TALBOT, Sir Christopher

Christopher Talbot’s prospects at birth were as modest as his ancestry was exalted. When he was born in about 1415, he was, with respect to the Talbot patrimony (which lay largely in Shropshire), the younger son of a younger son, and in regard to the Furnival inheritance of his mother (centred on Sheffield in south Yorkshire), his prospects depended on his elder brother’s premature and childless death. Although, in 1421, his chances of a competence were increased when the death of his young cousin, Ankaret, brought the Talbot lands to his father, in another respect his prospects receded. As he was growing up, the potential claims on the family lands grew with him, for his father had several children by a second wife, Margaret Beauchamp.3 CP, viii. 55; xii (1), 620.

None the less, this disadvantage aside, Christopher was able to carve out a very promising career for himself. He was playing a part in the management of his father’s affairs by the summer of 1434. On 3 Aug. he was party to a lease of Talbot property dated at Sheffield, and soon afterwards he ordered the receiver of Blackmere, John Wenlock, and other of his father’s servants to ride to the house of Sir Richard Lacon* (unfortunately, the purpose of their visit is not known).4 C146/2946; Salop Archs. Bridgwater pprs. 212/76/7. His father’s concerns were also his own in another sphere. Lord Talbot was one of the leading commanders of the English armies in Normandy, and it was natural that Christopher should also have served there. In July 1435 he mustered with his own retinue at Barham Down in Kent; and he presumably fought during the difficult campaign of the following winter, when a peasant rising in the Pays de Caux threatened the English position and Paris was lost. It may even be that he was captured by the French: an unnamed son of Lord Talbot was ransomed by his father at some point before 1438, and, as his only legitimate brother of an age for military service is not known to have fought, Christopher is the most likely candidate, although it is possible that the prisoner was one of Lord Talbot’s illegitimate sons.5 CPR, 1429-36, p. 475; Add. Ch. 439; A.J. Pollard, ‘The Talbots’ (Bristol Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1968), 35. Another result of this period of military service was knighthood. In the deed of lease cited above he is identified as a knight, and yet, in the order for the muster at Barham Down, he is described as an esquire. The former identification is probably premature; but he was certainly a knight by August 1436.6 C146/2946; CPR, 1429-36, p. 475; Notts. Archs. Portland mss, 157DD/P/CD/129.

On Christopher’s return from France, his father made him the sort of provision that was vital to a younger son. On 27 Aug. 1436 Lord Talbot’s feoffees granted him the manor of Bubnell in north Derbyshire in fee tail, and he is known to have received the neighbouring manor of Glossop at about the same time. Both manors had been purchased by his father in the 1420s, and he must have been aware that he had little hope of receiving any part of the Talbot patrimony, not least because his father had already made a generous settlement in favour of his children by Margaret Beauchamp.7 Trans. Hunter Arch. Soc. ii. 233; Portland mss, 157DD/P/CD/129. Lord Talbot’s two eldest sons by Margaret were named as remaindermen in the grant of Bubnell. They had already been named as such (expectant on the death of their parents) in the much more-valuable ldships. of Blackmere and Painswick to the potential disinheritance of the main line: Pollard, 52. And yet, despite this grant of lands in Derbyshire, Sir Christopher continued to concern himself principally with the Talbot heartland of Shropshire. At some point between September 1436 and 1437 he visited Shrewsbury, receiving the modest gift of 2s. from the borough authorities. In June 1437 his father nominated him as a feoffee in two Shropshire manors, and two months later he was at Blackmere with 12 horse attending to his father’s business there.8 Salop Archs. Shrewsbury recs., bailiffs’ acct. 3365/373; deeds, 6000/4503; CPR, 1436-41, p. 73; Bridgwater pprs. 212/76/9. Blackmere may have been his habitual residence, for a chamber in the castle there was named for him: Pollard, 336n. His close involvement in the county is made yet clearer a few years later: in February 1441 both he and his elder brother were added to the commission of the peace there, and nearly a year later he was returned to represent the shire in Parliament in company with the experienced local lawyer, William Burley I*, who served the Talbots among others. There can be no doubt that the two men were elected in his father’s interest, presumably to rally the support in the Commons for the financial grants necessary to the defence of Normandy. Very soon after Parliament assembled Lord Talbot himself returned from thence to raise further troops. It was during his brief visit that our MP became an earl’s son: Lord Talbot was created earl of Shrewsbury on 4 May.9 CPR, 1441-6, p. 589; C219/15/2; Pollard, 184.

