CLIFFE, John

Cliffe was also known by the name of the south Devon village where he probably originated. Although he shared his name with one of the household knights of Edward Courtenay, earl of Devon, there was in fact no blood relationship between them. Nor, indeed, does Cliffe appear to have been connected with the earls of Devon in any other way: he was a tenant of the Dynhams of Nutwell, the wealthiest of the Devon gentry, who were ennobled by Edward IV in 1467. Of lowly stock – he was a mere yeoman farmer – the circumstances of his return to Parliament in 1453 are obscure. The elections of that year took place in the wake of the political eclipse of the then earl of Devon, Thomas Courtenay, resulting from his ill-advised participation in the duke of York’s Dartford campaign in the previous year. In neighbouring Cornwall, the unstable Henry Holand, duke of Exeter, was able to secure the return of a number of his retainers to the Commons. In Devon, by contrast, the local communities that year opted for the return of local men, many of them of limited standing. When drawing up the election indenture, the sheriff’s clerk took care to specify the obscure John Cliffe’s address, not least since there was a rather more prominent namesake who lived at Stoke Damarel in the immediate vicinity of Plymouth and was well connected in the borough.2 C219/16/2; CPR, 1436-41, p. 207; CP40/658, rot. 190; 660, rot. 87d. There were also several other namesakes, residing respectively at Ashburton, Bideford, Merton, Milton Abbot and Newnham: REQ2/3/212; KB27/679, rot. 36; CP40/808, rot. 60; C1/9/404, 293/3.

Little else is known for certain of Cliffe’s career. He is encountered among the witnesses to a land transaction in 1465, and two years later was among a number of retainers pardoned alongside the future Lord Dynham for offences against the statute of liveries.3 Devon RO, Hole of Parke mss, 312M-7/L1; CPR, 1467-77, p. 60. He apparently survived into the mid 1480s, for some years serving as Dynham’s permanent reeve in the manor of South Pool.