DALBY, Richard II

Richard’s father Hugh, a lawyer, devoted his life to the service of the Mowbrays, earls marshal and dukes of Norfolk, from whom he farmed the Warwickshire manor of Kineton for over 50 years from 1387. His offices, which earned him an annuity of £10 besides other rewards, included being the Earl Marshal’s attorney-general from 1399, and for Earl John he acted as councillor, receiver in Warwickshire, justice at great sessions in Chepstow, and feoffee, such duties continuing until 1425 or later.7 Moye, 387-8. Hugh died on 27 Jan. 1439, leaving three sons: John, Richard (our MP) and another Hugh. Although John was the heir at common law, his father’s feoffees had been instructed in 1435 to convey the lion’s share of his lands to Richard, who also succeeded their father as farmer of Kineton. Our MP thus came into the spoils of Hugh Dalby’s successful career in magnate service: substantial landed holdings in south-east Warwickshire centred on Brookhampton, which were settled on him and his first wife in jointure. He also had a remainder interest in lands in the east of the county, at Newbold-on-Avon, failing the issue of his brother John, which eventually happened.8 E149/166/19. These family estates, together with others Dalby acquired for himself, were to be given a value of £33 p.a. by the jurors at his post mortem, but this was no doubt an undervaluation.9 C140/78/89.

Before he came into possession of his patrimony, Richard had already made a mark in Warwickshire, where he was listed among those required to take the oath against maintenance in 1434.10 CPR, 1429-36, p. 384. He was perhaps the man of this name who served in France in 1436 under the command of Sir William Oldhall*, 11 Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, fr. 25772/987. but even if so, before too long he made a reputation for himself at home as a professional feodary, finding employment with a succession of noble patrons. In gaining expertise as a feodary, Dalby needed legal training, and like other lawyers he was usually called ‘gentleman’. It is perhaps his profession that provides the most satisfactory explanation for his return to Parliament in 1442 for the distant borough of East Grinstead in Sussex. This borough pertained to the duchy of Lancaster, and although there is no evidence to link him with duchy administration at this stage in his career it may be that some such link did exist. Alternatively, the family connexion with the Mowbrays, who owned substantial estates in Sussex, may have counted for something; indeed, Richard apparently preserved his father’s association with the dukes of Norfolk, reviving it more positively in the 1450s. Meanwhile, in the years immediately following his return to the Commons, the patronage of Humphrey Stafford, duke of Buckingham, proved of more value for his advancement. He crossed to Calais with the duke in 1444 and again in the following year. Furthermore, Buckingham valued his services sufficiently highly as to grant him leases of land near his home.12 DKR, xlviii. 361, 365.

Buckingham was to play a role in the early stages of the local disputes which were to plague Dalby for the rest of life. His principal opponents were members of the Verney family of Compton Murdack, whose lands lay close to his own. The first incident in the feud started innocently enough with Dalby’s appearance at the Exchequer on 14 May 1445 as mainpernor for two other Warwickshire men, given the wardship of property in Essex during the minority of the heiress Agnes Waldegrave. The latter, also known as Anne, was the daughter of a Northamptonshire gentleman,13 CFR, xvii. 322; C139/117/12. and according to lawsuits brought in the King’s bench shortly afterwards Dalby and the two grantees, abetted by several others including Dalby’s brother Hugh, forcibly abducted her on 26 May from the household of an esquire named John Withinale. The abduction allegedly took place at Brookhampton, when valuable clothes and jewelry (two silk gowns embroidered with silver and gold thread, eight gold rings set with rubies and sapphires and a gold cross), said to belong to Withinale, were also taken.14 KB27/737, rot. 78d; 739, rot. 60; 741, rex rot. 28; C. Carpenter, Locality and Polity, 416-18. This explains why Dalby was required to enter recognizances in 1,000 marks to bring the heiress into Chancery on 10 June to hear what order the King should make concerning her and himself.15 E159/221, recogniciones Trin.; CCR, 1441-7, p. 308. Although he complied, an indictment was laid against him before the Warwickshire j.p.s. In the following year he responded with a plea in the King’s bench against Withinale and his wife Anne (possibly the heiress herself), alleging that they had conspired with the Verneys, notably John Verney, dean of Lichfield, and Richard Verney of Compton, to bring this false charge against him. It should be noted that at the same time Dalby’s lord the duke of Buckingham commenced proceedings against Richard Verney and Withinale on a plea of trespass, so evidently our MP could depend on the duke’s backing, at least for the time being.16 KB27/742, rots. 88, 102; 744, rot. 13d.