However, even though Sir Christopher remained active in Shropshire, it was clearly his father’s intention that both he and his elder brother, Sir John, should play a part in the administration of the family’s Furnival estates in the north. At the same time as our MP received his Derbyshire manors, the valuable manor of Worksop in north Nottinghamshire was settled on Sir John, and both brothers played some part in the affairs of the West Riding. In March 1438, for example, Sir Christopher was attending to his father’s affairs at Sheffield.10 Pollard, 65, 315; Bridgwater pprs. 212/76/10. More significantly, he later entered into an arrangement that gave him much more extensive interests in the north. On 1 Nov. 1441 he took a lease of the Yorkshire manors of Handesworth, Bramley and Attercliffe and the bailiwick of Staincross, all in the neighbourhood of Sheffield, together with the lordship of Edwinstowe in Nottinghamshire. We cannot be certain what lay behind this arrangement, but it is suggestive that the lessor, the very elderly Geoffrey Lowther*, was the last surviving executor of our MP’s maternal grandfather, Lord Furnival, and that the three manors had once been Furnival’s. It appears that Lowther, who reserved a rent of £44 p.a. payable for the term of his life, was surrendering a long-held interest in property, the bulk of which was destined to descend to our MP’s elder brother as their mother’s heir. If so, the lease is to be seen as another act of provision for our MP.11 CCR, 1441-7, pp. 60-61.

Sir Christopher’s new local prominence was soon recognized by the Crown. On 4 May 1442, a few weeks after the conclusion of the Parliament in which he had represented Shropshire and on the same day on which his father was raised to an earldom, he was added to the bench in the West Riding (again together with his elder brother). At the end of the same year the Crown surrendered its rights in respect of the lease of 1441: it granted him the office of bailiff of Staincross, part of the duchy of Lancaster, and a yearly rent of 19 marks out of the lordship of Edwinstowe, both of which Lowther had held by royal grant since the reign of Henry IV.12 DL37/10/5; CPR, 1441-6, p. 136; R. Somerville, Duchy, i. 521. Sir Christopher then added to his local interests by purchasing early in 1443 several hundred acres scattered over several vills in the vicinity of Sheffield and Rotherham.13 CP25(1)/280/159/12.

By the early 1440s Sir Christopher was a significant figure in his own right. Although most of the surviving evidence relates to his role in local affairs, whether in Shropshire or Yorkshire, he also had a place in the King’s household. In two royal grants, that of the rent from Edwinstowe and that made to him in May 1443 of £20 p.a. from the issues of Shropshire (to be held jointly with his elder brother), he is described as ‘King’s knight’; and in a later indictment he is described as a knight of the Household.14 CPR, 1441-6, pp. 136, 194; KB27/733, rex rot. 23d. More interestingly, in November 1440 one of the correspondents of John Paston* wrote of the arrival in England of a Spanish knight, ‘wyth a kercheff of plesaunce i wrapped aboute hys arme’, who was to run a course ‘for his sovereyn lady sake’ against either our MP or Sir Richard Wydeville.15 Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, ii. 47. It was Wydeville who ran the course: CCR, 1435-41, p. 397; Chrons. London ed. Kingsford, 148.

