TIMPERLEY, John I

The first of his family to settle in East Anglia, it is often difficult to distinguish Timperley from his son and namesake, whose own son was yet another John. The various (and conflicting) pedigrees relating to the Timperleys of Suffolk do not help matters, since one of them suggests that the MP had a younger brother of the same name.5 Add. 19152, ff. 44v-45, 46v, 50v, 52v; Harl. 1174; Vis. Suff. ed. Metcalfe, 170-1; Blomefield, ix. 474. Timperley, probably himself a younger son, arrived in Suffolk after entering the service of the Mowbray dukes of Norfolk. (He is said to have originated from Cheshire, where the Mowbrays had lands, although one account argues that he came from Northumberland.) He married a local woman and he succeeded his father-in-law, William Pettistree, as the lord of three small manors in Sutton by Woodbridge, all held of Mowbray’s castle at Framlingham, in about 1436.6 Ryan and Redstone, 2, 4-5, 140. Some peds. state that Timperley’s wife was the da. and h.of ‘Mantell of Yorkshire’, others that she was the da. of ‘Roydon’ but Ryan and Redstone’s assertion that she was Margaret Pettistree makes better sense. On the other hand, it is possible that he had earlier been married to another woman of the same name.

Timperley had become active in East Anglian affairs by the later 1430s, since he attested the return of Suffolk’s knights of the shire to the Parliament of 1437 and was appointed escheator in Norfolk and Suffolk in November 1439. It is even possible that he saw military service abroad in the meantime, since John Timperley was a member of the force with which Sir William Bucton, captain of Lisieux, rode to the relief of the fortress of Le Crotoy in Picardy in the latter part of 1437.7 Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, Fr. mss, 25774/1266. The MPs for Suffolk in 1437 were two other Mowbray retainers, Sir Robert Wingfield* and Gilbert Debenham I*, and Timperley stood as one of the latter’s sureties at his election. Debenham was from Little Wenham, a parish neighbouring Hintlesham, later the Timperleys’ principal place of residence. In due course he and Debenham became close associates, although in the autumn of 1438 Timperley stood as a mainpernor on behalf of a woman who had brought an appeal for murder against Gilbert in the court of King’s bench.8 KB27/710, rot. 70d.

In spite of serving as escheator, Timperley never became a j.p. and his role as an ad hoc commissioner was an extremely limited one. He did, however, help the duke of Norfolk to put down the disturbances which broke out at Norwich in January 1443. After quelling the trouble, Mowbray sent him to London with several prisoners, who were committed to the Tower. The King’s Council, which entrusted him with various messages to take back to his master, gave him £3 6s. 8d. as a reward, along with a further five marks for his expenses.9 R.L. Storey, End of House of Lancaster, 217, 221-2; PPC, v. 238; Issues of the Exchequer ed. Devon, 444. Timperley himself was guilty of disorderly behaviour later that year, when he and other Mowbray men raided the property of their patron’s estranged retainer, Sir Robert Wingfield. According to the findings of a subsequent inquiry, he, William Brandon† and William Lee‡, all described as ‘of Framlingham’, and 17 others had attempted to abduct Wingfield’s daughter, Elizabeth, as she accompanied her mother to church one Sunday morning in September 1443.10 KB27/735, rex rot. 37. This was not the first occasion that Timperley had engaged in lawless behaviour: five and a half years earlier, he and others acting for Mowbray, including Debenham and John Wymondham*, had forcibly seized Ralph Garneys’ manors of Stockton and Geldeston in south-east Norfolk.11 KB27/738, rex rot. 4; KB9/249/108.

Given the duke of Norfolk’s limited influence in East Anglia politics in the 1440s, it is unlikely that Timperley owed his seat in the Parliament of 1445 solely to his master’s support. He certainly did not depend on Mowbray patronage alone during his career. In 1439 the Crown had provided him with a corrody at Thetford priory as a reward for his good service;12 CCR, 1435-41, p. 259. during 1443-5 (and probably for longer) he received an annual retainer of £6 13s. 4d. from John de Vere, 12th earl of Oxford;13 Suff. RO (Ipswich), accts. of ministers of earl of Oxford for farms in E. Bergholt and Ipswich, 1443-6, HA6:51/4/5.3, mm. 3, 4. and by the second half of the 1440s either he or his son was an esquire of the Household and a feoffee of Thomas, Lord Scales.14 CCR, 1454-61, pp. 90-92; E101/409/16; CPR, 1446-52, p. 111; CFR, xviii. 183-4. Yet, although in many respects an inept lord, Mowbray possessed ample resources to reward his followers. At some stage before 1444, for example, he made Timperley his constable at Bretby, Derbyshire, with an annual fee of 60s. 10d.15 It is assumed that it was his son and namesake who was the duke’s parker at Gt. Chesterford, Essex, since this John Timperley, who had become parker by the late 1440s, still held the office in the mid 1470s: Moye, 427. Also, it was the yr. John, rather than the MP, who received an annuity from Sele priory in Suss. (a religious house of which the Mowbrays were patrons until 1459): Cat. Suss. Deeds, Magdalen Coll. ed. Macray, i. 134, 186; ii. 115; VCH Suss. ii. 61. In the mid 1440s, moreover, Mowbray leased a mill at Wrexham to the MP and another retainer, William Holand,16 SC6/1234/14, m. 9. and in September 1449 he granted land at Orwell near Ipswich to Timperley and John Felawe (father of Richard Felawe*).17 Ryan and Redstone, 5. More significantly, Timperley received a conveyance of lands at Reigate, Surrey, from the duke in 1446, and it was probably in that year that Mowbray made over the manor of Gatton in the same county to him.18 VCH Surr. iii. 198, 237. The Crown augmented this latter gift in March 1449, when in return for his past good service the King granted him permission to create a park and warren at Gatton and Merstham. In the same grant the King awarded him and his heirs other privileges, including an exemption from serving on any assizes, juries or inquisitions.19 CChR, vi. 112. Although both Reigate and Gatton were ‘rotten boroughs’ controlled by the Mowbrays, it is quite possible that Timperley – if the Household esquire – owed his return to the Parliament of 1453 (as royalist and compliant as any of Henry VI’s reign) to the Crown, since at that date he had recently lost favour with Mowbray.

