HAYTFELD, Stephen

A study of Haytfeld’s career poses a number of intransigent problems of identification, mainly because before his marriage to the thrice-widowed heiress Isabel Russell he did not figure in the records of the counties in southern England where she held land. That he came from Yorkshire is clear, for he was styled ‘of Yorkshire, esquire’, in 1423, and in a suit brought in the court of common pleas 25 years later he was described as formerly ‘of Risby’ (in the East Riding), but at that time residing in Oxfordshire.7 CP40/749, rot. 174. Stephen was a forename often used by the Haytfelds of Holderness, who had earlier numbered among their more distinguished kinsmen Thomas Haytfeld, the bishop of Durham (d.1381).8 Poulson, i. 442-3; Vis. of the North, iii (Surtees Soc. cxliv), 165-6. If he was the yr. s. of the William Haytfeld who died in 1402, he was bro. of Robert (d.1451), and uncle of another Stephen Haytfeld (d.1492) of Skeckling: Test. Ebor, v (Surtees Soc. lxxix), 1. If the MP did belong to this particular northern family, he must have been a younger son, who made a career for himself through military service. A major opportunity for advancement for men in similar circumstances arose from Henry V’s invasion of Normandy in 1415, and indeed on 29 Apr. that year a Stephen Haytfeld, almost certainly the future MP, indented to join the royal army with another man-at-arms and six archers he had himself conscripted. Payment was made at the Exchequer for their first quarter’s wages, and the treasurer of the King’s chamber delivered to Haytfeld certain items of silver and plate as pledge for their dues for the second quarter. Haytfeld lost two of his men on the battlefield at Agincourt or earlier in the campaign, but eventually accounted for wages for 140 days from 8 July to 24 Nov., the date of his disembarkation at Dover.9 E101/47/16; E404/31/313.

It is unlikely that Haytfeld returned to Normandy with the forces led by the King two years later, for before the autumn of 1417 he had the good fortune to reach the notice of the King’s brother, John, duke of Bedford, who remained in England as Henry’s lieutenant while he was away. Bedford recruited Haytfeld into his service, and it was as one of the duke’s esquires that in this year or the next he received a gift of as much as £4 6s. 8d. from Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick.10 Egerton roll 8773, m. 5d. A member of the army commanded by Bedford in May 1420, he mustered at Southampton with two esquires and seven yeomen in his company,11 E101/49/36. and was assigned the captaincy of Exmes during the campaigns of the later months of that year, before sailing back to England with the duke and King early in 1421. Letters of protection issued on 16 Apr. 1422 attest to his departure for France yet again, once more in Bedford’s retinue, and he was probably still overseas when Henry V died at Troyes at the end of August.12 DKR, xliv. 638. Bedford was henceforth to spend long stretches of time in France in the 1420s and early 1430s, acting as regent for his young nephew Henry VI, but although Haytfeld periodically joined the ducal household there his private interests and intermittent role in local government sometimes required his presence at home.

It would seem that Haytfeld’s advantageous marriage was contracted before he sailed in 1422, for when in the previous June he had been party to a recognizance to guarantee the appearance of a defendant in the tolsey court at Bristol, this was in association with Nicholas Alderley, a man who had long been a trusted friend of his wife’s father, the late Sir Maurice Russell, and remained a feoffee of the Russell estates of which Isabel was a coheiress.13 CCR, 1419-22, p. 200. When Sir Maurice had died in 1416, she and her sister, Margaret, then the wife of Sir Gilbert Denys† of Siston, had inherited the valuable estate at Dyrham in Gloucestershire which had been entailed on the issue of Sir Maurice and his first wife (their mother) more than 45 years earlier, and the two women accordingly partitioned the estate between them.14 C138/17/61; 27/43; E149/107/12; The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 251-3. For the time being the rest of the widespread Russell estates, in Somerset and Dorset, remained in royal wardship during the minority of their half-brother Thomas, and there seemed little prospect that Isabel and Margaret would ever succeed to them. But besides her share of Dyrham, Isabel brought to her fourth husband Haytfeld the fruits of her three earlier marriages. The first, to William le Scrope, the first son and heir-apparent of Richard, Lord Scrope of Bolton, who had been created earl of Wiltshire by Richard II, had ended with his execution and attainder in 1399 by order of Henry of Bolingbroke. Isabel had successfully petitioned Parliament for help in her widowhood, thereby receiving in 1404 a pension of £100 a year for life, and this annuity, charged on the Exchequer, had been confirmed by Henry V in 1413. It seems to have lapsed after the accession of Henry VI,15 CPR, 1401-5, p. 466; SC8/22/1076; RP, iii. 483-4 (cf. PROME, viii. 317). but she may have also received financial support from the late earl’s family, the Scropes. Thus it may not have been entirely coincidental that Haytfeld himself had dealings with this northern family, albeit with its branch at Masham. On 19 Feb. 1423 he appeared in the Exchequer alongside Sir John Scrope, as a mainpernor for the lessees of lands previously held by Scrope’s parents. Sir John later successfully recovered the entailed estates and title of Lord Scrope of Masham, forfieted for treason by his brother Lord Henry (exec.1415), whereupon he granted Haytfeld an annual fee of £9 6s. 8d. from the Yorkshire manor of South Muskham.16 CFR, xv. 28; E163/7/31/2, no. 23.

