LANGHOLM, John I

The career of this John Langholm poses some difficult problems. His parentage is obscure, but it is certain that one of his 14th-century ancestors, perhaps his grandfather, married the heiress of the family of Conisholme, tenants of the baronial family of Welles and resident at Conisholme, near the Lincolnshire coast.4 A mid-16th ped. names his parents as Thomas Langholm and Katherine, da. of William Trancrosse: Genealogist, iv. 187; Assoc. Archit. Socs. Reps. and Pprs. xli. 134. A more serious difficulty lies in the near impossibility of determining when the career of our MP either began or ended. On balance, the probability is that his career was a very long one, stretching from his first appearance in the records in 1405 and ending nearly 60 years later. Following his election to his first Parliament in 1426 the abbot of Croyland named him as his proxy, a responsibility unlikely to have been entrusted to a young man untried in public affairs; and in a Chancery petition of the mid 1440s, albeit in the hyperbolic language of such documents, he described himself as ‘owlde and of no powar to labour’, suggesting that he may well have been active as long before as 1405.5 SC10/48/2383; C1/17/238. Thereafter, his continued appointment to the bench from 1435 to 1461 implies that he then survived into the 1460s.

There can be no doubt that Langholme was a lawyer who began his long career in the service of his feudal overlords, the baronial family of Welles. In July 1405 he was pardoned for his involvement, along with Ives, the son of John, Lord Welles, in the rebellion of Archbishop Scrope, and then found more routine ways to serve the family. In November 1417 he stood surety when the shrievalty of his native county was committed to John Normanvile, the husband of Ives’s widow.6 CPR, 1405-8, p. 78; CFR, xiv. 212. More significantly, on 21 Aug. 1421, five days before his death, Lord Welles employed him and others, including Sir Robert Roos*, to keep his lands out of royal wardship during the minority of Ives’s son, Lionel, showing his special trust in Langholm by naming him among his executors.7 CIPM, xxi. 859; CPR, 1429-36, p. 97. Later, in October 1435, our MP was involved in the marriage settlement of Lionel’s son, Richard, to Joan, daughter and heiress of Robert, Lord Willoughby of Eresby.8 Lincs. AO, Ancaster mss, 2ANC3/A/19-20; C140/3/32; 4/33; E163/7/31/2.

Although Langholm’s relationship with the Welles family was both close and very long-lasting, he also found employment with other important men. In March 1418 Sir William Clifford of Caythorpe bequeathed him a generous life annuity of ten marks, presumably as generous reward for his legal services.9 Lincs. AO, Reg. Flemyng, f. 219d. This association was the beginning of another. Clifford was married to Anne, first cousin of Ralph, Lord Cromwell, and Langholm soon found employment with this rising magnate. From June 1425, when he acted for him in the purchase of a market at Burgh-le-Marsh, he was regularly used by Cromwell in similar transactions over the next 30 years. In November 1454 he was nominated as one of the feoffees for the implementation of his will; and, revealingly, when the statutes were drawn up for Cromwell’s collegiate foundation at Tattershall, Langholm, described as ‘juris peritus’, was one of those whose anniversary was to be kept.10 CCR, 1422-9, p. 208; CPR, 1452-61, pp. 199-200; HMC De L’Isle and Dudley, i. 181. For other evidence of his association with Cromwell: CCR, 1422-9, pp.445, 447, 452; CP25(1)/145/158/20; 192/9/10; HMC De L’Isle and Dudley, i. 17.

