part for the loss of the keeping of his first wife’s inheritance, for which his son, Robert, seems now to have assumed responsibility: in a fine levied in Hilary term 1432, concerning two Freville manors in Warwickshire, it was the son rather than the father who was party with Ferrers and Willoughby.17 Warws. Feet of Fines (Dugdale Soc. xviii), no. 2557. Robert was also probably contracted in marriage at about this date: our MP’s own marriage into a Cheshire family probably explains his son’s to Isabel, the daughter of another Cheshire knight, Sir William Brereton.18 The date of the marriage is unknown, but it must have taken place in our MP’s lifetime, for Robert left a son and heir of age at his death in 1465: C140/13/24.

Although from the early 1420s Aston appears to have confined his activities to Staffordshire, he made occasional journeys to London outside of his two Parliaments. On 15 Jan. 1433, for example, he was at Lichfield, sitting as a j.p. in company with the earl of Stafford and Sir Richard Vernon, but later in the month he appeared personally in the court of common pleas to pursue an action of debt against another of the Staffordshire gentry, Thomas Griffith of Wichnor. He was again in the common pleas in Michaelmas term 1435 and Easter term 1436 demanding various debts, including 20 marks each against two local gentleman, John Fisher and William Hextall*, and damages of £20 against a husbandman who had negligently repaired one of his houses at Hikston.19 KB27/694, rex rot. 1d; CP40/688, rot. 16; 699, rots. 317d, 493d; 701, rot. 233d. He also appears in another slightly surprising context. In 1433 he and his wife, Joan, in company with a Herefordshire lawyer, John Monnington*, and two men of Bristol, Thomas Snell and John Leynell, brought an assize of fresh force in the Bristol mayor’s court against William Roberd, vicar of the parish church of All Saints there, for a tenement in ‘Oldcoynestrete’. How he came to have an interest in property in Bristol does not appear, but he was resolute in pursuing his supposed right: in 1438 he sued two Bristol merchants and a scrivener for maintaining his rivals in the plea, and in 1440 he brought an action of decies tantum against the Bristol jurors who had brought in a verdict against him. The result of the case is not known.20 CP40/708, rot. 298; 719, rots. 277d, 398d.

All this implies that Aston’s interests, even after the period at the beginning of his career when he was a man of substance outside his native shire, were more extensive than the surviving records show. Interestingly, late in his career he still had influence enough to secure from the Crown, on 14 Feb. 1437, a life exemption from office in recognition of his good service and ‘his age and infirmity’. His purpose was probably to avoid a further pricking as sheriff, and he may have been minded to sue the exemption, offered to few, because of recent difficulties he had had concerning a debt claimed against him by the Crown. His failure to account for £73 owed for the keeping of the disputed Bohun lands had led, on 20 Sept. 1436, to the seizure by the sheriff, Richard Peshale, of his manors of Haywood and Leigh (together valued at 35 marks p.a.) and eight oxen. Although he regained his property ten days later, he probably viewed the exemption as a means of avoiding further aggravation of the same sort.21 CPR, 1436-41, p. 41; E199/41/32; I. Rowney, ‘Staffs. Political Community’ (Keele Univ. Ph. D. thesis, 1981), 60. As, however, in the case of others who received such exemptions, he continued to accept the appointments upon which local standing depended, remaining on the county bench and appearing on occasional ad hoc commissions.

In these years another matter must have closely demanded Aston’s attention. On 16 Oct. 1438 Countess Anne chose him as one of her nine executors. No doubt the bulk of what must have been a considerable body of work was undertaken by the professional administrators among the nine, who included two barons of the Exchequer, John Fray† and Robert Frampton, yet our MP, as a servant of the countess for 30 years, must have taken his part.22 Reg. Chichele, ii. 597. For the rest, however, Aston was, in the last ten or so years of his life, about as anonymous as a man of his wealth and connexions could be. He attested his last parliamentary election on 28 Dec. 1441 and was appointed to his last ad hoc commission of local government in the summer of 1443.23 C219/15/2; DL37/10/46. He died shortly before 30 Jan. 1449, when writs of diem clausit extremum were issued to the Staffordshire escheator. Regrettably they were either not acted upon or the return no longer survives. In any event his son and heir, Robert (d.1465), was comfortably of age.24 CFR, xviii. 97; Middleton mss, Mi D 4766-7. On 5 Oct. 1452 the Freville inheritance was formally divided, very belatedly, and Robert was assigned manors in Surrey, Worcestershire and elsewhere. When, in 1488, John Aston, our MP’s great-grandson and heir, contracted to marry the daughter of his neighbour, Sir William Lyttleton, the lands then united in the family’s hands were valued at a minimum of 300 marks p.a. This match made the Astons yet richer for it brought them further property, including, most notably, the manor of Tixall, very near Haywood, which later generations of the family made their home.25 William Salt Lib., Stafford, Aston Colln., HM 20/1.