RITTE, John

Ritte came from a minor gentry family with landholdings in the south-west of Devon, who derived their name from their original home at Rutt in Ugborough.3 Place Names of Devon, i (English Place Name Soc. viii), 286. Little is known for certain about his early career, short of the occasional appearance in the royal courts in disputes with local husbandmen over rights of pasture.4 CP40/730, rot. 75; 771, rot. 172; 791, rot. 46. It was in 1435 that Ritte gained his first experience of the courts and the dangers they could present. Currently engaged in the execution of the will of a kinsman, Richard Ritte, he had brought an action of debt in the court of common pleas against one Matthew Asheridge, a husbandman from Goutsford. Asheridge, however, did not lack useful family connexions: Walter Asheridge, a clerk, sued Ritte in the court baron of a local liberty, where Walter’s brother happened to be bailiff, causing his opponent to complain to the chancellor of what he described as ‘right a perillous court’.5 C1/10/315; CP40/697, rot. 45.

Ritte’s father, William, had made profitable marriage to Isabel, one of the coheiresses of the Holcombes of Hollacombe, but the partition of the inheritance between Isabel and her sister Agnes, the wife of Richard Fortescue, embroiled the Rittes in several decades of squabbling after Fortescue, ‘a grete meyntenour and oppressour in þe countrey’, laid claim to the lands under the terms of an entail of 1419. After a failed arbitration by Fortescue’s eldest brother Henry† and others in 1438, the parties submitted to the judgement of his second brother, Chief Justice (Sir) John Fortescue*, under whose award the disputed lands were to be divided between the parties, but litigation soon flared up again.6 C1/17/11-15; 26/565; 73/65; 75/77; C253/29/10, 16-17; 35/339; SC8/166/8255; CP40/766, rot. 55d; 768, rot. 127; 771, rot. 516; Stonor Letters, i (Cam. Soc. ser. 3, xxix), 36-37; JUST1/199/13. Although it was Ritte’s father who bore the brunt of the quarrel, John was also drawn into it, for at Easter 1452 he complained of having been physically attacked by his uncle Richard Fortescue a year earlier, and demanded £100 in damages, while Fortescue for his part did not deny having used force, but claimed to have acted in self-defence.7 CP40/765, rot. 124d.

As William Ritte survived into the second half of the 1450s, John sought estates of his own through marriage to Joan Brightricheston. Instrumental in this enterprise was William, Lord Zouche of Harringworth, the girl’s joint guardian with Henry Pomeray, who, following the death of her under-age brother John, granted Ritte custody of her lands during her minority. But the inheritance proved to be as troubled as that of Ritte’s mother had been. Joan’s cousin Elizabeth, assisted by the influential Pomeray, challenged the couple’s possession of their lands before the justices of common pleas.8 CP40/804, rots. 184d, 265; 805, rot. 107; 808, rot. 22. In the summer of 1465 Elizabeth, her husband the lawyer John Wynell, and her nephew William Carswell, claiming to be the rightful heirs to the Brightricheston estates, brought charges of forcible entry against the Rittes.9 CP40/800, rot. 84d; 820, rots. 405, att. 1, 2. At the same time Carswell’s father-in-law John Pralle* of Totnes sought to settle the matter by riding to Brightricheston with a gathering of armed men, intending to kill Ritte but only succeeding in driving away the livestock.10 CP40/820, rot. 277d. The dispute found its echo in various court proceedings for some years to come, for even after Ritte’s death Wynell and his wife continued their litigation in Chancery against his widow for allegedly withholding charters and muniments relating to a messuage with a garden in Plympton Erle.11 C1/54/257.

These quarrels aside, Ritte seems to have enjoyed generally cordial relations with his neighbours, for whom he occasionally acted as a mainpernor.12 KB27/681, rot. 13. Considered to be of some consequence in the locality, he was empanelled on local juries alongside representatives of the wealthiest families of the south-west, such as Charles Dynham†, John Speke† and Walter Courtenay†.13 CP40/836, rot. 240d. By the mid 1450s he had also formed a connexion with the influential Stonors, a gentry family from the Thames valley who also owned property at Ermington. These holdings brought first Thomas Stonor I* and subsequently his son and heir Thomas II* into conflict with the Fortescues, and by 1466 also resulted in a fresh clash between Ritte and his cousin Richard Fortescue* the younger who, so he claimed, had assaulted him while he was seeking to prevent the theft of Stonor’s timber.14 Stonor Letters, i. 74, 130-1; ii (Cam. Soc. ser. 3, xxx), 16-17, 181.

Although it is likely that Ritte’s local links and his standing in the area contributed to his return to Parliament for the borough of Totnes, his connexion with the lord of the borough, Lord Zouche, may have been instrumental, for Ritte’s old adversary John Pralle was of some consequence in the town. Although he never embarked on a public career beyond the occasional service on local juries, Ritte did take some interest in parliamentary affairs prior to his own election, standing surety for Thomas Asshenden* on the occasion of his election for Dartmouth in 1437.15 C219/15/1.

In 1470 Ritte was among the members of a grand jury charged with inquiring into an act of perjury alleged by Ralph Trewyke, but he is not recorded thereafter.16 CP40/835, rot. 258; 836, rot. 240d. The exact date of his death is uncertain, but it probably occurred not long before 14 Nov. 1478, when a writ of diem clausit extremum in his name was sent to the escheator of Devon.17 CFR, xxi. 449.