LICHFIELD, Sir William

The surviving records portray Lichfield as an insignificant figure. One reason for this may have been the disparity between his modest birth and the landed wealth he acquired through two strokes of fortune. His first piece of luck was to fall heir to his first cousin, once removed, Aymer Taverner, a wealthy merchant of Lichfield, who had played an important part in Staffordshire affairs during the reign of Richard II. This brought him a significant estate in Lichfield with scattered holdings in its surrounding vills, although his expectations, in respect of at least part of this estate, were deferred by the life interest of Sir William Newport†, who survived until 1416.1 CIPM, xx. 530. Other property to which Aymer could lay claim never came to him. Aymer’s wife was heiress to the manor of Stretton en le Field, Derbys., and by a fine levied in 1372 the final legal remainder, expectant on the death of the wife without issue, had been settled on Aymer’s right heirs: Derbys. Feet of Fines (Derbys. Rec. Soc. xi), 911. Our MP’s first appearances in the records concern his acknowledgment, by a series of transactions between 1409 and 1412, of the sale of this manor to the Exchequer official, John Fynderne: CP25(1)/126/72/37; CCR, 1409-13, pp. 308-9; M. Jurkowski, ‘John Fynderne’ (Keele Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1998), 431-3.

Lichfield’s second piece of fortune more than compensated him for this delayed inheritance. On 12 Apr. 1413, in the early days of the reign of Henry V, he offered surety in £100 for the good behaviour of Sir John Cornwall, and there is every reason to suppose that he was then the husband of Cornwall’s only child. The match may have come about through the Mortimer retinue – Cornwall was a tenant of Edmund Mortimer, earl of March, in respect of his manors of Kinlet (Shropshire) and Ashton (Herefordshire) and our MP went on to serve in the earl’s retinue in 1415 – but this can be no more than a speculation to explain what is otherwise inexplicable.2 CCR, 1413-19, p. 63. What is not in doubt is that, as far as Lichfield was concerned, the match was a great one. The bride was heir to her maternal inheritance, principally the manor of Eastham in Worcestershire, and if, as seemed more than probable at the time of the marriage, Sir John should die without male issue, she would also inherit his considerable patrimony. This consisted of property in three counties: aside from Kinlet and Ashton, he also held the manors of Asthall and Idbury in Oxfordshire. According to a later inquisition, Lichfield’s father-in-law granted him a life interest in a moiety of the manor of Ashton, probably as part of the marriage settlement.3 The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 661-3; C139/122/35.

Lichfield began to play an active part in public affairs at about the time of his marriage. In the dispute between Hugh Erdeswyk* and Edmund Ferrers of Chartley that disturbed the peace of Staffordshire in 1413, he sided with the latter. He was one of those who took Ferrers’s livery on Christmas day 1413 and was indicted for the offence when King’s bench came to the county early in the following summer. This was a minor inconvenience compared with the windfall brought to him by the death of his father-in-law shortly afterwards.4 KB9/113/41; CIPM, xx. 253. Nearly all Cornwall’s property was in the hands of feoffees at his death. In Nov. 1419 one of these, John Greote, quitclaimed to Lichfield and his wife his right in the lands in Salop, Herefs. and Oxon.: Salop Archs., Copies of deeds, 1756/9. His career immediately flourished. On 31 Oct. 1414 he headed attestors to the Worcestershire election, offering surety for the appearance of John Throckmorton I* as one of the MPs, and soon after he took service in the retinue of the earl of March in Henry V’s first great French campaign.5 C219/11/5.

By the time Lichfield was mustered in the earl’s retinue before the walls of Harfleur in August 1415 he had been accorded the honour of knighthood. Although March was invalided home by dysentery during the siege, our MP probably went on to fight at Agincourt. He also took part in the campaign of 1417, on this occasion joining the retinue of Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, rather than March.6 E101/44/30(1); 51/2, m. 12. Lichfield maintained his connexion with Mortimer, if one may judge from his appearance at the head of the jurors at the earl’s inq. post mortem at Worcester: CIPM, xxii. 491. It is not known if his military service continued after the campaign. He was, however, back in England by January 1420 when named in the lists sent to the royal council from Shropshire and Worcestershire as being suitable to fight in the defence of the realm. No further evidence of his service abroad has been found, but it is possible that he served on the 1421 campaign. On 10 June 1421, the day on which Henry V reached Calais, Lichfield conveyed to feoffees the property that had come to him on Newport’s death, perhaps as preparation for departure for France.7 E28/97/26B, 34; C139/122/35.

