BLAKE, Edmund

From a family of minor Norfolk gentry,16 On one occasion Blake’s elder brother, Simon, was described as a ‘yeoman’; on another as ‘franklin’: KB27/799, rot. 19; CP40/813, rot. 497d. Blake made his way in the world in the service of the Lancastrian Crown. There is no evidence for his earliest years but, given his relatively humble background, he was very probably already one of the King’s men when he joined John Paston* in standing surety at the Exchequer for John Wilton and John Chyttok* in July 1449, since he did so as an ‘esquire’.17 CFR, xviii. 113. He was certainly a ‘King’s serjeant’ and a clerk of the signet office by the following October, when Henry VI granted a corrody in the monastery of St. Augustine, Bristol, to him and Elizabeth his wife, in response to a petition they had submitted to him.18 E28/79/25; CCR, 1447-54, p. 157.

The signet clerks’ duties placed them in close proximity to the King, for whom they often acted as messengers, as did Blake in 1452, when he and Garter King of Arms carried a message to Henry VI from the new earl of Douglas, who had rebelled against James II of Scotland.19 Corp. London RO, jnl. 5, f. 30; Foedera ed. Rymer (Hague edn.), v (2), 41. He also upheld royal interests in other respects; in 1450, for example, he seized on behalf of the Crown wine, wool, rabbit skins and kerseys from two ships moored at London because the owners of this merchandise had attempted to avoid paying customs.20 E159/226, recorda Easter rot. 7d. Blake took advantage of his privileged access to the Crown to apply for other grants besides his corrody. In March 1450 he successfully petitioned for the office of keeper of the castle and park at Hadleigh, a grant for life twice renewed in the following 14 months.21 E28/80/36; CPR, 1446-52, pp. 330, 457. In July 1450 the King made Blake steward of the honour of Richmond in Norfolk and Suffolk (another appointment for life), and in June 1451 he awarded his servant the keeping of certain lands in Little Hadham, Hertfordshire, for 12 years (although Blake ended up surrendering this farm after just three).22 CFR, xviii. 226; xix. 82. In November 1452 Blake paid the Crown £40 for the wardship of the grandson and namesake of Sir Robert Clifton*.23 CPR, 1452-61, p. 30. Less successfully, in October 1453 he acquired a 20-year farm of the manor of Polstead Hall in Burnham Westgate, a property that had once belonged to Lewis Robessart, Lord Bourgchier, having offered the Crown a higher rent than that paid by Robert Fouleman, the previous farmer. In the event, Fouleman regained the manor a few weeks afterwards, having agreed to match Blake’s offer.24 CFR, xix. 68, 72. Blake’s position in the royal bureaucracy also afforded him important contacts and gave him a social status he would not otherwise have enjoyed. Ralph, Lord Cromwell, named him as a feoffee in 1454,25 CPR, 1452-61, pp. 199-200; E159/234, brevia Mich. rot. 29. and he gained honorary admission to Lincoln’s Inn in 1455. He appears also to have formed a link with Edward Neville, Lord Abergavenney, a younger brother of the earl of Salisbury, who (or so he later claimed) appointed him his steward in Norfolk and Suffolk in 1451.26 CP40/781, rot. 205.

Yet there is no evidence that Blake achieved enrichment on anything like the scale of others associated with the Lancastrian regime. He may even have encountered some financial difficulty, as evidenced by the bonds into which he entered at various stages during his career. Yet the circumstances in which he gave these securities are unknown, and it is impossible to determine whether they arose from official duties, private interests or both. He entered into a bond for £14 with William Melbourne of London, ‘painter’ in July 1447; two more, for 50 marks and 100 marks respectively, with William Calthorpe* in September 1455; a fourth, this time for £9 6s. 8d., to Melbourne in May 1459; and finally another, for no less than £200, to the brothers-in-law, William Brandon† and John Wingfield†, in May 1460. All of these creditors subsequently began legal action on the strength of the bonds in question, and in the case of Melbourne after Blake’s death.27 CP40/802, rot. 129d; 813, rot. 497d; C241/241/1; 244/7, 24.

