BURGH, John III

In two generations the Burghs were transformed from a minor Westmorland family into one of the principal gentry families of Shropshire. Our MP’s father came to the latter county as a result of the marriage of the daughter and heiress of his lord, the northern magnate, Thomas Neville, Lord Furnival, to John Talbot, later Lord Talbot and earl of Shrewsbury, and it was a combination of service to the Talbots and two excellent marriages that advanced the Burghs. Our MP’s godparents exemplify his father’s close connexion with the Talbots. His godfathers were John, Lord Talbot, himself, and Laurence Merbury, chancellor of Ireland under Talbot. However, it was not Talbot who ensured that the young Burgh prospered when, at the age of 16, he inherited the family patrimony.8 C139/72/43. It is not known how long his inheritance was burdened by the interest of his stepmother, Agnes, only that she had assignment of dower in Card. on 23 Sept. 1430: SC6/1161/3, m. 1d. His wardship passed to the Crown and he benefited significantly from his time as a ward. On 5 Dec. 1430 the Crown committed the keeping of his maternal inheritance to a syndicate of four, headed by Joan, widow of Sir William Clopton, at a discounted annual rent of £44 p.a. The close connexions of Joan and two other of the grantees, John Throckmorton I*, Joan’s nephew, and the King’s attorney-general, John Vampage*, with Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, suggest that the earl may have been responsible for securing the grant.9 CFR, xvi. 21-22. If so, the earl’s intervention was to the ward’s benefit. Joan had two daughters by Clopton and, on the death of their brother, Thomas, they had fallen coheiresses to the Clopton patrimony and a share of the Besford inheritance spread over the counties of Shropshire, Warwickshire, Worcestershire, Gloucestershire and Staffordshire. Joan’s decision to marry her ward to the remaining unmarried daughter thus represented for Burgh as materially good a marriage as he could reasonably have hoped to make.10 CIPM, xxi. 245-9. The marriage had probably been made by 18 Jan. 1432 when Joan joined Burgh among the grantees of two tenements in Shrewsbury: Salop Archs., Deeds 6000/3850.

Burgh’s proof of age was taken at Shrewsbury on 28 June 1435, only eight days after the issue of the writ for its taking.11 CIPM, xxiv. 394. It is possible that he was serving in France at this date. One of his seals is said to have described him as lord of Clonde and lieutenant of Cherbourg, and, if this seal has been correctly identified, then our MP was the holder of the Cherbourg lieutenancy under the captaincy of Thomas, Lord Scales, in 1436.12 Trans. Salop Arch. Soc. xxxviii. 210. John Burgh was lieutenant by Nov. 1435 and served beyond the following July: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, fr. 25772/998; E28/70/89; CPR, 1429-36, p. 533; E403/721, m. 17; A.E. Curry, ‘Military Organization in Lancastrian Normandy’ (Council for National Academic Awards Ph.D. thesis, 1985), ii, p. lxiii. Other evidence, however, implies that the lieutenant was an experienced soldier who came from Colthorp in Yorkshire: it is surely more than coincidental that, in his will of 1438, the latter named Richard Hayton, one of the Cherbourg garrison, as his executor.13 Add. Ch. 11918; CPR, 1441-6, pp. 112-13. John Burgh of Colthorpe began his military career in 1415, was captured by the French in c.1431 and died in 1438: E159/208, recogniciones, Trin. Further, if our MP was the lieutenant, he was absent from his post for at least the later part of 1436. In August 1436 he was at Blackmere, in company with (Sir) Christopher Talbot* and Thomas Corbet II*, attending to the business of his godfather, John, Lord Talbot; and, two months later, he received into his household at Wattlesburgh Corbet’s widow, Ankaret, Lord Talbot’s niece.14 Salop Archs., Bridgwater pprs. 212/Box 76, nos. 9, 10.

