LEDES, John

For at least 20 years Ledes was employed in the service of the Mowbrays. Of uncertain origin (although his name was quite likely derived from Leeds in Yorkshire), it is unclear precisely when he joined the Mowbrays’ entourage. A man of this name was clerk of the ‘riding household’ to Thomas, Earl Marshal (d.1405), but as he was consistently described as a clerk, he may have been in clerical orders rather than a layman.7 Add. Ch. 16556, m. 1d; L.E. Moye, ‘Estates and Finances of the Mowbray Fam.’ (Duke Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1985), 400. Our John,‘of Yorkshire’, stood surety at the Exchequer in March 1411 for four Mowbray retainers granted the keeping of the castle and lordship of Bramber in Sussex during the minority of the late Earl Marshal’s brother and heir John, and for those granted keeping of two-thirds of the manor of Ryersh in Kent, which William Rees† had held for life by grant of their father, Thomas, duke of Norfolk.8 CFR, xiii. 200, 207. When, at the beginning of Henry V’s reign, the new earl came into his inheritance, he appointed Ledes constable of Bramber and master forester throughout his estates in Sussex, in return for his previous good service.9 C139/60/43, m. 44. Ledes was also active on his lord’s behalf elsewhere in England. In March 1415, for instance, he carried letters from London to Raby for Mowbray, returning two months later with revenues for the earl’s household. At the same time Earl John was licensed to enfeoff Bishop Beaufort and others of certain of his estates, including the reversion of the manor of Lady Hall in Moreton, Essex, which by then he had granted to Ledes for his lifetime.10 Moye, 400; C139/60/43, m. 32; CPR, 1413-16, pp. 319-20; Arundel Castle mss, A1642. The gift indicates the high regard which the earl had for this particular retainer, for he rarely made grants of life-tenancies.

John and his kinsman William Ledes both enlisted in the Earl Marshal’s force for Henry V’s first expedition to France in 1415, only for both of them to be sent home sick from the siege of Harfleur, along with their lord.11 E101/44/30 (1). John returned to France in 1417, once more in Mowbray’s company, and it looks as if they then did not come back to England for any prolonged period until 1421.12 E101/51/2, m. 27. Ledes is recorded in the accounts of the receiver-general of the Mowbray estates acting as attorney for one of the earl’s annuitants in March 1422, and at the end of that year the earl appointed him his steward in Sussex in succession to James Knottesford. As such, he received a fee of ten marks a year. In the following spring he recruited soldiers at Bosham for the earl’s voyage to Normandy and then formed part of the countess’s escort at Sandwich.13 Moye, 280, 329; Add. Chs. 16555, m. 4, 17209, mm. 9, 10. Ledes was among the Mowbray councillors who purchased the manor of Kenninghall, Norfolk, in 1425, the year their lord was confirmed as duke of Norfolk, the title that had been lost to the family in 1399. Several years later, as the last surviving feoffee, he was to convey Kenninghall to his own son and heir John, who together with two of the Bourgchier brothers was to hold it in trust for the Bourgchiers’ sister Eleanor, duchess of Norfolk.14 CP25(1)/169/186/14; CCR, 1422-9, p. 221; C140/5/46. It may therefore be the case that our John continued in Mowbray service after the death of his lord in October 1432 and the succession of Eleanor’s husband, the third duke.

