SEYTON, Thomas

The Seytons were a family of ancient distinction, numbering among their ancestors a c.j.c.p. of the 1270s, Master Roger Seyton. They had long held lands in Northamptonshire, Rutland, Leicestershire, Oxfordshire, Essex and Buckinghamshire, a significant part of which had come to them through the marriage of the judge’s brother, Sir Richard Seyton, to the heiress of Simon de Maidwell.4 Oxf. DNB, ‘Seaton, Roger of’; VCH Rutland, ii. 217; J. Bridges, Northants. ii. 45-46. In about the middle of the fourteenth century they seem to have moved from their ancient seat at Seaton in Rutland to Maidwell in Northamptonshire. Three heads of the family represented the former county in Parliament between 1302 and 1337, but our MP’s grandfather, Sir John† (d.1396), sat for the latter (in 1378) and was buried at Maidwell. This distinguished record of parliamentary service was matched by a traditional attachment to the house of Lancaster. Sir Richard Seyton, son of the Maidwell heiress, was pardoned for adherence to Thomas, earl of Lancaster, in 1318, and Sir John was an annuitant of John of Gaunt, serving with him on several military campaigns.5 Knights of Edw. I (Harl. Soc. lxxxiii), 245; S.K. Walker, Lancastrian Affinity, 28, 281. According to the Northants. visitation of 1564, the last Sir John died at Jerusalem in 1396: Bridges, ii. 49. None the less, despite this impressive history, the family’s standing appears to have been in decline by the end of the fourteenth century. This decline may have begun in the time of Sir John, who, in 1381, sold his distant manor of ‘Mortivaux’ in Ashdon (Essex).6 P. Morant, Essex, ii. 540. On the other hand, in 1394 he purchased a small manor in Draughton near Maidwell for £40: Add. Chs. 21799, 21801; CP25(1)/178/89/163. Although our MP’s father appears to have been well connected in that the prominent Lancastrian, Sir Thomas Erpingham, numbered among his feoffees, he abandoned the family tradition of knighthood and played little part in local affairs. It may be that he suffered from a serious physical disability: an old pedigree describes him as ‘with a broken back’.7 Add. Ch. 22260; Bridges, ii. 46. He was among the many Northants. landowners distrained to take up knighthood in 1411: E198/4/39.

On John’s death early in 1430 he left a patrimony burdened by the interests of our MP’s stepmother, Joan, daughter of Sir James Bellers† of Eye Kettleby (Leicestershire).8 This marriage had taken place by 12 Sept. 1421 when Erpingham and others settled ‘Wolverton fee’ in Maidwell on the couple: Northants. RO, Finch Hatton mss, 2699. She brought her interest in the Seyton estates to her third husband, John Feldyng of Lutterworth in Leicestershire, and her survival combined with his youth explains our MP’s infrequent appearances in the records in the 1430s. This marriage had a further significance for the young Thomas in that it led to another match, that of his half-sister to Feldyng’s son and heir, William*. She took with her to the Feldyngs the family’s manor of Martinsthorpe in Rutland, probably because it had been settled in jointure on her parents. In return for this permanent diminution of his patrimony our MP gained the minor compensation of a connexion that was of some later significance to him.9 VCH Rutland, ii. 85.

Matters improved for the young Thomas in 1437 when he came to an agreement with his stepmother. She accepted a life interest in the family’s outlying manor of Barford St. Michael in Oxfordshire with other lands in that county, Buckinghamshire and Leicestershire, as her dower and jointure entitlement, thus leaving the heart of the inheritance, principally the two manors of Maidwell (‘Wolverton fee’ and ‘Rabas fee’), in his hands. Thereafter he did not have to wait long to reunite his patrimony: the date of Joan’s death is uncertain, but by 6 Feb. 1441 she had surrendered, either by death or otherwise, all the Seyton lands she held. On that date Thomas conveyed the family patrimony (save his wife’s jointure) to a group of 15 feoffees that included several of the leading gentry of Leicestershire, Rutland and Northamptonshire – Sir Laurence Berkeley* and his son, Thomas†, Sir William Trussell†, John Bellers* and his son, Anthony, William Beaufo*, Edmund Dyve and Everard Digby*, the son of Seyton’s stepmother – together with the ubiquitous Chancery clerk, Nicholas Wymbissh, and Sir William St. George of Hatley St. George (Cambridgeshire).10 Add. Ch. 22274. The pretext of this conveyance may have been his impending fatherhood for his son and heir, also named Thomas, was born at the following Whitsuntide. This impressive list of feoffees illustrates the family’s residual importance, and these connexions were probably of assistance to him in another of the difficulties of his early career, the long-running dispute over the family’s property in Draughton near Maidwell.