Dalby’s growing expertise in estate management also caught the attention of other magnates, such as John Talbot, the first earl of Shrewsbury, for whom in 1452 he drew up a ‘feodarium’ – a list of reliefs and aids due from the free tenants in the lordship of Sheffield and from the holders of knights’ fees of the barony of Furnival in Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire.17 Trans. Hunter Arch. Soc. i. 137-72. In the same year he was appointed by John, duke of Norfolk, as his feodary in four Midland counties, and later also served him as a feoffee of the ducal estates in Surrey and Sussex.18 He later had a rental income from Mowbray property at ‘Brokenwharf’, Mdx.: Moye, 431, from Lambeth Pal. Lib., A.D. MS VI/330, f. 13. How these connexions with magnates affected Dalby’s political stance in the years of civil war is open to speculation. Evidently, what continued to concern him most was his feud with the Verneys, which in the 1450s accelerated into a war of attrition, featuring trampled closes, stolen flocks and innumerable summonses to the law-courts. The differences between the Dalbys and Verneys essentially arose from both families’ determination to build up compact estates for pastoral farming in their part of Warwickshire. Dalby and Richard Verney, both highly ambitious, were forced to compete for the limited amount of land and leases on the market, to acquire the extended pastures necessary for large flocks of sheep. Initially, Dalby met with more success than his rival, especially with regard to the acquisition of leases. In the 1440s he obtained a shared lease of the warren of Tysoe from his lord the duke of Buckingham, who held the principal manor there, and a lease of Westcote, a subordinate hamlet of Tysoe, from the Oxford Hospitallers.19 Carpenter, 129-30, 178-9, 184-5; VCH Warws. v. 177. Then too, he was able to persuade Buckingham’s ward William Verney of Great Wolford (a cousin to the Verneys of Compton), to sell him land nearby in Ratley, in 1445, and Buckingham himself to sell him the Verney manor of Kites Hardwick two years later. In February 1452 William Verney confirmed by indenture that he had sold Dalby the manor of Upton in Ratley, for which the latter agreed to pay £77 6s. 8d. All this provoked the ire of William’s cousins, who particularly resented Dalby’s continued tenure of the lease of Kineton, which had been derived from his father’s links with the Mowbrays and had been renewed in 1445 to run for 24 years.20 CCR, 1441-7, p. 296; 1447-54, pp. 23, 328-9; Carpenter, 127, 416-18; KB27/818, rot. 117. The next stage in the feud began in the middle of 1452, and when accomplices of Dalby and William Verney were indicted before the j.p.s in October that year for assaults on the property and persons of another branch of the Dalby family, their opponent Richard Verney presided over the sessions. A further indictment was made two months later, implicating Dalby directly, and there was an attempt to revive the charge of abduction of seven years earlier. In the mid 1450s Dalby and Richard Verney (now a knight) agreed to put themselves under the arbitration of the abbot of Kenilworth, who made an award whereby the land at issue was conferred on Verney in exchange for an annuity to be paid to Dalby.21 Carpenter, 461-2, 473; KB9/94/1, m. 9; 270, m. 66; KB27/768, rot. 61; 769, rot. 69; C1/28/481-2. Even so, Sir Richard was not content; during the civil conflict of 1460-1 he took the opportunity to launch an attack on his rival. Dalby’s political affiliations at this time are uncertain. In the spring of 1460 he had contracted to go to Guînes in Picardy in the company of the lieutenant, the Sussex landowner Nicholas Hussey, but in the event he failed to cross the Channel, and the letters of protection granted him on 8 Apr. were revoked a few weeks later. His onetime lord the duke of Buckingham was killed on the loyalist side at the battle of Northampton in July, but his current employer, the duke of Norfolk, favoured the victorious Yorkists. Whether he himself took the field is not known, but as it was only a few miles from his home this is at least a strong possibility.22 CPR, 1452-61, pp. 581-2.

