CLIFTON, Sir Gervase

The Cliftons were one of the most ancient families in Nottinghamshire, claiming descent in the heraldic visitation of 1569 from a Domesday ancestor, Alvere de Clifton, putative warden of Nottingham castle. While this may have been no more than a self-regarding family tradition, the family is traceable back to at least the reign of Henry II. The founder of its fortunes was Sir Gervase Clifton† (d.1323), who, shortly before 1280, acquired the manors of Clifton and Wilford, both lying just to the south of Nottingham, and that of Upper Broughton in the far south-east corner of the county, and went on to represent Nottinghamshire in the Parliament of 1295.3 Vis. Notts. (Harl. Soc. iv), 16; Trans. Thoroton Soc. xxxvii. 25-28; Thoroton, i. 10, 141; W. Farrer, Honors and Knights’ Fees, i. 238-9; CChR, ii. 238. Over the next few generations the Cliftons added little to this valuable and remarkably compact estate, but the marriage of our MP’s parents in 1382 was to produce a very significant augmentation of the family property. When this marriage took place, the bride had a surviving brother, yet, as a fine levied in 1401 demonstrates, it was clear even before his death that he would die without issue.4 Clifton mss, Cl D 621-2; CP25(1)/290/59/24. Hugh Cressy’s marriage was dissolved in 1399 on the grounds of his impotence: Borthwick Inst., Abps. Reg. 16 (Scrope), ff. 24v-25. This is what happened in the autumn of 1408, but, unfortunately for the prospects of our MP it was to be some years until he benefited from the promised augmentation of his estate. After his father’s death fighting for the house of Lancaster at the battle of Shrewsbury in 1403, the Cressy coheiress married Ralph Mackerell*. Accordingly, on her death in about 1420, Ralph was to enjoy courtesy in her moiety of the Cressy inheritance, the valuable manorial estates at Hodsock in north Nottinghamshire and at Claypole in Lincolnshire with lands at West Melton in south Yorkshire, until his own death in 1436.5 CIPM, xxiv. 453-5. For the division of the Cressy inheritance in Apr. 1409 between Mackerell and Sir John Markham, j.KB, the husband of the other coheiress: S.J. Payling, Political Society in Lancastrian Eng. 204-5.

Nevertheless, although Clifton was to be long kept out of his mother’s inheritance, he could at least draw comfort from the fact that his paternal estate was not long burdened by her dower interest. Further, a fraudulent or at least an incomplete return by the jurors who sat on his father’s inquisition post mortem – that Sir John held no lands in the county on the day of his death – kept his patrimony out of wardship.6 E152/389/6. The family’s ancient manors of Clifton and Wilford were held as tenants of the lord of Langar, who, at Sir John’s death, was Roger, Lord Scrope of Bolton, but its manor of Upper Broughton was held of the duchy of Lancaster lordship of Tutbury. The Crown may have chosen not to pursue its rights because Sir John had died in its service. In any event that wardship would have been only brief. He was said in the inquisition to be only 14 at his father’s death, but he was at least a few years older for, as early as 1407, he appeared in person in the court of King’s bench to sue several men of Nottingham for trespass.7 KB27/583, rot. 59d. That he was born earlier than 1389 is also implied by the fact that his illegit son and namesake was serving in France as early as 1422. He had thus been in control of the family lands for some years when, in the tax returns of 1412, these lands, wholly confined to Nottinghamshire, were assessed at an annual value of £60. His recorded public career began soon afterwards. With many other of the greater landholders in the county, on 2 June 1414 he served on the grand jury which made presentments at Nottingham before commissioners of inquiry sent to the county to investigate serious disorders. On the following 5 Nov. he attested his first parliamentary election, being named second on the list of attestors to the return of his stepfather, Ralph Mackerell.8 E179/159/48; KB9/204/2/6; C219/11/5.