Isabel had married twice more after the death of the earl of Wiltshire, thereby steadily accumulating lands and wealth. On her marriage in 1400 to Thomas de la River, the son and heir of Sir Henry de la River†, she had received in jointure the manors of Tormarton and Acton Turville in Gloucestershire, worth at least £25 p.a.,17 The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 215-16; C138/27/43; C139/81/43. and her third husband, Sir John Drayton, whom she married in about 1409, settled on her for life the Oxfordshire manor and advowson of Nuneham Courtenay, worth at least £50 p.a., together with the manor of Burghfield and lands and rents at Shinfield and elsewhere in Berkshire, providing further, undocumented revenues.18 The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 794-7; CIMisc. vii. 543; Harl. Chs. 47 C 4; 49 F 35; VCH Berks. iii. 400. Marriage thus made Haytfeld a wealthy man, found by the tax assessors of the mid 1430s to enjoy an annual income of £167 derived from lands in eight counties, ranging from Northumberland in the far north to Hampshire and Dorset in the south, and including the two shires he represented in Parliament.19 E159/212, recorda Hil. rot. 14 (ix).

Isabel, who, proud of her status, liked to be addressed as ‘Lady Scrope’, clearly had much to offer to her fourth husband in terms of social standing and income, yet it remains uncertain what Haytfeld might have offered in return, save for his position in the retinue of the King’s uncle. Presumably he was her personal choice, and one made on her part without consideration of material gain. She may by then have been beyond child-bearing age. Unreliable evidence given at inquisitions post mortem place her birth in the late 1380s, and her surviving children, Maurice de la River and the two Drayton girls, were born in Henry IV’s reign.20 E149/107/12; C139/55/39. After the death of Sir John Drayton in 1417 Isabel allegedly concealed the wherabouts of her daughters, Sir John’s under-age coheiresses, and disputed with the Crown possession of the Drayton estate in Oxfordshire. The manor of Nuneham Courtenay was taken into the King’s hand, but on 17 Feb. 1423, just two days before Haytfeld ‘of Yorkshire’ appeared in the Exchequer as a mainpernor with Scrope, he and Isabel obtained in the same place custody of the manor and its issues with effect from Drayton’s death, after the Crown’s lawyers finally accepted that Sir John had granted the manor to her and certain feoffees to hold in fee simple, and she had since been left in sole possession. On 14 May the trespasses committed in connexion with these transactions were pardoned for a substantial fine of 40 marks, and the Haytfelds received a royal licence henceforth to hold the manor jointly, with remainder to Isabel’s heirs. They decided to make a quick profit, albeit one which meant Haytfeld would lose Nuneham after his wife died. Within two years they sold the reversionary interest, to fall in at Isabel’s death, to Thomas Chaucer*, who had purchased the marriage of one of the heiresses from the Crown.21 CFR, xv. 32; CPR, 1422-9, pp. 97, 280; VCH Oxon. v. 240. Haytfeld and his wife helped her son, Maurice de la River, who was still a minor, to make arrangements for the modification of ordinances governing the chantry established in the parish church of Tormarton by his ancestors, by obtaining in September 1423 a papal mandate to the bishop of Worcester to approve the new rule.22 CPL, vii. 283-4. Nevertheless, Isabel kept possession of Maurice’s inheritance until she died.

