FENWICK, Henry

The Fenwicks had been established at Fenwick Tower, some 15 miles to the north-west of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, since the reign of Henry II. By the early fourteenth century they were one of the leading families in the county. Sir John (d.1346), sheriff of Northumberland in the 1320s, distinguished himself in border warfare; and his nephew and heir, another Sir John†, was retained by John of Gaunt in the 1380s and in the 1390s was bailiff of the liberty of Tynedale for Gaunt’s brother, Edmund, duke of York.8 Hist. Northumb. xii. 352; A. King, ‘War, Politics and Landed Society in Northumb.’ (Durham Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 2001), 62, 85, 108, 206-7; S.K. Walker, Lancastrian Affinity, 269; B.A. Barker, ‘The Claxtons’ (Univ. of Teeside Ph.D. thesis, 2003), 171. This Sir John also added to the family’s estates by marriage to Elizabeth, one of the three daughters and coheirs of Sir Alan Heton† (d.1388) of Chillingham. Although she was largely disinherited in favour of her cousin, Sir Henry Heton, the son of a bastard brother of Sir Alan, she brought the Fenwicks parts of manors in Lowick, Ingram and Heathpool (in Kiknewton) with many burgage tenements in Wooler and Bamburgh, all in the north of the county.9 King, 173-85; CIPM, xvi. 594; xix. 938. Less happily, at some point before Sir John’s death shortly before July 1401 both their sons, Sir Alan and another John, had become prisoners of the Scots, and he made provision in his will for the payment of their ransoms.10 Northumb. and Durham Deeds (Newcastle-upon-Tyne Recs. Cttee. vii), 56.

Sir Alan did not long survive his release from captivity. He died in May 1406, leaving our MP, then only four years old, as his son and heir. The young Henry had had illustrious beginnings. According to his proof of age he was born in the Percy castle of Alnwick on Christmas day 1401, and at his baptism Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, and the earl’s grandson, Henry Percy of Athol, stood as his godfathers. Further, this spiritual relationship with the Percys may have been supplemented by a blood one through the baby’s mother, thought to have been one of the earl’s daughters.11 CIPM, xxii. 813, 831; Hist. Northumb. xii. 352. These connexions did not, however, prevent Henry’s wardship from becoming an object of dispute. It was initially claimed by Ralph, Lord Greystoke, but that claim was successfully resisted by the child’s mother, uncle, John Fenwick, and Sir Thomas Gray (d.1415) of Heaton in Wark, who had been nominated by Sir Alan as his son’s guardians.12 CP40/585, rot. 503d. Another claimant was William Folberry, from whom, or at least so it was later said, Sir Alan held property in Fowberry and Coldmartin. Folberry seems successfully to have established his title: it was later claimed that he sold the boy’s marriage to Henry’s mother and that she then granted the marriage to Sir William Leigh so that her son could marry Leigh’s daughter Joan.13 CIPM, xxii. 813. It is tempting to see this story, set out in an inquiry of 1426, as a fabrication designed to show that the right to Henry’s marriage did not lie with the Crown. It does, however, have some independent verification. By 1413 Leigh was leasing the manor of Fenwick and paying an annual rent of ten marks to Henry: Northumb. and Durham Deeds, 57.

This marriage was allegedly made before the question of the wardship was again thrown into doubt by the death of the boy’s paternal grandmother, the heiress Elizabeth Heton, in June 1410. Since she was a tenant-in-chief in respect of her share of the Heton inheritance, the Crown could now claim the wardship. Gray took advantage of the new dispensation to secure the wardship for himself. On 12 Feb. 1412 a commission was issued to him to inquire into the tenure of Elizabeth’s estates, and on the following 19 May, after an inquiry found that she had indeed been a tenant-in-chief, the Crown sold the wardship and marriage to him for a modest £100, far less than it was potentially worth.14 CIPM, xix. 938; CPR, 1408-13, p. 372; CFR, xiii. 219, 240. Yet here there was a further complication: the Crown had no right to the marriage if the boy had been contracted in marriage before the descent to him of lands held in chief. This doubt was to have implications when the young Henry came to prove his age.

