FILONGLEY, Henry

Filongley’s putative father was a royal servant, holding office as serjeant of the King’s scullery from 1399 until perhaps as late as the 1420s. The elder Henry was alive as late as June 1437, when he had a writ of non molestetis addressed to the Exchequer in respect of prests for war wages and other accounts due from the time of Henry V, but by this date he had long retired from public life.4 E159/213, brevia Trin. rot. 42. It was probably the er. Henry rather than our MP who was assessed in Warws. on an income of £53 p.a in the subsidy returns of 1436: E179/192/59. Both men are to be distinguished from their namesake of Chelsea, Mdx.: C67/38, m. 25; CPR, 1429-36, p. 408; CP40/794, rot. 401. Nor is our MP to be confused with a namesake who was a servant of Richard, duke of York, and then yeoman drawer of the cellar to Edw. IV: CCR, 1461-8, pp. 102, 247. The younger Henry had already embarked on a career that was to take him to far greater heights. Crucial to his early progress was his kinship with the influential Leicestershire lawyer, Bartholomew Brokesby. In a letter of 1456, he described Brokesby as his uncle, and, in a settlement of 1472, his sister, Agnes Fraunceys, was called the lawyer’s niece.5 Paston Letters, iii. 98; Leics. Village Notes ed. Farnham, ii. 262. The probability is that Brokesby was his mother’s brother, but, whatever the precise family relationship, the two men had a close connexion: between 1423 and 1442 the younger Henry acted in several of Brokesby’s property acquisitions.6 Bodl. Wood empt. 7, ff. 46, 65v-66, 94v, 100, 103v-104, 105, 106, 125-6, 142v; Harl. 7178, f. 14.

Filongley’s close connexion explains his entry, as a young man, into the service of Brokesby’s patron, Joan Fitzalan, widow of William Beauchamp, Lord Abergavenny, although it is also relevant here that the Filongleys were tenants of Lady Joan in respect of their manor of Old Filongley. By the autumn of 1427 our MP was employed among her feoffees, and he quickly established himself among her leading adherents.7 VCH Warws. iv. 70-71; HMC Hastings, i. 6-7; CPR, 1422-9, p. 486; Essex Feet of Fines, iv. 13. On 17 Mar. 1431 he was involved in the violent clash at Birmingham between her retinue and that of Sir Edmund Ferrers of Chartley, where very serious violence was only averted by the intervention of Thomas Greswold, the King’s attorney and coroner in the court of King’s bench.8 C. Carpenter, Locality and Polity, 389-90; PROME, xi. 55-62, 126-9; KB27/681, rex rot. 21. Lady Joan rewarded Filongley’s loyalty: in 1433 she appointed him as constable of her castle at Holt, and in her will of 10 Jan. 1435 she bequeathed 100 marks each to him and his sister Alice, the wife of another of her servants, Robert Darcy.9 CIPM, xxiv. 514; Reg. Chichele, ii. 538.

After Lady Joan’s death in November 1435, Filongley, along with several other of her retinue, transferred allegiance to her young grandson, Sir James Butler, son and heir-apparent of James, earl of Ormond, by her daughter, Joan. She passed to her grandson those lands she had acquired from Hugh, Lord Burnell, among which was the valuable manor at Fulbourn in Cambridgeshire, where Butler established a residence.10 Ancestor, viii. 178. His pretensions in the county quickly engaged the hostility of its leading magnate, John, Lord Tiptoft†, and the resulting conflict came to involve our MP. On 19 July 1439 the Crown granted Filongley and another of Butler’s men, William Cotton*, the keeping of the alien priory of Linton there. Since this superseded a grant made to Tiptoft two years before, it was bound to add to local tensions, and it was soon followed by an election in the county violently disputed between the two affinities.11 CFR, xvii. 101-2; R. Virgoe, ‘Cambs. Election of 1439’, Bull. IHR, xlvi. 95-101. It is not known what part Filongley played in the election dispute, but he was involved soon after the hustings had gone in Butler’s favour. Early in January 1440 he and William Tyrell I* headed a small group of Butler’s men who came to Cambridge for the purveyance of the Butler household and other ‘disportez’. They were confronted in the market by some 120 of Tiptoft’s followers led by Thomas Lokton*, and reacted by sending for support to the Butler residence at Fulbourn so that they could return home safely. On the intervention of two prominent clerics, Masters Richard Caudray, dean of St. Martin le Grand, and Master John Tylney, vice-chancellor of Cambridge university, and the mayor of Cambridge, both sides agreed to withdraw.

