LEWKNOR, Richard

Richard was one of the five sons of Sir Thomas Lewknor born of his marriage to Elizabeth Etchingham. Like his half-brother Roger and his brother John, in his youth he was married to an heiress, in his case to one of the three daughters of Thomas Town, the former shire-knight for Kent, and coheiress of her paternal grandmother Benedicta Detling. In the summer of 1440 he and his wife together with her sisters and their husbands successfully sued for possession of a moiety of the manor of Detling and lands at Staplehurst and elsewhere. The defendants were the feoffees to whom Benedicta had conveyed the manor of Throwley and other properties some 18 years earlier.8 Peds. Plea Rolls, 371; The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 636. Richard’s participation in other lawsuits in the following decade came as a consequence of his long involvement in the affairs of the prominent east Sussex family of Fynch, as a co-feoffee with Gervase Clifton* and William Sydney* of the estates belonging to Clifton’s brother-in-law William Fynch* (d.1443). Early in 1444 Sir John Pelham brought suits in the common pleas against the feoffees and members of the family over the wardship of William’s son and heir John, and five years later William’s widow Agnes, together with her new husband Babylon Grantford*, successfully brought an action against the feoffees for a dowager’s portion in the Fynch manors. The widow of one of the Fynch tenants sued them over another wardship in 1452, and a year later John Fynch challenged their right to retain part of his inheritance. John’s complaint had still not been settled to his satisfaction by the summer of 1455 when he petitioned the chancellor for redress. This coincided with a petition from two of his aunts who alleged that Lewknor, Clifton and the rest had failed in their duty to perform William’s will, in particular regarding its provision that the 200 marks set aside from the issues of the Fynch lands for the marriage of William’s daughter Isabel should now, following Isabel’s death, be divided between the two of them. The chancellor ordered them to make payment.9 Add. 39376, ff. 30v, 56-57, 66v-67, 73; C1/25/182; 26/12-15; CP40/732, rot. 484d. Trusteeships such as these, to which Richard was nominated from early on in his career, may suggest that he received some training in the law, although there is no surviving evidence of his membership of an inn of court.

Meanwhile, in 1448 Richard had joined his father and brothers as a co-feoffee of manors in Norfolk, Kent and Wiltshire inherited by his sister-in-law Joan Halsham (the wife of his brother John).10 CPR, 1452-61, pp. 215-16; Wilts. Feet of Fines (Wilts. Rec. Soc. xli), 587; CCR, 1461-8, pp. 206-7. John had been attached to the King’s household in the early 1440s, and Richard took his place there at some point before 1447, thereafter continuing to receive fees at the wardrobe for at least the next five years.11 E101/410/1, 3, 6, 9. In the aftermath of Cade’s rebellion of 1450, during which their kinsman James Fiennes*, Lord Saye and Sele, was murdered, John agreed to take on the undesirable and dangerous post of sheriff of Surrey and Sussex, while Richard accepted that of escheator. Their term in office coincided with a period of continuing insurrection and serious unrest in the region, but the Lewknors stayed loyal to the Lancastrian government. In 1453 Richard secured election to the strongly loyalist Parliament summoned to meet at Reading, as a representative for the Sussex borough of Bramber, at the same time as his half-brother, Roger, recently knighted in the illustrious company of the King’s own half-brothers, was returned for the county. Yet although they may have shared their political outlook it should not be assumed that the Lewknors were of one mind in other respects. Their father, Sir Thomas, had died in the previous year, and at the time of the parliamentary elections Sir Roger was engaged in a quarrel with his stepmother Elizabeth and her five Lewknor sons over the descent of the former Tregoz estates which Sir Thomas had inherited. Indeed, while he and Richard were fellow Members of the Commons they were actively opposing each other in the law-courts. In another lawsuit Richard’s interests clashed with those of the other knight of the shire for Sussex, John Audley*. In Michaelmas term 1453, during the parliamentary recess, he sued a widow named Isabel Tregornowe for a pyx containing deeds, one of which recorded a grant made to him of an annual rent of £20 from lands in Hampshire belonging to his kinswoman, Anne Etchingham, the widow of the elder John Roger of Bryanstone, and now Audley’s wife. Lewknor said he had accidentally lost the pyx in the parish of St. Andrew Holborn (near the law courts) in May 1452, and claimed 100 marks in damages. At the same time Audley also sought possession of the pyx. Isabel said she would give it up to whomever the court considered entitled to it, and asked that Lewknor and Audley should sue each other to settle the matter.12 Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. n.s. iii. 214-15. During his escheatorship Richard had taken into the Crown’s keeping the Sussex manor of Burton and two messuages in Chichester, after finding that the heir was of unsound mind. Now, while Parliament was in recess on 31 Oct., he obtained a ten-year lease of this property, and although it was granted to someone else just two weeks later, he secured a renewal of the lease in the following July, after the dissolution.13 CFR, xix. 65, 70, 87.

