DYVE, John

The Dyves were a long-established family of middle gentry rank. Through marriage they had made a series of modest additions to their ancient holdings at Church and Chapel Brampton in Northamptonshire.6 Feudal Aids, iv. 9; Bridges, i. 492. For the early hist. of the family: Henry de Bray’s Estate Bk. (Cam. Soc. ser. 3, xxvii), pp. xxvii-viii, 63, 95-97, 137. In 1308 John Dyve (d.1334) married Alice, daughter and eventual heiress of Henry Bray of Harlestone;7 The Northants. MP of 1300 was not this John but rather his kinsman and namesake of Ducklington (Oxon.) who held property in the county at Wicken. The branch of the family represented by this MP failed in the male line in about 1360: Knights of Edw. I (Harl. Soc. lxxx), 297-8; VCH Oxon. xiii. 119. their son Henry (1310-c.1337) was the husband of Margaret, daughter and in her issue heiress of Laurence de Quinton of Quinton (Northamptonshire);8 Add. Ch. 21629. Our MP’s gdfa. Laurence Dyve, fell heir to a manor in Quinton on the death of Sir William Quinton in 1373: CIPM, xiii. 305. and our MP’s father married a Bedfordshire bride, who, on the death of her brother, brought the family the manor of Houghton Regis. This last marriage had taken place by 12 Sept. 1409 when the groom’s father, Laurence Dyve (who had served as one of the Northamptonshire coroners in the 1390s) settled on the couple an annual rent of ten marks, assigned upon the manor of Chapel Brampton, and, judging from his first appearance in the records, our MP was born at about this date.9 Add. Ch. 21639.

The value of the estates to which Dyve stood heir can be estimated from the subsidy returns of 1412. Laurence was assessed on an annual income of £30 in Northamptonshire, and our MP’s maternal kinsman, Henry Sewell, upon one of £25 in Bedfordshire.10 Feudal Aids, vi. 396, 495. It was our MP’s misfortune that he had to wait so long for even part of this respectable inheritance to come to him. And yet this disadvantage was outweighed by the benefits bestowed upon him by a legal training. There is no direct evidence of his attendance at an inn of court, but his later career suggests that he was trained there. It is a reasonable speculation that he, like his neighbour and exact contemporary Thomas Billing*, attended Gray’s Inn in the late 1420s.

By the early 1430s Dyve was active as a lawyer in his native county. He may have served a term as under sheriff in 1430-1, and in October 1431 he was at Northampton to arbitrate a minor dispute between a saddler of the town and a local gentleman.11 CP40/681, rot. 424; KB27/732, rot. 35d. But it was not until the 1440s that he began to be employed by leading local figures. In Hilary term 1444 he stood mainprise in the court of King’s bench for the payment of a fine by young Edmund, Lord Grey of Ruthin; early in the following year he acted in a property settlement on behalf of Sir William Ferrers of Chartley (Staffordshire); and in 1446 he and his father were agents in the settlement of jointure on Sir Edward Doddingselles* and his wife, Alice.12 KB27/731, fines rot. 1; Warws. Feet of Fines (Dugdale Soc. xviii), 2622; CPR, 1441-6, pp. 406, 409. It was probably at about this date that he married the daughter of a prominent landholder in Northamptonshire and Buckinghamshire. Indeed, this marriage may explain why he was employed by Ferrers, who, through his mother Ellen Roche, was the first cousin of our MP’s wife. However this may be, the marriage had certainly taken place by May 1448 when George Longville settled a distant reversionary interest in his manor of Wolverton upon his daughters, one of whom was then Dyve’s wife.13 CPR, 1446-52, pp. 151-2; C139/169/36.