This, at least, is the emollient description of events in Butler’s answer to a now-lost petition of complaint made against him by Tiptoft to the King’s council.12 Egerton Roll 8791. Other evidence shows that there was much more serious violence, if not on this occasion then on another. In Hilary term 1441 our MP, described as ‘of Filongley, esquire’, and with another Warwickshire landholder in Butler’s service, Thomas Boughton*, offered mainprise in the court of King’s bench for Butler’s servant and his own kinsman, Henry Brokesby, who had been appealed of murder; and in the following term he himself was joined with Brokesby among those appealed.13 KB27/719, rot. 53d; 720, rot. 79. The appeal was soon abandoned, but such inconveniences justified the handsome reward given to him by Butler early in 1442: by final concord ‘Shardelowesmaner’, a subsidiary manor in Fulbourn and Sawston, was settled on Filongley for the term of his life.14 CP25(1)/30/98/62; VCH Cambs x. 141. Soon after Filongley supplemented his interest in Fulbourn by acquiring another sub-manor there, that of ‘Dunmows’: ibid. 142. This grant seems to mark Butler’s disengagement from Cambridgeshire affairs in favour of a closer involvement in the West Country where lay the extensive estates of his wife, Avice, daughter and heiress of Sir Richard Stafford* of Hooke (Dorset) and, through her mother, of the wealthy Bryan family. In any event the heat had been taken out of the situation when Butler accompanied York to France in the summer of 1441. Our MP did not go with him although others involved in the violence of 1439-40 did.15 E101/53/33.

Butler’s withdrawal from Cambridgeshire did not mark an end to the contention to which his complex affairs gave rise. Filongley supported him in his new difficulties, even though it yet further removed him from the affairs of his native shire. The title of Butler’s wife to the Stafford inheritance was contested by the heir male, her uncle, William Stafford*, and this led to a major clash at Toller Porcorum in Dorset in August 1444, in which our MP was implicated as accessory to the death of one of Stafford’s servants. The corruption of the sheriff, Robert Cappes, another of Butler’s servants, then served to protect him and other Butler men from Stafford’s actions for damages.16 KB27/738, rot. 25; CP40/738, rot. 126. For a fuller account of these disturbances see the biography of William Browning I*. Even worse from Stafford’s point of view was the fine levied late in the following year: our MP joined the west-country lawyer, William Boef*, in a conveyance that secured for Butler a life interest in the Stafford lands of his wife should she die childless.17 E13/144, rots. 2, 11; CP25(1)/293/71/302.

Almost all that is known of Filongley’s early career concerns his successive service to Lady Abergavenny and Butler, but it had other less well documented dimensions. One of these involved the new associations that came with his marriage, at an unknown date, to Cecily Harling. It was a good match. As a niece of Sir John Fastolf, she was very well connected among the gentry of East Anglia. Further, after the death of her brother, Sir Robert, at the siege of St. Denis in 1435, only her young niece stood between her and a share of both the Harling inheritance and the lands of her maternal grandfather, Sir Robert Mortimer. This potential windfall never came to her and our MP (although, had they had issue, it would have descended to that issue on the death of her niece as late as 1498); none the less, the marriage represented social advancement for Filongley and Cecily was not entirely without lands. Probably as the result of an undocumented first marriage, she and our MP were, in the late 1440s, tenants for term of her life of nearly 300 acres of land in Great and Little Maplestead and Gestingthorpe in Essex. She seems also to have had an interest in a manor in West Bergholt, also in Essex, which she and Filongley quitclaimed to William Bury of Colchester in 1445.18 F. Blomefield, Norf. i. 319-21, 510; xi. 206; Essex Feet of Fines, iv. 35, 43; VCH Essex, x. 29.

