PALTON, Sir William

Palton was born in 1379 at Paulton in Somerset as the second surviving son of an important southern landowner,9 CIPM, xviii. 390. whose estates extended across four counties and included the manors of ‘Paltonescourt’ in Shipton-on-Cherwell, Oxfordshire, Ower in Hampshire, Lake and Oare in Wiltshire and Camerton and Croscombe in Somerset.10 CIPM, xviii. 384-9; Reg. Stafford, ii (Som. Rec. Soc. xxxii), 190; Reg. Bubwith, ii (ibid. xxxi), 457; Fortescue mss, 1262M/TSO/109, 112, 113; Notts. RO, Portland mss, DD/P/CD/158-60. His father, Sir Robert, much increased the family’s standing by a prestigious marriage to Elizabeth, sister of Lord Botreaux, whose mother Isabel was one of the coheiresses of the last Lord de Moels.11 CP, ii. 241-2; ix. 8. In line with the family’s wealth and standing, the birth of even a younger son attracted some attention in local society. More than 20 years later a number of men recalled how they had been at dinner with Lady Elizabeth Fitzroger, wife of the wealthy Sir Henry Fitzroger, when messengers had arrived inviting her to become William’s godmother, while a different group of younger men remembered how they had been on their way to Farnborough when they met William Erlingham, one of the chamberlains of Bristol, on his way to the infant’s christening.12 CIPM, xviii. 390. No details of Palton’s upbringing have been discovered, but it probably followed the pattern usual for the younger son of a wealthy knight. Yet, shortly before he formally came of age his fortunes changed dramatically. In August 1400 his elder brother Robert, who had controlled the family estates since their father’s death, died, leaving no children.13 CIPM, xviii. 384-9. It took more than a year for William to prove his age, and several further months before the escheators in various counties had released the family lands to him, but by mid 1402 he was in control of his patrimony, diminished only by the dower of his mother, who survived into the 1420s.14 CIPM, xviii. 390; CCR, 1399-1402, pp. 458-9; CFR, xii. 123-4; CP40/603, rot. 138.

Elizabeth Botreaux had bought her son’s marriage from the Crown for £80, and it was no doubt she who arranged for him to marry Elizabeth, daughter of the Middlesex landowner Sir John Wroth, probably for a good price, for although Wroth was a wealthy man, his daughter’s expectations of inheritance were slim, as she had three brothers.15 CFR, xii. 97. In the event, however, Elizabeth Wroth’s expectations were realized, for her last surviving brother died childless on 24 Aug. 1412, and a month later she and her husband were granted seisin of the inheritance, which centred on the manors of Brookley in Hampshire, ‘Wrothesplace’ in Enfield in Middlesex, Frampton Coterell, Weston Birt, Sandhurst, and Norrslade and Ablingdon in Gloucestershire, and also included 13 manors in Cornwall, Devon and Somerset which had descended to Elizabeth from her great-uncle, Sir John Wellington. Altogether, Elizabeth’s lands were thought to be worth more than £200 p.a., a vast sum, even allowing for the claim of her widowed sister-in-law Joyce to a third part as her dower.16 CIPM, xix. 946-51; CFR, xiii. 246; CCR, 1409-13, p. 382. In the event, Joyce was persuaded to relinquish her claim in return for a handsome annuity of £70 p.a., and her lands returned to the possession of Palton and his wife.17 Some Som. Manors (Som. Rec. Soc. extra ser. 1931), 39; CCR, 1409-13, pp. 403-4. Yet William was not to enjoy his new wealth for long. On 2 Sept. 1413 Elizabeth died, aged just 23, and as the marriage had remained childless more than half of her vast properties were lost to her husband, and fell instead to the next Wroth heir, Sir John Tiptoft†.18 CIPM, xx. 115-20. Nevertheless, Palton could think himself fortunate, for part of his wife’s south-western lands, including the manors of Wyke, Bourbache, Hockham, Brompton Ralph, Elworthy and Withycombe, had been settled on the couple in jointure just months before Elizabeth’s untimely death, and thus remained in his possession for life.19 Som. Feet of Fines, ii (Som. Rec. Soc. xxii), 174; CPR, 1408-13, p. 472; Some Som. Manors, 181-2; Reg. Bubwith, i (Som. Rec. Soc. xxix), 279; ii (ibid. xxx), 347, 359. His title was challenged almost immediately by his wife’s aunt Isabel Wellington, and subsequently by the latter’s son, Sir Thomas Beaumont, and litigation over the valuable Wellington lands continued for more than 15 years.20 CP40/615, rot. 101; 654, rot. 319; 667, rots. 135, 136; C245/39/10. Equally, Palton himself also proved reluctant simply to accept Tiptoft’s title, forcing the latter for his part to assert his claim in the law courts.21 CP40/615, rot. 600.