Clifton then embarked on a brief military career: he served on the campaigns in France of 1415 and 1417, in the latter in the retinue of Richard, Lord Grey of Codnor, and in May 1418 he was in the garrison at Harfleur under Thomas Beaufort, duke of Exeter.9 E101/45/4; 48/6; 51/2. His illegit. son and namesake continued this service as lt. of the garrison at Arques between c.1422 and 1432: A.E. Curry, ‘Military Organization in Lancastrian Normandy’ (Council for National Academic Awards Ph.D. thesis, 1985), ii. p. xlvi; Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, fr. 25770/735. At some point in this service he was knighted, for it was as a knight that he attested the Nottinghamshire parliamentary election of November 1421. Thereafter he appears to have taken an active interest in the county’s parliamentary affairs. He attested four consecutive elections between 1421 and 1425. It may be more than coincidental that at three of these elections his neighbour and distant cousin, Sir Henry Pierrepont*, who had also served in Lord Grey’s retinue in 1417, was returned. Clifton himself was elected on 10 Feb. 1426 at hustings attended by both his stepfather, with whom he appears to have enjoyed a positive relationship, and Pierrepont. He was also on close terms with another of the attestors, his prominent neighbour, Hugh Willoughby*, for whom, between 1423 and 1429, he acted as feoffee, arbiter and mainpernor.10 C219/11/5, 12/6, 13/1-4; Nottingham Univ. Lib. Middleton mss, Mi D 1104, 3471; Payling, 203; CFR, xv. 282. Their presence, particularly that of Mackerell, is suggestive: Sir Gervase’s candidature may have had a private motive, namely, to offer support to his stepfather in a dispute with the abbot of Barlings in Lincolnshire. It may be that such a motive was necessary to overcome a personal disinclination for parliamentary service. Despite his obvious qualifications for election, he was not returned again.

In the years immediately after Clifton’s single election he played little recorded part in local affairs, and by the middle of the following decade he had turned his attention to more private matters. On 1 Sept. 1435, with his wife, he secured a papal indult to have a portable altar, and on the following 28 Nov. he entered into an important agreement with his stepfather. Mackerell conceded that our MP should have the use and possession of the valuable manor of Hodsock and those other lands he held by law of England of Clifton’s inheritance in return for an annual rent of 100 marks. This part of the arrangement was highly favourable to Clifton for the lands were certainly worth more than this, but Mackerell’s motive in making this concession was to do something the common law would not allow him to do, that is to make provision for his third wife, Margery, out of the lands he held for life in right of his second. Sir Gervase agreed to pay an annual rent of 40 marks from the manor of Claypole to Margery after her husband’s death. Mackerell died within two months of the agreement, and almost immediately afterwards our MP found himself facing an action in the court of common pleas. Margery had lost no time in remarrying. In Hilary term 1437 she and her new husband, Nicholas Fitzwilliam*, sued Sir Gervase for a debt of £1,000, the sum in which he had bound himself to adhere to the agreement, claiming that he had defaulted in her late husband’s lifetime. Clifton appeared personally to enter the defence that Mackerell had, a fortnight before his death, released to him all suits real and personal, a release he was able to produce in court. The result of this case has not been traced, but it is improbable that the plaintiffs were successful. Indeed, they soon found themselves facing a counter-suit from our MP: in Easter term 1441 he sued them for detinue of charters.11 CP40/704, rot. 257; 705, rots. 118, 304; 721, rot. 154; 722, rot.178d. Clifton’s anxiety to free himself from the terms of his agreement with Mackerell is understandable. Not only had the latter’s death deprived him of any benefit from the reduced rent, but Margery appears to have been a comparatively young woman when left a widow – she survived Mackerell by nearly 40 years – and hence threatened to be a long-term charge on the Clifton estates.