Yet more important than his marriage was Filongley’s entry into the peripheries of the royal service. In 1440 he joined his brother-in-law Darcy (whose interest in the office dated from as long before as 1410) in the remunerative office of keeper of writs and rolls in the court of common pleas, a grant he almost certainly owed to Darcy’s friendship rather than Butler’s patronage.19 CPR, 1436-41, p. 471. Darcy named our MP among his executors: CPR, 1446-52, p. 312. This appointment later led to dispute. On 17 Oct. 1444 the King granted the same office to John Ulveston*, receiver of Eton, and Thomas del Rowe*, clerk of the common pleas. Such confusion in the organization of royal patronage was typical of these years, but here there may have been something more than mere misunderstanding at stake. When the two contradictory grants became the subject of litigation on the first day of Hilary term 1445, Ulveston and del Rowe (as plaintiffs claiming £500 damages against their rivals) argued that the letters of 1440 were void. They rightly asserted that, in 1415, Darcy had been granted an annuity of £60 in compensation for the temporary loss of the office to John Hotoft*, and that this fact should have been mentioned when our MP and Darcy petitioned for the office. Filongley and Darcy, equally correctly, replied that the latter had surrendered the annuity when restored to the keepership in 1423, and backed up their plea by petitioning in the Parliament then in session (of which Darcy was a Member) for the confirmation of their letters patent. On 15 Mar. they were granted what they asked and then went on the offensive, demanding £600 damages against del Rowe for impeding them in the implementation of the office between 30 Oct. 1444 and 9 June 1445. The matter was resolved at the end of the year: on 1 Dec. the two parties released all actions one to the other.20 CPR, 1413-16, pp. 333-4; 1436-41, p. 316; CP40/736, rot. 450; 738, rot. 528d; 739, rot. 337; 740, cart. rot. 1.

By the late 1440s Filongley had established himself as a man of influence, an influence augmented by his master Butler’s own rising status at court. This was recognized by others. The wealthy Worcestershire knight, (Sir) Humphrey Stafford I*, for example, had an annuity of 20 marks from Sir James; at Michaelmas 1448 he assigned payment of ten marks to our MP, presumably to buy influence with Butler.21 Add. Ch. 74169. Filongley’s election to represent the Dorset borough of Weymouth in the first Parliament of 1449, in company with William Tyrell II* (brother of his associate), was another aspect of his service to his lord. This can be inferred both from the lack of any other satisfactory explanation for his election and his activities on Butler’s part during the Parliament. On 20 Feb., eight days after Parliament had gathered, he acted for his master in a property transaction, taking a bond in 100 marks from John Fulborn, a London haberdasher, defeasible on condition that Fulborn would convey a manor to Butler. Later in the session, on 25 Mar., the King’s esquire, Nicholas St. Loe, granted the keeping of Gillingham forest in Dorset to our MP and others, several of whom were followers of Butler, for whom they were probably acting.22 C219/15/6; CCR, 1447-54, p. 121; CPR, 1446-52, p. 242. During the third session, in Trinity term, Filongley was party to a final concord by which his fellow MP, Thomas Everingham*, secured a life interest in the lands of his wife, Filongley’s kinswoman, Margaret Bugge. Everingham was connected with John, Viscount Beaumont, and it may be that Filongley’s readiness to act here was an aspect of the local co-operation between two prominent courtiers. In May 1447, for example, both Butler and our MP acted alongside Beaumont as feoffees in disputed property in Leicestershire.23 CP25(1)/293/71/345; CCR, 1441-7, p. 474; 1447-54, p. 17; KB27/746, rot. 10d.