However this may be, the early 1420s appear to have been a difficult period for Lichfield. The death of his wife was the prelude to the assertion of a rival claim to one of his most important properties, the manor of Eastham.8 A fine alabaster effigy in the church of Kinlet has been plausibly identified as her memorial. An enshrouded infant figure lies beside the effigy, suggesting the possibility that she died in childbirth: D.H.S. Cranage, Salop Churches, 318, pl. xxxix. In 1423 he was called into King’s bench to defend his title against two unlikely claimants, a gentleman of Worcester, John Porter, and a husbandman of Whitbourne (Herefordshire), Thomas Rawlins, who claimed the manor under the terms of a final concord levied in 1319. He sought to delay the action by praying aid, as tenant by the courtesy, from his young daughters, Elizabeth and Alice, as heirs-in-tail under a settlement made upon their great-grandfather, Sir William Wastneys; the plaintiffs replied that he had been joint-tenant with his late wife and was thus obliged to defend the action on his own account. It was this question of tenure that was put to a jury, but no verdict has been traced.9 KB27/648, rot. 66. The plaintiffs cited the quitclaim made by Greote in 1419, but this grant did not include Eastham: Copies of deeds, 1756/9. Porter may have been the namesake, John Porter I*, who was returned for Worcester in 1447. Lichfield then went on to the offensive. In Trinity term 1425 he appeared personally in King’s bench to sue Porter and Rawlins for fabricating false deeds concerning the disputed manor. Less acceptably, he exploited the influence that came with his appointment as sheriff of Shropshire in 1427 to secure indictments against his antagonists. At two sessions of peace, held at Shrewsbury on 13 Apr. and 4 Aug. 1428, Porter and his allies were indicted for proclaiming a false deed concerning Eastham some five years before; and another of their adherents, William Buryton*, was indicted for breaking Lichfield’s close and houses at Kinlet and feloniously taking a chest containing charters as long before as 1416.10 KB27/658, rots. 2, 76; 665, rot. 35; 672, rex rot. 2; 673, rex rot. 21.

A search for allies in this quarrel may explain why Lichfield lost no time in taking a second wife. As half-sister of one of the wealthiest of the Gloucestershire gentry, she was well connected, and, although a widow, young enough to provide him with the son he did not yet have.11 His 2nd marriage had taken place by 9 Sept. 1430, when his lands in Staffs. were settled in jointure: CPR, 1446-52, pp. 110-11. It may be significant here that his new brother-in-law, had, like him, been associated with the late earl of March: CIPM, xxii. 508 (p. 472). He also found a husband for one of his daughters. By 1426 Elizabeth was married to Roger Corbet I*, comfortably old enough to have been her father. Although an influential figure, he was a younger son (albeit from one of the leading Shropshire families) and the match offered him an unexpected opportunity to endow a line; for Lichfield the match had the recommendation of obliging a former colleague-in-arms, as the two men had served together in France. On 18 Aug. 1429 our MP headed the attestors at Shrewsbury to Corbet’s election to Parliament, and on the following 14 Nov., while Parliament was in session, he joined Corbet in offering mainprise for a grant made to another prominent member of the Shropshire gentry, Hugh Burgh*. Corbet was soon drawn into the defence of Lichfield’s title. In Easter term 1430 he joined his wife and his unmarried sister-in-law, Alice, in suing William Buryton for detained charters.12 C219/14/1; CFR, xv. 280; CP40/677, rot. 19.