The final session of the Parliament had considered what action should be taken against Robert Poynings, alleged to have stirred Cade’s adherents to do their ‘robbery and tyranny’, and now said to be fomenting rebellion against the King in Sussex and Kent. An Act passed after the appointment of the duke of York as Protector in April 1454 accused him of treason, and in May commissioners were appointed to arrest him and bring him before the King’s council. The identity of the commissioners is significant. Headed by Sir Richard Fiennes, nephew of the murdered Lord Saye, and including John Gaynesford II* (MP for Surrey in the Parliament), they were three of the Lewknor brothers, Richard among them. Poynings was brought before the King’s bench on 1 June.14 PROME, xii. 271-2; CPR, 1452-61, p. 173; KB27/789, rex rots. 4, 5. The background to the ‘riots’ which Poynings had allegedly raised was his attempts to drive his niece Eleanor, daughter-in-law of the earl of Northumberland, from what he regarded as his rightful inheritance. The Lewknors were far from neutral in this matter, following the lead of their half-brother Thomas Hoo as he emerged as a principal counsellor to Eleanor and her husband, who succeeded to the earldom a year later.

The tangled affairs of Hoo and his half-brother Thomas Hoo I*, Lord Hoo and Hastings, concerned Richard Lewknor more nearly when Lord Hoo died in February 1455 and his widow and Thomas II expressly refused to act as his executors. On 7 Dec. Archbishop Bourgchier commissioned Richard to administer the goods of the deceased, requiring an inventory to be drawn up before 4 Mar. following. The executors stood surety that he would do his duty with diligence. This was no easy task; perhaps he only accepted it to protect the interests of his mother (Lord Hoo’s stepmother), who retained a number of Hoo family properties in Sussex as her dower. Lord Hoo’s great indebtedness and the complications of his legacies led to Lewknor’s further involvement in suits in Chancery and the other central courts. At some point in the years 1456-60 he petitioned the chancellor to complain that the feoffees of the Hoo estates had refused to sell the rape of Hastings to provide him with sufficient money to fulfil the provisions of the will. Then, in about 1466, after the death of their mother, Thomas Hoo suggested that Lewknor be summoned to Chancery to supply information about whether Lord Hoo’s creditors had been satisfied, so that the feoffees could release the manors of Wartling, Bucksteep and Brooksmarle to his widow, Lady Eleanor, and also make estate to Hoo himself of land worth £20 p.a. as the testator had intended. When he gave evidence Lewknor said that although a number of the outstanding debts had indeed been cleared, he had insufficient resources to complete his task as the widow had taken away jewels, goods and bonds before the administration of the will had been committed to him.15 Reg. Bourgchier, 173; C1/26/117-19; 41/239-44. His dealings with Lady Eleanor and her new husband, James Laurence, an esquire from Lancashire, had continued to be acrimonious, with the Laurences accusing him in the courts of the palatinate of stealing their goods, and he in his turn pursuing them in the common pleas, actions which resulted in all three of them being outlawed. In Lewknor’s case his outlawry coincided with his election to the Parliament of 1467, although he secured a revocation in King’s bench on a writ of error.16 PL15/20, rot. 24d; 31, rot. 25d; CP40/815, rot. 13d; 822, rot. 133; 825, rot. 134; E159/243, recorda Mich. rots. 44-46d; KB27/826, rots. 27, 28.