Filongley’s rising prominence, and, perhaps particularly, the profits of his office in the common pleas, led him into a significant property purchase.24 As keeper, his annual fee was ten marks but he also had a share of the fines levied in that court: M. Hastings, Ct. Common Pleas, 104n. In 1450 he began the process of acquiring the manor of Barkby near Leicester. The process was a difficult one for the manor was in dispute between three sisters, daughters and coheirs of William Willoughby of Barkby. By a fine of Hilary term 1450 he acquired the title of the first; another fine of two years later brought him the rights of the second; but he had to wait until Michaelmas term 1455 before securing the surrender of the third. Notably, two of Beaumont’s retinue, Everingham and Richard Neel*, acted for him in these fines, another indication of local co-operation between the affinities of Beaumont and Butler.25 Leics. Village Notes, i. 121-2; CP25(1)/126/76/72, 75; 77/82. However, for the latter, promoted to the earldom of Wiltshire in July 1449, the West Country remained the main focus of his local interests, and hence so too did it for Filongley. In March 1451 he joined two prominent west-country gentry, Humphrey Stafford II*, first cousin of the earl’s wife, and Thomas St. Barbe of Brent, in entering two bonds in £2,500, the one to (Sir) John Wenlock*, the other to Thomas, Lord Scales. This was part of the arrangements to secure the release from French captivity of the earl’s brother, John, whose ransom had been set at that massive sum.26 CCR, 1447-54, pp. 266-7; C76/133, m. 10. More interestingly, on the following 3 July, when Filongley offered surety for Robert Cappes, indicted as accessory to a felonious theft from the earl’s enemy, Sir Edward Brooke*, Lord Cobham, he was described as ‘of Hooke in Dorset, esquire’, one of the principal properties of the earl’s wife.27 KB27/761, rex rot. 1d. Further evidence of his residence in the West Country is provided by his stewardship of the Somerset priory of Montacute and by his appearances, on 2 Nov. 1450 and 19 Feb. 1453, at the head of the attestors to the parliamentary elections in Dorset, even though he held no property there in his own right. His influence was probably then material in securing the election of another outsider, his young nephew, Thomas Froxmere*, for Weymouth.28 C219/16/1, 2. In the 1450 indenture he is described as ‘John’ but this is clearly an error.

None the less, although Filongley’s all-encompassing concern for the affairs of the earl of Wiltshire ensured that he played very little part in the affairs of his native county of Warwickshire, this did not prevent his return, two weeks after he had attended the election in distant Dorset, to represent it in Parliament. Here he was in breach of the electoral statutes which required both the attestors and those they elected to be resident in the county in which they acted on the day the writs of summons were issued. More significantly, however, his return, in company with Thomas Boughton, was a marked departure from the established pattern of Warwickshire’s representation in that neither of the MPs was a retainer of the dominant local lord, Richard Neville, earl of Warwick. Indeed, the readiness of the electors to return Filongley is an index of the decline in Warwick’s local influence, but it also owed something to the national resurgence of the royal court. This Parliament was far more sympathetic to the Crown than its immediate predecessors had been, and one reason for this was the influence that courtier nobles, like the earl of Wiltshire, were able to exercise over local elections.29 Carpenter, 467; C219/16/2; Six Town Chrons. ed. Flenley, 139-40. For Filongley himself election was the immediate prelude to another significant advancement in his career. On 17 June 1453, during the second session, he succeeded his friend, William Cotton, who was also sitting in the Commons, as keeper of the great wardrobe. Again he presumably owed his appointment to Wiltshire, with whom Cotton was also associated. Six weeks later he was entrusted with considerable funds: the Exchequer was ordered to make assignment to him as wardrober of 1,000 marks for the benefit of the queen and ‘grete causes ... that muste also nedes be hadde and purveied fore in Right grete haste’.30 CPR, 1452-61, p. 77; R.A. Griffiths, Hen. VI, 307; E404/69/215.