For some unknown reason the Seytons had come into conflict with their feudal overlords at Draughton, the Staffords. In the 1420s Anne, dowager countess of Stafford, had seized both their manor and some property there known as ‘Bestons’, which John Seyton had purchased in 1417 from the Northamptonshire lawyer, Thomas Beston of Sywell. John had successfully petitioned the countess’s son, the young Humphrey, earl of Stafford, for restoration and had been rewarded on 9 May 1429 with a confirmation of his estate in the manor, but ‘Bestons’ remained in the hands of the countess, who proved impervious to John’s entreaties. At an unknown date between the dowager’s death in October 1438 and the earl’s elevation to the dukedom of Buckingham in September 1444, Seyton made a renewed effort, asking that ‘Bestons’ be restored to him. The probable success of this petition meant that the Seyton patrimony was entirely reunited in his hands.11 Finch Hatton mss, 460, 3070; Add. Chs. 21535, 21842.

The value of this united inheritance can only be roughly estimated. In 1412 Seyton’s father had been assessed upon an income of £40 p.a., drawn equally from the counties of Northamptonshire and Rutland. This was certainly an underestimate as far as the former county was concerned: a surviving account for 1419-20 has cash liveries of over £20 with receipts (excluding arrears) of over £24 from Maidwell with further liveries of a little less than £10 from neighbouring Draughton. Moreover, to this has to be added the income derived from counties for which the 1412 assessments do not survive. A damaged rental of 1392 lists rents of £24 from Barford St. Michael and over £7 from Hallaton (Leicestershire), to which has to be added the value of the family’s large manor at Ellesborough (Buckinghamshire) and other lesser properties. In short, it is unlikely that our MP had an annual income of less than £100.12 Feudal Aids, vi. 498; E179/387/21; Finch Hatton mss, 444, 485.

With such an income, even if it was less than the family had once enjoyed, Thomas looked set fair to resume the prominent place the Seytons had once enjoyed in local affairs. On 30 May 1441 he secured a papal indult to have a portable altar, and on the following 28 Dec. he began his recorded public career by attesting the Northamptonshire parliamentary election. Late in the autumn of 1442 he acted as a feoffee for the influential Leicestershire lawyer, Thomas Palmer*, and on 6 Apr. 1443 he was named as one of a distinguished group to whom Everard Digby entrusted the manor of Offord Cluny in Huntingdonshire. More significantly, on the following 17 July he was one of the many Northamptonshire landholders who mustered at Portsdown in the retinue of John Beaufort, duke of Somerset, and he presumably remained on campaign until the end of the year.13 CPL, ix. 231; C219/15/2; CCR, 1441-7, p. 117; Westminster Abbey muns. 14178; E101/54/5, m. 1.

These promising early beginnings, however, did not prove to be the start of a successful career. The next reference to Seyton is suggestive of considerable financial difficulties, perhaps because he had been captured by the French and ransomed (although this can only be a speculative suggestion). On 4 Nov. 1445 he and his wife granted the manor of Grove in Ellesborough with nearly 1,000 acres of land to Cardinal Kemp and a group of Kentish men, including Gervase Clifton* and Hugh Pakenham, closely connected with the cardinal. This was clearly either a sale or a mortgage and it proved a permanent alienation. In small part this marked a rationalization of his interests (for at the same time he acquired over 100 acres of farmland at Little Bowden, a few miles from Maidwell), but debt is the only convincing explanation for the alienation of a manor which had so long been part of the Seyton patrimony.14 Add. Ch. 7383; VCH Bucks. ii. 335; CP25(1)/22/122/19; 179/95/115. An action tried at the Northamptonshire assizes in July 1447 may have arisen out of another device of the financially hard-pressed: the sale of manumissions. Three members of the same family, claimed as villeins by our MP, had their freedom confirmed by a jury and then remitted the damages awarded to them. There can be little doubt that this, as in other cases of the same type, was collusive litigation designed to confirm such a sale.15 CP40/745, rot. 214d.