Lawfully married or not, he seems to have been Gray’s ward until Gray’s execution for treason in 1415, when his wardship came into the hands of Gray’s brother, Sir John (d.1421). Sir John went on to enjoy a notable military career, and it is tempting to think that the young Henry fought under him in France, but if so that service has gone unrecorded. Nothing is known of his activities until November 1424 when he acted as mainpernor to Thomas de la More* in a grant of certain forfeited lands in Cumberland; and in June 1425 he stood surety for Sir Robert Ogle I* when the latter put his dispute with Sir William Elmden* to arbitration.15 CFR, xv. 92; Arch. Aeliana, ser. 2, xiv. 18; CCR, 1422-9, p. 210. Such involvement in the routine affairs of his neighbours implies that he had seisin of the family lands, but it seems that, at least as formal seisin was concerned, this was not the case, probably because of lingering doubts about the right to his marriage. On 10 Oct. 1426, when Henry had been of age for nearly four years, a writ was belatedly issued for his proof of age, and ten days later a further writ was issued to the escheator for an inquiry into whether the Crown had any title to his marriage. There can be no doubt that both these writs were sued out by Henry himself. His aim was to lay to rest any future claims against him for the value of his marriage and to secure formal seisin to the lands of his heiress grandmother, which (at least if the record is to be taken at face value) were in the hands of William Gray, bishop of London, Sir John’s brother and executor. On the following 31 Oct. his proof of age was duly taken at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and, more importantly, on 12 Dec., an inquiry found that Henry’s marriage did not pertain to the Crown. Consequently, on 20 Jan. 1427 the King ordered the escheator of Northumberland to take Henry’s fealty and deliver him seisin of his grandmother’s lands.16 CIPM, xxii. 813, 831; CCR, 1422-9, p. 286.

Now secure in the extensive Fenwick estates, Henry was soon involved in the government of the region. In March 1427 he was appointed to a commission of array in Northumberland and in the following November he was pricked as sheriff.17 CPR, 1422-9, p. 405; CFR, xv. 195.

His shrievalty brought an unwelcome acquaintance with parliamentary affairs. In Easter term 1429 Sir William Elmden and William Strother*, the county’s MPs in the Parliament of 1427 which ended during his shrievalty, sued him in the Exchequer for his alleged failure to pay them £29 8s. each for their 147 days’ service in the Commons.18 E5/485; H. Kleineke, Parliamentarians at Law, 368-9. The outcome of the case is not known, but Fenwick may have escaped answering for the debt because in the autumn of that year he was among those retained to accompany the young King on his coronation expedition to France. Along with the veteran soldier Thomas Burgh, he was retained to serve for six months with an extremely large retinue of 78 men-at-arms and 600 archers. Quite how Fenwick and Burgh assembled so large a force is unclear, but it is possible that our MP was able to recruit from the Percy estates in the north of England as the earl himself was absent from the expedition. On 12 Dec. a commission was issued to muster their force at Winchelsea on the eve of their planned departure for France, but in the event they did not set sail for France until April 1430.19 E403/692, m. 8; 693, m. 7; CPR, 1429-36, p. 42.

Fenwick was back in England by 28 Dec. 1430 when he was elected as one of the knights of the shire for Northumberland.20 C219/14/2. He may have been returned as a representative of the interests of the earl of Northumberland, who was absent from the Parliament as detained on the defence of the northern marches against the Scots. More significantly, it was at about this time that his career was reshaped in a more important way by his service to the earl. Although he is not known to have been in office as lieutenant of the earl’s great Cumberland lordship of Cockermouth until the early 1440s, it is probable that he held the office some ten years earlier and that this explains why he then came to take a part in that county’s affairs. It may also explain his second marriage, probably shortly before her father’s death in 1432, to one of the several daughters of the Cumberland esquire, William Stapleton.21 C1/70/85. On 30 June 1433 he was present in Carlisle to witness the election of Sir William Leigh*, the brother of his late first wife, as one of the knights of the shire for Cumberland; and it was in that county rather than his native Northumberland that he took the parliamentary oath not to maintain peace-breakers in the following year and was assessed (at an income of £60 p.a.) to the subsidy of 1435-6.22 C219/14/4; CPR, 1429-36, p. 383; E179/90/26. Although he also continued to play a part in the administrative affairs of Northumberland, serving as a juror there in 1433 and 1434 and, in the autumn of 1435, attesting the parliamentary election both in that county and Cumberland, it was in the latter county that he was named as sheriff in 1436.23 JUST3/54/13, 14; C219/14/5; CFR, xvi. 303.