Soon after, however, the fair prospects open to Filongley as a senior household official and intimate servant of a leading courtier magnate, were put at hazard. Henry VI’s mental breakdown in August 1453 left the way open for the duke of York and his allies to return from the political wilderness. During the last session of Parliament, in the spring of 1454, he must have viewed with trepidation York’s nomination as Protector, particularly because of the new tension in the relationship between the duke and the earl of Wiltshire. The two peers had been on close terms during the 1440s, but their relationship had been compromised both by York’s intervention in the disorders in the West Country in the autumn of 1451 and his displacement by the earl as lieutenant of Ireland in the spring of 1453. None the less, our MP’s position was not damaged. The duke now replaced the earl as lieutenant, but proved wise enough to treat both him and his servants with equanimity. On 28 May 1454 Filongley offered mainprise when the earl was granted a modest Gloucestershire wardship, and, on the following 5 Nov., he himself benefited from the patronage of the new government with a joint grant of the keeping of certain lands in the West Country forfeited by Lord Cobham.31 CFR, xix. 89, 115-16. More interestingly, on 5 Dec. the Exchequer was ordered to make allowance to Filongley ‘by his oath’ for the goods he had provided, as keeper of the great wardrobe, for the birth and baptism of Prince Edward. Among the numerous items for which he claimed were large quantities of blue worsted to cover the cupboards and windows of the queen’s chamber and the steps up to her bed at the time of her purifying, linen cloth to line the font in Westminster abbey and various hangings for the prince’s cradle.32 E159/231, brevia Hil. rot. 12d.

Although Filongley had no reason to complain about his treatment during the first protectorate, its end offered him new opportunities. Wiltshire’s nomination as treasurer on 15 Mar. 1455 promised him further gains from royal patronage; and it was perhaps this hope that, 13 days later, prompted him to join another Lancastrian official from Warwickshire, John Brome II*, in advancing a loan of £370 to the Crown.33 E401/843, m. 41. Five days before Wiltshire became treasurer, administration of the will of his father, who had died as long before as Aug. 1452, had been granted to our MP: CP40/782, rot. 3d. Again, however, his expectations were to prove very short lived. The Yorkist victory at the first battle of St. Albans on the following 22 May brought another unwelcome change in the political climate. Filongley could, however, take comfort from the fact that he, unlike his master, had acquitted himself with credit at the battle. While he ‘faught manly, and was shet thorwe the armys in iii. or iiij. placys’, the earl, charged with bearing the royal banner, lay his charge ‘agayne an howse end and fought manly with the helys’, fleeing the field in a monk’s habit.34 Paston Letters, iii. 30; Historical Collns. Citizen of London (Cam. Soc. ser. 2, xvii), 198; C.A.J. Armstrong, ‘Politics and the Battle of St. Albans’, Bull. IHR, xxxiii. 43, 46, 64. One source places Filongley among the battle’s dead: Armstrong, 72. Servant and master also had contrasting fortunes after the battle: not surprisingly, Wiltshire was immediately removed as treasurer and lost all remaining credit with the duke (as much perhaps for his cowardice as for his support for the King), but Filongley retained his position in the Household throughout York’s second protectorate. Clearly, if his associations were unacceptable to the Yorkists, he personally was not. Indeed, at least in the eyes of those concerned with the affairs of Sir John Fastolf, he retained influence: after the battle one of Fastolf’s correspondents reported that Filongley ‘is at home at his owen place with his wyf, and shal doe ryght weel; but we have a greet losse of his absence this terme, for hit wole be longe er he come this terme, I am a ferde’.35 Paston Letters, iii. 33. For Filongley’s services to Fastolf, for whom he was a feoffee and executor: P.S. Lewis, ‘Fastolf’s Lawsuit over Titchwell’, Historical Jnl. i. 13, 19; C.F. Richmond, Paston Fam.: Fastolf’s Will, 61, 91; Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 178; Paston Letters, ed. Gairdner, iii. 165-6.

