CERF, John

Cerf hailed from a family of small freeholders established at Newhay near Hemingbrough since at least the reign of Edward III.4 T. Burton, Hist. Hemingbrough, ed. Raine, 300. He made his career in the Exchequer, far exceeding the achievements of any earlier member of his family. No early patron can be identified, but he was active there by Michaelmas term 1412 when he appeared as an attorney for the sheriff of Yorkshire, Sir Thomas Rokeby*. He soon attracted further clients. In 1417, for example, he represented Sir William Asenhill* in a suit over unpaid parliamentary wages and Sir Edmund Hastings* as former sheriff of Yorkshire. By then he was well enough established to secure a royal lease, albeit a very minor one: on 17 Nov. 1417 he had the keeping of a ruinous cottage in Selby near Hemingbrough (the forfeiture of an outlaw) for an annual rent of 2s.5 E159/189, adventus Mich. rot. 1; E13/133, rots. 9d, 19; CFR, xiv. 215. At this date his local connexions lay chiefly in his native county. In May 1417 he was described as resident there when offering mainprise for another Yorkshire lawyer, Christopher Boynton; and a few months later he discharged the same function when Robert Middleton was named as alnager in Yorkshire and York.6 CFR, xiv. 197, 199. His marriage to a local bride is probably also to be assigned to about this date: he espoused a daughter of a neighbour from Cawood, only a few miles from Hemingbrough, and the kinswoman, perhaps the sister, of Robert Cawood, another Exchequer clerk.7 Burton, 300. Robert Cawood, who began his career in the Exchequer at about the same time as our MP, was clerk of the pipe from 1431 to 1449: E13/133, rot. 19; PRO List ‘Exchequer Offs.’, 63.

Cerf, however, also had interests in Northumberland. In November 1420 he was named as escheator there, and three months later he was described as of that county when he entered into a recognizance with the King that royal rights would be honoured in respect of the marriage of Alice Cramlington of Cramlington, a few miles to the north of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. What is not clear is whether he held property in the county in his own right; it is known only that, while serving as escheator, he was granted the keeping of land there in royal wardship. On 17 July 1422 Henry V committed to him the wardship and marriage of John, the young son and heir of a wealthy Newcastle merchant and landholder, Thomas Hebburn†. Since the heir was a mere infant this grant was a potentially valuable one, and our MP had acted quickly to obtain it for it was made only 16 days after Thomas’s death.8 CCR, 1419-22, pp. 136-7; CFR, xiv. 437; CIPM, xxii. 127. Later in the same year he again exploited his local knowledge. On 19 Nov. he secured a royal grant of the wardship and marriage of the young son of John Lisle, son and heir-apparent of the Northumbrian knight, Sir Robert Lisle†, despite the fact that no writ had yet been issued for inquiry into John’s lands.9 CFR, xv. 20; CIPM, xxii. 17. His own landholdings in the county are scarcely documented. In 1426 he sued two husbandmen for retaking a horse he had seized for service they owed him at Hawkwell near Stamfordham, but this action probably accrued to him as the Lisle guardian: CP40/661, rot. 179d.

Northumberland was, however, too remote a base for one who hoped to make a career in the Exchequer. Indeed, it may be that Cerf only fitfully discharged his responsibilities for, throughout his tenure of the office, he periodically acted as Exchequer attorney, routinely appearing for the sheriffs of the northern counties when they came to make their proffers at Easter and Michaelmas.10 e.g. E159/197, adventus Easter rot. 1; 200, adventus Mich. rot. 1. On 13 Nov. 1423 he was replaced as escheator, and a month later he surrendered his interest in the Hebburn wardship to Thomas Holden*, steward of Thomas Langley, bishop of Durham.11 CPR, 1422-9, p. 157. This surrender may not have taken effect. In 1428 Cerf was said to be seised of property at South Gosforth and West Newton, seemingly by virtue of the Hebburn wardship: Feudal Aids, iv. 83, 84. Further, the Lisle grant had probably been attractive to him, not because it brought him the wardship of further Northumbrian estates (John died before inheriting his patrimony), but because it added to his interests further south. The only property John Lisle had held at his death lay at Sawcliffe (in Risby) in north Lincolnshire, some 20 miles from Hemingbrough. And, although, after the death of his ward’s grandfather in 1425, he secured the keeping of the manor of Felton in Northumberland, he played no further recorded part in the affairs of that county.12 CFR, xv. 170-1; CIPM, xxii. 17, 537. In so far as he subsequently had a career in local administration it was in Yorkshire and, more particularly, Lincolnshire.