Less happily, on 8 June 1447 Dyve’s brother, Edward, was murdered in the parish of St. Clement Danes by two gentlemen of that parish, John Penson and Edward Trever. The location of the crime suggests that it arose out of a dispute between residents of the inns of court and Chancery, but there is no evidence to give it a further context. Our MP unsuccessfully brought an appeal against the alleged murderers.14 KB27/746, rot. 115. This setback did not impede the expansion of his legal practice. In the next few years he was employed in a variety of capacities by Sir William Lucy*, Ferrers’s widow, Elizabeth, her uncle, Ralph Butler, Lord Sudeley, Thomas Seyton*, and others.15 CP25(1)/293/72/351; KB27/758, fines rot. 1d; CFR, xviii. 180, 188; Northants. RO, Finch Hatton mss, 635, 1962.

The connexions of a well-established lawyer explain why Dyve, despite his relative lack of acres, was able to secure a county seat in Parliament. On 6 June 1455, in the wake of the Yorkist victory at the battle of St. Albans, he was returned at hustings in which his father was present. Given the duke of York’s ability to influence elections in a county in which he had a significant landed interest, it is likely that both Dyve and his fellow, MP, William Zouche*, were sympathetic to his cause. The fact that our MP’s addition to the county bench had come six months before, during the duke’s first protectorate, is certainly consistent with such a view. While, however, his career in the late 1450s gives a further indication of this allegiance – he was removed from the bench in 1458 and restored after the Yorkist victory at the battle of Northampton – he is clearly not to be numbered among the partisans of that cause. Despite the duke’s lands in Northamptonshire, Dyve is nowhere recorded as acting for him. He is found rather in association with men who were yet to show any sympathy for the duke. In May 1460, for example, he was one of those to whom Thomas, Lord Richemount Grey, younger brother of Edmund, Lord Grey of Ruthin, conveyed disputed property in Essex and Buckinghamshire. The feoffor was a servant of one of the leading Lancastrian lords, Henry Holand, duke of Exeter, who headed the feoffees.16 CCR, 1454-61, pp. 482-3. Moreover, although he was removed from the bench, the Lancastrian regime had enough trust in him to appoint him to commissions of gaol delivery in 1459 and 1460.

Whatever questions of loyalty were raised for Dyve by the events of the late 1450s, it was in these years that he began to lay out the profits of his practice in the purchase of land. In May 1458 he came into Chancery and purchased the reversion of the manor of East Haddon, not far from Harlestone, for 100 marks from a feoffee of Thomas, son and heir of Reynold Ragon†. The manor should have descended to Thomas’s daughter, Agnes, wife of Thomas Wylde of Bromham in Bedfordshire, but the chancellor had ordered its sale when Wylde had refused to contribute 100 marks to the discharge of the outstanding debts of the Ragon family.17 C1/13/194d. This purchase led to litigation. In 1462 he sued the lessees of the manor for waste: CP40/804, rot. 193; 807, rot. 121. Our MP and his parents may have taken advantage of the disturbed conditions of the spring of 1461 to add to their holdings in a less respectable way. According to an action sued against them by William Agmondesham in the following Michaelmas term, they had made a forcible entry on the previous 6 Mar. into two small manors in Amersham in Buckinghamshire, to which Dyve’s mother had a distant hereditary claim. Late in the same term a jury gave a verdict in favour of the plaintiff’s claim and awarded him costs and damages of £20.18 CP40/801, rot. 35; VCH Bucks. iii. 151. It may be, however, that this suit was collusive, designed to have the Agmondesham pedigree enrolled in a ct. of record. This is implied by the pleadings in a similar action sued by the plaintiff in the previous Hil. term. On that occasion the Dyves had affirmed the ped. he adduced in support of his claim: CP40/800, rot. 219.