Seyton had another more valuable resource to solve his apparent difficulties. On 1 Feb. 1450 he entered into a contract for the marriage of his young son and heir to Joan (b.1441), daughter of Thomas Boughton* of Little Lawford in south Warwickshire. Boughton was a servant of Edward Grey, Lord Ferrers of Groby, as too was William Feldyng, and this indirect connexion between the two fathers is the best available explanation for the marriage. Whatever drew the parties together, however, Boughton was prepared to pay handsomely for the match: he undertook to pay a portion of either 325 or 365 marks (erasures in the surviving document leave the amount ambiguous), as much as 200 marks of which was to be paid on or before the day of the marriage, scheduled for the following 15 June. He also agreed to bear all the costs of the marriage celebrations save for the ‘weddyng clothes’ of the groom. In return, our MP undertook to convey to Boughton and others lands in Seaton and elsewhere in Rutland (said in an erasure to be worth 20 marks p.a.) so that Boughton might take the issues for the maintenance of the couple until the groom should come to the age of 18, at which time the property was to be settled on them and the groom’s male issue. Seyton also agreed to ensure his patrimony to the groom, entering into a separate indenture that his feoffees of 1441 would continue their legal estate in his lands until his death when, provided his son was then of full age, they would settle the lands on him in tail-male.16 Finch Hatton mss, 635, 1962. A conveyance of 1464 shows that the manor of Seaton and other lands in Rutland were duly settled on the couple: Add. Ch. 22292. There was nothing particularly unusual about these terms, but it may be significant that our MP saw fit to maximise the value of his heir’s marriage by surrendering immediately lands worth as much as 20 marks p.a. even though his heir was so many years short of his majority.

Nothing of what is known of Seyton’s career to this point prepares us for his next appearance in the records: his election to the politically contentious Parliament of 1450-1. In Northamptonshire, as in other counties, the hustings were the subject of some active electioneering on the part of Richard, duke of York. At about Michaelmas 1450 the duke’s auditor, Thomas Willoughby, rode from his place at Wardington in Oxfordshire to Milton and Harringworth in Northamptonshire ‘ad loquendum’ with William, Lord Zouche, and Henry Green* (and also to the place of William Vaux* and then to Minster Lovell ‘pro colloquio habendo’ with William, Lord Lovell) ‘mandato domini pro suis amiciciis habendis in ellecione militum comitatus in eisdem comitatibus hoc anno’.17 K.B. McFarlane, Eng. in the 15th Cent. 233n., quoting Egerton Roll 8783, m. 3; C219/16/1. The election, conducted by Vaux as sheriff, was held on 22 Oct. 1450, and one of the duke’s retainers, Thomas Mulsho*, was returned together with Seyton. While it is easy to explain the return of the former, it is hard to explain Seyton’s. There is no evidence, from either before or after this date, that he had any association with the duke, and it is difficult to see why he should won election at so contentious a moment. His opportunity may have arisen from a reluctance on the part of others to stand: the murder of the leading figure among the Northamptonshire gentry, William Tresham*, a month before the election may have had a deterrent effect upon potential candidates, and reinforced a reluctance on the part of the county’s leaders to commit themselves openly to the Yorkist cause. Why, however, Seyton, comparatively inactive in the county’s affairs both before and after his election, should have taken this opportunity, can only be a matter for speculation.

While serving as an MP, Seyton joined with his wife Joan in conveying their recently-acquired property at Little Bowden to Robert Isham and others in what appears to have been a sale.18 CP25(1)/179/95/126. This suggests that, if he was in financial trouble, his difficulties had been only temporarily relieved by the sale of his son’s marriage. He also faced an additional aggravation. In Trinity term 1451 he was one of the many Northamptonshire landowners distrained to appear in the Exchequer for their failure to appear before the subsidy commissioners. In his case his absence had been occasioned by his service in Parliament, but this is unlikely to have encouraged the Exchequer to give him relief. Another indication of his difficulties may be the lease, on the following 11 Nov., to William Feldyng of three closes in Maidwell for four years at £5 p.a.19 E159/227, brevia retornabilia et irretornabilia, Trin. rot. 3; Add. Ch. 22282.

When in October 1452 a powerful royal commission of inquiry came to Peterborough as part of the campaign against the Dartford rebels of the previous February, Seyton sat on the county grand jury. This jury endorsed as true several bills against Mulsho and other Yorkists. It would, however, be wrong to see this as necessarily indicative of anti-Yorkist sympathies on the part of our MP and his fellow jurors. Nor need there be any political explanation for the order issued on 30 May 1454, during York’s first protectorate, for Seyton’s replacement as one of the verderers in the forest of Rockingham on the obviously spurious grounds that he was ‘too much busied elsewhere’. It is much more likely that that our MP petitioned for his own removal than that the Yorkist government was seeking the replacement of a perceived opponent in what was a very minor office. Indeed, his election in 1450 and his attestation of the parliamentary election of 6 June 1455, held in the aftermath of the Yorkist victory at the battle of St. Albans, strongly suggest that he was not identified with the duke’s opponents.20 KB9/94/1/12d; CCR, 1447-54, p. 458; C219/16/3. None the less, his appearance as a juror in 1452 makes it equally clear that he cannot be described as a Yorkist partisan and removes any temptation to interpret his election to Parliament in political terms.

