MALETT, William

At Michaelmas 1446 William Malett of Normanton near Wakefield was in receipt of robes as an esquire of the royal household.4 E101/409/16, f. 33v. His place there firmly identifies him as the later MP, who is therefore to be distinguished from the namesake who lived at Irby-upon-Humber in north Lincolnshire and served as escheator of that county in 1446-7.5 This man is probably also to be identified with the soldier who mustered in the retinue of Sir Thomas Beaumont, a yr. s. of the Lincs. baronial family, at Sandwich in 1421: E101/50/1, m. 2. At a later date (probably the late 1420s), he was involved in the victualling of Rouen. In an unknown Parl. another Lincs. man, John Croxby, presented a petition to the Lords complaining that, after he had been sent home from Rouen by Malett to gather wheat and barley for the provisioning of the city, his efforts had been thwarted by fraud and threats: SC8/85/4203. The MP’s family had long been established at Normanton but were of minor gentry rank. William enjoyed a greater prominence than earlier heads of his family through his close connexion with his wealthy and well-connected neighbour, Sir Robert Waterton*. In 1442 he stood surety on Waterton’s re-appointment as alnager in Yorkshire, and three years later he was described as ‘of Methley’, the knight’s residence, when the two men were co-defendants in an action of debt brought by the wealthy Derbyshire knight, Sir Richard Vernon*.6 CFR, xvii. 201-2; CP40/737, rot. 358d.

Malett’s election to represent Westmorland in the Parliament of November 1449 is perhaps to be explained in terms of this relationship with Waterton. Although he might have been motivated to seek a seat by his place in the Household, the local connexions necessary to find one probably depended on his knightly patron, whose wife Beatrice was the paternal aunt of Westmorland’s hereditary sheriff, Thomas, Lord Clifford. Malett may also have had his own connexion with Clifford: a sixteenth-century pedigree identifies his wife as the daughter of his neighbour, John Thwaites, a lawyer in Clifford’s service.7 Vis. Yorks. 194; C.E. Arnold, ‘Political Study of the W. Riding, 1437-1509’ (Manchester Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1984), ii. 13. His return was both anomalous and irregular in that it shows clear signs of emendation. His name has been added over an erasure both in the election indenture, dated at Appleby on 30 Oct. 1449, and on the dorse of the electoral writ. His fellow MP was one of the leading Cumberland gentry, (Sir) Thomas Curwen*, who had previously played no part in the affairs of Westmorland (although he had property there), and it looks as though the electors, not for the first time in that county, had difficulty in finding suitable candidates. That difficulty seems to have been supplied, in respect of one of the MPs, by Lord Clifford.8 C219/15/7.

Little is known of the rest of Malett’s career. Soon after his term as an MP he lost his place in the Household, for he does not appear in the 1450-1 list of those in receipt of Household robes.9 E101/410/6, f. 40. On 12 Sept. 1455, as ‘of Normanton, gentleman’, he sued out a general pardon, and, in 1458, he was a feoffee of property in nearby Barwick-in-Elmet in company with John Greenfield, who, in 1432, had married his kinswoman, Joan Malett.10 C67/41, m. 19; CCR, 1454-61, p. 274; Test. Ebor. iii (Surtees Soc. xlv), 327. There is nothing to suggest that he played any part in the civil war of 1459-61, but, whatever his political loyalties, his career reached the height of his modest prosperity in the 1460s. He sued out a general pardon on 24 June 1462; and on the following 10 Mar. his kinsman, Greenfield’s son, another John, surrendered his office of receiver of the duchy of Lancaster honour of Pontefract to the intent that it be re-granted to our MP for life.11 C67/45, m. 23; DL37/32/53.

Malett purchased another general pardon in July 1470 and may have died soon afterwards. If he did hold the Pontefract receivership for life, he must have died shortly before 11 June 1471 when Ralph Snaith, a yeoman of the Crown, was appointed to that office.12 C67/47, m. 2; Somerville, i. 517; Arnold, ii. 9, 28-29. On the other hand, the continued appearance of his name in the records of the later 1470s suggests that he survived longer. In 1474 this William had an action pending against two tradesmen of Dewsbury for assaulting him there; in 1478 he was bequeathed the modest sum of 10s. by Sir John Pilkington† of Sowerby as a servant; and in the following year he made a quitclaim of a manor in which his great-grandfather, John Malett, had been enfeoffed.13 CP40/849, rot. 191d; Test. Ebor. iii. 239; Yorks. Deeds, iii. 111. The 1479 deed gives a descent that omits the name of the father of the grantee. If the grantee was our MP’s son then our MP’s father was one Robert Malett. If the grantee was the MP himself then his father was perhaps another William, who headed the witnesses to a deed dated at Normanton in 1395 and was a tenant of the duchy of Lancaster honour of Pontefract at Ackton, near Normanton, in 1401: Yorks. Deeds, vii. 39; Feudal Aids, vi. 604. Although, however, there is no direct evidence that the MP had a son and heir named William, it is possible that these later references refer to his heir. Pilkington’s modest bequest certainly implies a younger and lesser man than our MP. However this may be, the Maletts of Normanton survived into the seventeenth century. They attracted the notice of the antiquary John Leland in the 1530s, who remarked that their lands ‘by sales and heires generales be sore disparkelid’ and that the current head of the family had but £30 p.a. with his ‘best house’ at Normanton. This hint of a significant family in decline hardly tallies with the historical record, but proved to be a prediction of the future. The last of the family, Richard Malett, died childless in 1668, leaving all his lands to be sold for the payment of his debts.14 J. Leland, Itin. ed. Toulmin Smith, iv. 91; Yorks. Arch. Jnl. vii. 2n.