Shortly before his nomination as the Cumberland sheriff, Fenwick had been raised to the honour of knighthood. The occasion is unknown, but it is a reasonable speculation that he was knighted at the successful raising of James I of Scotland’s siege of Roxburgh in August 1436 by an army led by the earl of Northumberland.24 Three 15th Cent. Chrons. (Cam. Soc. ser. 2, xxviii), 165-6; EHR, lxxii. 614. This enhancement of his status was followed by a series of grants and other transactions that served to confirm his place among the leading figures of his adopted county. In October 1438 the King granted him the wardship and marriage of the young William Colville, grandson and heir of the Cumberland knight, Sir Peter Tilliol*, and in January 1441 he was granted a seven-year lease of the barony of Arthuret, in the far north of the county, which the recently-deceased Joan, countess of Westmorland, had held for life.25 CFR, xvii. 57, 78-9, 184. While these royal marks of favour were important, it was his position as one of the earl of Northumberland’s leading servants in the county that made Fenwick so powerful a figure. As well as his office at Cockermouth, he served as the earl’s master forester at Wasdale Head, and in 1444 he leased from him Westward forest for 20 years at the preferential rate of £26 p.a.26 E40/4751; J.M.W. Bean, Estates Percy Fam. 24. Thus, despite being a newcomer to the county, he added to his shrievalty of 1436-7 a place on the bench in 1443 and a term as escheator in 1445-6.27 CFR, xviii. 9; CPR, 1441-6, p. 469. He also acted in the private affairs of Cumberland’s leading families. In 1437 he witnessed a quitclaim by another Percy follower, Sir John Pennington*; around the same time he was, with Hugh Lowther* and others, chosen to arbitrate in the dispute between his brother-in-law, William Stapleton*, and Thomas Bethom*; and in August 1445 he was one of those who arbitrated a dispute within the important Cumberland family of Threlkeld.28 Cumbria RO, Whitehaven, Pennington-Ramsden mss, D/Pen 28/12-14; C1/9/68, 307; Cumbria RO, Kendal, Le Fleming of Rydal mss, WDRY/92/91, 92.

Fenwick’s local importance and undoubted attachment to the Percys meant that his career was affected by the growing hostility between them and the other great northern family, the Nevilles. Indeed, he may have inadvertently played a part in exacerbating that hostility. At some unknown date, but perhaps in the early 1440s, he had been appointed by George Neville, Lord Latimer, as steward of his manor of Bolton-in-Allerdale. This manor, half way between Carlisle and Cockermouth, lay within the Percy honour of Cockermouth, and Fenwick was a natural appointee at a time when the two families did not exist on unfriendly terms. This was to change in the late 1440s, when Latimer lost his mind and his elder brother, Richard Neville, earl of Salisbury, took control of his estates. In December 1449 Salisbury replaced Fenwick as steward with his own son, the lawless and aggressive Sir Thomas Neville. This, for reasons that are not entirely clear, produced an angry reaction from the earl of Northumberland’s second son, Thomas Percy, Lord Egremont, who in the spring of 1450 led a raid on the manor. The extent of Fenwick’s involvement in this violence, often said to mark the beginnings of the long Neville-Percy feud, is unclear. His lost office was a minor one, carrying a modest fee of 40s. p.a., and it is unlikely that he felt the loss.29 Booth, 101-4. Egremont’s reaction was probably prompted not by his removal but rather by the identity of his replacement with a Neville now holding a stewardship in Percy territory.

In any event, Fenwick career continued its established course as the hostility between Percy and Neville mounted. On 1 Oct. 1450 he was present at Newcastle-upon-Tyne to witness the election to the Commons of two retainers of the earl of Northumberland, William Bertram* and John Ogle*; and 16 days later, contrary to statute, he was at Carlisle to set his seal to the Cumberland election at which the quarrelling Percys and Nevilles apparently reached a compromise with the return of Thomas de la More, a Neville servant, and Thomas Crackenthorpe*, a Percy man.30 C219/16/1. In the following July he joined another Percy retainer, Alexander Heighmore, in securing a royal lease of 27 acres of meadow and pasture at Cleadhow (in Westward); and a month later, he was with Northumberland’s elder son, the warden of the east and middle marches, Henry, Lord Poynings, at Carlisle to negotiate an extension to the truce with the Scots. Later, in early 1453, he was one of several members of the Percy affinity who witnessed Lord Egremont’s award in a dispute between the widow and heir of Sir Henry Threlkeld*.31 CFR, xviii. 216; Foedera ed. Rymer (Hague edn.), v (2), 34-37; HMC Le Fleming, 3-4.