By late 1423 Haytfeld had returned to Normandy, where he served for about six months as captain at Exmes. Although he came back home to take up office as sheriff of Gloucestershire in November 1424, after the end of his term he undertook further periods of military service in France, as is indicated by the royal letters of protection he obtained on 28 Oct. 1426 and renewed in March 1428 and January 1430. These letters all refer to him as a member of the retinue of the Regent, Bedford.23 DKR, xlviii. 244, 255, 257, 265. These letters raise doubts that he was the Stephen Haytfeld appointed constable of Dunstanburgh castle in Feb. 1427. He was not in France when the King was crowned there in December 1431, for by then he had undertaken further administrative duties in the south of England, notably a second term as sheriff of Gloucestershire, beginning the previous month. No doubt he was anxious to be at home to look out for the interests of his wife with regard to her Russell inheritance. In May that year Isabel’s half-brother Thomas, still under-age, had died, leaving his widow pregnant with their only child. This child, a daughter, died just two days after she was born early in 1432, whereupon a flurry of inquisitions sought to establish who were the next heirs to the different parts of the Russell estates, with Isabel Haytfeld and her older sister Margaret, now the wife of John Kemys*, seeking to establish their title. Their stepmother, Joan Dauntsey (wife successively of Sir John Stradling and John Dewall*), retained a substantial dower portion, and Thomas’s widow Joan was assigned another (although when she and her new husband John Chambre sued them for dower in the Dorset manor of Bradpole they riposted that as Thomas had never had seisin they need not comply). More seriously, the descent of certain manorial holdings was restricted by entails to the male line. It was eventually concluded, in November 1432, that the advowson of Horsington in Somerset pertained to the sisters, but that one moiety of the manor there ought to pass to the heir male, Sir Theobald Gorges alias Russell* and the other to the heir general, their more obscure cousin, John Haket. Haket was also to take possession of some of the Russell estates in Dorset, notably the manor of Kingston Russell, the hundred of Redhone and Beaminster Forum and property at Bradpole.24 C139/55/39; CFR, xvi. 88, 98-99, 124-32; CP40/696, rot. 108. It was clearly to Haytfeld’s advantage that the current treasurer was his patron, John, Lord Scrope of Masham, who probably arranged his appointment as escheator of Gloucestershire on 5 Nov. 1432, thus enabling him to have control over his wife’s inheritance in that county; indeed, he was the recipient of writs regarding the same just two weeks later. The sisters began negotiating with Haket to obtain his release of certain of the estates, and in May 1434 they and their husbands took possession from their father’s feoffees of the manors of Yaverland, Rouburgh and Wathe on the Isle of Wight, and obtained a royal licence to put other of their holdings, including the manor of Dyrham, land in Horsington and the advowsons of Horsington church and the free chapel of South Cheriton, Somerset, into the hands of their own nominees. This they did in transactions completed early in the next year. Then, in November 1435, an agreement was reached whereby the Haytfelds were confirmed in possession of two-thirds of the manors on the Isle of Wight and of Bradpole in Dorset for life, with remainder to John Cottesmore, j.c.p.25 CPR, 1429-36, pp. 367-8; CP25(1)/292/68/161, 195. The Haytfelds had been connected with Cottesmore for some time. In 1432, for instance, the three of them had brought an action in the court of common pleas against Elizabeth, widow of Sir John Blaket†, for the theft of livestock and goods at Churchill in Oxfordshire worth £40.26 CP40/686, rot. 352d; 691, rot. 22; 699, rot. 586d. Even so, it is unclear why Isabel should have thus disinherited her children in Cottesmore’s favour, unless spurred on by financial considerations she needed to sell.

While escheator, early in 1433 Haytfeld was appointed during royal pleasure as joint steward of Chepstow and Tidenham, then in the King’s gift owing to the minority of the duke of Norfolk, the grant being made by bill of the treasurer, Haytfeld’s patron Lord Scrope.27 CPR, 1429-36, p. 252. His former commander, the duke of Bedford, came back to England in the summer, and presided over the Parliament summoned to meet on 8 July. Two weeks earlier Haytfeld had been elected shire knight for Oxfordshire, fulfilling the residential qualification by virtue of his tenure of the Drayton estate there. While the second session was in progress in November he was made sheriff of that county and Berkshire, while other tasks in the locality followed on from the business of the Parliament, after its dissolution, notably the requirement for the MPs to compile lists of those of standing in their shires who ought to take the oath not to maintain law-breakers, and to administer the same. More important, Haytfeld was among a select group of knights and esquires called to attend meetings of the great council held in late April and early May 1434 in the parliament chamber at Westminster, at which the duke of Gloucester’s criticisms about the conduct of the war in France led to a heated debate with his brother the duke of Bedford. In view of Haytfeld’s links with the latter, we may perhaps assume that he supported him in this dialogue, although along with all the others present he subscribed his name to the young King’s ruling that in the interests of harmony between his uncles everything that had been put in writing should be rendered null and void. There is no evidence that Haytfeld sailed back to Normandy again after the end of his shrievalty, and when, following Bedford’s death in 1435, a decision was taken to dispatch an army under the leadership of Richard, duke of York, as lieutenant-general, Haytfeld was requested for a loan of £50 to help finance the expedition rather than to return to the field himself.28 PPC, iv. 213, 329.