The breakdown of order in the aftermath of the battle had serious consequences for our MP. If we are to believe the petitions of him and his wife Lucy, from August 1460 for at least the next 18 months the Verneys (notably Sir Richard and his eldest son Edmund) perpetrated the most appalling series of acts of aggression against them. Dalby related his sufferings at the hands of the Verneys in depositions addressed to the chancellor Bishop Neville early in Edward IV’s reign. He stated that not only had Sir Richard failed to keep to the award made by the abbot of Kenilworth, but for some 15 years he had also neglected to pay him rent for parcels of land he had purchased in Compton, and his enmity had taken a violent turn. On 17 May 1461, as he and his wife were coming out of their parish church, Edmund Verney had appeared with 12 armed men and assaulted them, and on another occasion Lucy was attacked on her way to church and one of her servants was knifed in the churchyard. Sir Richard’s men stole fish and rabbits from Dalby’s servants, and so threatened them at harvest-time that they were unable to work. Then, at Christmas following, ‘being than a grete snowe’, Verney sent his men to Brookhampton, seized 400 sheep and 12 ‘grete yoked oxen’, and impounded them for three days without food or water, so that half the beasts died of cold and hunger. Dalby’s difficulties had been compounded since Verney was a man ‘of grete myght and power’ in Warwickshire, and the under sheriff, Edward Duraunt*, was of his covin, and would not sue process against him. Furthermore, since Dalby himself ‘was with my lord of Norfolk and was his receiver and might not come home’, the burden for suing for remedy had fallen on his wife. Dalby hastened to assure the chancellor that the lordship of Neville’s brother the earl of Warwick had ‘gretly eased’ him, but in fact there is no sign that Warwick ever did anything positive in response to his appeals. Indeed, Dalby seems to have been badly let down by his aristocratic employers. The duke of Norfolk had apparently transferred his estate at Kineton to (Sir) John Howard*, who at Michaelmas 1460 had granted the lease to Verney, giving the latter some legal justification for his actions and ousting the Dalbys from a tenure which dated back over 70 years. There seemed little Dalby could do to gain redress. Verney was put in Warwick gaol in October 1461, only to be promptly released on making security of the peace, and although a commission of arrest for him and his kinsmen was issued in April following, it seems to have proved impossible to restrain them, and molestations of our MP’s person and servants continued for another two years or more. In a search for better protection, in May 1463 Dalby secured appointment by the King’s mother, the duchess of York, as her feodary.23 C1/27/359, 28/481-2; Carpenter, 496-7; CPR, 1461-7, p. 202.

Perhaps as a consequence of his finding support at court, for a while Dalby gained the upper hand. On two occasions in 1463 Verney was required to find pledges, each in £100, that he would appear in Chancery to answer Dalby’s accusations, and he was bound over in £500 not to do our MP any harm.24 C244/97, nos. 28, 31. Dalby brought a bill in King’s bench in October 1465 against Verney, alleging that on 1 June 1461 he had unlawfully seized 50 acres of his land at Kineton, and depastured 100 acres of meadow with his livestock. He claimed damages of £200. But although Verney was held in the custody of the marshal for a while, the case did not come to judgement.25 KB27/818, rot. 117. Nor was the feud to be settled in Dalby’s lifetime. Matters were made worse when he fell out with his erstwhile ally William Verney, who was outlawed at his suit for a debt of £39.26 CPR, 1461-7, p. 511. Their falling out caused the dispute to take a new turn, for in 1468 William made another sale of the land at Upton, Ratley and Kites Hardwick, which Dalby had purchased from him in the 1440s. The new buyer was (Sir) Richard Harcourt*, of the prominent Oxfordshire family, to whom the neighbouring manor of Shotteswell had been granted by Edward IV. In 1468 Harcourt impleaded Dalby on charges of forging documents and taking his crops on the land in question, and it was probably Harcourt’s proximity to the King that now prevented Dalby from holding his own. He was outlawed, although he protested that there had been error in the process and obtained in May 1470 an order to Chief Justice Danby to investigate.27 CCR, 1468-76, no. 111; Carpenter, 509; KB27/836, rots. 36d, 71.

Dalby’s professional standing suffered decline in this period. From having been feodary to the King’s mother, he now occupied the post of mere deputy feodary in the honour of Leicester. Nor did matters improve in the years to follow. At some point in 1472-3, while Edmund Verney was escheator of Warwickshire, Dalby was imprisoned on suspicion of felony laid against him by Verney and his father Sir Richard, and because the sheriff, John Hugford†, was in league with the Verneys, he refused to grant him bail. Dalby had to petition the chancellor (at an unknown date after May 1474) for a writ of corpus cum causa.28 C1/64/131. His last years were clouded by other difficulties, and a quarrel between him and Magdalen College over their respective rights to the manor of Westcote ended in favour of the college in 1476.29 VCH Warws. v. 177.

Dalby died on 28 Jan. 1477. It would appear, if the findings of inquisitions post mortem (delayed for nearly four years) have been correctly interpreted, that towards the end of his life Edward IV had forced him into a compromise that would eventually bring to an end this long-running saga. Feoffees dominated by the King’s associates conveyed the manor of Kites Hardwick and some 400 acres of land and six messuages in Upton and Ratley, which Dalby had disputed with Harcourt, to Dalby’s widow and her second husband John Crowland for her lifetime. However, this settlement was challenged by Edmund Verney, whose men entered Dalby’s inherited estates at Brookhampton and elsewhere.30 C140/78/89; E149/243/18. In yet more lawsuits it was alleged that the Dalbys seized 200 sheep from Edmund Verney after he had pastured them on their land.31 Carpenter, 534-5; CP40/864, rot. 481d; 870 rot. 274. The later history of the various holdings makes it clear that the disputed property was subsequently lost to the Dalbys, though our MP’s own inheritance continued in his family in the person of his son Robert.32 VCH Warws. v. 106, 145.