Such court connexions, together with his father’s influence, may have helped Sir Christopher to a marriage that allowed him to overcome the disavantages of a younger son and become a rich man. The match is known only from a suit in the court of common pleas: in 1445 Sir John Talbot had an action for the considerable debt of £500 against his brother’s widow, Joyce, Lady Tiptoft and Powis. She was a woman of great wealth: not only did she have significant dower and jointure holdings from her first marriage, but in her own right she was one of the two coheiress to the lands of her father, the feudal lord of Powis, and through her mother she had title to a small share of the Holand earldom of Kent.16 CP40/736, rot. 392; CIPM, xxi. 884; J.S. Roskell, Parl. and Politics, iii. 113-14. The marriage did not promise much hope for the establishment of a new branch of the Talbots – Joyce had a son by her first marriage, namely John Tiptoft, later earl of Worcester, and was coming to the end of her child-bearing years – but she brought her new husband lands enough to support the rank of a baron. The marriage must have taken place with almost indecent haste after her first husband’s death in the early days of 1443, and it may be that the match, or at least the negotiations preceding it, took place in Shrewsbury. Judging from the gifts of bread and wine made by the borough authorities, our MP came to the town on three occasions in 1443, first in company with his elder brother, then with Lady Tiptoft and John Sutton, Lord Dudley, and finally with his wife and Sir James Butler (whose sister, Elizabeth, was the spouse of Sir John Talbot) in what the accounts describe as ‘in primo adventu uxoris sue’. The second visit is particularly interesting. Sutton was the husband of Lady Tiptoft’s stepmother, and his eldest son, Edmund Dudley, was the husband of her daughter, another Joyce. If she had wanted help in concluding an agreement for a new marriage, he was an obvious choice, and it is not fanciful to suggest that this was the purpose of the visit to Shrewsbury.17 Shrewsbury bailiffs’ accts. 3365/377, m. 2.

The marriage was to be a very short one. In the following summer Sir Christopher met his death in strange circumstances. On 10 Aug. 1443, days after his father had returned to Normandy after another brief visit, a Welsh knight, Sir Gruffydd Vaughan of Trelydan (in Guilsfield in Montgomeryshire), ran him through with a lance at Caus castle (Shropshire), the property of Humphrey, earl of Stafford. Talbot’s death seems to have happened in the context of a tournament, but it was not seen as an accident. It was the subject of two indictments. The first of these was taken at Shrewsbury on 17 Oct. before royal commissioners, headed by Sir Richard Lacon, inquiring into treasons in Shropshire and the adjacent march. A jury placed the death in the context of a treasonable rising: it claimed that Sir Gruffydd and others imagining the death of the King had collected many traitors from Wales at Caus where Sir Gruffydd had killed Sir Christopher, described in the indictment as Vaughan’s master. Later, on 16 June 1444, a further indictment was laid at Shrewsbury, on this occasion before the county’s j.p.s. headed by our MP’s elder brother, Sir John.18 KB27/733, rex rot. 23d; 743, rex rot. 8. A London chronicle notes that Sir Christopher was ‘falsely slayne’: Chron. Grey Friars London (Cam. Soc. liii), 18. The Crown added its own summary action to the indictments. The lands of Vaughan and others implicated in the death were declared forfeit, and granted in fee to Lord Dudley; a reward of 500 marks was offered for Vaughan’s arrest; and when a general pardon was granted in May 1446 those involved in the murder were specifically excluded.19 CPR, 1441-6, p. 281; Trevelyan Pprs. i (Cam. Soc. lxvii), 26-27; C67/39, m. 49. This exemption may have moved a local lord, Sir Henry Grey, count of Tancarville, to take the law into his own hands: in July 1447 he had Vaughan executed at his castle at Welshpool. He had two obvious motives for this violent act, namely to claim the substantial reward and, perhaps more powerfully, to avenge our MP’s widow, who was Sir Henry’s maternal aunt. He was, however, roundly condemned by the Welsh bards Lewis Glyn Cothi and Dafydd Llwyd, who accused him of securing Vaughan’s person by the duplicitous offer of a safe-conduct.20 D.F. Evans, ‘Murder in the Marches’, Procs. Harvard Celtic Colloquium, xviii/xix. 55-58; Mont. Collns. i. 335-8; lxxxvi. 24-27. In short, the true circumstances of Sir Christopher’s tragic death are beyond recovery, but there is every reason to suppose that it was murder rather than accident.

Talbot’s death was soon followed by another. Even though his wife was in her forties at his death, she was then pregnant. The infant’s life was to be very brief: at some date between September 1443 and September 1444 the borough authorities at Shrewsbury spent 10d. on wine given to the Talbot servants who had come to the town for the burial of Sir Christopher’s child. Joyce, Lady Powis, did not long survive this double blow. She died in the autumn of 1446 and thus did not live to see her second husband apparently avenged.21 Shrewsbury bailiffs’ acct. 3365/377, m. 3. She is commemorated by a magnificent tomb at Enfield in Mdx., the property of her first husband: R. Gough, Sep. Mons. ii (2), 136.