Haytfeld’s second election to Parliament, this time for the county of Berkshire, where he was currently a j.p., took place during his wife’s lifetime. The Parliament, which met from 21 Jan. to 27 Mar. 1437, was mainly concerned with the situation across the Channel, but to Haytfeld his private affairs assumed greater importance when his wife died in May. Isabel’s sale of the reversion of Nuneham took immediate effect, with the transfer of the manor to Thomas Chaucer’s daughter and heiress, the countess of Suffolk; and Haytfeld had to relinquish to his stepson Maurice de la River the latter’s paternal inheritance in Gloucestershire.29 C139/81/43; 82/47; E149/161/12; CFR, xv. 346. Isabel was buried next to her 3rd husband, Drayton, in Dorchester abbey, Oxon.: Mon. Brasses ed. Mill Stephenson, 404. Naturally enough, Maurice sought to oust him from the former Russell estates too, perhaps at first by force, since in June 1446 Haytfeld was required to enter recognizances to his stepson in the huge sum of £2,000, and to answer his suit in the court of common pleas in the following Hilary term. Maurice claimed that the descent of Bradpole and the Dorset hundred were governed by entail, and ought therefore to have passed to him on the death of his mother. Haytfeld contested this, but verdict was given for the plaintiff in the Michaelmas term.30 CCR, 1441-7, p. 397; CP40/744, rot. 279; 747, rot. 652.Although left in severely reduced circumstances, the MP did secure confirmation of his tenure of the Hampshire manors which had been settled on him for life, and under the terms of those earlier settlements he presumably also obtained, on the death of Joan Dewall in 1457, some of the Russell lands which she held in dower.31 CCR, 1435-41, pp. 141, 143; 1454-61, pp. 161-2; CPR, 1436-41, p. 99; C139/163/1, 6; 166/25.

At the request of the Commons, on the last day of the Parliament, 27 Mar. 1437, Henry VI granted his first general pardon, covering all offences committed before September 1431. Haytfeld took advantage of the grant, by suing out a pardon on 15 June, within a few weeks of his wife’s death.32 PROME, xi. 220-1; C67/38, m. 15. Although he ceased to be appointed to royal commissions and offices in southern England, with the exception of a single reappointment to the Berkshire bench, a new phase of his career began on his entry to the King’s household, where he was listed among the esquires of the chamber and hall from 1438 to 1452 (when the records cease).33 E101/408/25, f. 7; 409/9, 11, 16; 410/1, 3, 6, 9. If it was indeed he who held the constableship of Dunstanburgh, his authority there also suffered diminution in 1437, for in July the post was granted jointly to Ralph Babthorpe, who was to hold it for life. Following Babthorpe’s death at St. Albans in 1455, Haytfeld appears to have again been sole constable until Sir Ralph Percy, 4th son of the earl of Northumberland, who had been doing duty at the castle as his deputy, was elevated to joint constable on 12 Mar. 1457: Somerville, i. 538. He attached himself to the treasurer of the Household, John Stourton II*, created Baron Stourton in 1448, and it was as ‘of Stourton, Wiltshire’ (that lord’s seat), that on 1 May 1455 he offered mainprise at the Exchequer for Stourton’s younger son, Sir Reynold, then granted keeping of the profits of the rabbit warrens in Groveley forest.34 CFR, xix. 131. Significantly, he and his fellow mainpernor, Thomas Hardgill*, both represented Dorset boroughs in the Parliament which assembled two months later – with Hardgill sitting for Melcombe Regis, and Haytfeld for Shaftesbury. There can be little doubt that they owed their returns to Stourton. While Haytfeld no longer had any territorial stake in Dorset, the Stourtons exercised considerable influence over the parliamentary representation of the shire and its boroughs in this period.

Whether Haytfeld was in the north of England when he died on 8 Nov. 1460 is not known, although it is at least possible, given its timing in a period of civil war, that his death was a violent one. Inquistions post mortem were not held in Hampshire until over a year later, after the accession of Edward IV. These recorded his tenure for life of the three Russell manors on the Isle of Wight. His heir was said to be his brother John, aged over 50.35 CFR, xx. 1; C140/1/10; VCH Hants, v. 207.