COKESEY, Sir Hugh

Of high social status and impressive connexions, Cokesey was the last in the male line of an old Worcestershire family. The Cokeseys had held two of their manors in the county, those of Great Cokesey (from which they took their name) and Great Witley, since the mid thirteenth century and another, at Alderminster, since the later 1200s. By the fifteenth century, their main residence was the manor of Caldwall in Kidderminster, Cokesey’s birthplace, although they also held extensive estates elsewhere. Cokesey enjoyed a far fuller career than did his father, Walter, who succeeded his own father and namesake, Sir Walter Cokesey†, in 1405, but died aged just 23 in August 1407. In May 1409, the Crown acknowledged the right of Walter’s widow Maud to hold the manor of Lee in Lincolnshire and a moiety of that of Weston Turville in Buckinghamshire for her jointure. By that date she had found a new husband in John Phelip†, a household esquire of the prince of Wales. She died some time before September 1414 when the Crown granted Phelip, by then a knight, custody of the manor of Bickley and Shocklach in Cheshire, a property that she had held in dower. After Phelip died at the siege of Harfleur a year later, the manor passed into the hands of his executors for the duration of his stepson’s minority.9 VCH Worcs. iii. 170, 232; iv. 9, 372; CIPM, xviii. 1124-6; xix. 175-80; xxii. 673; CPR, 1408-13, p. 79; DKR, xxxvii (2), 156, 587; The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 70.

At his father’s death, Cokesey was a little over two years old.10 Calculated from his proof of age (CIPM, xxii. 673) rather than his father’s inqs. post mortem, which state that he was then aged ‘three years and more’ (ibid. xix. 175-80). His paternal inheritance lay over at least seven midland counties, and he was the heir presumptive of his childless great, great-uncle, George Brewes, as well. The uncle of Cokesey’s paternal grandmother Isabel Cokesey, Brewes was a landowner in Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Yorkshire, Surrey and Sussex.11 CIPM, xviii. 1124-6; xix. 175-80; xxi. 136-40; DKR, xxxvii (2), 587; VCH Bucks. ii. 368; VCH Warws. vi. 117-18, 260; VCH Worcs. iii. 24, 170, 232; iv. 9-10, 269, 329, 347, 367, 372; VCH Surr. iii. 83, 336; VCH Suss. vi (1), 207, (2), 156; VCH Wilts. x. 114; VCH Yorks. (E. Riding), viii. 220. According to estimates made for the Crown, the Cokesey and Brewes estates, including those parts of the Cokesey lands held in jointure and dower by the boy’s mother Maud and grandmother Isabel, were together worth 300 marks p.a., making his wardship an extremely valuable prize. On 5 Nov. 1408, the King awarded it to his chamberlain, Richard, Lord Grey of Codnor, but Grey’s grant proved very short-lived. He surrendered it just days later, for on the 14th of the same month the wardship was re-granted to Sir Robert de Ty, the lawyer Thomas Belne†, the clerk John Stone and William Boteller.12 CFR, xiii. 82-83; CPR, 1408-13, pp. 30-31. For many years, Belne had served the Cokeseys as a legal adviser, while Boteller was one of the family’s feoffees. It is therefore possible that they and their fellow grantees were acting on behalf of the Cokeseys rather than themselves.13 CP40/656, rot. 215d; The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 182. Whatever the case, they appear not to have retained the wardship for the remainder of its term, since in early 1419 Hugh was ‘in the King’s ward’.14 CIPM, xxi. 136.

By then George Brewes was no longer alive, for he had died at the end of December 1418. In the following April the King committed the keeping of the Brewes manors of Chesworth and Sedge Wick in Sussex to the late Sir John Phelip’s elder brother and executor, Sir William Phelip†, and others to hold until Hugh came of age. The grant was a matter of some controversy, because in 1422 two feoffees of the manors, Nicholas Carew† and the clerk John Bromsgrove, challenged it in a petition to the Crown. No doubt, Carew and Bromsgrove were not acting in Hugh’s interests, since by then he himself was already in dispute with Bromsgrove. In Michaelmas term 1421 a suit that the lawyer John Forthey* had brought on behalf of the still under age Cokesey came to pleadings in the court of common pleas. Forthey accused Bromsgrove of detaining a pyx containing charters and other documents relating to the Brewes lands, but Bromsgrove claimed that he had already surrendered the pyx to Cokesey.15 CIPM, 136-40; CFR, xiv. 276; CIMisc. viii. 4; CP40/643, rot. 477d .