Meanwhile, Lewknor had been among the knights and esquires of Kent to whom in June 1456 Henry VI had sent out letters asking them to give assistance to commissioners of oyer and terminer due to hold sessions at Maidstone, so it is perhaps surprising that he was not appointed to any more ad hoc commissions until long after Henry’s deposition. He purchased a royal pardon as an esquire ‘formerly of Horsted Keynes’ on 28 Jan. 1458. Horsted Keynes had been his father’s principal residence in Sussex, and it was there that Richard purchased some land in the 1450s, although he had to bring a suit in Chancery against the vendor’s feoffee for failing to relinquish his title. He had also been unfortunate in his purchase of the manor of Eston in Little Horsted, for he subsequently sued John Warde, formerly of Southover, for refusing to complete the sale.17 PPC, vi. 289; C67/42, m. 42; C1/27/55. If Horsted was Lewknor’s home, as appears likely, then he lived at some considerable distance from three of the boroughs he represented in Parliament. His first return, in 1453, had been for the borough of Bramber, which belonged to John Mowbray, 3rd duke of Norfolk, so it may be the case that he had already been holding office by the duke’s appointment as constable of Lewes castle and master forester of Worth by that date. Quite possibly he had been drawn to the duke’s attention by his half-brother Hoo, a valued Mowbray retainer of longstanding. Lewknor clearly stood high in ducal favour, for the posts were granted to him for life with fees amounting to £13 6s. 8d. a year.18 DL29/454/7312. His links with the duke and his relationship to Hoo undoubtedly played a part in Lewknor’s second election to Parliament, the assembly summoned to Coventry in November 1459. This time he represented another Mowbray borough, that of Horsham, and was accompanied to the Commons by his brother John. Neither of them, styled esquires on the schedule accompanying the shire indenture to Chancery, was a burgess of Horsham, but Hoo lived at Roffey on the outskirts of the town and was in a strong position to influence the townsmen’s choice of representatives.19 Add. 39376, ff. 152-3.

The pattern of Lewknor’s engagement in local administration provides no clues about his political attitudes in the early 1460s, although it is curious that he received no Crown appointments from 1454 until 1469, whatever the regime in power. He obtained another pardon, this time as ‘of Southwark and Horsted Keynes’ and former escheator, on 10 Feb. 1462.20 C67/45, m. 36. When he next sat in the Commons, in the Parliament of 1467, it was as a representative for New Shoreham, while Thomas Hoo secured one of the seats for Horsham. Their patron the 3rd duke of Norfolk had died in 1461, but both men had promptly offered their services to his son and heir, the 4th duke, with Lewknor continuing in his post as constable of Lewes castle and Hoo assuming the roles of Mowbray’s principal councillor and treasurer of his household. During a parliamentary recess, on 1 May 1468, Duke John named both of them among the feoffees of his estates in 16 counties, and they accordingly figured in a final concord in Hilary term 1469 when transactions were completed in the interest of the duke and his duchess Elizabeth. The duke sold certain of his Sussex properties to Hoo, and in Michaelmas term 1471 Lewknor and his co-feoffees sued Sir George Brown† for an illegal entry into them. Lewknor, who was to remain in Mowbray’s service until his patron’s death, appeared as a witness in September 1474 to a settlement concerning the castle and manor of Reigate, Surrey, to be held to the use of the duchess.21 CP40/828, cart. rot. 1d; Add. 39376, f. 164; CP25(1)/294/74/64; CPR, 1467-77, p. 130; Moye, 440-1; Add. Ch. 7619. Meanwhile, the Crown had found need of his services. In order to encourage him to accept appointment as sheriff of Surrey and Sussex in November 1469, Edward IV had instructed the Exchequer to make him an assignment of £40 charged on the issues of his bailiwick to help cover his costs. At the start of the Readeption in the autumn of 1470 he was confirmed in office, only to be replaced by Sir John Fiennes† on 6 Nov.22 E404/74/2/71. While Henry VI’s last Parliament was in progress, the Lewknor brothers John, Richard and Thomas, all rallied to support Thomas Hoo in his commitment to repay debts amounting to over £800, but whether any of them were then sitting in the Commons is now impossible to say, owing to the loss of the parliamentary indentures. John Lewknor was killed at Tewkesbury fighting for the Lancastrians, and it is possible that Richard, too, opposed the return of the Yorkists that spring. He procured a pardon from the restored Edward IV on 25 Jan. 1472.23 CCR, 1468-76, no. 650; C67/48, m. 14.

This pardon described Lewknor as ‘late of East Grinstead and Brambletye’, so it is clear that by the time of his election to the Parliament summoned to assemble in October 1472 he had established links with the borough he represented. He purchased a messuage and 82 acres of land at East Grinstead from John Wody† (with John Audley, now Lord Audley, and his own kinsman Lord Dacre acting as his feoffees) in the following year,24 CAD, vi. C4242. but a more important property in the locality, the manor of Brambletye, had come to him some ten years earlier through his second marriage. His new wife, the heiress Elizabeth St. Cler, was already part of his wider family network, for her mother was Thomas Hoo’s aunt.25 CIPM Hen. VII, i. 205. Precisely when the match had been contracted is uncertain, but it was after 1457, when Elizabeth was still married to her previous husband, and before the autumn of 1462, when the Lewknors were sued on a bond allegedly made by her when she was single in the previous year.26 KB27/806, rot. 301. Their tenure of Brambletye led to a sequence of violent events at East Grinstead, beginning in November 1465. At the core of these events was a dispute between Lewknor and the brothers John Alfray II* and Richard Alfray*, in which the Alfrays were supported by the town constable, William Modyll. In the Michaelmas term of 1467 Modyll alleged in the King’s bench that in March 1466 Lewknor had forcibly broken into his property in East Grinstead, assaulted him and held him prisoner. Lewknor’s response was that Modyll was a villein on his wife’s estate. But this was just one of many suits brought during that law term in a search for justice following the murder of Lewknor’s servant Thomas Brampton by the Alfrays’ men. Lewknor was attached to answer the King and Richard Alfray for illegally maintaining Brampton’s brother Henry in his appeal against the murderers, while in response he accused Alfray of maintaining Modyll.27 KB27/826, rots. 34, 101, 110-13, 118, rex rot. 16; Suss. Arch. Collns. xcv. 56-57; KB9/315/32, 33. Both men were Members of the Parliament of 1467 then in progress.