These elevated connexions explain why the electors of Grimsby, about 12 miles to the north-west of his home at Conisholme, were prepared to return Langholm to five Parliaments, four of them successively between 1426 and 1431. These returns may have been justified by the property he held in the borough: in 1460 a John Langholm contributed 12d. to the expenses of the town’s parliamentary burgesses.11 N.E. Lincs. Archs., Grimsby bor. recs., assessments for parlty. expenses 1/612/2 (formerly 1/800/2). Yet this may have been our MP’s son, John II, MP for the borough in 1453, and there is little, beyond his elections to Parliament, to connect John senior with Grimsby’s affairs.12 In Jan. 1432 he acted as an arbiter in a dispute among the burgesses over a capture at sea, and in 1436 he was a feoffee for the burgess Roger Graynesby: Grimsby recs., ct. rolls 1/101, 10 Hen. VI; CAD, iii. C3397; vi. C5104. The most probable explanation for Langholm’s returns is that he actively sought election in a town anxious to secure candidates prepared to serve at small cost. In doing so he may have been acting at the instigation of Cromwell, who was seeking Members to support the interests of the Beaufort faction during the troubled political manoeverings of Henry VI’s minority. Langholm’s third return, to the Parliament of 1429, is, however, more readily explicable in terms of a Lincolnshire quarrel. It was in this Parliament that Walter Tailboys* petitioned against Sir John Keighley in their dispute over property in Theddlethorpe in which Langholm was one of Tailboys’s co-feoffees.13 KB27/673, rot. 64; JUST 1/1537, rot. 9; CCR, 1429-35, pp. 109-10.

During this period Langholm was also active as an attestor of county elections: he was present at the election of March 1421 and at six successively between September 1423 and December 1430. While sitting in the Parliament of 1431 he was one of those who stood surety that the Lincolnshire MP, Hamon Sutton I*, would appear in Chancery to answer a consortium of staplers for a large debt.14 Lincs. Archit. and Arch. Soc. i. 70-73; CCR, 1429-35, pp. 112-13. It was probably his parliamentary service that brought him to the notice of the Crown as a potential workhorse of local government. In November 1431 he was appointed escheator of his native county, and thereafter he played a very active part in local administration until the fall of the Lancastrian regime. In November 1433, while sitting in his last Parliament, he acted as a mainpernor for Thomas Darcy, the newly-appointed Lincolnshire sheriff and a servant of Cromwell. Langholm himself was soon to benefit from Cromwell’s patronage as treasurer. In November 1436 he was appointed to the stewardship of the Lincolnshire lordship of Burwell, an appointment made in preparation for the grant of the lordship to Cromwell in February 1438. And although that lord was not, as treasurer, directly able to influence duchy of Lancaster appointments, there can be little doubt that he secured Langholm’s appointment both as Sir Ralph Rochford’s deputy as steward of the honour of Bolingbroke and as feodary there.15 CFR, xvi. 213; S.J. Payling, Political Society in Lancastrian Eng. 141-2; CPR, 1436-41, pp. 25, 165; R. Somerville, Duchy, i. 576, 581.

Langholm’s place in local affairs was underpinned by not inconsiderable landholdings. In the subsidy returns of 1436 he was assessed on an annual income of as much as £40;16 E179/136/198. Two other Langholms appear in the returns: Katherine, who may have been his mother, was assessed at £10, and Thomas of Croxby at ten marks. Thomas served under Robert, Lord Willougby, in the 1417 campaign in Normandy: E101/51/2, m. 15. and from the mid 1440s this income was supplemented by the inheritance of his wife, the daughter and coheiress of a merchant of Louth, a few miles from Conisholme. The couple were married by 20 Sept. 1422 when her father settled property in Skegness upon them, the family patrimony (valued at £20 p.a. in the 1436 subsidy), to which she was heir to a half, came to her some 20 years later.17 Lumley mss, 491; E179/136/198. By Trinity term 1445 Langholm was acting as his father-in-law’s executor, and it was no doubt as a result of his wife’s lands that he began to play a part in the affairs of Louth. On 25 Jan. 1447 he was one of those who secured a royal licence to found a guild in the parish church there and endow it with lands worth 20 marks p.a.18 CP40/738, rot. 168; Lincs. Archit. and Arch. Soc. vi. 76; SC8/186/9300; CPR, 1447-54, p. 81. His new lands augmented his local importance and there was rarely a time in the 1440s and 1450s when he was not serving on one local commission or another. On 9 Aug. 1448, for example, he was one of the Lindsey j.p.s who sat with Lionel, Lord Welles, at Horncastle to hear indictments against Cromwell’s enemy, William Tailboys*; and at least into the early 1450s he remained one of the most active of the Lindsey j.p.s., serving for ten of the 12 days the j.p.s. met between the autumn of 1453 and the late summer of the following year.19 KB9/260/93; E101/569/41.

