HUSSEY, Sir Henry

This MP was the sixth Sir Henry Hussey in succession to inherit the extensive manor of Harting in west Sussex, in a direct line of descent which began in the mid thirteenth century. His inheritance was widespread and valuable, including besides estates at Harting and Pulborough, a moiety of the manor of Sapperton in Gloucestershire and a manor in South Moreton in Berkshire, which when his father died on 5 May 1409 were together said to be worth more than £111 p.a. Another manor, that of Hascombe and Danherset in Surrey, had been granted by the older Sir Henry to John Tauk for life, and the Hussey estate at Standen in Wiltshire is not mentioned in his inquisitions post mortem. The Sussex estates were the most remunerative of his landed possessions, but these, worth some £83 p.a., were retained by the heir’s mother as her jointure. Henry clearly felt aggrieved at her continued presence at Harting, and on 11 Aug. while she was at the parish church attending high mass, he entered the manor-house with a gang of 40 armed men and removed a number of title deeds. After he had returned three or four times more and made threats of violence against her, Margaret petitioned the chancellor for help. She called on influential friends to make her case, and the former Speaker, Sir William Sturmy* and his nephew Robert Erle*, probably relations of hers, came to her aid.6 CIPM, xix. 513-16, 788; CFR, xiii. 154-5; C1/16/35. When assessments were made for taxation in 1412 Henry was said to have in his possession besides the manors of South Moreton and Pulborough, two parts of the Sussex manors of Harting, Wenham and Iping. Yet from these Sussex estates he effectively derived nothing, for he had to make annual payments of £38 13s. 4d. to his mother and her second husband Richard Bitterley†, and of 40 marks to his kinsman Mark Hussey (in accordance with an agreement made by his father to recompense the disinherited line of the family).7 Feudal Aids, vi. 521-2, 402. For the dues to Mark Hussey see The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 463; CP, vii. 7-8. Hussey leased his Berkshire properties for £10 p.a. to Thomas Bekingham†, and following his marriage he stipulated that his wife’s rights of dower there should be respected if he happened to die before her. No royal licence was obtained for the transaction, but he was pardoned the trespass in December 1413. Hussey’s wife, Constance, was a Spanish lady who had come to England in the entourage of Henry IV’s queen, Joan of Navarre. On 24 Mar. 1409 Queen Joan had granted her an annuity of as much as £20 from her estate at Kingsthorpe in Northamptonshire, to which was subsequently added £5 p.a. more from Odiham in Hampshire. It seems likely that the marriage was arranged either by Hussey’s stepfather Bitterley, an esquire in the queen’s chamber, or by Sir William Sturmy, her chief steward,8 CPR, 1413-16, p. 140; 1436-41, p. 534; SC6/1093/1, m.5; SC8/85/4230. and it is of interest to note that Constance’s sister, Petronilla, also married a knight from Sussex: Sir Hugh Halsham, another retainer of the queen.9 Harl. 544, f. 53; CP40/709, cart. rot. d.

Despite his earlier quarrel with his mother, Hussey stayed on amicable terms with his stepfather Bitterley until his death. He had enfeoffed Bitterley and others including the rectors of Pulborough and Harting of all his estates earlier in 1413, and for much of his life they remained in the keeping of his nominees,10 CCR, 1441-7, p. 208. probably because he spent long periods overseas on military service. As he had been knighted before the end of 1413 it may be speculated that he had already served abroad, perhaps in the force led to Gascony in the previous year by the duke of Clarence. For Henry V’s own major invasion of France in 1415, he enlisted in the retinue of another of the King’s brothers, Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, and was mustered with his company at Romsey in Hampshire on 16 July. Hussey provided the largest contingent under Gloucester’s command: a total of 30 men-at-arms (including his stepfather) and 74 archers.11 E101/45/13. The size of his retinue again suggests that he was no newcomer to warfare. Like his stepfather, Sir Henry was listed among those who fell sick at the siege of Harfleur, yet it seems that he was able to go on to fight at Agincourt, for on 16 Jan. following he entered an obligation in 200 marks, promising to satisfy the King of the Crown’s share of the ransoms of the eight prisoners he or his men had taken on the field.12 E101/44/30 (1); 46/4. Towards the end of 1416 Hussey settled some 400 acres of land, just part of his large estate in Wiltshire, on John Bird*, Queen Joan’s steward and receiver in the county.13 Wilts. Feet of Fines (Wilts. Rec. Soc. xli), 356. Little is recorded about his military service in the latter part of the reign, save that in the spring of 1418 he departed for Normandy in the duke of Exeter’s retinue, and it was probably there that he remained until 1421 or later, perhaps until Henry V’s death.14 DKR, xliv. 605-6.