The end of York’s second protectorate in February 1456 and the subsequent move of an increasingly militant court to Coventry brought Filongley into a renewed prominence. He was the beneficiary of two direct grants of royal patronage: in May that year he was granted the keeping of certain waste land in Derbyshire, and in the following autumn he was granted £100 owed to the Crown by Reynold, bishop of Chichester.36 CFR, xix. 160; CPR, 1452-61, p. 323. More importantly, as keeper of the great wardrobe, he came to play a more central role in royal finance than was customary for holders of that office. The transfer of the royal household to Coventry created the need for sources of income not directed through the Exchequer at distant Westminster. He had an important part in this new system. On 20 Oct. 1456 he was assigned over £2,000 charged on the customs and other sources of royal revenue for the expenses of the wardrobe in the year Michaelmas 1456-7; on the following 8 Aug. he was licensed to ship 600 sacks of wool in the ports of London and Chichester for wardrobe expenses; and, on 12 Apr. 1458, £2,000 was reserved from prerogative revenues to replace the grant of 1456, which had proved abortive.37 Griffiths, 787; CCR, 1454-61, pp. 231-2, 260; CPR, 1452-61, p. 418. The last of these grants was made to Filongley on the following 20 Oct., when he was granted 132 forfeited cloths, and soon afterwards he surrendered his office for reasons that are unclear. It is curious that this surrender should have coincided with the reappointment of the earl of Wiltshire as treasurer.38 CPR, 1452-61, p. 460. His successor in the great wardrobe, John Wood III*, accounted from 13 Nov. 1458: E361/6, rot. 51d. Our MP had continued to serve the Butlers after the humiliation of St. Albans, acting for the earl in a particularly sensitive transaction. On Avice Stafford’s death in 1457 the earl had married Eleanor Beaufort; in April 1458 Filongley stood as strawman in a tortious conveyance designed to secure part of Avice’s Bryan inheritance for Eleanor and her issue by Wiltshire.39 J.M.W. Bean, Estates Percy Fam. 120; E326/5414-16. For Filongley’s involvement in the affairs of the earl’s brother, Thomas: CPR, 1452-61, p. 355; CFR, xix. 174. His loss of office cannot, therefore, have betokened a withdrawal of the favour of either the Crown or the earl.

Another explanation is that Filongley’s services were needed elsewhere: within days of surrendering the keepership he was pricked as sheriff of Warwickshire and Leicestershire. This appointment owed more to his place as a courtier than his lands in these counties. He was one of the very few gentry there who commanded the implicit trust of the regime, and, if he was replaced as keeper to become sheriff, it was obviously intended that he take an active part in his new role. He was given further local responsibility when he was added to the Warwickshire bench on the following 22 July (although technically he should have been excluded from the bench as sheriff), and he soon afterwards had the opportunity to bring the resources of his shrievalty to the support of the regime. He was, very likely, at the head of his county’s posse comitatus at the rout of the Yorkists at Ludford Bridge on 12 Oct. 1459.40 His presence there is a reasonable inference to the reference, in a grant made to him in Apr. 1460, of ‘his good service against the rebels’: CPR, 1452-61, p. 583. A few weeks later, he performed another important service by conducting the shire elections at Warwick to the Parliament summoned to Coventry. Two Lancastrian loyalists, (Sir) Edmund Mountfort* and Henry Everingham*, were returned by attestors from whom the leading shire gentry were entirely absent.41 C219/16/5. Filongley would probably have been returned instead of Everingham had he not been sheriff. It may be inferred from his absence from Coventry on 7 Dec. that he was not elected for another constituency: Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 187. Significantly, Mountfort was one of the few Warwickshire gentry with whom Filongley had documented connexions: in 1457 he had acted for him in a controversial conveyance designed to secure the Mountfort inheritance against Sir Baldwin Mountfort.42 CCR, 1454-61, p. 364; Carpenter, 481.