The change of regime at first made little perceptible difference to Dyve. Indeed, of more importance to his fortunes than this change was the death of his elderly father. Alive late in 1461, Edmund was dead by August 1463 when Maud is described as his widow.19 Add. Chs. 21559-61. Her survival kept our MP out of part of the family estates throughout his life, but his immediate inheritance was enough to give him a greater weight in local affairs, particularly when added to the acquisitions he continued to make on his own account. On 31 Mar. 1463 he agreed to pay Walter Cotton 40 marks for a quarter of the manor of Holdenby (called ‘Katerynsmaner’) with land in neighbouring Church Brampton; and early in the following year he purchased the reversion of a more substantial property, ‘Baldesmanor’ in Quinton, where he already had a manor.20 Add. Chs. 21957-9; CP25(1)/179/96/6, 7. However, inheritance and purchase is not the main explanation for the advancement that came his way later in 1464. The King’s marriage to a Northamptonshire bride, Elizabeth Wydeville, had opened an avenue of advancement in the new queen’s administration, and on 24 Oct. he was appointed by her letters patent as her general attorney in all the royal courts at an annual fee of £10.21 A.R. Myers, Crown, Household and Parl. 293-4. This nomination may have been due to an undocumented prior connexion with Elizabeth or perhaps to the recommendation of a greater man: Thomas Billing, who had been promoted to the judicial bench in the summer of 1464, and Edmund, Lord Grey, are likely candidates. His relationship with the latter was certainly of long standing and appears to have grown closer over the years. Significantly, Grey’s steward, Roger Salisbury, had acted for him in both his recent purchases.

Dyve’s new office brought him a much greater prominence. Take, for example, the year 1467, for which his activities are unusually well chronicled. Between 7 and 11 Jan. he was with others of the queen’s council at Coventry; on 9 May he witnessed a deed for Grey, now earl of Kent, on whose council he probably also served (he was then in receipt of five marks p.a. from the earl);22 CAD, iv. A8468. It is not known when the annuity was granted, only that Dyve was in receipt of it by 1467: R.I. Jack, Grey of Ruthin Valor, 68. By this date he also enjoyed an annuity of £2 from his colleague in the Parliament of 1455, William, now Lord Zouche: C140/30/53. on the following day he was named to a royal commission to deliver Northampton gaol; and on 12 and 13 May he was on the queen’s business in London and Windsor. By this date he had probably already been elected to represent his mistress’s interest in another sphere. Parliament had been summoned on 28 Feb. to meet on 3 June and Dyve was elected, as a pure carpet-bagger, to represent Dorchester in company with another lawyer with royal connexions, David Middleton†. During the first session he received a modest reward for his efforts: on 16 June he was granted the wardship and marriage of a Northamptonshire husbandman at a price to be agreed. When Parliament was prorogued he returned to Harlestone, where, in September, he received a messenger sent from the queen’s council in London to solicit his advice.23 DL37/36/1; SC6/948/5. Soon after more appropriate recompense came his way. On 21 Oct. he was appointed during pleasure to the potentially lucrative office of customs’ controller in Boston on condition that he execute the office in person.24 CPR, 1467-77, p. 15; E122/10/10.

Dyve may also have had the queen to thank for a profitable marriage for his son and heir, Henry. The bride was her distant kinswoman, Elizabeth (c.1452-97), daughter and heiress-presumptive of Thomas Wylde (whose default had earlier enabled our MP to purchase the manor of East Haddon) by Agnes, great-niece of Thomas Wydeville* and heiress of the manor of Bromham. The marriage had taken place by Wylde’s death in the autumn of 1467 and was no doubt contracted on the assumption that Elizabeth would inherit her parental estates.25 C140/23/3, 27/2. This valuable acquisition later led the Dyves to move to Bromham. Less happily, in the short term it led them into dispute with a powerful rival over two manors in the marches of Wales. These had been settled on Wylde in tail by his half-brother, the noted soldier, Sir John Cressy* (d.1445) of Dodford, subject to the life interests of Cressy’s widow, Constance, and mother, Christine Wylde. Sir William Herbert*, Lord Herbert, however, had had different ideas. If a petition presented to the chancellor by Henry Dyve and his wife shortly after Herbert’s execution in July 1469 is to be credited, he had not only forcibly disseised the widows and Cressy feoffees, but after a few years had sent for Thomas Wylde to come to his castle at Raglan on a false promise of restoration, and there threatened him that he would not return alive to England unless he agreed to sell the manors. A deed enrolled on the close roll gives some support to this account: on 31 July 1462 Wylde confirmed Herbert’s estate in the manors and quitclaimed his right in them with limited warranty. The petition was sued against Thomas Billing, c.j.KB, the last survivor of Sir John Cressy’s feoffees, who acknowledged the plaintiffs’ case and agreed to do as the court awarded. Our MP, described as ‘of London, gentleman’, was one of the pledges for the prosecution.26 C1/39/18-19; CCR, 1461-8, pp. 149-50.