Timperley remained active in East Anglian affairs after acquiring his interests in Surrey. He was one of those who attested the return of Suffolk’s knights of the shire to the Parliament of February 1449, and in 1451 he appears to have assisted John Paston* in his dispute with Robert Hungerford, Lord Moleyns.20 Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 71, 73-74. In the following year, he fell out with the duke of Norfolk, who dismissed him, Gilbert Debenham and William Lee from his council, and in August 1452 a band of Mowbray retainers forcibly entered lands belonging to him at Hintlesham. While the reason for the duke’s dismissal of the three men is unknown, it is possible that in Timperley’s case it was due to malicious charges of treasonable practice which Roger Church, one of the most lawless Mowbray retainers, had brought against him.21 Ibid. 72; KB9/118/1/25; Ryan and Redstone, 7. Whatever the case, the duke was prone to falling out with his followers, most notably Sir Robert Wingfield. It was not the first time he had quarrelled with Debenham and he lost the loyalty of John Wymondham and William Brandon on other occasions.22 H.R. Castor, King, Crown and Duchy of Lancaster, 112, 116. It is unlikely that Timperley was estranged from Mowbray for long, since in June 1453 he and others forcibly entered the manor of Stockton (by then in the possession of Alice de la Pole, the widowed duchess of Suffolk) on the duke’s behalf.23 C1/26/164; C.F. Richmond, Paston Fam., The First Phase, 147-8; KB27/784, rot. 87. But Richmond, 148n, mistakenly suggests that the Stockton entry occurred in the autumn of 1453.

Yet, notwithstanding his actions at Stockton, Timperley managed to maintain a friendly relationship with prominent members of the de la Pole affinity like Sir Thomas Tuddenham* and Reynold Rous*. In March 1454 the Crown licensed him to have the manor and advowson of Hintlesham (which he had probably only just acquired) settled on himself and his feoffees, among them Tuddenham, Rous and John Wymondham, of whom the latter was by then another de la Pole man.24 CPR, 1452-61, p. 150; KB27/774, rot. 49. A few months later, ‘Tympyrle’ (either the MP or his son) was one of a large band of men which accompanied the de la Pole retainer, (Sir) Philip Wentworth*, on an abortive attempt to abduct Thomas Fastolf†, a young heir whose wardship Wentworth was disputing with Sir John Fastolf.25 Paston Letters, ii. 94; A.R. Smith, ‘Sir John Fastolf’ (Oxford Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1982), 204-5, 207. Furthermore, in 1455 Timperley and his wife, Margaret, conveyed the manors which she had inherited from her father to a group of feoffees, headed by Wentworth and including de la Pole men like Rous and John Heydon*.26 CP25(1)/224/119/13. Ryan and Redstone, 9, state that this conveyance was a sale. They may be correct, since the property does not feature in John II’s inq. post mortem: CIPM Hen. VII, i. 809.

In spite of his association with members of the de la Pole affinity, it is likely that Timperley accompanied the duke of Norfolk to St. Albans in May 1455. Norfolk’s party arrived there on 23 May, a day after the duke of York’s defeat of the King’s army, no doubt because the duke was too circumspect to commit himself to either side.27 Ryan and Redstone, 8n. In the summer the victorious Yorkists summoned a Parliament in which a John Timperley sat for Ipswich (he was admitted to the freedom of the borough a year before his election),28 Add. 30158, f. 17v; N. Bacon, Annalls of Ipswiche ed. Richardson, 112. but it is not clear whether this John was the subject of this biography or his son and namesake. While the exact date of the elder man’s death is unconfirmed, it is likely that he was the John Timperley who, as recorded in a long-since disappeared inscription in Hintlesham parish church, died in 1460.29 J. Weever, Funeral Mons. 765; Add. 19105, f. 29b; 19152, f. 50v; Blomefield, ix. 474; W.A. Copinger, Suff. Manors, vi. 54. The John Timperley ‘senior’ who took part in a conveyance of property with his wife Margaret in 1476 (CP25(1)/224/121/6) must have been John Timperley II. Margaret was a very common name, so there is every chance that he had married a namesake of his mother. It is therefore possible that it was the older John who received royal pardons in November 1455 and April 1458,30 C67/41, m. 24; 42, m. 25. who was distrained for knighthood in 1458 and who, in the following year, was party to a conveyance of property in Middlesex (apparently on behalf of the duchess of Norfolk),31 London Metropolitan Archs., Christie, Manson and Wood mss, Q/CMW/14; VCH Mdx. xii. 121. and attested the election of Suffolk’s knights of the shire to the penultimate Parliament of Henry VI’s reign. Probably it was the younger John Timperley who was burgess for Reigate in the Commons of 1460, given that the elder man is likely to have died before Parliament was dissolved.

For want of a will or inquistion post mortem, evidence for the MP’s lands is piecemeal. As already noted, he had held several manors at Sutton in the right of his wife, acquired property at Hintlesham and received lands in Surrey and elsewhere from the duke of Norfolk. He may also have held a manor at Merstham, given the licence to empark there granted to him in 1449 and the pardon he received, as of that Surrey parish, in 1452.32 VCH Surr. i. 364; iii. 198, 216, 237; O. Manning and W. Bray, Surr. i. 305; C67/40, m. 1.