In the late 1420s Cerf spent enough time at his home at Hemingbrough to fall foul of a knightly neighbour. On 24 June 1427, according to an indictment laid before the East Riding j.p.s at York castle two months later, he, at the head of armed gang of some 100 men, destroyed various enclosing ditches set up by Sir Robert Babthorpe at ‘Brakenholmebyrnd’, which, it was subsequently claimed, illegally impeded the rights of common pasture enjoyed by the prior of Durham’s tenants in the lordship of Hemingbrough. Babthorpe, who as steward of the King’s household was a powerful adversary, added to the pressure by suing out, in the following October, a commission of oyer and terminer in respect of the same offence.13 KB27/666, rex rot. 22; CPR, 1422-9, p. 465. Although not specifically stated in the pleadings, it is likely that our MP was himself a tenant of the priory of Durham. In 1423 he had acted as the prior’s attorney in the Exchequer: E159/199, brevia Trin. rot. 18d. What consequences followed for our MP do not appear, but it says much for his self-confidence that he should have led a minor revolt against so powerful a figure.

In any event, Cerf’s career at the Exchequer was unaffected. He benefited from minor Exchequer leases in 1427 and 1428, and began to act routinely as a mainpernor for grantees of increasingly higher standing. Between 1430 and 1432 he offered surety for Robert Warcop*, Sir Robert Roos*, Sir Thomas Cumberworth* and Richard Neville, earl of Salisbury.14 CFR, xv. 226, 326; xvi. 44, 95, 98. He also established a place in Lincolnshire society. When he offered mainprise for Roos and Cumberworth it was on their appointment as sheriff there. Further, on 3 Feb. 1432 he delivered into the Exchequer that county’s return to the 1431 subsidy.15 Feudal Aids, iii. 340. His interests there can hardly have depended on his wardship of the Lisle manor at Sawcliffe, described in 1423 as ruinous through neglect and worth only 40s. p.a., and there can be no doubt that he had either inherited or, more probably, purchased further property in the county. Unfortunately his property purchases are not well documented. As early as 1415 he sued two local poulters for failing to deliver him seisin of a messuage, 16 acres of land and an acre of meadow in Cliffe; and by final concords in 1418 and 1433 he acquired a messuage in Selby and some 60 acres of land at Reedness, Newhay and Osgodby.16 KB27/619, rot. 65; CP25(1)/280/154/8, 156/41, 43. All these inconsequential parcels of land lay in the immediate or near-neighbourhood of his ancestral home, but his more substantial purchases lay a little further afield in north Lincolnshire. He bought an estate at Sawcliffe next to that of his ward, Thomas Lisle. This, at least, is the implication of letters patent he sued out in February 1437, an inspeximus of a charter of Henry III granting to William de Insula, an ancestor of Lisle, free warren in his lands in Sawcliffe, Appelby and Coningsby, with confirmation to himself and Thomas (who had just come of age) as the present tenants of the property. His will of 1444 shows that he had also acquired a neighbouring manor at Saxby All Saints with property at Whitton on the Humber.17 CPR, 1436-41, p. 40; PCC 28 Luffenam (PROB11/3, f. 224).

Yet, although Cerf maintained and extended his local interests – he even found time to act as under sheriff in Yorkshire under Sir Henry Brounflete – the main focus was the Exchequer. His career there reached its apogee on 8 Nov. 1435, when the treasurer, Ralph, Lord Cromwell, named him to the important office of remembrancer. This brought, above a generous annual salary of 40 marks, an additional fee of the same sum and other unquantifiable benefits, notably a fee from each official who came to make account at the Exchequer.18 E159/212, recorda Mich. rot. 3d; PRO List ‘Exchequer Offs.’, 50, 54; Studies Presented to Sir Hilary Jenkinson ed. Davies, 269. It is possible that he was aided in securing this nomination by a place in the Commons, although there must be considerable doubt about whether he took his seat. He had been elected to the Parliament that met on the previous 10 Oct. (and was still in session when he was appointed remembrancer) for the Westmorland borough of Appleby, which often returned lawyers with little or no previous connexion with the town. There is, however, good reason to suppose that he rejected the election. The joint return for Westmorland and Appleby, dated at the county court held at Appleby on 22 Sept. 1435, names those returned for the borough as Cerf and another lawyer, Robert Lambton*; but the writ is endorsed with the names of Lambton and Thomas Gower I*. Since the endorsement almost certainly post-dates the drawing up of the indenture it is likely that Gower took the seat, presumably because Cerf refused to serve. Cerf himself had attested the Lincolnshire election, held on 12 Sept., to the same Parliament, and so accepting the Appleby seat would have put him in technical breach of the electoral statutes. This is unlikely to explain why he did not sit. More probably, he had no inclination for parliamentary service for he is recorded as sitting in no other Parliament.19 C219/14/5. The returns for this Parliament are complete so it is clear that he did not reject nomination for Appleby because he had been elected elsewhere.