Whether or not our MP was the soldier, in 1441 he emerged to a sudden prominence in the affairs of his native shire. In the summer of that year he was at Shrewsbury, when he appeared personally to defend an assize of novel disseisin for a messuage there sued against him by another of the county’s leading figures, Sir Richard Lacon*.15 The borough authorities spent 3s. 5d. on wine to entertain the litigants: Salop Archs., Shrewsbury recs., bailiffs’ accts. 3365/377, m. 1. Burgh retained a connexion with Shrewsbury throughout his career. In 1447 his wife was entertained by the borough authorities on a visit there, and, in 1457-8, he sold four oak trees to the borough for the reconstruction of the Welsh bridge: ibid. m. 6d; 3365/385, mm. 1, 2d. In the following September Humphrey Stafford, earl of Stafford, of whose lordship of Caus he held a large part of his Shropshire estates, retained him at a generous annual fee of ten marks (assigned on that lordship) to provide armed men as required and serve him before all others in England. Two months later, perhaps not coincidentally, he was named as sheriff even though his only recorded experience of local government was a single appointment, in 1439, to a commission of gaol delivery.16 Rawcliffe, 232; C47/34/2. His fee from Stafford appears to have had no impact on his old attachment to the Talbots. On 18 Jan. 1442 he conducted the Shropshire election which saw the return of Sir Christopher Talbot. On the following 26 Sept. he headed the witnesses to a quitclaim made to Lord Talbot, now earl of Shrewsbury, and, on 17 Oct. 1443, he accompanied the earl’s son, Sir John Talbot, to Shrewsbury for a session of the peace.17 C219/15/2; Deeds, 6000/2803; Shrewsbury bailiffs’ accts. 3365/377, m. 3.

The formal division of the Clopton inheritance took place on 7 Feb. 1444, when an indenture was drawn up between the coheirs and Sir William Clopton’s feoffees, John Throckmorton I and William Wollashull*. The division was a curious one. Given the location of our MP’s estates, it might have been expected that he would be assigned Sir William’s Shropshire holdings. These, however, were settled on his wife’s sister, Agnes, and her second husband, Thomas Herbert*. Burgh and his wife took the lands in Warwickshire, principally the manor of Moor Hall, and Gloucestershire, centred on the manors of Radbroke and Clopton.18 Bodl. Dugdale mss, 15, p. 165. With new estates formally in his hands our MP was probably one of the two richest members of the Shropshire gentry. The returns for the county to the 1450 tax on incomes are badly damaged, but, in that part of the document that can now be deciphered, the two wealthiest men were Burgh and Roger Kynaston, both assessed on annual incomes of 100 marks.19 E101/681/39. Much of our MP’s property lay near and over the Welsh border, but it would be unwise to take at face value the statement of jurors in his inquisition post mortem that several of his manors lay wasted ‘per latrones et Rebelles in Wallia’: C140/39/61. These were empty words routinely used to justify the undervaluation of property on the border. For the quick recovery in the value of Mawddwy, one of Burgh’s properties, after the Glyn Dwr rebellion: Bull. Bd. Celtic Studies, xxiii. 329-45. Such a finding is consistent with what else is known of the pattern of landholding in the county, and, with such wealth, Burgh was an obvious candidate both for knighthood (particularly if he is to be identified with the soldier) and election to Parliament. Both came at about the same time. He was returned as an esquire to the Parliament that met in February 1445, but he was a knight by the following July, when, between the second and third sessions of this long Parliament, he was added to the commission of the peace. The strong probability is that he was knighted at the coronation of Queen Margaret on 30 May.20 CFR, xvii. 326, 328; CPR, 1441-6, p. 477. His new standing was recognized by Stafford, then duke of Buckingham, who, in March 1447, appointed him as his steward in the lordship of Caus. He also formed an association with a lesser Shropshire peer, James Tuchet, Lord Audley. On 1 Dec. 1448 he headed the witnesses to an important family settlement made by Tuchet, and, by the spring of 1450, he was holding office as bailiff of his manor of Ford in company with a local lawyer.21 Salop Archs., Sutherland collection, 972/221/1/3; CCR, 1454-61, pp. 53-54.

On 26 Oct. 1451 Burgh entered into an agreement for a marriage between his youngest daughter, Elizabeth, and Thomas Mytton* of Shrewsbury. The bargain, made with the groom’s grandfather, William Burley II*, and stepfather, Roger Eyton*, was at first sight an uneven one: a substanial jointure of £20 p.a. was to be settled on the couple by the groom’s family in return for a modest portion of 70 marks, less than a quarter of what might reasonably be asked for so large a jointure. Further, our MP was to have the keeping of the groom’s inheritance – a substantial estate in Shrewsbury – to support the couple until they should be old enough to live independently. That the match should have been made on terms so unfavourable to the groom’s family may have arisen in part from a disparity in social rank as borough elite married into county elite. But the bride’s prospects of inheritance are likely to have been another determining factor: our MP, after some 20 years of marriage, seems to have had only daughters, and, if this was so, the strong possibility that Elizabeth would fall coheir must have influenced negotiations for her marriage.22 Trans. Salop Arch. Soc. xxxviii. 219-21. By this date at least one of his other daughters was also married. Some five years earlier, in February 1446, Burgh had headed the witnesses to a grant of the manor of High Ercall, in joint fee tail, to his own daughter, another Elizabeth, and her husband, William Newport, and in all probability the grant was an expression of a contemporaneous marriage indenture. His other two daughters were probably married at about the same date, the one to another member of the Shropshire gentry, John Leighton† of Stretton-en-le-Dale, and the other to John Lingen of Lingen in Herefordshire.23 Raby Castle, Staindrop mss, 2/8/48-9; C140/39/61.