Whatever the reason for these securities, Blake did encounter financial difficulties as clerk of the King’s works, an office he assumed on Christmas Eve 1451, while still a clerk of the signet, and for which he received daily wages of 2s.28 E364/93, rot. A. He took on a particularly important responsibility, since the works stood in a more ‘Ruynouse’ state than ever before.29 E404/68/78. As clerk of the works, Blake accounted for large sums of money, receiving nearly £2,750 and spending almost £1,561 during his term of office.30 Hist. King’s Works ed. Brown, Colvin and Taylor, i. 1024. He had also to travel widely in the course of his duties, visiting among other places Nottingham, York, Norwich, Southampton, Hereford, Shrewsbury, Windsor and Oxford. The Exchequer was the principal source of revenue for the King’s works, although there was also a regular, if much smaller, income from the sale of timber and underwood in royal parks, and from casual sales of building materials to courtiers and other favoured persons.31 Ibid. 196, 199-200. Sometimes it paid Blake directly in cash;32 E403/791. on other occasions it made over the sums needed for the works by means of the far less satisfactory system of assignment. By mid 1453 he possessed no fewer than 34 tallies, representing £831 6s. 8d., he could not convert into cash. He was obliged to petition the Crown for help and, in response, the King ordered the customs collectors at London and other principal ports to honour the tallies.33 CCR, 1447-54, p. 383; E404/70/1/43. On at least two other occasions Blake went to law in a bid to obtain sums assigned to him, but sometimes he himself was late in paying those from whom he had bought building materials and, perhaps, none too scrupulous in acquiring such supplies. In February 1456 several men who had sold him stones and other materials in London and Surrey four years earlier sued him in the Exchequer for payment. Not long afterwards, Thomas Nicholl, from whom in March 1453 he had bought 25 feet of timber at North Mimms, Hertfordshire, for works at the palace of Westminster, took action against him in the same court for 63s. 3d.34 E13/146, rots. 19d, 38d, 39d, 42, 46, 74, 75. Later, in 1460, Thomas Thorndon sued Blake in the court of King’s bench, alleging that the clerk had forcibly taken from him seven carriage loads of timber without payment at London in 1454.35 KB27/798, rot. 21.

Originally, Blake’s appointment as clerk of the works was for life and he gained an exemption safeguarding his tenure when the Parliament of 1455 passed an Act of Resumption.36 PROME, xii. 425. In spite of his exemption, he surrendered the office a few weeks after the dissolution of the same assembly. Yet he cannot have fallen out of favour. During the rest of his career he remained a trusted servant of Henry VI, who appointed him an usher of the chamber and controller of customs at Great Yarmouth in 1457. In the same year the King also made grants for life to Blake of the offices of steward of the Cambridgeshire manors of Bassingbourne and Brabaham and warrener of the lordship of Swaffham.

At Swaffham, possibly his birthplace, Blake succeeded to a position previously held by his elder brother, Simon. Simon, another ‘King’s serjeant’ and keeper of the seal in the court of the Marshalsea, had become bailiff and warrener of Swaffham and bailiff of the honour of Richmond in Norfolk and Suffolk in 1450,37 CPR, 1446-52, pp. 329, 335. but he was not as closely associated as Edmund with the royal court. Indeed, as bailiff of Swaffham he clashed with the courtier, Sir Thomas Tuddenham*, formerly one of the servants of the King’s late chief minister William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk. Tuddenham, who was steward and farmer of the manor of Swaffham, was highly unpopular in the local town, the inhabitants of which accused him of oppressive behaviour. In late December 1450 Simon journeyed to London, to warn the chancellor of the likelihood of uproar, or even a rising, in Norfolk if Tuddenham and his associate, John Heydon*, received pardons for the various misdemeanours which they had committed in the county.38 Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 60-61, 528-30; C.F. Richmond, Paston Fam.: First Phase, i. 241n. In the same month Sir John Fastolf informed two of his servants that Edmund Blake was the new under steward (presumably in Norf. and Suff.) of the duchy of Lancaster, but it is impossible to tell whether the MP did in fact hold that office: Paston Letters ed. Davis, Beadle and Richmond, iii. 108. There is no evidence that Edmund himself had any significant dealings with members of the de la Pole affinity and, despite his position in the Lancastrian bureaucracy, he was on friendly terms in the early 1450s with local opponents of Tuddenham and Heydon like Sir John Fastolf and John Paston, for whom he was a useful contact at Court. In 1451, for example, he acted as an intermediary between Paston and Robert Hungerford, Lord Moleyns, who had made a spurious claim to the Paston manor at Gresham.39 Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, ii. 212; Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 74-75.