Another four and a half years were to pass before Cokesey finally attained his majority, on St. George’s Day 1426. On the following 27 May he proved his age before the escheator in Worcestershire, and a day later the escheator and his counterparts in the other counties where the Cokesey and Brewes estates lay were ordered to take his fealty.16 CIPM, xxii. 673; CCR, 1422-9, p. 236. Cokesey did not gain possession of all of his inheritance immediately, because parts of it were still in the hands of two widows, the former wives of his grandfather, Sir Walter Cokesey, and George Brewes. Cokesey’s grandmother Isabel had died in 1403, but Sir Walter had married another lady of the same name. Possessed of a life interest in parts of the Cokesey manors at Alderminster, the younger Isabel did not enjoy a good relationship with her step-grandson, who in the mid 1420s accused her of committing waste on those lands. As for Brewes’s widow Elizabeth, she held the Brewes manors of Little Bookham, Surrey, and Bidlington, Sussex, in jointure and a share of that of Bramley in the former county for her dower.17 CIPM, xviii. 1125; xxi. 140, 947; CP40/656, rot. 215; 657, att. rot. 265; CPR, 1416-22, p. 401; CCR, 1419-22, pp. 177-8; VCH Surr. iii. 83. Dissatisfied with her dower allocation, she and her second husband Thomas Slyfield* appealed to the Crown for a more generous provision for her after Hugh came of age, and in November 1430 she received a share of the manor of Manningford Bruce in Wiltshire. It was not until after her death in August 1433 that Cokesey gained full control of the Brewes estates, although he afterwards leased out Manningford Bruce to his feoffee and legal adviser John Wood I*.18 CIPM, xxiii. 603; xxiv. 144-5; CFR, xvi. 165, 175; Cat. Med. Muns. Berkeley Castle ed. Wells-Furby (Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc.), ii. 703; The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 892. The Brewes connexion also meant that Cokesey succeeded to the Gloucestershire manor of Tetbury near the end of his life. The manor had once belonged to Sir Thomas Brewes† (d.1395) of Manningford Bruce, from a different line of the Brewes family to George Brewes. Following Thomas’s death, Tetbury had remained in the hands of his long-lived widow Margaret, afterwards the wife of Sir William Burcester† and then of Sir John Berkeley†, until her own death in 1444, by which date the next heir was Cokesey.19 VCH Glos. xi. 265; CPR, 1441-6, p. 391; CCR, 1441-7, p. 323.

Some property also came to Cokesey in marriage, for his first wife was a coheir to the manor of Shifnal in Shropshire and the lordship of the town of Talgarth ‘English’ in Herefordshire. Formerly held by Sir Philip ap Rees (d.1369), these properties had passed to his daughter Elizabeth and her husband Sir Adam Peshale†. Peshale had survived both Elizabeth and his only child by her, and in Henry IV’s reign the Crown had granted the reversion of the ap Rees estates to Thomas Neville, Lord Furnival, a younger brother of Ralph Neville, 1st earl of Westmorland. In the event, Furnival had predeceased Sir Adam, meaning that after the knight’s death in October 1419 the ap Rees lands were divided between Furnival’s daughters and coheirs, Maud and Joan.20 The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 61-63; CIPM, xxi. 299; CFR, xiv. 322. By then Maud, who was Furnival’s daughter by his first wife, was married to John Talbot, while her half-sister Joan, the daughter of her father’s second marriage, was the spouse of Cokesey. Joan’s mother Ankaret was the daughter and heir of John, 4th Lord Strange of Blackmere, and also the mother of the same John Talbot, her second son by her previous marriage to Richard, 4th Lord Talbot. John Talbot, who succeeded to the title Lord Furnival and became earl of Shrewsbury in 1442, was therefore the half-brother of Joan Cokesey and Cokesey’s brother-in-law.21 A.J. Pollard, ‘The Talbots’ (Bristol Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1968), table 1. Whoever arranged the match, Cokesey’s marriage is testimony to his social status and the size of his inheritance.

At the time of Sir Adam Peshale’s inquisition post mortem in November 1419, Cokesey was already a knight although still a minor.22 CIPM, xxi. 299. He had won the honour in Ireland earlier in the same year, having accompanied John Talbot, lieutenant of that lordship, across the Irish Sea. According to one account, he received his knighthood on the previous 12 May, the day that Talbot’s forces took prisoner Donnchada Mac Murchada, the rebellious Gaelic king of Leinster, suggesting that he had somehow distinguished himself in the engagement leading to Mac Murchada’s capture.23 Pollard, 225; Ancient Irish Histories, ii. 28. Cokesey was still only 16 in May 1421 when he and Talbot indented with the King to serve in France for six months, in his case with two men-at-arms and six archers.24 E101/70/5/700. He had certainly returned to England by 1423, when he was a member of the retinue with which his brother-in-law conducted a violent feud with John Abrahall* in Herefordshire and the Welsh marches. The unfortunate inhabitants of those parts appealed to the Parliament of that year for help, and the Commons petitioned the Crown about the behaviour of both warring parties. Their petition, which named Cokesey as one of the malefactors of the Talbot ‘menie’, asked the authorities to take sureties of the peace from both sides and to send the court of King’s bench to Herefordshire to deal with the offenders. The Crown responded by arranging for the taking of such sureties, and by agreeing to dispatch the court, or a commission of oyer and terminer, to the county.25 The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 3; PROME, x. 187-8.