It is not known when Dyve surrendered his office as the queen’s attorney-general. A complicated dispute in Chancery between him and the queen’s former receiver-general, John Forster†, on the one part, and Thomas Young II*, as former recorder of Bristol, on the other – over the discharge of a tally assigned on the town’s fee farm prior to the grant of the farm to the queen – shows that he was in office at least a year after Young’s promotion to the bench of the common pleas in November 1467.27 C1/43/102-3. Conversely, the fact that he retained his place on the Northamptonshire bench during the Readeption may be taken to imply that he was then no longer in the queen’s employ and such a conclusion is certainly consistent with the relative obscurity of the last years of his career. He then largely confined himself to the local affairs of his native county. For example, on 1 Apr. 1472 he was one of several local gentry present at a meeting of the newly-founded fraternity of ‘the Holy Rode in the Walle’ in the church of St. Gregory the Pope in Northampton, and on the following 12 Sept. he was again in the county town when one of only eight attestors named in the parliamentary return for the county.28 HMC Hastings, i. 141-2; C219/17/2. This suggests a connexion with the Hastings family: William, Lord Hastings, and his brother, Sir Ralph†, were joint founders of the fraternity, and the latter was elected MP.

In the same year Dyve was involved in two interesting Chancery suits as a feoffee in the Kentish property of John, Lord Clinton (d.1464). Here his role was seemingly merely a passive rather than an active one in that the real dispute was not between the plaintiffs and the feoffees, our MP and John Hampton II*, but rather between the plaintiffs in the separate actions, Clinton’s widow, Margaret, and her stepson, John, Lord Clinton (d.1488). None the less, the story related by the feoffees is so remarkable as to be worth recounting. The late lord had been captured by the French and ‘sette to a grete fynaunce’ and had sent for his two young sons, John and Richard, the elder of whom was not even 12 years old, so that they might replace him in captivity while he returned to England to raise the ransom. On his return he settled the disputed property on our MP, Hampton and others as the nominees of the boys’ mother, Joan, sister of our MP’s early patron, Sir William Ferrers. The intent was that the feoffees should stand seised to the payment of the ransom. Thereafter, if this story is to be credited, Clinton behaved with what appears to have been remarkable callousness, leaving the ransom unpaid and condemning his younger son to a captivity ended by death and his heir to one which was still continuing after a term of more than 26 years. The outcome of the suit is not recorded. 29 C1/39/4-9, 40/21-2.

Dyve died shortly before 26 Sept. 1475, when writs of diem clausit extremum were issued, and his mother followed him to the grave shortly afterwards. No inquisitions post mortem survive for either of them despite the fact that the heir, our MP’s grandson and namesake, was then a minor. In 1 June 1482 Sir Ralph Hastings, who appears to have been one of our MP’s feoffees, granted the stewardship of the manor of Harlestone to William Catesby†, during John’s minority.30 CAD, iv. A9178. This John, educated at Middle Temple, was knighted in about 1513, and the family enjoyed a distinguished later history, with at least two of its heads, Sir Lewis† (d.1592) and Sir Lewis† (d.1669), serving as MPs.31 Men of Ct. comp. Baker (Selden Soc. supp. ser. xviii), i. 622; The Commons 1509-58, ii. 77-8; 1604-29, iv. 145-7.