CARTINGTON, John

Although the Cartingtons had been established, as tenants of the Percys, at Cartington in the middle of Northumberland since the end of the thirteenth century, it was not until the time of our MP that they attained to any significance.4 Arch. Aeliana, n.s. xiv. 397; Hist. Northumb. xv. 371-2. He made his career as a local lawyer whose most important client was his feudal overlord, Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland. By the early 1440s he was in receipt of the standard lawyer’s fee of 40s. a year from the earl, but their association was already well established by that date. As early as July 1428 Cartington had offered surety when the Crown committed to the earl the wardship of John Heron*. 5 J.M.W. Bean, Estates Percy Fam. 97; CFR, xv. 234. At this early stage in his career he also represented the interests of another important local figure, Sir Robert Ogle I*: on 17 July 1426 he had received an assignment of the Exchequer in respect of money due to Ogle as keeper of Roxburgh castle.

This combination of a close association with leading figures in Northumberland and his readiness to travel to Westminster to further their interests helps to explain his election, while still young and untried, to the Parliament of 1429.6 E403/675, m. 8; C219/14/1. This parliamentary service served to recommend him to the Crown as an office-holder. In November 1430 he was appointed escheator of his native county, and in May 1433 he was added to the quorum of the peace there. In the meantime, on 12 Feb. 1433 he was modestly rewarded with the grant, to hold jointly with two others, of a royal fishery in the Tweed for 12 years at the modest annual rent of 20s.7 CFR, xvi. 17, 133; C66/433, m. 26d. Two further elections to Parliament followed in the 1430s. On 26 June 1433, two weeks before the beginning of this first assembly, he acted for Ogle’s son, Sir Robert Ogle II*, joint keeper of Roxburgh castle, in securing the reassignment of irredeemable tallies; and this Ogle connexion may also have had a significance in his return to the second of these Parliaments in 1437, for he was elected alongside Ogle as the Northumberland MPs.8 C219/14/2, 4; E 403/709, m. 8.

The closeness of Cartington’s connexion with Ogle was matched by that he enjoyed with another important local knight, Sir Ralph Gray, who was the joint custodian of Roxburgh. When the two knights were briefly appointed to an office normally the preserve of even greater men, the wardenship of the east march, in April 1438 Cartington acted as their attorney at the Exchequer, receiving assignments on their behalf, and when Gray died in March 1443 he was named as one of his executors.9 E403/734, m. 7; 736, mm. 15, 16; CP40/755, rot. 457d. The execution of the will proved a troublesome and protracted affair. Cartington and his fellow executors, including Gray’s widow, Elizabeth, faced difficulties securing the moneys the testator was owed by the Crown and the wardship of Gray’s young son and heir, Ralph II*. On 6 July 1443 the second battle was won, and Cartington acted as one of the mainpernors when the Crown granted the wardship of the young Ralph to his mother; and the first partially so in January 1445 when the executors secured the payment of Gray’s arrears as chamberlain and customer of Berwick-upon-Tweed.10 E159/221, brevia Hil. rot. 7d; E403/749, m. 10; CFR, xvii. 268-9. The Crown continued, however, to pursue the executors. On 20 June 1445 the barons of the Exchequer ordered the sheriff of Northumberland to distrain them for their failure to render proper account for jewels given to Sir Ralph as security for wages on the eve of the Agincourt campaign, and it was not until two years later that the Crown ordered the barons to pursue the matter no further.11 E159/222, recorda Mich. rot. 17d; 223, brevia Easter rot. 7.

Most of what is known about Cartington concerns his service to others, but he was also an important figure in his own right. In the subsidy returns of 1436 he was assessed on an annual income of £20 derived from property in Northumberland, Newcastle -upon-Tyne and county Durham. This was a fairly insignificant income in wealthier counties, but made him a relatively rich man in the context of his impoverished native county. A mark of that status came in May 1442 when he had received licence to crennelate his manor house at Cartington. The profits of his legal career, although seemingly only a modest one on the surviving evidence, had clearly given him the resources to develop his family’s ancient home, where he created ‘a sophisticated upper-hall house with an unusual plan and large traceried windows’, part of which still survives.12 E179/158/38; CChR, vi. 35; A. Emery, Greater Med. Houses, i. 64. His high standing is also apparent in the marriage he contracted in December 1457 for his son and heir, another John, to Joan, one of the four daughters of the wealthy knight, Sir Robert Claxton of Claxton in the palatinate of Durham. The marriage was not only socially desirable but also materially so, for the bride’s status as one of her father’s coheiresses-presumptive was recognized in the terms on which the match was made. Her father undertook to settle on the couple in remainder expectant on his own death of the Northumberland manor of Whittonstall, valued at £20 p.a.; in return our MP guaranteed that, after his own death, the bride would have jointure in his caput honoris, the castle and manor of Cartington. Later, the marriage was to bring a considerable augmentation to the Cartington estates, for on the death of her father in 1483 Joan inherited, alongside the manor of Whittonstall, further manorial property at Dilston in Northumberland and at Hawthorn and Fishburn in the palatinate.13 Hist. Northumb. x. 263n.; B.A. Barker, ‘The Claxtons’ (Univ. of Teeside Ph.D. thesis, 2003), 28, 79.

Little is known of the later part of Cartington’s career. He represented Northumberland for the fourth and last time in the controversial Bury St. Edmunds Parliament of 1447. By 1453, despite the rising tensions between the Percys and the Nevilles, he was retained of counsel by Robert Neville, bishop of Durham; and in March 1454 he acted as arbiter in the quarrel between two local knights, Sir William Euer* and Sir John Middleton of Belsay.14 C219/15/4; J.H. Baker, Men of Ct. (Selden Soc. supp. ser. xviii), i. 432; DURH3/47, m. 19d. His last public duty was his appointment on 13 July 1458 to inquire into repairs made at Roxburgh castle. He was not present at the inquisition held on the following 10 Sept. and was most likely already in extremis as he died on 21 Oct. A writ of diem clausit extremum was issued just six days later, and the inquisition post mortem held at Rothbury on 20 June 1459, with Sir Robert Claxton at the head of the jury, returned his son, John, then aged 23 years or more, as his heir.15 CPR, 1452-61, p. 443; CIMisc. viii. 246; C139/171/2. The son followed in his father’s footsteps: he too was a lawyer, educated at Lincoln’s Inn, and enjoyed a long career in the service of both the Crown and the earls of Northumberland until his death in 1505. His death marked the end of the male line. He was succeeded by a daughter who married a younger son of Sir Edward Radcliffe of Derwentwater (Cumberland), and was the mother of Sir Cuthbert Radcliffe†, MP for Northumberland in the Reformation Parliament.16 A.A. Cardew, ‘Society in the Anglo-Scottish Borders’ (St. Andrews Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1974), 163; Baker, i. 432; HP Biogs. ed. Wedgwood and Holt, 161-2; Hist. Northumb. x. 264; The Commons 1509-58, iii. 166-8.