Near the end of 1425, Cokesey was involved in yet more lawless behaviour, again in association with Talbot. In November that year the brothers-in-law raided the manor of Snitterfield, Warwickshire, a property belonging to Joan Beauchamp, Lady Abergavenny, at the head of an armed following. There followed an affray with Joan’s servants, during which Talbot’s brother Sir William Talbot was killed. Probably, there was a connexion between the raid and Talbot’s feud with Joan’s son-in-law James Butler, earl of Ormond, in Ireland, although it seems also to have enjoyed the tacit approval of her nephew by marriage, Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, to whose authority in the Midlands she was posing a challenge. A year later, both sides agreed to refer the quarrel to the arbitration of John, duke of Bedford, who took recognizances of £1,000 from Joan and Talbot, to guarantee that they would abide by his award, in November 1426. In the following May, however, the Crown instituted a commission of oyer and terminer to investigate her complaint that Cokesey and a band of armed followers had broken into her houses and park at Snitterfield, hunted her game and assaulted her servants and tenants. Given that the commission did not refer to Talbot, and that Bedford was to have made his award by the previous February, it would appear that Cokesey had raided her property for a second time.26 C. Carpenter, Locality and Polity, 378-80; CPR, 1422-9, pp. 317-18, 23; KB9/224/332. Within weeks of the establishment of the commission of oyer and terminer, Bedford helped to ensure peace between Joan and her opponents by retaining Talbot and Cokesey to serve with him in France. With his energies now more usefully deployed, Talbot began to make his name as one of the leading English commanders across the Channel, notably in the recovery of Maine. His military career was nevertheless not one of continuous success, since he fell into the hands of the French at Patay in June 1429 and remained their prisoner for the next four years.27 DKR, xlviii. 251; Oxf. DNB, ‘Talbot, John’. By that date, Cokesey had already returned home and he began a term as deputy sheriff of Worcestershire in the following autumn.

Cokesey owed his appointment to the earl of Warwick, the hereditary sheriff of Worcestershire. Cokesey’s association with Warwick dated back to at least the mid 1420s and, by about 1431, the earl had granted him a fee of £26 13s. 4d. p.a. The Cokeseys had a long record of serving the Beauchamp family, with whom Sir Hugh’s brother-in-law, John Talbot, also had links. Talbot had entered Warwick’s service after marrying his second wife, the earl’s daughter Margaret Beauchamp, in 1425. Warwick became one of Cokesey’s feoffees, and he arbitrated between Sir Hugh and the Warwickshire esquire Richard Archer of Tanworth in June 1429. The two men had fallen out over an annuity of ten marks that Cokesey’s grandfather Sir Walter Cokesey had granted to Archer’s parents Thomas and Agnes, a daughter of Sir Walter, at the time of their marriage. Payable from the manor of Cokesey, presumably the annuity had fallen into arrears. Warwick ruled that Cokesey should pay £40 to Archer in full satisfaction of all claims, and that in return the latter should surrender the deed by which Sir Walter had granted the annuity.28 CPR, 1441-6, p. 391; DKR, xxxvii (2), 156; SC12/18/45, f. 2; A.F.J. Sinclair, ‘Beauchamp Earls of Warwick’ (London Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1988), 315; Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Archer mss, DR 37/2/Box 72/7.

It is possible that Cokesey returned to France in the 1430s, since there is very little evidence of his activities in England during that decade. By 1439, he was acting as a feoffee of the Gloucestershire manors of Great Rissington and Sapperton on behalf of his brother-in-law, John Greville*. Greville, who had taken Joyce, one of Cokesey’s sisters, for his second wife, was in possession of the manors as the mortgagee of Sir Henry Hussey*, to whom he had given a loan of £320.29 CPR, 1436-41, p. 289; The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 242. Not long afterwards, Cokesey was busy with his own affairs, for by the beginning of 1441 he had married his own second wife, Alice daughter of William, Lord Lovell. In February that year his feoffees, headed by John Throckmorton I*, obtained licence to settle the manor of Bramley in Surrey on the couple and any children of their marriage.30 CPR, 1436-41, pp. 429, 495. The property was just a small part of the extensive settlement that he made for Alice, since he awarded her a jointure interest in all of his estates.31 DKR, xxxvii (2), 710; CIPM, xxvi. 409-15; C139/178/49. The generous arrangements he made for her reflected her status as a daughter of a peer, like his first wife. Following their marriage, the couple petitioned the papal curia for the right to have mass celebrated in their household before daybreak, and they received an indult to that effect in May 1442.32 CPL, ix. 313.