The chances are that Edmund Blake’s offices at Swaffham and in Cambridgeshire were little more than sinecures, although he did act as a receiver in the county for Hugh atte Fenne. He had relinquished the latter office by the autumn of 1455, when atte Fenne sued him over six marks for which he had failed to account.40 E13/146, rot. 7d.

It is scarcely surprising if he had neglected his duties as receiver, since those of clerk of the signet and then clerk of the works necessarily limited his involvement in local affairs. On the other hand, he found the time to invest in property in his native county. A royal pardon he purchased in 1452 referred to him as ‘late of Southery’,41 C67/40, m. 19. perhaps indicating that he had acquired lands in that part of south-west Norfolk by that date, but his main investment was at Holme Hale near Swaffham where at some stage in the early 1450s he bought the manor of ‘Whightes’ from Sibyl Boys, the mother and executor of Robert Boys, its former owner.42 C1/22/165; 66/606.

Blake immediately ran into problems with his purchase at Holme Hale. After Boys’s death in 1450 Robert Langstrother had abducted and married his widow Jane and she and her new husband objected to the sale, claiming that Boys had willed the property to her and to Katherine, the daughter and heir she had borne him. The Langstrothers received support from three of Boys’s feoffees, John Heydon, Robert Inglose and Jane’s father, Edmund Witchingham. They refused to release the manor to Blake, who in 1454 filed two bills in Chancery, one against Heydon and Inglose and the other against Witchingham. In reply, Inglose argued that Sibyl had made the sale after substituting her son’s true will with a forgery. When the chancellor came to make his award he found for Blake, but this was not the end of the matter, since Witchingham responded with a bill of his own. He alleged that Blake and his brother Simon had menaced the priest who had acted as Robert Boys’s confessor, to stop him from revealing the deceased’s real intentions to a Chancery commission. In the course of his suit Witchingham admitted to drawing up a conditional release of the manor, but stressed that he had done so before he had known about Boys’s true will. Blake countered by denying interfering with any witnesses, asserting that his version of the will was valid and referring to the award that the Chancery had already made in his favour.43 C1/15/319; 22/165; 25/204; 66/606; Richmond, 40n, 142n. A registered copy of Boys’s will survives but it does not contain any instructions as to his lands: Norwich consist. ct. Reg. Aleyn, f. 46. Witchingham’s suit was unsuccessful, since the court refused to reverse the award and his opponent retained his troublesome purchase. In 1458 the King committed the wardship of Katherine Boys, the child in whose interests Witchingham and the other feoffees had claimed to have acted, to the courtier (Sir) Edmund Hampden*, a grant for which Blake stood surety for Hampden in the Exchequer. A year later, Blake acquired the farm of a small part of Katherine’s inheritance at Honing for himself.44 CFR, xix. 227, 249.