In April 1423, rather than joining a further military expedition, Hussey took out letters of protection and attorney as travelling to the General Council of the Church in the company of Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester.15 DKR, xlviii. 223-4. On their return home he was elected at Chichester on 14 Oct. to the Parliament scheduled to assemble at Westminster six days later. He is not known to have had a private interest in the business of the two sessions, although he may have helped to forward a petition made on behalf of Queen Joan.16 PROME, x. 173-6. After the dissolution, Bishop Beaufort was made chancellor on 16 July 1424, and just a few days later Hussey was appointed to the Sussex bench. It was while the bishop was still chancellor that Sir Henry was returned to Parliament again, in the following year. While there are, therefore, hints that Hussey may have been ranked among Beaufort’s followers in the Parliaments of 1423 and 1425, there are no more telling signs of a personal connexion between them. At an unknown date during Beaufort’s chancellorship Hussey sent him a petition regarding a currency exchange of £10 he had made while in Rouen on royal service. Although he had satisfied Martin Milton of Rouen, who had made the exchange for him, of any sums owing, he had been bound to two Londoners, one of whom, a haberdasher named William Wodeward, had pursued him in the courts in England, even though, he said, the English courts should have had no jurisdiction in the case. The matter was not resolved by Beaufort, for in February 1427 Wodeward entered recognizances to the King to abide by the award of his replacement as chancellor, Archbishop Kemp.17 C1/6/161; CCR, 1422-9, p. 327. Meanwhile, most likely while he was attending the Parliament of 1425, Hussey and his wife had successfully petitioned the Commons to pray to the young King, the ‘trespuissant prince le duc de Gloucestre’ and his fellow Lords, to grant Constance letters of denization.18 SC8/85/4230. Early in 1427 he again prepared to go overseas, once more taking out letters of attorney before doing so.19 DKR, xlviii. 245, 247. A contemporary list included him among members of the retinue of the duke of Bedford ‘in the French wars’, and it may be that this year was when he entered Bedford’s service.20 Letters and Pprs. Illust. Wars of English ed. Stevenson, ii (2), 436.

In the course of a prolonged stay in England in 1430 Hussey witnessed a deed for another prominent landowner from west Sussex, Sir John Bohun of Midhurst.21 Add. Ch. 20114. He also tardily obtained formal confirmation of a charter of free warren in his demesne lands in Harting which had been granted to one of his ancestors in 1252,22 CPR, 1429-36, p. 79. probably intending to use it as ammunition in his escalating dispute with his neighbours, the canons of Dureford abbey. Hitherto, relations between the Husseys and the abbey had been cordial, for this house of Premonstratensian canons, established in about 1160 by one of Sir Henry’s ancestors, had long been the beneficiary of the family’s generosity. Yet during Sir Henry’s stay at home in 1430 he quarreled violently with the abbot, Thomas Dollyng, and in November that year he was required to make a general release of all personal actions towards him. Furthermore, on 2 July following he entered recognizances to the King in £200, binding himself and 11 other men to keep the peace towards the abbot and canons as well as to their officers, servants and tenants, and undertaking that if he and Dollyng failed to reach a concord by arbitration of the Hampshire lawyers Thomas Haydock* and William Chamberlain* they should appear in Chancery on 12 Nov. 1431 to answer to the chancellor. The matter under dispute was the abbey’s claim of title to a heath bordering Hussey’s Down Park, and to the profits of the fair held every year at Dureford. When the arbitration process failed, Sir Henry presented himself in Chancery as required, but then had to enter further recognizances to reappear the following spring (1432). However, the abbot then acknowledged that he had no further quarrel with him, as they had reached an agreement.23 VCH Suss. ii. 90; CCR, 1429-35, pp. 92, 122, 160-1. It is unclear whether the recognizances in £20 which Hussey and John del Chambre, a ‘gentleman’ of Harting, entered in February 1431 to Henry Somer*, the chancellor of the Exchequer, had anything to do with this dispute.24 CCR, 1429-35, p. 113. Hussey witnessed a settlement of estates in Sussex on the widow of Thomas Poynings, Lord St. John, in March 1433, and another on behalf of his brother-in-law Sir Hugh Halsham that November.25 Cat. Goodwood Estate Archs. ed. Steer and Venables, i. 36; Add. Ch. 8877. In view of his standing as a landowner in the county it is not surprising to find him listed among the gentry of Sussex required to take the generally administered oath against peace-breakers in the following spring.26 CPR, 1429-36, p. 372.