Meanwhile, as a consequence of his offices on the Mowbray estates in Sussex, Ledes had established a place for himself in the community of the shire. In 1418 he had been commissioned to administer the goods of a kinsman and namesake, John Ledes, the vicar of Cowfold in the centre of the county.15 Reg. Chichele, iv. 66. His own lands in Sussex, situated not far away, were acquired through his first marriage, to the daughter and heiress of Peter Wilcombe, who held her property at Wappingthorn of the Mowbrays’ honour of Bramber. The match had taken place by the summer of 1426, and in 1428 Ledes was recorded in possession of part of his wife’s inheritance in Piddinghoe. Another part of it was ‘Stantons’ in East Chiltington,16 Suss. Arch. Collns. liv. 39-41; Feudal Aids, v. 161; VCH Suss. vii. 67, 100. and he was called lord of Wappingthorn in 1433. Following his wife’s death, which occurred before 1 Jan. 1443, some of the property fell to their son, John, still a minor, and in the Michaelmas term of that year a suit was brought in the common pleas in the name of the latter regarding land in Horsham, Nuthurst and Rusper, to which he laid claim as a descendant of the Wilcombes.17 VCH Suss. vi (1), 229; CP40/730, rot. 325d; 731, rot. 121d; KB27/842, rot. 37. The value of the estates Ledes held jure uxoris had been sufficient to qualify him for election to Parliament on 17 Apr. 1432 as a shire knight, although his reputation as a long-serving retainer of the then duke of Norfolk probably counted for much more. The duke’s death in the autumn deprived him of a patron.

Ledes attested the shire elections to the next Parliament, on 11 June 1433, but is not known to have taken part in any other parliamentary elections, or to have been returned to the Commons again.18 C219/14/4. As John Ledes ‘esquire’ he was listed among those of Sussex required to take the oath against maintenance, which was administered in the spring of 1434 by authority of Parliament.19 CPR, 1429-36, p. 372. Although Ledes was not asked to be a feoffee of land in the locality with any frequency, he was often associated with the prominent local lawyers Richard Jay* and William Fenningham*, and acted on behalf of the former in property transactions completed at the time that Jay was his fellow Member of the Commons (as a representative for New Shoreham). In return, Jay took on the role of the Ledes family attorney in the courts at Westminster in the suits over the former Wilcombe lands.20 CP25(1)/241/86/24, 32; CCR, 1429-35, pp. 169-70, 247; Cat. Wiston Archs. ed. Booker, 2262; CP40/730, rot. 325d. Ledes once more served as a feoffee for Jay, with regard to the manor of Wykham in Steyning, in 1446.21 CP25(1)/241/89/29.

Ledes’s second marriage, like his first, came about as a consequence of his connexion with the Mowbrays, for Isabel Boys, the daughter of a Lincolnshire man, was the widow of Robert Southwell, who had been Earl John’s receiver-general from 1413 to 1426, and the MP’s fellow Mowbray councillor thereafter. Isabel herself received an annuity of five marks as one of the ladies attending on the countess.22 Moye, 381, 411; Add. Ch. 17209, m. 6. The full extent of the property she brought to Ledes is unknown, save that her Southwell dower lands in Hertfordshire were worth £14 p.a., according to the tax assessments of 1436.23 E159/212, recorda Hil. rot. 14 (iii). Ledes’ will (of an unrecorded date) came for probate at Lambeth on 17 May 1457. He was buried in the hospital of St. Mary without Bishopsgate in London. Ledes had named his wife and two of his sons, John and Reynold, as executors, and left his unmarried daughters, Margaret and Isabel, the sums of 40 marks and 50 marks, respectively. His plate, spoons, a few items of jewelry and several head of livestock were divided among members of his immediate family, with one special bequest, his horn, passing to Reynold, his baselard to another son, Stephen, and the largest of three pairs of ‘armdeyrons’ to his heir.24 PCC 16 Stokton. In May 1458 the widowed Isabel was party with other Mowbray retainers, Richard Southwell* (her son) and John Stodeley*, to a conveyance of lands in Cheshunt, Waltham Holy Cross and elsewhere in Hertfordshire, which probably comprised her Southwell dower.25 CCR, 1454-61, pp. 286-7. Having taken as her third husband yet another member of the Mowbray circle, John Leventhorpe, the former treasurer of the duke of Norfolk’s household, she lived on until 1481. Isabel chose to be buried near Leventhorpe’s seat at Sawbridgeworth. As we have seen, Ledes’ son, John the younger, followed him into Mowbray service, becoming receiver for the dowager Duchess Eleanor in 1473-4, the same year that he acted as a feoffee of the castle of Reigate and a number of manors in Sussex on behalf of her son, another Duke John, and the latter’s consort Elizabeth Talbot.26 Moye 400; Add. Ch. 7619.