Among the wealthiest of the Somerset gentry, Palton was extremely well connected in local society. A sizeable portion of his Somerset lands were held from the influential Luttrells of Dunster, and he numbered many members of this family’s circle among his associates. Among the most important ties so forged was one with the Courtenay earls of Devon and their cadets. Palton’s younger brother, John, fought in France with Earl Hugh (d.1422), and after the earl’s death William himself became closely associated with the Dowager Countess Anne.22 Honour of Dunster (Som. Rec. Soc. xxxiii), 155-6; SC6/1118/7; CFR, xv. 58, 62; M. Cherry, ‘Crown and Political Community, Devon’ (Wales Univ. Swansea Ph.D. thesis, 1981), 217, 218, 220. Feudal tenure aside, ties of blood provided other important connexions. Through his mother, Palton was a kinsman of William, 3rd Lord Botreaux (d.1462), and for many years he maintained close links with his baronial relatives. Between 1417 and 1423 he served as a feoffee for the lands settled by Lord Botreaux and his mother on their collegiate foundation at North Cadbury, and at various points in the 1420s the two families were associated in their respective land transactions.23 CPR, 1416-22, p. 69; 1422-9, pp. 190, 257, 462; Som. Archs., Helyer mss, DD/WHh/925. Similarly, in November 1414 Palton found sureties of 500 marks for William, Lord Clinton, who had married his kinswoman Anne Botreaux, and who was then embroiled in an acrimonious quarrel with the Shropshire esquire John Wele†.24 CCR, 1413-19, pp. 200, 203; CP, iii. 315.

Not all of Palton’s acquaintances were as reputable as these. At several points in the first half of Henry V’s reign he stood bail for prominent men suspected of heresy on account of their association with the ‘lollardus lollardorum’, Sir John Oldcastle†, including Sir Thomas Brooke* and the Hertfordshire knight Sir John Mortimer, who would later be executed for treason.25 CCR, 1413-19, pp. 116, 456; E159/207, recorda Trin. rot. 6. Palton’s links with Brooke and Mortimer appear not to have done him any harm in the government’s eyes, for although an intended appointment as sheriff of Glamorgan in November 1414 was never followed through, the next year he was added to the Devon bench.26 E372/263. The reason for his omission from the commission of the peace in late 1418 is unclear, but it may have owed something to his absence in France in the retinue of Thomas Beaufort, duke of Exeter, rather than to any form of disgrace, for in February 1422 he was added to the Somerset bench, and later that year elected to Henry VI’s first Parliament as one of the knights for that shire.27 DKR, xliv. 604, 610. There is nothing to suggest that Palton distinguished himself in the Commons, and no immediate preferment to crown office ensued. Yet, four years later he replaced his former associate and fellow MP Brooke as sheriff of Devon, in a set of delayed appointments apparently intended to diminish the influence of the chancellor, Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester. The background to this appointment is uncertain, but if – as has been suggested – John, duke of Bedford played a part in the choice of the new officers, it is possible that it was Sir William’s earlier service in France that had recommended him.28 E199/9/1, 2; E5/479; R.A. Griffiths, Hen. VI, 79.