The hopes invested in this match were soon to be disappointed. Both bride and groom died within a very short time of each other in the summer of 1430, leaving an infant daughter, Margaret, as their heir. This, in turn, brought both a threat and an opportunity to Lichfield. On the one hand, it raised the possibility that the feudal guardian of the infant Margaret, whomsoever that proved to be, might seek grounds to challenge his title to his tenure of his late wife’s inheritance; on the other, that guardian might be ready to support Margaret’s title, and hence his own, to the disputed manor of Eastham. Perhaps it was these dangers and possibilities that prompted him to seek election to Parliament in the interval between Corbet’s death and the holding of an inquisition into his estates (the findings of which would determine the right to the child’s wardship). On 3 Jan. 1431 he was elected to represent Worcestershire in company with Thomas Hewster alias Westcote*, prothonotary of the court of common pleas. Two months later, while Parliament was in session, Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, asserting title as feudal overlord of the manor of Eastham, granted Margaret’s wardship to John Wood I*, a lawyer in his service. The findings of an inquisition taken at Worcester on the following 6 May imply the question of the wardship was a matter of controversy. The jurors correctly returned that Lichfield was seised of the manor of Eastham by the courtesy after the death of his wife, the tenant-in-tail, but they added, disadvantageously from his point of view, that he had granted a messuage to the infant Margaret and alienated another to her disinheritance. Thus, they concluded, these two messuages, together with wardship of Margaret’s body, accrued to the earl as feudal overlord, and they cited his grant to Wood. It is difficult to know what lay behind these findings, but it is possible that they arose out of a compromise struck between the earl (or Wood) and our MP, who was ready to surrender the two messuages in return for security in his tenure by courtesy and, perhaps also, support against the claim under the ancient entail.13 C219/14/2; CIPM, xxiii. 489.

Little is known of Lichfield after the end of his second shrievalty in 1438. In Trinity term of that year he had actions of debt pending against 21 defendants for a total of £253, largely, one assumes, for sums due to him as sheriff. More interestingly, on 19 Mar. 1445, he conveyed his manor of Kinlet to two of his servants.14 CP40/714, rots. 64d, 158, 158d; CIPM, xxvi. 405. This feoffment was probably a preparation for approaching death, as too was, if later testimony is to be believed, another of his last acts. According to the testimony of a yeoman of Eastham, Sir William, ‘liyng in poynt of dethe’, had ordered the burning of evidences he himself had been responsible for forging.15 CCR, 1447-54, pp. 333-4. This apparent resort to fabrication provides further evidence of the insecurity of Lichfield’s title to significant parts of his estate, and it is not surprising that his death in January 1446 should have been followed by dispute. This arose from the claim of his widow to a substantial jointure and, more importantly, of the heirs male of Sir John Cornwall to the manor of Ashton and other property. Although the records are silent about this claim during the course of Lichfield’s life, the allegation that it prompted the alleged act of forgery demonstrates that it was then in agitation.

These complications explain why the process of taking the relevant inquisitions into Lichfield’s property proved such a long drawn out process. Writs of diem clausit extremum were issued on 1 Feb. 1446, within days of his death.16 CFR, xviii. 2. His date of death is variously given in the inqs. as 27 or 30 Jan.: CIPM, xxvi. 404-8. No inquisition, however, is known to have been held until the following 29 Apr., when a Herefordshire jury returned that Sir Edmund Cornwall, great-grandfather of our MP’s first wife, had settled a moiety of the manor of Ashton on his son, Brian, in tail-male. The finding was a controversial one. Such a settlement meant that the other conveyances detailed by the jurors – that is, a grant by Brian’s son, Sir John, to Lichfield for life and Lichfield’s subsequent resettlement on himself and his second wife in fee – were to the disinheritance of the heir male, whom they returned as Edmund Cornwall (d.1452), second cousin of Lichfield’s first wife. Nearly two weeks later, on 10 May, a Shropshire jury returned that the manor of Kinlet, as his only property in the county, was in the hands of the survivor of the feoffment of 1445. These findings were very much against the interests of Sir William’s common-law heir. Both juries named that heir as his grand-daughter Margaret, wife of Humphrey Stafford of Halmond’s Frome in Herefordshire (kinsman of Fulk Stafford*), but their testimony meant that, in the short term at least, she was to inherit nothing in either county. More welcome to her were the findings of an inquisition held at Worcester between 1 Sept. and 1 Dec. 1446, when the jurors returned that her grandfather had died seised of the manor of Eastham in fee simple. But even here there was a problem: the inquisition was subsequently tampered with, the date of its taking erased and a new date entered, which states that it had been held after it had been delivered into Chancery.17 A superscription dates the delivery into Chancery to 1 Dec. 1446; the amended date for the holding of the inq. is 12 Jan. 1447: CIPM, xxvi. 404; C139/122/35. An inquisition held in Staffordshire on 19 June 1447 raised further problems for Margaret and Stafford. The jurors returned that, on 10 June 1421, Lichfield conveyed his properties to feoffees, who on 9 Sept. 1430 enfeoffed Lichfield and his second wife, Joan, and their issue.18 CIPM, xxvi. 406.