By this date Langholme must already have been an old man. His removal from the bench on the accession of Edward IV was probably prompted by this consideration rather than political factors, although he did take the precaution of suing out a general pardon on 5 Feb. 1462 as ‘of Louth, gentleman, alias of Conisholme, justice of sewers’.20 C67/45, m. 42; E159/239, brevia Easter rot. 12d. He was certainly alive as late as 18 Sept. 1466 when, described as ‘legifer’, he was present in the church of St. James at Louth to give evidence concerning tithes. The last reference may be in April 1468 when a John Langholm, as a feoffee, probably of the prominent Lincolnshire family of Skipwith, presented to the church of Little Carlton, although thus reference may be to his son. He was certainly dead by November 1471 when his grandson and heir, William, son of his eldest son, William, by Ellen, daughter of John Vavasour*, conveyed the family estate an influential group of feoffees, including Vavasour.21 Lincs. AO, Lindsey deposit, LD94/1/1; Reg. Chedworth, f. 147; Lumley mss, 537; CP25(1)/145/162/27; C1/41/296.

The chief interest of Langholme’s career lies in the range and extent of his connexions. Like his Lincolnshire contemporary, Robert Sheffeld*, he is a good example of a lawyer who employed his expertise not in search of advancement within the profession but in developing a large local practice. His range of clients was impressive. Beyond his long service to the Welles family and Lord Cromwell, he is found in association with many of the leading figures of Lincolnshire. He was a feoffee for Robert, Lord Willoughby of Eresby, Sir Thomas Cumberworth*, Sir John Gra*, Walter Tailboys, Patrick Skipwith* (probably as part of the marriage settlement of his daughter, Agnes, to Patrick’s eldest son, John), and John and Henry, sons of Sir Thomas Hawley†, together with a host of lesser men.22 CPR, 1436-41, pp. 17, 358; CCR, 1429-35, p. 305; 1435-41, pp. 108, 159; 1441-7, p. 350; 1447-54, p. 281; W.O. Massingberd, Ormsby-cum-Ketsby, 78; CIPM, xxvi. 216; CP25(1)/145/159/39; CP40/679, cart. rot. 2. He was also one of the executors of the will, made in 1417, of Gra’s brother, Thomas, and of that made in 1439 by Cromwell’s friend Sir Ralph Rochford, under whom he served in the administration of the honour of Bolingbroke. Another role in which he is found is that of mortgagee: for example, in March 1421 Sir John Gra undertook to pay him £50 within five years on the security of his lands in Saltfleetby.23 N. Country Wills (Surtees Soc. cxvi), 15; Fifty Earliest Eng. Wills (EETS, lxxviii), 121; Magdalen Coll. Oxf., Saltfleetby deeds, 18.

So intense an involvement in the affairs of others meant Langholm frequently figured as a litigant, generally as plaintiff, on their behalf as well as his own, but occasionally as defendant. For example, as a feoffee of the Calais stapler, William West of Partney (Lincolnshire), who drowned at Calais in about 1460, he was involved in the dispute between West’s nephew and niece over lands in Winthorpe near Skegness. In October 1464 a verdict was given in favour of the niece and Langholm was ordered to make conveyance accordingly. He is described in the nephew’s petition as ‘of so grete age and feblenes that he may not with oute grete jupertie of his liff labour nor trauell’, lending further support to the assumption that his career stretched back to the early years of the century.24 C1/28/164-70; 29/65.