MOUNTFORT, Sir Thomas

The Yorkshire Mountforts were a junior branch of a Somerset family, anciently established at Nunney, which failed in the main line in the fourteenth century. By that time the junior branch had settled, in somewhat unusual circumstances, at Hackforth in the Richmondshire parish of Hornby in the North Riding. In 1320 Elizabeth, wife of Sir Alexander Mountfort, claimed that her brother, Sir Thomas Burgh, was impotent and thus that, as his two avowed sons were bastards, she was his heiress-presumptive. After her brother’s death in 1322 she acknowledged that this claim was false, but she was able to extract a price for that acknowledgment. Her nephew, John Burgh (d.1330), conceded to her his manor of Hackforth and his other Richmondshire lands in return for her renunciation of any claim to his other lands in Yorkshire and Cambridgeshire.6 J.W. Walker, ‘Burghs of Cambs. and Yorks.’, Yorks. Arch. Jnl. xxx. 326-7, 329-30. This compact inheritance, aside from Hackforth, included nearby manors at East and West Appleton and Great Langton and, further to the west, at Aysgarth and West Burton.7 Sir Thomas’s son later sold the manor of West Burton to Richard, duke of Gloucester: CP25(1)/281/165/23; CP40/873, rot. 81; VCH Yorks. (N. Riding), i. 205.

Before the time of our MP the Mountforts of Hackforth played only a modest part in their new county’s affairs. Our MP’s father, the brother of Alexander Mountfort (who had died young), had but a brief adult career. Inheriting as a minor in 1395, he proved his age in 1405 and died shortly before February 1417. 8 CIPM, xviii. 1139-40; CFR, xiv. 145. Little is known of him, although he initiated two legal actions designed to protect his family’s rights. In 1415 he sued the dean and chapter of York to hold to an agreement made by their predecessors with Sir Thomas Burgh to provide a chaplain for the chapel of St. Andrew at Hackforth, and, more importantly, he resurrected a family claim to the manor of Emborough in Somerset, which was to be pursued by his son Thomas.9 CP40/616, rot. 197; 618, rot. 150. Like his father, the latter succeeded to the family estate while under age. Since the Mountforts were tenants of the honour of Richmond, it is likely that he was brought up in the wardship of the lord of Richmond, Ralph Neville, earl of Westmorland (d.1425). This surmise is supported by the action brought in 1420 by his mother against the earl for her dower in Aysgarth and West Burton.10 CP40/636, rot. 77. It may, therefore, have been to the earl that Thomas owed his marriage to Elizabeth, daughter of his North Riding neighbour the future royal justice James Strangeways. The marriage apparently took place on 1 Sept. 1418, at the church of Kirby Hill near Ravensworth, some miles from both Hackforth and West Harlsey.11 In 1433 in the proof of age of Margery, da. and coh. of Sir Philip Darcy (gdda. of John, Lord Darcy, and sis. of Elizabeth, wife of James Strangeways, and by then w. of Sir John Conyers), a Thomas Mountfort recalled marrying his wife Elizabeth at Kirby Hill on the same day as Margery’s baptism, 1 Sept. 1418: CIPM, xxiv. 129. This would seem to be the future MP, although he is (presumably mistakenly) recorded as being ‘40 years and more’ at the time of the inquest. This relationship, and particularly that with his brother-in-law, the future Speaker Sir James Strangways*, was to prove perhaps the pivotal association of Mountfort’s life.