The office of remembrancer left Cerf less time for local affairs. Significantly, when his income was assessed at £20 p.a. for the subsidy return of 1436, the assessment took place in London rather than Lincolnshire or Yorkshire.20 E159/212, recorda Hil. rot. 14. And although his place in Lincolnshire society was recognized by his appointment to the quorum of the Lindsey bench in April 1438, the centre of his interests was now London and the Exchequer. In the latter, as befitting the remembrancer, he had several important clients. In 1440, for example, he was acting there for Robert Gilbert, bishop of London, and William, Lord Lovell, receiving 6s. 8d. from the latter for withdrawing process against Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, in an action concerning a wardship; and, in the following year, he received assignment on behalf of Sir Roger Fiennes*, treasurer of the household.21 Northants. RO, Finch Hatton mss, 3152; E403/739, m. 12; 741, m. 7. The breadth and quality of his connexions is also reflected in the feoffees to whom, probably in early 1444, he conveyed his property at Sawcliffe and Whitton: headed by the treasurer, Ralph Butler, Lord Sudeley, and another senior Exchequer official, Peter Ardern, they comprised five Household men, the King’s carver, Sir William Beauchamp*, James Fiennes* (brother of Sir Roger), John Hampton II*, John Norris*, and John Penycoke*, with two prominent Lincolnshire gentry, (Sir) John Pygot* and John Neville*.22 E159/229, commissiones Mich. rot. 2. He also employed a combination of his local and Exchequer connexions to make a good marriage for one of his daughters. At an unknown date, but probably at some point during the 1430s, she married John Holme, a native of Beverley in Yorkshire who rose, in 1446, to become one of the barons of the Exchequer.23 Cerf and Holme are found acting together from the late 1420s: CFR, xv. 226; xvi. 72; KB27/700, fines rot. In 1433 they lent £40 to Sir John Gra* on the security of rents in Kingston-upon-Hull: Yorks. Deeds, vii (Yorks. Arch. Soc. Rec. Ser. lxxxiii), 140-1.

Ill-health may explain Cerf’s replacement as treasurer’s remembrancer in February 1444 by the rising official, Thomas Thorpe*. He certainly did not long survive his loss of office, making his will on the following 17 July. Thirty years of service in the Exchequer had eroded his local connexions, emotionally if not physically. Describing himself as a citizen of London, he wanted to be buried in the cemetery of the cathedral of St. Paul’s and he left ten marks for a chaplain to celebrate for his soul in the church of the Holy Sepulchre outside Newgate. His wife was to have the manor of Saxby All Saints for her life on condition that she remained single; on her death or marriage it was to pass to their grandson, Marmaduke Holme, in fee tail with a final remainder to Cerf’s right heirs. The condition that his widow should remain single was an ungenerous restriction, but it was balanced by the will’s final clause: she was to have all his un-bequeathed lands in Yorkshire not simply for life but in fee simple. He also remembered generously his former ward, Thomas Lisle, bequeathing the large sum of £100 to the marriage of Thomas’s daughter, Juliana. More strikingly, she was also to have to her and her issue the manor of Sawcliffe and lands in Whitton; the most likely explanation is that she was his grand-daughter and thus one of his coheirs in company with Marmaduke Holme. Cerf was dead by the following September when his will was proved.24 Much of the enrolment of his will has been torn away: PCC 28 Luffenam.

Cerf’s widow later married, as his second wife, Master John Somerset*, the King’s physician and chancellor of the Exchequer. On 4 Aug. 1446 Brian Boys, presumably as a feoffee of our MP, released to the new couple and others all his right in Cerf’s lands. Among the rest were two other couples, John Holme and Denise, and Richard Portington and Juliana: since one of Cerf’s daughters is known to have married Holme, the probability is that Portington, who was probably a younger son of John Portington, j.c.b., of Eastrington (not far from Hemingbrough), was also our MP’s son-in-law. This latter couple were probably remembered in the will’s lost section.25 DURH3/46, m. 1d; 49, m. 2.