On 2 June 1435 Hussey procured letters of attorney, apparently with the intention of accompanying Cardinal Beaufort on his journey to Arras for the negotiations for peace with France,27 DKR, xlviii. 302. and in August, probably as part of his preparations for the voyage, he put his affairs in order. In the event of his death he instructed his feoffees to give as much as 40 marks to Dureford abbey for masses for his soul, and to settle on his widow his manors of Harting, Pulborough, Standen and Wenham, provided that she did not remarry. His younger son, Nicholas, should have Iping in tail and Hascombe and Danhurst for life, with remainders and residue to his elder son and heir, Henry.28 Add. Ch. 18726. Equipping such journeys overseas often proved to be expensive, and Sir Henry ran up debts with suppliers in London, such as the £35 13s. 4d. he was bound to pay Ralph Barton the London skinner in February 1436.29 CCR, 1435-41, p. 52. Furthermore, the Exchequer was still proceeding against him for the payment of 200 marks from the ransoms of prisoners taken on the Agincourt campaign. Hussey was called ‘former captain of Gallion and the two fortalices of Gowele’ when he took out a pardon in June 1437, although his precise term of service as captain of these garrisons is not recorded.30 C67/38, m. 19; E101/46/4; E159/214, recorda Mich. rot. 22.

The pattern set by Hussey’s violent confrontations with the canons at Dureford abbey continued in the late 1430s with assaults on other of his neighbours elsewhere, most notably on an intruder, Walter Bedell, the yeoman of the ewery to whom in July 1438 Henry VI granted the office of parker of Ashurst in Chiddingfold, Surrey, adjacent to Sir Henry’s manor of Hascombe. In the course of the following year Hussey’s officers levied various rents of assize and farms which Bedell believed pertained to his office, and in 1439 he began proceedings in Chancery against Sir Henry, claiming that he had instructed his son Nicholas to lead a band of men to expel him by force. Nevertheless, Nicholas gained dismissal from the court sine die, and a suit brought in the exchequer of pleas in the Easter term of 1440 reached a similar judgement, when the barons deemed the letters patent of Bedell’s appointment to be insufficient to compel Sir Henry to answer.31 VCH Surr. 12, 35; C1/9/377, 43/9. By then Hussey’s elder son and namesake had started to emulate his military career, and was knighted soon after sailing across the Channel in 1439 to join the company of Sir Richard Wydeville.32 E101/71/4/904; DKR, xlviii. 329.