By then Cokesey had recently sat in his only known Parliament, as a knight of the shire for his native Worcestershire. It was to his Membership of the Parliament of 1442 that he owed his appointment to his sole ad hoc commission, a body tasked with distributing allowances of the subsidy that he and his fellow MPs had granted to the Crown. While an MP, he stood surety on behalf of Thomas Courtenay, earl of Devon, and others, when the Crown granted the wardship of the son and heir of Sir William Bodrugan* in March 1442. How he came to act for the earl and his associates is a matter for speculation; possibly he and Courtenay had campaigned together in France. Just before the Parliament ended, the Crown made plans to send a new army across the Channel, but it unclear whether Cokesey participated in the subsequent expedition, which set sail in June 1442 under the command of John Talbot, now earl of Shrewsbury. He certainly returned to France with Talbot in the autumn of 1444, as a member of the party sent to escort Henry VI’s bride, Margaret of Anjou, to England. A pair of grooms accompanied him, and he and his servants received wages of £31 17s.33 CFR, xvii. 211; Letters and Pprs. Illust. Wars of English ed. Stevenson, i. 447; Add. 23938, ff. 5, 13d; R.A. Griffiths, Hen. VI, 486. Griffiths assumes that Cokesey was a member of Shrewsbury’s household at this time.

Following his return to England with the queen in the spring of 1445, Cokesey had only months to live, for he died on 15 Dec. that year. Neither of his marriages had produced any surviving children, meaning that his heir was his 40-year old sister Joyce. By then she was the wife of the Gloucestershire esquire Leonard Stapleton, having outlived her previous two husbands, John Greville and Walter Beauchamp. Owing to the provision that her brother had made for his second wife, Joyce did not come into her inheritance until after her sister-in-law Alice died in 1460. Following Cokesey’s death, Alice had married Sir Andrew Ogard*, whom she had also survived.34 CIPM, xxvi. 409-14; DKR, xxxvii (2), 156-7, 569; The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 242; VCH Glos. xi. 287; C67/45, m. 21; C139/178/49; CFR, xix. 278-81. When Joyce herself died in 1473, her heir was Sir John Greville, her son by her first husband.35 C140/44/32. Sir John did not retain all of his inheritance, for he sold the former Brewes manor of Weaverthorpe in Yorkshire to the dean of York in 1476.36 VCH Yorks. (E. Riding), viii. 220. He died in 1480 leaving a son, Thomas.37 C140/77/72. In acknowledgement of the importance of his grandmother’s lands, Thomas had already adopted the name of Cokesey.38 The Tudor antiquary John Leland incorrectly recorded that Thomas had adopted the name after marrying an heir of the Cokeseys: J. Leland, Itin. ed. Toulmin Smith, iv. 79. It was as Thomas Cokesey† that he had participated in Edward IV’s expedition to France39 E405/59, rots. 8, 9. and sat for Gloucestershire in the Parliament of 1478. Later a distinguished knight of the body of Henry VII, he died childless in 1498, so finally extinguishing the name of Cokesey. After Thomas’s death the old Cokesey estates passed to Robert Russell (son and eventual heir of Robert Russell II*) and Roger Winter, both descendants of the MP’s sister Cecily, who had married Thomas Cassy. The heirs to the former Brewes lands were Thomas Howard†, earl of Surrey, and Maurice, Lord Berkeley, who were descended from Aline, daughter of William, Lord Brewes (d.1326) and wife of John, Lord Mowbray (d.1322).40 CFR, xxii. 591; CP, vi. 181; ix. 379; CPR, 1494-1509, pp. 164, 192; VCH Bucks. ii. 368; VCH Warws. vi. 117-18, 260; VCH Worcs, iii. 24, 170, 174, 232; iv. 9, 10, 269, 329, 347, 367; VCH Glos. xi. 265, 287; VCH Surr. iii. 83, 336; VCH Suss. vi (1), 207, (2), 156; VCH Wilts. x. 114; Cat. Med. Muns. Berkeley Castle, ii. 702.