It was not only its value that made Sir Gervase so anxious to acquire his maternal inheritance. Subsequent events show that he had decided to move from his ancient home at Clifton and make his principal residence some 30 miles further north at Hodsock, for a long time the residence of the Cressys. As soon as he had acquired the manor, he had a new rental compiled, a sure indication of a close interest in his new estate.12 Clifton mss, Cl M 87. One can only speculate on his motive in moving to the north of the county. It has been suggested that he was seeking to appropriate a social status superior to that of his own family, namely that of the Cressys; and that evidence of this ‘appropriation’ is proved by the re-foundation in about 1446 of the hospital that the Cressys had anciently founded at Blyth near Hodsock.13 J. Denton, ‘The East-Midland Gentleman’ (Keele Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 2006), 89-90; J. Raine, Hist. Blyth, 149. There may be merit in this explanation, but Sir Gervase might, additionally or alternatively, have been prompted by a desire to move away from an area dominated by the seats of the greater gentry. Within a few miles of Clifton were the residences of the Strelleys, Willoughbys, Pierreponts and Babingtons, but in the north of the county the only families of greater gentry were the Stanhopes and the Markhams. Whatever his personal motives, however, his move north had a significance when considered in terms of local government, for it occurred at about the same time as the death of Sir Richard Stanhope*. The latter had long dominated the sessions of the peace which sat at East Retford or other venues in north Nottinghamshire. Very rarely did the leading gentry from the south of the county concern themselves with sessions of the peace held outside Nottingham or Newark, and hence his death in April 1436 created an administrative problem. Clifton’s move north provided, whether intentionally or not, a solution. Briefly commissioned as a j.p. in 1422-3, he was restored to the bench a month after Stanhope’s death. From then until his own death the records of payments suggest that he attended nearly all the northern sittings of the bench. The place of 13 of those many sessions at which he sat is recorded in the legal or Exchequer records, nine of these were at East Retford, and only one in southern Nottinghamshire (at Nottingham on 12 Jan. 1439). Indeed, what is known of his career after his move suggests that he confined his activities to the neighbourhood of Hodsock. He never again came to Nottingham to attest parliamentary elections, not even when his son Robert was returned in March 1453, and it is probably a reflection of something more than the patchy survival of evidence that, after his cousin Sir Henry Pierrepont had nominated him as an arbiter in July 1435, he is no longer found in association with his fellow greater gentry from the south of the county.14 Payling, 174-5; E137/36/1/1; CCR, 1429-35, p. 365. He was, however, at Nottingham on 27 Feb. 1441 when he and his son Robert were on the grand jury which, in a collusive action, confirmed the verdict of an assize of novel disseisin taken between Pierrepont and the feoffees of Ralph, Lord Cromwell, over the manors of Gonalston and Widmerpool: C260/144/18/20.

Given his great wealth, particularly in the later part of his life, Sir Gervase’s career is colourless. His inheritance of the Cressy lands made him, according to the tax assessments of 1436, the third richest man in Nottinghamshire, with an annual income of £193; and yet he never held the shrievalty, despite being short-listed on at least two occasions, and sat only once in Parliament.15 E179/240/266; C67/34/2/2-3. Not until the career of his son and heir, Robert, did the family assume the leading role in county administration to which their wealth both committed and entitled them. But if Sir Gervase’s career is hardly worthy of note, the same cannot be said of that of his namesake, the former lieutenant of Arques who was executed in 1471. An entry in a fifteenth-century ‘Book of Hours’ that once belonged to the family describes the younger Sir Gervase as the son of our MP and such an identification is consistent with other evidence, notably the fact that the younger man bore the arms of the Cliftons with a difference.16 Miscellanea Genealogica et Heraldica, i. 305; Papworth’s Ordinary of British Armorials intro. Squibb and Wagner, 93. In 1435, on the same day as our MP was granted an indult for a portable altar, the younger Gervase and his wife received a similar grant; in 1461 the younger Gervase had licence to marry Maud, coheiress of Ralph, Lord Cromwell, in the chapel of the manor of Clifton; and in a pardon of 1470 he is described as ‘late of Brabourne, alias late of Clifton’: CPL, viii. 5; Test. Ebor. iii (Surtees Soc. xlv), 336; CPR, 1467-77, p.180.