On 1 Mar. 1453 Burgh returned himself to Parliament. It may be that, in making the return, he attempted to disguise the breach of statute this represented: the indenture describes the MP as ‘Sir John Burgh, son and heir of Hugh Burgh of Wattlesborough’, no doubt with the intention of falsely distinguishing him from the sheriff. This implies that he had a particular reason for sitting in this assembly, but this motive is not revealed in the surviving evidence. He also showed an interest in the next parliamentary hustings, heading the attestors to the Parliament summoned in the wake of the Yorkist victory at the first battle of St. Albans.24 C219/16/2, 3. This raises the question of Burgh’s political allegiance in the troubled years that followed. There is a suggestive but misleading reference in the Shrewsbury borough accounts. In 1456-7 Richard Stury*, as bailiff of Shrewsbury, confiscated a jacket of mail from one of our MP’s servants, guilty of an affray. Later, however, ‘ob amorem’ of the duke of York’s son, Edward, earl of March, he made restoration. Presumably Burgh’s servant was also a servant of the young earl, but, if the earl and our MP shared a servant, they were not political allies. Indeed, on 25 May 1458 Sir John was outlawed in Northamptonshire for his failure to answer the duke for debts totaling £180, a sign that he was not on the best of terms with his powerful neighbour.25 Shrewsbury bailiffs’ accts. 3365/899, rot. 15; CP40/783, rot. 545. This evidence aside, there are strong grounds for assigning our MP to the active supporters of Lancaster in the late 1450s. Not only was such an allegiance natural to one who served Talbot and Stafford, but the commissions to which he was appointed and, equally crucially, from which he was omitted, indicate that he was seen as a supporter of Henry VI. In the wake of the rout of the Yorkists at Ludford Bridge he was named to a commission of inquiry, headed by his lords, the duke of Buckingham and the 2nd earl of Shrewsbury, into treasons in Shropshire and neighbouring counties; he was appointed to the Lancastrian commission of array two months later; and early in 1460 he was nominated to two powerful commissions of oyer and terminer designed to investigate treasons in the Welsh and marcher lordships of the Yorkist lords.26 CPR, 1452-61, pp. 557, 558, 562, 564-5. His removal from the Shropshire bench after the Yorkists had restored their fortunes argues to the same point. Further, in view of his place in Buckingham’s retinue, it is a fair speculation that he was present at Ludford Bridge and at the battle of Northampton, where the duke met his death.27 Interestingly, on 17 July 1460, a week after Buckingham’s death, John Harper*, acting as the duke’s last surviving feoffee, named Burgh as attorney to deliver the lordship of Caus to Thomas Bourgchier, archbishop of Canterbury, and others: Cat. Med. Muns. Berkeley Castle ed. Wells-Furby (Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc.), ii. 947.

Although Burgh’s support for Lancaster did not go far enough to lead to his attainder in the first Parliament of the new reign, his standing suffered from the change of regime. He was excluded from the Shropshire commission of the peace, a mark of disfavour in the case of one of a shire’s wealthiest gentry, throughout the 1460s, and also from the ad hoc commissions of local government. In these circumstances, it is striking to find that he was pricked as sheriff of the county in 1463. The likely explanation is a shortage of suitable candidates – a consistent problem in the county – for all the other evidence suggests that he was compromised by his Lancastrian past. A Chancery petition reinforces this impression. It details his desperate measures to secure a husband for his illegitimate daughter, Anne. On 10 Mar. 1466 he seized a townsman of Shrewsbury, Degory Heyward, and imprisoned him at Wattlesborough, releasing him only when Heyward’s friends entered a bond in £200 that he would marry Anne. The marriage duly took place; none the less, after the deaths of our MP and his reluctant son-in-law, those who had joined Burgh in taking the bond (namely his sons-in-law, John Leighton and Thomas Mytton, and Laurence Roche, rector of Wem) sued upon it in the borough court of Shrewsbury, and Heyward’s sureties turned to the chancellor for redress.28 C1/47/80.