A different part of Lewknor’s wife’s inheritance was the subject of inquiries held during the first session of the Parliament of 1472, in November that year. The inquiries concerned certain events which had taken place during the Readeption. It transpired that in February 1471 Lewknor’s wife and her coheirs of the St. Cler estates had entered the manors of Lullingstone Castle and Queencourt in Ospringe, Kent, only to be evicted themselves shortly afterwards. The coheirs purchased a pardon in January 1473, and a month later, during the second session of the Parliament, Lewknor and Thomas Hoo secured an Exchequer lease of one of the disputed properties, Queencourt. This they relinquished on 30 Oct. following, when the annual farm demanded was increased from £15 to £53.28 CPR, 1452-61, p. 350; C140/42/46; Peds. Plea Rolls, 434-5; CFR, xxi. nos. 152, 215; C67/49, m. 12; E159/250, recorda Mich. rot. 3. The estates Elizabeth brought to the marriage are poorly documented, but her share of the St. Cler inheritance undoubtedly comprised more than Brambletye (where Richard built or extended an imposing manor-house), and the manors of Westbourne, also in Sussex, and Wethersfield in Suffolk.29 Suss. Arch. Collns. ix. 135-40; xxiii. 160-1; VCH Suss. iv. 129; CIPM Hen. VII, ii. 645. Lewknor’s transactions of the 1470s and 1480s involved him, as always, in bolstering the interests of members of his family. Early in 1476 he was party with the head of the family, Sir Roger, and the latter’s eldest son Thomas, in making payment of 500 marks to their kinsman Thomas Frowyk II* in full settlement of a bond, and in 1478 he held courts at Dallington and Wartling on behalf of Thomas Hoo, who in April 1480 leased to him, his brother Thomas and others the manor of Wartling and view of frankpledge there for three years.30 CCR, 1468-76, no. 1589; Add. Chs. 23826, 31515.

While sitting in the Commons in July 1474, Lewknor had been appointed to the Sussex bench, and was thus a j.p. when elected for East Grinstead again in 1478. That he was still holding the offices of constable of Lewes castle and master forester of Worth, which the Mowbrays had granted him for life, implies that he had won the approval of the queen, Elizabeth Wydeville, and her fellow guardians of the former Mowbray estates which had now fallen to the young Prince Richard. Lewknor remained on the bench for the rest of the reign and through the opening months of that of Richard III. The rebellion against the new monarch in the autumn of 1483 brought into question his loyalty to the Crown, for other members of his family were opposed to Richard’s rule. On 8 Nov. 1483 he was commissioned to summon men of Sussex and Kent to lay siege to Bodiam castle, which had allegedly been taken by rebels. In fact, the castle belonged to his nephew, now Sir Thomas Lewknor, who had revolted against the King. It is not known whether he ever acted on this commission, but his removal from the Sussex bench on 5 Dec. was only to be expected in the circumstances. Yet he must have confirmed his allegiance to Richard III for on 1 May following he, his brother Thomas and another one of their nephews were all appointed commissioners of array, and three weeks later he helped bail Sir Thomas out by joining in bonds in 1,000 marks, which would be forfeited if Sir Thomas failed from thenceforth to be true to the King and to serve him in peace and war when so commanded. For the time being Sir Thomas was to be kept under house arrest at the home of his brother-in-law (Sir) John Wood III*, the treasurer of the Exchequer.31 CPR, 1476-85, pp. 370, 397-8; CCR, 1476-85, no. 1242. Richard was restored to the bench in June. A year later, in March 1485, the King requested from him a loan of 100 marks, which he duly forwarded, and four months later he and his wife purchased pardons.32 BL Harl. MS. 433 ed. Horrox and Hammond, iii. 132, 237; C67/52, m. 4. Remaining ambivalent towards Richard III, he showed no reluctance to accept the new regime after the battle of Bosworth, and continued to be a j.p. after Henry VII’s accession. Furthermore, in March 1486 the new King appointed him master forester of Ashdown forest for the rest of his life. Besides serving for two more terms as sheriff, Lewknor also acted in 1497-8 as receiver in Surrey and Sussex of the Mowbray estates, presumably by appointment of the Crown.33 Suss. Arch. Collns. lvii. 188, 193.

