BARDOLF, Edmund

Although related to the Lords Bardolf, the obscure Edmund was a cadet member of the Bardolf family. Situated in the Midlands and southern England, the Bardolf estates included the Hertfordshire manors of Watton and Crowborough in Watton-at-Stone. After William, 4th Lord Bardolf, died in 1386, his widow Agnes received a third of Crowborough in dower,3 CP, i. 419. but this portion reverted to a junior branch of the family following her death in 1403,4 CIPM, xviii. 789-94. perhaps by virtue of a settlement which William had made in favour of a younger son. By 1405, Crowborough was in the hands of another William Bardolf, evidently a close relative and possibly the father of the MP, to whom it afterwards passed.5 VCH Herts. iii. 162; Feudal Aids, ii. 448. The other manor at Watton remained with the main Bardolf line, and in due course it was partitioned between Anne and Joan, the daughters and coheirs of Thomas, 5th Lord Bardolf, who had died in rebellion against Henry IV. Anne married Sir William Clifford and Joan Sir William Phelip†, created Lord Bardolf in 1437.6 CIPM, xix. 421-5; VCH Herts. iii. 160.

Edmund regularly attested parliamentary elections but he appears not to have held any official position in Hertfordshire save that of coroner. The Crown ordered the sheriff of Essex and Hertfordshire in February 1437 to hold an election for a new coroner in his place because he was not qualified to hold the position. In spite of this mandate, he was still in office in June 1441, when he and a fellow coroner investigated the death of a tavern keeper from Ware.7 CCR, 1435-41, p. 81; CPR, 1436-41, p. 545. Coroners were not necessarily lawyers, and sometimes they lost their positions because they were ‘insufficiently qualified’, but political or administrative reasons could also lie behind such dismissals.8 VCH Wilts. v. 25, 29. No doubt, his lineage and the help of influential family connexions like Sir William Phelip enabled Edmund, an otherwise insignificant figure, to gain election to Parliament as a knight of the shire.

The MP survived for nearly another decade and a half after leaving Parliament, for he died on 1 Apr. 1455. Following his death, he was buried in the parish church of Watton-at-Stone with his first wife, Joan, and ‘cousin’, Sir Edmund Bardolf, perhaps the knight of that name who presented to the local rectory between 1366 and 1385. The brass for the three Bardolfs, now a fragment, records that Joan died on 23 May 1438 and depicts seven children (four boys and three girls) presumably representing the offspring of Edmund and Joan who had failed to survive childhood.9 VCH Herts. iii. 163; J.E. Cussans, Herts. (Broadwater), 183; R. Clutterbuck, Herts. ii. 485, 491; Trans. E. Herts. Arch. Soc. i. 96. The MP’s will, dated 28 Mar. 1455, shows that he had remarried after Joan’s death, for it refers to his then wife, Margery, to whom he assigned livestock and chambers at Crowborough. It also refers to his son and heir, Henry, whom he appointed his principal executor, and one of his daughters, Elizabeth, the wife of Thomas Rogers. Almost certainly, Henry and Elizabeth were his children by Joan, not least because Henry’s son, George, and three unmarried daughters, likewise feature in the will. Edmund also made various charitable bequests, requested masses for his soul and the souls of others, including Thomas Howard, a Hertfordshire esquire for whom he had acted as a witness and feoffee, and sought marble stones for his grave and that of his unnamed father. Furthermore, he asked his own feoffees to try to settle all ‘matters’ pending between him and his son-in-law, Thomas Rogers, the holder of another manor at Watton-at-Stone.10 PCC 6 Wattys; CAD, iii. D465; E159/226, commissiones Easter.

Immediately after Edmund’s death, Henry Bardolf was embroiled in litigation in the court of common pleas, in two, evidently co-ordinated suits that came to pleading in Michaelmas term 1455. In one, John Brome and his wife, Agnes, stated that she had entrusted a muniment chest to the late MP for safe-keeping in 1446, following the death of her previous husband, John Elynore, and before her marriage to Brome. The purpose of their suit was to secure the return of the chest and its contents from Henry, into whose possession it had now fallen. The plaintiffs in the other action were Elynore’s sisters, Agnes the wife of Thomas Nicoll, Isabel the wife of John Horn and Margaret Fitzjohn, acting in association with the said Nicoll and Horn. Their interest arose from the fact that the sisters were Elynore’s heirs, to whom the lands of their late brother that Agnes Brome held for her life would in due course revert. They likewise sought the release of the chest, which evidently contained deeds upholding their claims. In the case of both suits, the plaintiffs must have feared what Henry might do with the chest, having already fallen out with him and his father while Edmund was still alive. Following Agnes Brome’s previous marriage, the Bardolfs had become feoffees for her and John Elynore. After she married Brome, she and her new husband sued Edmund and Henry in the Chancery, for breach of trust with regard to lands at Datchworth, Hertfordshire. This Chancery suit probably dates from about mid 1454, for the Nicolls, Horns and Margaret Fitzjohn, apparently co-ordinating their action with that of the Bromes, sued the Bardolfs in the same court in June that year, again for breach of trust, over the late John Elynore’s lands in Stapleford and Bengeo in the same county. The common pleas suits concluded in Trinity term when Henry complied with the court’s direction to surrender the chest and its contents to the Bromes.11 CP40/779, rots. 103, 103d; C1/24/100, 103.

There were further controversies in the following decades, for the MP’s difficulties with Thomas Rogers had remained unresolved. In the late 1460s or early 1470s, by which stage Henry Bardolf was also dead, Rogers brought a couple of Chancery suits against Thomas Brocket* and other feoffees of his late father-in-law. One concerned the settlement that his father, William Rogers, and the MP had made when he married Elizabeth Bardolf. William had undertaken to set aside lands worth £5 p.a. in Watton-at-Stone and its vicinity, or else an annuity of five marks, for Elizabeth’s jointure and the MP had agreed that she should have a marriage portion of 50 marks. Thomas Rogers complained that he had yet to receive most of that sum, of which the MP had paid 33s. 4d., and Henry Bardolf a further instalment of just 13s. 4d., and demanded that the feoffees should make good the shortfall. In his other Chancery suit, Thomas sought the enforcement of an exchange of lands in Watton-at-Stone and elsewhere in Hertfordshire that he had agreed with Henry’s son and heir, another Edmund Bardolf, in 1468. In the same period, this latter Edmund also went to Chancery to sue his grandfather’s feoffees, from whom he sought his rightful estate in the manor of Crowborough.12 C1/41/27-29, 128-30; 47/29. These dissensions probably explain why there was no grant of probate for the MP’s will until July 1472. Yet another six years were to pass before the Bardolf feoffees, George Josselyn and William Munden, came to an agreement with Thomas Rogers in resolution of the quarrel between the Bardolf and Rogers families.13 PCC 6 Wattys; Herts. Archs., deeds, DE/AS 3211.