A now lost letter, written by Burgh to his son-in-law, William Newport, at an unknown date in the 1460s, shows Burgh’s concern for a more conventional marriage to be contracted between a daughter of Sir Robert Harcourt* and John Newport, probably William’s son. He wrote that he ‘wolde be right glade to do that lieth in me’ to bring the match about, and it is easy to understand his enthusiasm. Harcourt was a prominent Yorkist, and our MP badly needed to build bridges with the new government.29 Powysland Club Collns. i. 97. Nothing came of these negotiations, but Burgh did find a measure of political rehabilitation through marriage. In the mid 1460s, he made a surprising match of his own. His new wife, of unknown paternity, was the widow of William Port, whose remarkable career had seen him rise from fellow of New College, Oxford, to servant of Cardinal Beaufort and, finally, to treasurer of the royal chamber in the first years of Edward IV. Porte had no geographical links with Shropshire – his documented landholdings lay in Surrey, Hampshire and Kent – and the relationships which brought about his widow’s unlikely match can only be imagined. The important point here, however, is that Burgh now had his much-needed connexion with the new regime.30 For Port: G.L. Harriss, Cardinal Beaufort, 360; Biog. Reg. Univ. Oxf. ed. Emden, 1501; VCH Hants. iii. 96; C1/48/285. He was alive as late as Apr. 1464: CPR, 1461-7, p. 326.

In the late 1460s Burgh seems to have made a conscious effort to draw his affairs into order. On 16 Oct. 1468 he sued out a general pardon, and, three weeks later, he did something that he should have done long before. On 5 Nov. he appeared in person in the court of common pleas to negate the outlawry that had been proclaimed against him ten years before at the suit of the late duke of York, producing a pardon, specific to the outlawry, bearing the same date. He produced sureties, headed by his son-in-law, Leighton, and the Shropshire lawyer, John Salter, for his reappearance later in the term, when the pardon was allowed when the fact of the plaintiff’s death was certified into court. In the same term he had pardons allowed for other outlawries, most notably that at the suit of Margaret (d.1467), countess of Shrewsbury, for failure to answer an action of account as receiver of her late son, Viscount Lisle.31 C67/46, m. 15; CP40/783, rots. 545, 545d; CPR, 1467-77, p. 79. The fact that our MP was able to wait so long before securing reversal of these outlawries is an indication of the ineffectuality of outlawry at suit of party. While an outlaw, Burgh had served as a j.p. and as sheriff and pursued actions of his own in the central courts.32 The most significant of these actions was one of maintenance against Sir John Greville of New Milcote, Warws.: CP40/820, rot. 172d; 822, rot. 400d.

In March 1470 Burgh’s rehabilitation was completed by his nomination to the commission of array appointed in Shropshire to resist the rising of the duke of Clarence and the earl of Warwick.33 CPR, 1467-77, p. 219. This was his first appointment to a local commission since 1460, but, if one may judge by his reappointment to the county bench during Henry VI’s brief restoration, he had not outlived his Lancastrian past. His death on 1 June 1471 resolved his problems of temporal allegiance, although it was the beginning of the troubles of the wife through whom he sought their resolution.34 Writs of diem clausit extremum for his lands in Salop, Glos., Warws. and Worcs. were issued on 7 and 23 July, but, for reasons that are unclear, the Warws. writ was superseded by a special comm.: CFR, xxi. no. 3; CPR, 1467-77, p. 289.