Yet although our MP was a far less prominent figure than either his legitimate or illegitimate sons, their careers were both significantly forwarded by the marriages he made for them. By 1432 he had contracted Robert to Alice, daughter of John Booth† (d.1422) of Barton in Lancashire, and, more importantly, the sister of William Booth, later chancellor of Queen Margaret and from 1452 archbishop of York. It is not clear what brought the Cliftons to marry into a Lancashire family, but there was an existing, if convoluted, connexion between the two families: the bride’s mother, Joan, was the paternal aunt of Henry Trafford, husband of Agnes, daughter of Sir Richard Stanhope, who in her turn, on Henry’s death in 1408, married Sir Robert Strelley of Strelley near Clifton. Moreover, on Agnes’s death in 1421, Sir Robert married a sister of our MP’s wife.17 Clifton mss, Cl D 898, 900-2; Payling, 81, 83, 233, 240-1., Probably this association with the Strelleys explains the Booth marriage, and it is tempting to explain the marriage of Clifton’s illegitimate son, Gervase, to Isabel, widow of William Scott I* (d.1434) of Brabourne in Kent, in the same terms. A later Chancery case claims that this Scott marriage was made ‘at the instance of Cardinal Kemp’, and it is therefore significant in this context that Sir Robert Strelley’s son, another Sir Robert*, married a niece of the cardinal.18 HMC Middleton, 283. The problem, however, is that this second marriage took place in 1443, whereas Gervase married his Kentish bride in the mid 1430s. It is unlikely that Gervase owed his bride to the good offices of his natural father, particularly as there is no evidence that the latter made any settlement of land or goods on him at his marriage or at any other time, and one can speculate that he owed his initial advancement to a place in Kemp’s service.

In contrast to his apparent neglect of his illegitimate son, Clifton made a generous marriage settlement on his heir. In September 1432 he settled on the couple and Robert’s issue land held at farm by various tenants of the manor of Wilford together with rents worth just over £4 p.a. and the right of common passage across the Trent, and on the same day he conveyed to the bride’s brothers John and Thomas Booth the site of the manor with its demesne of six bovates on condition that they reconveyed the same to him to hold for the life of his stepfather, Ralph Mackerell, with remainder to the couple and Robert’s issue. That this provision was limited was due, no doubt, both to the couple’s youth and the consideration that more could be done for them when the Cliftons finally came into the valuable Cressy estates, but it seems to have been enough to give Robert an annual landed income assessed at £35 for the purposes of the 1436 income tax. This was further supplemented in 1438 when Sir Gervase settled on his son by fine 16 messuages and 16 bovates in Claypole, once of the Cressys, and it may be that before his death he made further yet more generous settlements on him.19 E179/240/266; Clifton mss, Cl D 898, 900-2; CP25(1)/145/158/36. This is implied by the fact that, between November 1450 and his father’s death, Robert was appointed to the shrievalty and the county bench and elected to Parliament, an unlikely series of appointments for a man without a substantial inheritance already in his hands. It may also be significant that, in the tax returns of 1450-1, Sir Gervase’s annual income was assessed at only £100, compared with nearly twice that sum in 1436, although this decline may merely reflect the marked underassessment characteristic of the later tax.20 E179/159/84. Robert’s income was assessed at £38. The simplicity of his will, drawn up on 27 Nov. 1453, implies that he had also divested himself of his moveable goods. He requested burial before the high altar of the abbey church of Blyth near his mother, and left seven marks for a chaplain to celebrate divine service for his soul for a year after his death. The residue was to go to his wife, whom he appointed his sole executrix. He made no mention of his children. A little over a week later, on 8 Dec., he died. His inquisition post mortem, taken in the following October, recorded that he held no lands.21 Test. Ebor. ii (Surtees Soc. xxx), 169-70; Notts IPM (Thoroton Soc. xvii), 40.