In Henry VII’s reign Lewknor’s material circumstances altered again when, in October 1486, his wife Elizabeth fell coheir of certain of the Hoo estates following the death of her cousin (and his own half-brother) Thomas Hoo. One of the other coheirs was young Miles Harcourt, the grandson of her late sister, Edith, and (Sir) Richard Harcourt*. In the will which Sir Richard had made a month previously, it was stipulated that Miles, who was Harcourt’s principal heir, should be kept under Lewknor’s governance during his minority, and be supported from two former St. Cler manors in Oxfordshire and Sussex. Lewknor was also made a feoffee of Harcourt’s estates in Surrey which were to be settled on his widow for life and then transferred to Miles when he attained his majority, provided he was of good disposition; if Miles refused to be ruled by his uncle Lewknor then the feoffees were to keep the property to the use of his heirs.34 CIPM Hen. VII, i. 201, 205, 397; PCC 27 Logge (PROB11/7, ff. 205-7). Lewknor’s second wife died in 1492, leaving her St. Cler property to her issue by her former husband, William Lovell. His third wife, Katherine, had illustrious connexions, for although she was illegitimate she was of noble birth, being a daughter of the late Lord Scales, and her former husband had been Sir Thomas Grey, chamberlain to the late Prince Richard of York, and knight of the body to Henry VII. Katherine herself served in the households of two queens, in attendance on Elizabeth Wydeville and her daughter Elizabeth of York.35 Suss. Arch. Collns. ix. 135-40; lxxii. 2; Suss. N. and Q. iii. 235; iv. 51-53.

Richard was the last of the Lewknor brothers to survive. He acted as an executor for his brother Thomas (d.1492),36 PCC 22 Horne (PROB11/11, f. 182v). and himself died childless on 13 Feb. 1503. Three years earlier his nephew and heir, Francis (Thomas’s son), had made a quitclaim to him of the Sussex manors of French Court, Pett, Hosehand, Broomham and Stobens, which were apparently still in his possession when he died. An inquisition held in 1506 stated that he had also once possessed the manors of Burpham, Greatham and Beauxey, which (at some point before 1471) he had placed in the hands of feoffees, and then later conveyed to Henry VII’s queen, Thomas, marquess of Dorset, John de Vere, earl of Oxford, and others, to hold to the use of himself and his heirs. Lewknor’s will was found to have been tampered with, but it was thought that he had intended that certain of his properties should be settled on his widow for term of her life.37 CCR, 1485-1500, no. 1198; CFR, xxii. no. 752; CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 814. The widowed Katherine made her will on 9 May 1505 and died before 5 July, the date of probate. She asked to be buried in the chancel of the north aisle of East Grinstead church, beneath a tombstone with ‘piktures’ of herself in between her two husbands, and among her gifts to the church were a silver basin and ewer to be made into a cross at the parish’s expense, and silk gowns lined with fur to be turned into vestments. Her executors were to find poor men to dwell in the almshouse which Lewknor had founded, and she left his nephew Thomas Lewknor three silver bowls that had belonged to him. Echoes of her life before she married our MP are to be found in her bequests of goods at Tilbury (Essex) to be sold to pay a priest for prayers for her soul in the local church, of lands in the Isle of Ely to be sold to pay her debts, and of a gold tablet, which she left to ‘my lord of Oxford’.38 PCC 34 Holgrave (PROB11/14, f. 267v). The inscription on her monument recorded that she and Lewknor provided many ecclesiastical ornaments to the church at East Grinstead, and commended their foundation of an almshouse. To them may in all likelihood be also ascribed the foundation of the free chapel of Brambletye, which was endowed out of the manor. In his last will Richard had stipulated that the reversion of certain lands, rents and tenements which he had purchased in the locality should remain after the death of his widow in a trust-fund, ensuring that ten marks a year might support a priest to sing for his soul in the chancel where he was buried.39 Suss. Arch. Collns. ix. 135-40; xxiii. 160-1; cix. 25-26, 34.