Mountfort’s adult career had a slow beginning. In 1424 his mother and her second husband, John Pygot of Ripon, brought an uncontested and presumably collusive action against him for her dower in the family lands at Nunney and nearby Trudoxhill.12 CP40/652, rot. 139. Much more significantly, ten years later he secured for his eldest son, Thomas, marriage to the heiress of their Richmondshire neighbours the Kilhams of Danby on Ure (in Thornton Stewart).13 VCH Yorks. (N. Riding), i. 266-7; CP25(1)/280/157/18. The combined inheritance of the two families, a relatively compact group of manors around Richmond and Bedale, put the Mountforts among the most substantial gentry landholders in Richmondshire, probably second only the Conyers family.14 VCH Yorks. (N. Riding), i. 184, 205-7, 249, 303-4, 316, 334-7; Feudal Aids, vi. 303; CP40/958, rot. 419; Early Yorks. Chs. ed. Clay, v. 164-7. A. J. Pollard, ‘Richmondshire Community’, in Patronage, Pedigree and Power ed. Ross, 44. The Mountforts also held property at Riby in Lincs., but presumably this was not part of the Burgh inheritance, as Alexander Mountfort had interests there as early as 1313: SC8/334/E1145. The Richmondshire gentry were a relatively close-knit group, held together by strong ties of marriage and kinship, and the Mountfort marriages with the Strangeways and Kilhams were just two of a vast network of connexions within this group. It was also a region dominated by affinity with, and loyalty to, the greatest family of Richmondshire, the Nevilles of Middleham, the descendants of the earl of Westmorland by his second wife, Joan Beaufort, and it was within this circle that Thomas and his family moved.

If, however, Mountfort’s standing was increasing in Richmondshire, his lack of connexions in Somerset seems to have prompted him to surrender the family’s claim to Emborough. That claim had been pursued during his minority, but in July 1438 he joined with his mother and brother Christopher, parson of the North Riding church of Kirklington (the advowson of which belonged to John Wandesford, husband of their sister, Eleanor, and another prominent Neville retainer), in releasing their claims to the manor to a group headed by the then lord of Emborough, Sir Ralph Butler of Sudeley. The deed of quitclaim has a curious feature. Although dated at Winchcombe in Gloucestershire, the witnesses were all Yorkshire neighbours of our MP, headed by his father-in-law, Justice Strangways, and including Christopher Conyers of Hornby, Richard Weltden and several other members of the Neville affinity. This implies that Mountfort was already himself becoming an important member of that affinity, and this supposition is amply borne out by what is known of the second half of his career. He is named in a partial list of the retainers of Richard Neville, earl of Salisbury, dating from the late 1450s, when he was in receipt of a fee of £6 13s. 4d., and it is probable that he, like many of the others named in that list, was a retainer of long-standing, even if almost all were in receipt of only pro tempore fees.15 A.J. Pollard, ‘Northern Retainers’, Northern Hist. xi. 52-69. The first overt sign of Mountfort’s place in the affinity dates from 1 Oct. 1443, when he acted as a witness to a grant by the earl’s brother Robert Neville, bishop of Durham, of the Yorkshire manor of Lazenby to the King. Besides the Neville earls of Salisbury and Westmorland the witnesses included not only Mountfort’s brother-in-law James Strangeways and his neighbour Christopher Conyers, but others of the Neville affinity such as Sir Alexander Neville* and Sir Thomas Lumley. A few years later, on 31 Jan. 1450, he appeared alongside Sir John Conyers and the prominent Neville supporter Sir James Pickering* in witnessing a quitclaim to Christopher Conyers by another Neville retainer, Robert Roos of Ingmanthorpe.16 CCR, 1441-7, p. 199.; Yorks. Deeds, iii (Yorks. Arch. Soc. Rec. Ser. lxiii), 97.