Our Sir Henry moved to a different sphere of activity: in the following year he and his second son received letters of protection to cover a year’s stay in Ireland in the company of Leo, Lord Welles, the lieutenant of the lordship.33 CPR, 1436-41, p. 383. The costs of mounting these military expeditions, or perhaps the effect of being held to ransom, resulted in increasing financial difficulties for the family. On 5 July 1440 Hussey obtained the King’s licence to place his manors of Great Rissington and Sapperton in Gloucestershire in the hands of trustees to the use of John Greville*, thus raising a mortgage of 480 marks, repayable within two years, and in November he leased to a London draper his extensive demesne lands at Harting. Failing to recover part of the Gloucestershire estate, in December 1443 he made a quitclaim of Great Rissington to Greville, although licence for him to do so was not issued until two months later. Meanwhile, in January 1441, he and his two sons had confirmed his feoffees in their possession of Pulborough.34 CPR, 1436-41, p. 429; 1441-6, p. 237; Add. Ch. 8879; VCH Glos. xi. 90-91; CCR, 1435-41, p. 448; 1441-7, p. 208. In the four years since the death of Joan of Navarre Hussey’s wife had not received the annuity of £25 the queen had granted her, but in May 1441 Constance successfully petitioned for payments to begin again, in view of her service to the dowager throughout her life and of her husband’s personal commitment to Henry V, which, she said, had gone unrewarded. Henry VI’s confirmation of the annuity was probably made in order to encourage Hussey to return to the theatre of war in France. This he did that same month, in the army embarking with the duke of York. Even so, the fact that the grant to Constance was repeated in December indicates that it had not been put into effect, and the farmers of Odiham and Kingsthorpe had to be instructed to pay arrears.35 Cott. Vesp. FXIII, f. 33; CPR, 1436-41, pp. 534, 571; 1441-6, p. 29; CCR, 1441-7, p. 7; E101/53/33. Hussey’s financial problems were exacerbated by his outlawry in Lincolnshire on 4 Jan. 1445 for failing to answer suits for debt brought by Robert, Lord Willoughby. Yet the writs issued by the court of common pleas referred to him as ‘of Harting, Sussex’, and his lawyers successfully argued that while there were three places in Sussex with Harting as part of their name (East, West and South Harting), there was no place simply called Harting. A local jury confirmed this to the court in November that year, thus ensuring Hussey’s pardon of outlawry.36 CP40/738, rot. 331d. Nevertheless his troubles were by no means over, and he was forced to lease or grant his Berkshire properties to the Exchequer official Robert Aubrey* for term of his life.37 CCR, 1447-54, p. 342.