All this leaves no doubt that Fenwick remained identified as a leading servant of the Percys, and yet he also had strong links, through the marriages of his daughters, with families identified with the rival Neville interest. At least three of his daughters married into the Neville affinity: Elizabeth married Christopher Moresby; Mary was the wife of John Huddleston† of Millom; and Joan took as her husbband John Skelton, probably the second son of John Skelton II*.32 Booth, 104; Arch. Aeliana, ser. 3, vi. 83; Hist. Northumb. xii. 352. All these marriages had almost certainly been made before the two great families fell into dispute, and, potentially at least, they placed Fenwick in an equivocal position when serious violence broke out in the summer of 1453. On 24 Aug. in that year, at Heworth Moor near York, a group of Percy retainers, led by Egremont and his brother, Richard Percy, ambushed the Neville party returning from the marriage of Sir Thomas Neville to Maud Stanhope. Fenwick played an ambiguous role in these events. On 10 Aug. the King’s council had written to a number of Percy servants, Fenwick among them, accusing them of being ‘greet sturrer[s] and moever[s]’ of ‘divers riottes routes and gaderings . . . contrarie to our lawes and pees’ in Yorkshire.33 PPC, vi. 154-5. Yet it must remain doubtful how far Fenwick committed himself. Although in June 1454 his name was included in a bill of indictment of those present in Egremont’s ranks at Heworth, his was among several struck from the indictment and it must be accounted unlikely that he was there. This may suggest that his loyalty lay with the earl of Northumberland, rather than with Egremont, and that the violence of 1453 had been instigated by Egremont without the approval of his father and the senior members of his retinue. On the other hand, his own connexions with the Neville affinity may have stayed his hand.34 KB9/149/11/16; Booth, 107-16.

The last years of Fenwick’s career are obscure. On 16 Apr. 1455 he was summoned to represent Cumberland, along with another Percy man, Sir John Pennington, at the controversial great council summoned to meet at Leicester on the following 21 May, the call of which provoked the duke of York and his Neville allies into rebellion. One can only speculate as to whether he went on to fight, on the day after that council had been scheduled to convene, at the first battle of St. Albans, where the earl of Northumberland met his death.35 PPC, vi. 340. As one of the leading Percy retainers, it is not surprising that he should, in November 1458, have been again pricked as sheriff of Cumberland, for the Lancastrians and their Percy allies were then in the ascendant. His death towards the end of his term of office explains his failure to render the Michaelmas account at the Exchequer in 1459. On 8 May 1460 his widow secured a continuation of his Cleathow lease.36 E159/236, adventus Mich. rot. 1; CFR, xix. 271-2.

Almost immediately following Fenwick’s death a dispute began between the surviving husbands of his six daughters and his male heir, his cousin John Fenwick of Wallington (Northumberland). In Michaelmas term 1460 Sir John Huddleston, the husband of Sir Henry’s third daughter Mary and a committed Yorkist, brought an action against John Fenwick in the court of common pleas for forcibly entering his close at Fenwick. The disturbances in the north of England presumably delayed any immediate resolution of the matter, but in September 1465 it was put to the arbitration of John Neville, the new earl of Northumberland. On 7 Dec. that year he made his award, dividing the Fenwick inheritance between John, who received the manor of Fenwick and the family’s ancient estates as entailed in the male line, and Sir Henry’s six daughters, who between them enjoyed the Heton inheritance of their great-grandmother. Even so, the Heton inheritance continued to be disputed long after Sir Henry’s death. As late as 1527 the grandchildren of Sir Henry’s daughters sued Sir John Fenwick (d.1544) for possession of Lowick Tower.37 Arch. Aeliana, ser. 3, xiv. 178-9; Northumb. and Durham Deeds, 60; CP40/937, rot. 296; C1/561/78.