The controversy over Holme Hale was far from Blake’s only quarrel in his later years, and it may well have had yet to run its course when Richard Kirkeby and his wife Lettice sued him and others in Chancery. He and his co-defendants were the feoffees of lands of Lettice’s inheritance in north-east Essex, and in a bill of 1455 the couple claimed that they had refused her request to release the lands to her. Blake’s answer reveals that he was ready to surrender his title to the property but wanted an assurance that Lettice had not made her request under coercion from her husband. Presumably, he and his co-defendants made the desired release after May 1455, when commissioners appointed by the court examined Lettice, since she assured them that she was acting out of her own free will.45 C1/15/325; 16/240; 25/174-5; CCR, 1454-61, p. 61. In the following June Blake began a suit of his own against Simon Gunnor of East Beckham, subsequently appearing in person at Norwich’s lammas assizes of that year to accuse Gunnor of unjustly disseising him of the office of steward in Norfolk and Suffolk for Edward Neville, Lord Abergavenney. According to Blake, Neville had granted the office to him for life in July 1451. According to his opponent (represented in these proceedings by his ‘bailiff’, Walter Raulyns), the peer had previously granted it to (Sir) Miles Stapleton*, also for life, five years earlier. Gunnor added that he was Stapleton’s deputy steward, in which capacity he had acted on the knight’s behalf at Hockham, one of the manors belonging to Neville in Norfolk. The assize referred these conflicting claims to the court of common pleas at Westminster, where successive reservations of judgement left the matter still unresolved in the latter part of 1459.46 CP40/781, rots. 205, 205d.

In the meantime Blake received pardons (of September 1458 and the following February), related to his offences of commission or omission as an office-holder,47 CPR, 1452-61, pp. 469, 478. and continued to receive grants from the Crown. At the beginning of 1458 he became receiver-general of the honour of Richmond for life. Late the following year, he was made the administrator (again for life) of the honours of Clare and Rayleigh, as well as of lands in Suffolk and Essex forfeited by the duke of York and earl of Salisbury. He obtained the position of administrator during the Parliament of 1459, a partisan assembly which attainted York and his allies and in which he himself sat as one of the knights of the shire for Norfolk. In the same period there was a rumour that he had received a commission to arrest traitors and gaol supporters of the Yorkist lords in the county,48 Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 185. and on 21 Dec., a day after the dissolution of Parliament, the government appointed him to an anti-Yorkist commission of array.

Notwithstanding this favourable change of political climate, the disputatious Blake had further private quarrels with which to contend. Just weeks before taking up his seat in the Commons, a Norfolk jury had indicted him, along with a band of neighbours, servants and friends of over 80 strong, for forcibly seizing grain and livestock from the escheator of that county, Christopher Cooke, in August 1459. Cooke had confiscated these goods, worth £50, from Blake earlier in the year after the latter had incurred an outlawry in Surrey for failing to answer a suit for debt in the Exchequer on the part of Thomas Warham.49 E159/236, recorda Mich. rots. 10-13d, 17-18d. It may well be that Blake saw the immunities enjoyed by MPs as a means, temporarily at least, of evading both the indictment and his opponents at law. Among these opponents was John Hale, who won costs and damages totalling just under £264 against him in King’s bench after Parliament had dissolved. In early 1460 Hale brought two actions against Blake in that court, for assault and for imprisonment and extortion. In one the jurors found that Blake had assaulted him at Abbot’s Walden on 28 Feb. 1459; in the other they found that he had held Hale captive in the same parish for six hours on the following day, until his prisoner entered into a bond for £100. In both cases, Blake’s defence was that Hale was a villein belonging to his manor of Holme Hale, only for the latter successfully to plea that he was in fact a freeman. With regard to the second, Hale won costs and damages amounting to no less than £113 6s. 8d. in Hilary term 1460. After Blake failed to satisfy him of this sum, he returned to King’s bench to seek redress, and the court responded to his petition to it on 1 Mar. that year, when it committed the former MP to the Marshalsea until he paid. Unfortunately for Hale, the marshal of that prison, William Brandon, released Blake on the following 15 July, with the whole of that sum still outstanding. Hale responded by suing Brandon, who was dismissed from office on 8 Nov. 1460, both for allowing Blake to go free and for similar offences.50 KB27/793, rots. 57d, 83; 798, rot. 24, rex rot. 45; E159/236, recorda Hil. rot. 17d. Possibly the bond for £200 that Blake had given Brandon and John Wingfield in May 1460 had some connexion with his release from the Marshalsea. Why Brandon should have released Blake when he did is a matter for speculation: it seems unlikely that he had come under pressure from the Lancastrian establishment, which had lost the political initiative following the Yorkist victory at the battle of Northampton, fought five days before the MP had regained his liberty.