Thereafter, save for his reappointments as a j.p., Hussey rarely appears in the records, giving way to his younger son, Nicholas, an esquire in the royal household who was made sheriff of Surrey and Sussex in November 1445.38 E101/409/11, 16; 410/1, 3, 6, 9. According to inquiries held a year after the event, Sir Henry died on 30 Jan. 1450,39 C139/140/35. but this cannot be correct as a writ de diem clausit extremum had been issued two days earlier, on the 28th, and that same day Hussey’s feoffees and heir, Sir Henry the younger, had demised to his widow and others, headed by Bishop Waynflete of Winchester, the widow’s dower at Harting and elsewhere. In March 1451 Constance was confirmed in her life-tenure of Standen, so long as she stayed single.40 CFR, xviii. 132; CCR, 1447-54, pp. 260-2; Add. Ch. 18748. The heir entered a patrimony severely depleted since the death of his grandfather: the Gloucestershire estates had been lost, revenues from those in Berkshire would not be received for the foreseeable future, his brother had been given the manors of Hascombe and Iping and his mother occupied the Hussey lands in Wiltshire and the bulk of the valuable Sussex properties. Furthermore, payment of the annuity of 40 marks granted to the line of the family disinherited in the previous century now forced him to grant the demesne land at Harting for his lifetime to his kinsman John Hussey (although he reserved Up Park and Down Park to his own use). On confirming Aubrey’s life-interest in the Berkshire property in 1452, Sir Henry and his brother had to enter recognizances in £50 to the bishop of St. Davids, and in £200 to Drew Barantyn*, two of the feoffees acting on Aubrey’s behalf, and two years later he made a quitclaim of the family manor and advowson of South Moreton and lands in West Wittenham, to the bishop and his heirs.41 CP40/773, cart. rot. 1; VCH Suss. iv. 14-15; CCR, 1447-54, pp. 342, 354, 510. Meanwhile, there had been other financial transactions, involving the conveyance of Hascombe and Sapperton to a London tailor, and the sale to the lawyer Edmund Mille* of New Place in Pulborough, which had been in the Hussey family since the mid thirteenth century.42 CAD, iii. B4199; Suss. Arch. Collns. lxxii. 263; CP25(1)/241/90/21; CCR, 1447-54, p. 366. The younger Sir Henry found himself seriously in debt. Shortly after his father’s death he had placed his moveable possessions in the hands of friends to avoid their confiscation, so that when the escheator eventually made a return two years after his outlawry in 1452 all that was found in his possession at Harting was a few weapons. Although he obtained a pardon in 1455,43 E153/1801, no. 1; C67/41, m. 25. this was not the end of his troubles. He revived his father’s quarrels with the new abbot of Dureford, who in the early 1450s complained to the chancellor that two or three times every year for the previous six years Hussey had made forcible entries on the abbey’s property by day and night, in which he had taken horses and goods and damaged a grange and chapel. He had asked Hussey’s counsellors to advise him to stop these actions, but they continued regardless, so that religious services were disrupted and the abbot’s servants dared not carry out their business. A second petition, of about 1456, alleged that in 1454 an armed mob under Hussey’s command had threatened to burn down the monastery, so that the canons had to set watches through the night, and in the present year, on the Wednesday before Palm Sunday, Sir Henry had twice come to Dureford and threatened to slay the abbot, and had actually been responsible for the death of one of his servants at Farnborough. In July 1457 Hussey entered recognizances to the abbot and James Hopwode* in £100 as guarantee that he would do no harm to the abbot in future.44 C1/22/174; 26/615; VCH Suss. ii. 90; CCR, 1454-61, p. 222. A number of transactions concerning Hussey’s estates at Harting and Wenham in the 1450s and in 1460, reflect not only on Sir Henry’s parlous financial state and the troubled circumstances of the civil war, but also the likelihood that when he died his heir would be his brother.45 Add. Chs. 18752, 18758; C140/33/47. His last years were beset with Chancery suits over the title deeds to the Hussey estates, and defending himself in pleas for debt. One such debt, of £42 owed to a London pewterer, led to an order for his arrest on 6 Nov. 1461, but the sheriff of Sussex returned on 21 Nov. that he could not be found in his bailiwick. The pewterer subsequently complained to the chancellor that for surety of payment of sums owing to him, Hussey had delivered to him various deeds concerning his property. These he gave to Robert Basset*, the London alderman, to whom Hussey had sold his manor of Standen, in the vain hope that Basset would pay the knight’s dues.46 C1/28/162; 29/466; C131/71/5.

Our Sir Henry’s widow Constance died in 1461, while her elder son was thus disgraced, and was buried in the Minories in London next to her sister Petronilla Halsham who had died over 20 years earlier. This was in close proximity to royal tombs (although not that of her lady Queen Joan, who lay in Canterbury cathedral). Her epitaph referred to her late husband’s exemplary military service under Henry V.47 Harl. 544, f. 53. The younger Sir Henry did not long survive her. He died childless shortly after July 1462, leaving his brother Nicholas as his heir. Nicholas had served Henry VI as lieutenant and victualler of Guînes, but fared less well under Edward IV. Trustees leased Harting in 1464 to the earl of Worcester for his lifetime, but he shortly after assigned the lease to Nicholas, reserving to himself the two parks and the site of the manor when he should choose to pay a visit. Despite obtaining a pardon in 1467, Nicholas failed to become reconciled to the new regime and was indicted for treason in the following year. His estates were forfeited, but restored to him shortly before his death, which occurred during the Readeption on 15 Dec. 1470 or 15 Jan. 1471. Nicholas died without male issue, leaving two young daughters as his heirs. Despite the damage done to their inheritances by the indebtedness of their grandfather and uncle and the forfeiture of their father, their lineage ensured that their marriages were still of value. The elder girl, named Constance after her grandmother, was married first to (Sir) Henry Lovell and then to Sir Roger Lewknor, the grandson of Sir Roger* and heir to the principal Lewknor estates, while the younger, Katherine, married Henry VII’s minister Sir Reynold Bray†.48 C67/45, m. 20; CPR, 1467-77, pp. 20, 104; Add. Ch. 18762; CP, vii. 11; C140/33/47; Genealogist, n.s. xxii. 177.