Equally, if not more important, however, was once more Palton’s Botreaux lineage, for a leading member of the group of royal councillors who divided up the great offices of state among them was Sir Walter Hungerford†, newly created Lord Hungerford, who became treasurer, and whose son, Robert, had married Lord Botreaux’s daughter and heiress. In the absence of an adult earl of Devon, Hungerford’s circle, including men regularly associated with Palton in property transactions such as James Chudleigh* and (Sir) Philip Courtenay* of Powderham (the latter his second wife’s nephew), became increasingly dominant in south-western politics as Henry VI’s minority continued into the 1430s, and it may have been symptomatic of Palton’s lack of ambition that he failed to secure any local appointments during this period. In the second half of the 1430s, however, the balance of power in south-west England shifted once more. In 1435 Thomas Courtenay, the young earl of Devon, was declared of age and began to flex his political muscles, and from about the same time John Beaufort, earl of Somerset, increasingly made his influence felt, both in the government of the realm in general and the south-west in particular. In Devon and Somerset the challenge to the political settlement, which had seen Lord Hungerford, and his associates Sir William Bonville* and Sir Philip Courtenay assume the leading role in local society previously reserved for the earls of Devon, resulted in violent disturbances. In January 1440 one of the Powderham Courtenays mounted a challenge to Somerset’s tenure of lands in Bruton, and three months later it was Palton, through his Luttrell connexions as much as through his marriage a natural partisan of Sir Philip Courtenay, who felt emboldened to seize Somerset’s manor of Sampford Peverell. This, for much of the fourteenth century held by a junior cadet branch of the Dynhams of Hartland, had escheated to the Crown in 1399 on the death of the illegitimate Sir William Asthorpe, the husband of the last Dynham of that line, and had been granted to Somerset’s father by Henry IV in 1401. The Beauforts’ tenure had remained unchallenged for nearly 40 years, but in April 1440 Palton suddenly decided to make a claim based on an old entail of 1348, which settled the remainder of the manor on his grandmother, invaded Sampford with his retainers and equipped the crenellated manor-house with six guns. All of this was to little avail. The earl successfully pointed to his royal patent, and although Palton insisted that he was the original injured party and had merely reclaimed what was lawfully his ‘asistentibus [sic] sibi servientibus suis in numero moderato, gradui sui competenter, pacifico modo et non manuforti’, he and his associates had to pay fines to the Crown.29 CPR, 1399-1401, p. 454; KB27/717, rex rot. 5, fines rot. 2; E401/768, m. 28; Cherry, 253.

Palton’s subsequent career was uneventful. Already in his 60s, in 1444 he was appointed to inquire into the patronage of Hartland abbey, but otherwise he played no further part in local government. As he remained childless, he now put in place extensive arrangements for the passage of his estates to their rightful heirs, and between September 1439 and June 1446 he executed a series of enfeoffments to friends and retainers including Sir Philip Courtenay, James Chudleigh, John Cheyne of Pinhoe and the Lincoln’s Inn lawyer Adam Somaster*.30 C139/140/28; E13/143, rot. 44; Som. Feet of Fines, ii. 101; Fortescue mss, 1262M/TZ/2. He died on 5 Jan. 1450, aged about 70. The inquiry into his death found his heirs to be his distant kinswomen Joan and Agnes, daughters of John Austell* of Badgworth by Margaret Fitzpayn (a first cousin of Palton’s father, Sir Robert), and respectively the wives of John Kelly and Nicholas St. Loe. They, however, inherited only the old Palton lands, for under the terms of various entails the former Wellington estates fell to Elizabeth Wroth’s first cousin, Sir Thomas Beaumont, while other holdings passed to John Cheyne of Pinhoe and his wife Gillian.31 CFR, xviii. 132; C139/140/28; Some Som. Manors, 40, 181-2, 194-5; CCR, 1447-54, pp. 151-2, 216. Palton’s second wife, Anne, survived him and within six months of his death went on to marry Richard Denshill (d.1465) of Filleigh, to whom she brought her substantial jointure in Palton’s lands.32 Reg. Lacy, iii (Canterbury and York Soc., lxii), 71, 106; Reg. Bekynton, i (Som. Rec. Soc., xlix), 1002; C140/17/28; CP40/761, rot. 225; CCR, 1447-54, pp. 150-1.

Despite his early association with the Brookes, Palton’s religious views seem to have been conventional. He made provision for the construction of a chantry chapel at the east end of the south aisle of the parish church of St. Mary, Croscombe, with which his family had a long association. It was there that his mother had been granted a portable altar in 1422, and in the same year Sir William himself had – for reasons which are now obscure – procured Bishop Bubwith’s agreement to change the church’s dedication feast from 11 Oct. to 19 Oct.33 Reg. Bubwith, ii. 418, 423. As the chapel was not complete when Palton died, he was initially interred in the chancel of the church, but in June 1455 Bishop Bekynton authorized Anne Denshill to exhume her former husband’s body and to have it transferred to the new chapel.34 Reg. Bekynton, i. 924. It took several more years to complete the foundation, and only in December 1459 was an endowment for two chaplains to pray for the souls of Palton, Anne and her new husband settled on ten of the parishioners of Croscombe.35 C147/155; Procs. Som. Arch. Soc. xxxiv. 72-73. Anne’s stepdaughter Elizabeth, the only child of her second husband, successively married Martin Fortescue and Richard Pomeroy. Croscombe and the Palton mausoleum in the chapel there in the first instance descended to the Pomeroys, but later came to the hands of Elizabeth’s descendants by Fortescue.36 Procs. Som. Arch. Soc. liii. 67; C140/17/28; C1/31/465. As late as 1496 Palton’s former manor of Lake in Wilts. was also added to the endowment of the fraternity of Croscombe by the descendants of his heirs: C146/1085.