By this date Mountfort was a knight. He is first so described in Michaelmas term 1449, when plaintiff in an action of trespass, and it may be that the occasion of his dubbing was the disastrous campaign against the Scots which saw the English defeat at the battle of Sark on 23 Oct. 1448.17 CP40/755, rot. 249. However this may be, the 1450s were to provide opportunities for military adventures of another sort. As the tensions between the Nevilles and the Percys escalated into open conflict, Sir Thomas was active in the support of the former. On 27 July 1453 he was among the Neville men, headed by Sir John Conyers and Sir James Pickering, who received orders to cease their riotous activities and submit to the newly-appointed commission headed by Sir William Lucy*. It is very likely that he was present at the ‘council of war’ at Middleham in November 1458, where Salisbury and ‘al hys hole counsel’ decided to throw their full force behind Richard, duke of York.18 PPC, vi. 147-9; T.D. Whitaker, Richmondshire, ii. 261; Pollard, ‘Northern Retainers’, 52. That same year his connexions with his brother-in-law Strangeways brought him into confrontation with a leading Lancastrian, Henry Brounflete, Lord Vessy, who was pursuing the two of them, together with Ralph Assheton†, for a debt on a statute merchant of 500 marks. Brounflete claimed that in March 1453 the three men had bound themselves to pay him and his wife Eleanor, daughter of Henry, Lord Fitzhugh, certain sums due to them for a demise to Strangeways and his wife of certain manors in Yorkshire, Derbyshire and Ireland. However, they had defaulted on the remaining payments after Eleanor’s death in September 1457. The influence wielded by the Nevilles in the north at this time is clear from the response to Brounflete’s claims, when inquisitions in Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire all returned the implausible answer that none of the three men held any property in those counties upon which the debt could be levied.19 Yorks. Deeds, vii. (Yorks. Arch. Soc. Rec. Ser. lxxxiii) 141-2; CP40/790, rot. 495.

Despite Mountfort’s obvious attachment to the Nevilles, it seems that he did not join the Neville force which gathered at Middleham in September 1459 for the campaign which ended badly for the Yorkists at Ludford Bridge. Had he done so it is hard to imagine that he would, on the following 21 Dec., have been named to the commission of array in the North Riding explicitly issued to resist Yorkist rebellion.20 CPR, 1452-61, p. 559. However, that comm. also included other prominent Yorkists, such as Sir William Euer* and Sir John Melton*. Yet both Sir Thomas and his son Thomas appear to have felt themselves under some suspicion: in February 1460, with the Yorkist lords in exile, they hastened to obtain royal pardons for all offences committed before the previous 20 Nov.21 CPR, 1452-61, p. 591. As if to confirm that suspicion, our MP was dropped from the North Riding bench, after little more than a year upon it, in March. Unsurprisingly the subsequent Yorkist victory at Northampton in July brought an upturn in the family’s fortunes. On 17 Aug. Sir Thomas was appointed to deliver the gaol of York castle, six days later he was restored to his local bench, and two days after that, on 25 Aug., he was returned alongside Strangeways to sit in the Parliament summoned to assemble on 7 Oct. No doubt he was returned largely on the strength of his connexions with Strangeways and the rest of Salisbury’s retinue. It seems very likely that he had provided military or financial aid to his lord that summer. Even so, it is curious that he was selected to represent his county ahead of much more prominent Yorkists, such as Sir James Pickering. The election return was attested by a group unusually devoid of knights and with few representatives from the major county families.22 C219/16/6.

Mountfort’s election to Parliament proved to be the final major event of his life. Precisely when he died is unknown, but he was not reappointed to the bench after Edward IV took the throne, and it was clearly his son who was named on various ad hoc commissions by the new government in May 1461.23 CPR, 1461-7, pp. 30, 576. The Thomas Mountfort named in those comms. is not described as a knight, and appears near the end of the lists. Although a ‘Thomas Mownforth’ was listed among the knights going with the King to Scotland in the winter of 1462, it seems unlikely that Sir Thomas, around 60 years old and with no known previous military experience, would have enlisted for the campaign. However, the younger Thomas had certainly not been knighted by this date, so it is at least possible that this was our MP’s final service to his new King.24 Three 15th Cent. Chrons. (Cam. Soc. n.s. xxviii), 157. His son’s Yorkist credentials were sound; he became an annuitant of the earl of Warwick before Michaelmas 1463, and he maintained and built upon his father’s relationships by acting as an executor of the will of his uncle, Speaker Strangways, and later being rewarded, presumably for his support, by Richard III.25 C1/102/21; CP40/880, rot. 394; Yorks. Deeds, ii (Yorks. Arch. Soc. Rec. Ser. l), 5-6; Pollard, ‘Richmondshire Community’, 54-56; R. Horrox, Ric. III, 49-50. The family failed in the male line in the early sixteenth century.26 VCH Yorks. (N. Riding), i. 316.