Burgh’s widow was drawn into a lengthy dispute with the coheirs. With respect to our MP’s lands outside Shropshire, all of which had come to him through his first wife, there was no reason for dispute. They were to descend unencumbered to his coheirs by her, namely his daughters, Isabel, wife of Sir John Lingen, and Elizabeth, wife of Thomas Mytton, and his grandsons, John Newport and Thomas Leighton.35 C140/39/61. The only complication was occasioned by Leighton’s minority, and, on 21 Dec. 1471, the Crown committed the keeping of his share to his father, John Leighton, in recognition of John’s ‘great charges in the King’s service’: CPR, 1467-77, p. 294. In regard to Burgh’s patrimony in Shropshire, however, matters were complicated by the need to make provision for his widow, to whom he had promised a generous settlement. On 17 Aug. 1471 a Shropshire jury returned that a significant part of that estate, including the manor of Wattlesborough, had been conveyed by our MP to his four sons-in-law, the rector of Wem, and two others.36 Judging from the valuations in the inq., about 40% of the estate was in the hands of the feoffees: C140/39/61. The purpose of this feoffment was, unsurprisingly, to become one of the main points of contention between widow and coheirs. The widow claimed that the feoffees had been charged to make estate to her and her late husband in joint fee tail with remainder to Burgh’s right heirs; the coheirs, that the feoffor’s instructions bound them to make this conveyance only if the unfulfilled property on the Isle of Thanet (Kent), once of William Port, were settled on Burgh and Joan and their issue (with remainder to Burgh’s right heirs) and all the goods, jewels and obligations owned by Joan at the time of her marriage to our MP, were delivered to Burgh’s hands. When the dispute was presented to the chancellor, he ruled in the widow’s favour. In Hilary term 1474, he ordered the feoffees to make the required estate to Joan, and when Lingen failed to comply he required him to do so on heavy financial penalty. On 6 July the feoffees duly did as they were told, granting Joan a life interest in the enfeoffed property. A year later she gained more, as the escheator of Shropshire was ordered to assign her dower in what remained unenfeoffed.37 C1/44/243; C4/1/74; CPR, 1467-77, p. 394; CCR, 1468-76, nos. 1292, 1395.

More complicated was the parallel dispute over Burgh’s goods. In another petition to the chancellor, Joan claimed that Thomas Mytton, acting on the pretext of a letter of sequestration, had forcibly taken from Wattlesborough many of the goods not only of our MP but also of her first husband. To recover them she had been obliged to give bonds in 100 marks each both to Mytton and Lingen, calling upon several burgesses of Shrewsbury to act as her sureties; Mytton and Lingen had then sued these sureties in the Shrewsbury borough court and the court of common pleas; and the defendants, as indemnity against condemnation, retained the recovered goods.38 C1/48/24; 55/173, 177. In their replication Mytton and Lingen gave a different account. They claimed that Joan, fearing for the goods at Wattlesborough, since it was ‘withynne a litle space from the marche of Wales’, commissioned Mytton to collect them. Mytton did so, delivering the bulk of them to Joan at Shrewsbury. He and Lingen then sought to reach agreement with her, as the three of them were jointly in receipt of letters of sequestration, for the making of the necessary inventories of Burgh’s goods. Joan asked them that they renounce their part in the will’s execution and allow her to sue out letters of administration to her alone. Since, as husbands of two of Burgh’s daughters with a consequent right on the part of their wives to a share of the goods, they accepted (after the mediation of the abbot of Shrewsbury) payments of 100 marks each as the price of their agreement, and it was for this reason that the disputed bonds were made.39 C1/55/177. In the summer of 1476 witnesses were called into Chancery, and their testimony supported the story told in the replication but, at the same time, suggested that Mytton and Lingen had behaved improperly in taking bonds from Joan for sole administration. Regrettably, the chancellor’s verdict is unknown.40 C1/48/24; 55/172-7.

It is not known when Joan died. Her survival may, however, have been a factor in the long delay in dividing her late husband’s estate. The formal division did not take place until May 1501, when it was finally achieved by the drawing of lots at Ludlow. The Leightons took the manor of Wattlesborough and the bulk of the Shropshire estates with the manor of Clopton in Gloucestershire; the Lingens had most of the rest of the Shropshire estates with part of the Warwickshire lands of our MP’s first wife; the Newports’ portion consisted of lands in South Wales and Worcestershire; and the Myttons had the manor of Moor Hall in Warwickshire with land in North Wales. Curiously the division was not made on any thing like strictly geographical grounds: each of the four portions contained some Shropshire lands.41 Trans. Salop Arch. Soc. xxxviii. 214-19. The division was long remembered as a significant event. John Leland, writing in the 1530s, noted that Newport of Archhaul and Mytton of Cotton by Shrewsbury, ‘had Syr John Boroues landes in Shropshir and Warwik. Mytton had his best house More Haul in Warwicshire’: J. Leland, Itin. ed. Toulmin Smith, iii. 66.