By November 1460, however, Blake was dead. Apparently still alive on the previous 10 Oct. when his attorney answered the suit of Thomas Thorndon in King’s bench,51 KB27/798, rot. 21. he was certainly dead just days later. In the quindene of Michaelmas that year (13-19 Oct.) his attorneys in the Exchequer (where judgement between him and another opponent, Thomas Warham, was still pending), informed that court that he had been killed in London.52 E159/236, recorda Mich. rots. 10-13d, Hil. rots. 17-18d. The Exchequer plea roll in question does not elaborate on the circumstances of his death but perhaps he met his end during the fighting in the City that summer. In the wake of the Yorkist victory at the battle of Northampton on 10 July, a force of Lancastrians led by Lords Scales and Hungerford still occupied the Tower of London. On the 19th, members of the besieged garrison, including various courtiers and servants of the Household, attempted to break out but some of them were killed mid flight, while others died on the scaffold, having fallen into the hands of their pursuers.53 R.A. Griffiths, Hen. VI, 863, 877. While Blake cannot have been one of the defenders of the Tower, given that he had been in the Marshalsea until 15 July, it is possible that he lost his life in another incident connected with the civil strife in the City. On the other hand, he may have died in a totally unrelated and merely criminal incident.

There was another suit pending against Blake when he died. The plaintiff, William Jenney*, had bought the wardship of Katherine Boys from Edmund Hampden, and he claimed that the MP and several accomplices had abducted her from his residence at Theberton in Suffolk. In Hilary term 1461, he took out a writ of capias against the defendants for failing to respond to the suit he had begun against them in King’s bench, only for the sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk to return that Blake was dead. It is striking, indeed odd, that Jenney, a well-informed East Anglian lawyer, should have been ignorant of the MP’s demise. In the event, he continued his case against the other defendants, who included Blake’s brother Simon and son Thomas as well as a priest, another Edmund Blake, whom the MP had presented to the living of Holme Hale in 1454.54 KB27/798, rot. 66; 799, rot. 19; Blomefield, vi. 12. Jenney’s suit overlapped with other proceedings in King’s bench connected with Blake, for at the beginning of 1461 the late MP’s lands and goods were subject to a distraining order, to enable the doughty John Hale to recover the costs and damages awarded to him a year earlier.55 KB27/799, rots. 28, 28d; C241/244/24.

There was yet more litigation relating to the late MP in 1464, this time in the common pleas. The plaintiff was the already mentioned William Melbourne, who had gone to law against Blake’s widow Elizabeth over the bonds of 1447 and 1459. In pleadings of Michaelmas term 1464, he claimed to have received no more than 60s. due on the bonds from Blake. He also named Elizabeth, her brother-in-law Simon Blake and John Crudde of Framlingham, ‘gentleman’, as the executors of the MP’s no longer extant will, but she denied assuming that role or accepting the administration of her late husband’s goods. According to Melbourne, Elizabeth had taken control of goods and chattels formerly belonging to Blake in St. Martin Ludgate, London, presumably the parish where the MP had kept a residence in the City. The parties agreed to put the matter to a jury but there is no evidence of a subsequent trial.56 CP40/813, rot. 497d.

The MP’s heir was his son Thomas, whom Henry VI had made parker of Rayleigh for life on 21 Dec. 1459. Thomas’s letters of appointment referred to him as ‘King’s esquire’ but he does not feature in any of the extant accounts for Henry’s household. He became parker just three days after the King had appointed his uncle Simon bailiff and feodary of the honours of Clare and Rayleigh and parker of Hundon, Suffolk.57 CPR, 1452-61, pp. 529, 538. Simon adapted to the accession of Edward IV by becoming a client of Anthony Wydeville, the new King’s brother-in-law.58 C.E. Moreton, Townshends, 117. Before he died in 1489 he left instructions for the founding of a chantry at Swaffham and named his dead brother as one of those who should benefit from the masses sung there. When Thomas Blake made his own will 16 years later, he set aside part of the income from Holme Hale, the manor he had inherited from the MP, to augment the same chantry.59 CIPM Hen. VII, i. 539; Reg. Typpes, ff. 112-14; PCC 17 Adean.