The findings of these inquisitions strongly imply that Lichfield’s grand-daughter and her husband were thoroughly out-manoeuvred in the first stage of what was to prove a long dispute. Our MP’s widow, Joan, was quick to assert her rights. She sued out of Chancery an exemplification of the Staffordshire inquisition, and soon after brought an action against Margaret’s husband, Humphrey Stafford, for the large sum of 500 marks, perhaps arising from a forfeited bond to abide arbitration.19 CPR, 1446-52, pp. 110-11; CP40/755, rot. 143d; C131/70/11. Of greater concern to Margaret, however, was the claim of the Cornwall heir male to the manor of Ashton, and also, although no hint of it appears in the surviving Worcestershire inquisition, to the more valuable manor of Eastham. This latter claim, probably as purchaser from the Porters, whose claim had so troubled our MP, became the basis of a great quarrel which was not resolved until the 1530s, when Sir Thomas Cornwall† finally vindicated his right against Margaret’s grand-daughter, another Margaret, widow of Sir George Vere.20 CPR, 1452-61, p. 52; PROME, xv. 341-3; VCH Worcs. iv. 268.

This, however, is only part of the story. There was also another claimant whose title is not even hinted at in any of the inquisitions, namely Humphrey Blount† (grandson of Sir John Blount† of Sodington, Worcestershire) the precise nature of whose title is uncertain. He was a descendant of the Cornwalls in the female line, and for reasons that are unclear he was quickly able to establish title to most of the disputed property. The first suggestion of the Blount claim comes in September 1450, when Humphrey’s father, John, joined our MP’s widow in a royal grant of the keeping of the manor of Ashton.21 CFR, xviii. 178-9; CP40/759, rot. 184d. Later, in May 1455, Humphrey himself entered into a bond in 500 marks to (Sir) Walter Devereux I* (the father of Walter Devereux II*, the guardian of the Cornwall heir male) to abide arbitration concerning the same manor. The result of these deliberations is unknown, but the fact of Blount’s ultimate victory cannot be doubted. In 1477 he died seised of all the lands that had come to Lichfield through Elizabeth Cornwall, with the exception of the manor of Eastham.22 CFR, xix. 32, 33, 36-37; Longleat House, Wilts. Devereux pprs. DE/Box I/12. The inq. taken on his death implies that he had the manor of Kinlet by 4 Dec. 1450, when he conveyed it to feoffees: C140/61/23. This may, however, be a retrospective assertion of a title that was only established later. All this is the more mysterious because it was achieved while our MP’s grand-daughter lived and despite the fact that she had issue. The most probable solution is that he bought her out.23 Margaret survived Humphrey Stafford and was alive in 1465 when the wife of Thomas Langton despite an alleged precontract with Edward Ferrers: CPL, xii. 401; CPR, 1461-7, p. 450.

Lichfield’s widow probably succeeded in protecting her own interest in her late husband’s lands as the dispute over them continued. She died between 25 Aug., when she made an uninformative will, and 10 Nov. 1461, when it was proved. She spent her last years in Worcester, and wanted to be buried in the Dominican friary there. With the death of her niece of the half blood, Elizabeth, in 1452, she had fallen sole heir to the Greyndour estates, but they did not come to her, remaining instead in the hands of Elizabeth’s husband, John Tiptoft, earl of Worcester, as tenant by the courtesy.24 PPC 24 Stockton (PROB11/4, ff. 180v-181); C139/149/23.