While sheriff Filongley was the beneficiary of several acts of royal patronage, although only one had the potential for worthwhile profit. On 11 Nov. 1458 the Exchequer was ordered to allow him to account by his oath for his term as sheriff (in other words, not for the county farm but only for what he could collect). Such concessions were commonly made to sheriffs at this date and so cannot be taken to show any special favour to him personally. Similarly neutral was the grant made to him a month later: he was given five of his own horses, seized into royal hands as goods waived after unknown felons had stolen them from him at Tottenham and abandoned them at Crawley.43 E159/236, brevia Hil. rot. 1; CPR, 1452-61, p. 473. Nor was he to benefit much from the grant he shared, on the following 25 Feb., with William Wore, dean of collegiate church of Stafford, and William Cumberford*, of the keeping of the manor of Arley in Staffordshire, lately held by William Burley I*. Here the intended beneficiary was probably the Warwickshire serjeant-at-law, Thomas Lyttleton, the husband of one of Burley’s two daughters and coheirs; and, even if he were not, the grantees soon lost the manor to a judgement in Chancery in favour of Burley’s feoffees.44 CFR, xix. 227; KB27/793, rot. 28, rex rot. 9. In 1448 our MP had offered mainprise for Lyttleton, who was also connected with Butler: KB27/748, rex rot. 33d. Of much more direct benefit to Filongley was the grant made to him on 12 Mar. of the farm of the London alnage for the term of five years at an annual payment of £27 13s. 4d.: this was probably a significant underestimate of the profit that the alnage could be made to yield with efficient management.45 CFR, xix. 219. None the less, it was not until after his term as sheriff that he secured proper reward for his loyalty. The patronage available to the Crown during his shrievalty was not extensive, but this stock of patronage was very dramatically increased with the attainder of the Yorkist lords in the Coventry Parliament. Our MP had every reason to expect further reward and he was not to be disappointed. On 22 Apr. 1460 he shared with John Brome II a royal grant of the keeping of the manor of Berkswell, confiscated from the earl of Warwick and lying only a few miles from Old Filongley. Four days later he had a more generous grant: for his good service against the Yorkist rebels he was to hold for term of his life the manors in Roydon (Essex) and Enfield (Middlesex), forfeited by Thomas Colt*, to the value of 20 marks p.a.46 CFR, xix. 266; CPR, 1452-61, p. 583.

Although past middle age, Filongley was now at the height of his career. Soon, however, all was to come to nought. After the grants of April 1460 he appears in an active role only twice more: at the end of the next month he was one of those who nominated a customs collector in Yarmouth to secure repayment of a loan made to the Crown; and in the following Michaelmas term he entered into yet another agreement concerning his troubled purchase of the manor of Barkby.47 CFR, xix. 254, 256, 258; Leics. Village Notes, i. 122. The date and circumstances of his death are unknown. His removal from the commission of the peace at the end of the year was probably the result of the Yorkist victory at the battle of Northampton rather than his death; and it is tempting to conclude that he met his end fighting for the cause of Lancaster at the battle of Towton, where his master, the earl of Wiltshire, was captured (and subsequently executed). His death there is consistent with the grant made on 14 Apr. 1461, eight days before the court of common pleas sat for the first time in the reign of Edward IV, of the keepership of the writs there to John Fogg†.48 CPR, 1461-7, p. 11. And yet he may have survived into the new reign. On 28 Nov. 1461 he was summoned into the court of King’s bench on a writ of error relating to an assize taken in 1452; in response the sheriff of Somerset twice returned that he had no goods in that county. This may reflect no more than ignorance on the part of the plaintiff and the sheriff, but Filongley is not known to have been dead until September 1464 when an inquisition named him among the deceased feoffees of the earl of Wiltshire.49 KB27/770, rot. 63; E153/1880/8. No new London alnager was appointed until Mar. 1462: CFR, xx. 73-74. However, whenever he met his death, he was not named alongside Wiltshire among those attainted in the first Yorkist Parliament. His lands were allowed to descend to his three sisters and their descendants. One sister, Alice, was the mother of Robert Darcy II*, who sat for Essex in the Parliament of 1450. Another, Margaret, was the mother of Thomas Froxmere of Droitwich in Worcestershire; and the third, Agnes, married into the Derbyshire family of Fraunceys of Ticknall and was the mother of Thomas Fraunceys, who was clerk of the estreats at the Exchequer in the late 1450s under the earl of Wiltshire.50 CP40/913, rot. 113; VCH Warws. iv. 71. According to a later Chancery petition, our MP settled his manor of ‘Dunmows’ in Fulbourn on his nephew, John Fraunceys, in fee tail with remainder over to Froxmere, also in tail.51 C1/201/11. Froxmere later claimed that his remainder interest had been denied by Fraunceys’s wid. Joyce: C1/370/23.