In the late 1450s Seyton was drawn into a dispute with the Cistercian abbey of Pipewell over the advowson of the church of St. Mary at Maidwell. It seems unlikely that the abbey had an historic claim to something that had so long been in the hands of the Seytons, and it may be that the dispute turned on a mortgage which our MP had failed to redeem. It was no doubt in connexion with this quarrel that, on 30 June 1458, his feoffees granted to the abbey £10 p.a. from the manor of Draughton for the term of eight years, perhaps as the means of discharging a debt. On the following day the feoffees gave the disputed advowson to the abbey’s nominees, headed by Robert Wesenham (brother of Thomas Wesenham*), and our MP bound himself in £100 to Wesenham. The condition of this bond was that he would reveal to the abbot all evidences concerning the advowson so that the abbey might make secure its legal estate. Clearly Seyton had, at least for the moment, lost the advowson of the church in which at least one of his ancestors was buried.21 Add. Chs. 21839, 22285-7.

In the course of his dispute with the abbey, Seyton took another more promising step to resolve his financial difficulties. Through connexions now lost, he took as his second wife the widow of the Oxfordshire esquire, William Wykeham. She had a life interest in a significant part of the valuable Wykeham estate, including its principal property, the manor of Broughton in Oxfordshire. Unfortunately for our MP, however, the anticipated benefits of this match proved hard to accrue. Joan’s daughter, Margaret, the heiress of her father, was the wife of William Fiennes, Lord Saye and Sele, and Fiennes was reluctant to concede his mother-in-law her due. On 15 Aug. 1457 he forcibly entered the manor of Broughton and held it against her. In the following Hilary term, Seyton and Joan sued him by bill in King’s bench, claiming damages of as much as 900 marks for that offence and the plunder of goods.22 KB146/6/36/2. Whether they gained any redress is unknown, but Joan’s death soon afterwards ended the dispute and left our MP with no material benefit from what had appeared a favourable match.

There is no evidence to show that Seyton played any active part in the dramatic events of 1459-61. His absence from the ad hoc commissions of these years implies that he was an insignificant figure with no strong connexions (although, despite his financial difficulties, he was wealthy enough to have been otherwise). Most of what is known of him in the 1460s concerns his family affairs. His first appearance in the records in the wake of Edward IV’s accession dates from 20 Apr. 1462 when he granted to his two younger sons, William and John, lands he had lately acquired in Maidwell and Draughton; and, at some date before the spring of 1464, he took a third wife, identified in the historical record only by her Christian name. Better documented is the match he made for his second son, Everard, who had become the Seyton heir with the death of his elder brother.23 The yr. Thomas died between 1 Feb. 1458 and 20 Mar. 1464: Add. Chs. 22284, 20306. On 20 Mar. 1464 he entered into an indenture with Roger Salisbury, one of the leading retainers of the Northamptonshire magnate, Edmund, Lord Grey of Ruthin (soon to be elevated to the earldom of Kent), for his new heir’s marriage to Elizabeth, daughter of Salisbury’s brother-in-law, George Longville† of Wolverton (Buckinghamshire). Seyton agreed to settle the manor of Barford St. Michael on the couple and their issue (reserving the right to settle lands worth 20 marks p.a. on his third wife); in return, Salisbury agreed to pay 300 marks and to attempt to recover the advowson of St. Mary’s church. A month later, on 24 Apr., a further agreement was made: all Seyton’s manors, enfeoffed to (Sir) William Catesby*, Sir Thomas Berkeley, Thomas Billing* and others under the terms of the first agreement by our MP’s surviving feoffees of 1441, were to continue their possession without alienation until the groom should come to full age, our MP taking the profits for the term of his life. The sale of his heir’s marriage for a second time may have gone some way to relieving his financial difficulties.24 Add. Chs. 21507, 22292, 20306.

Little is known of Seyton’s remaining years. On 19 July 1465 he joined with his third wife in leasing to Philip Neel of London, a former household servant of Henry VI, the manor of ‘Moynesthyng’ with other lands in Draughton at an annual rent of £5. In the following year Salisbury’s promised aid in the recovery of the lost advowson bore fruit. On 11 Aug. 1466 the agents of the abbot of Pipewell delivered seisin of the advowson to a group of our MP’s nominees headed by Billing.25 Add. Chs. 21840, 22294. Less happily, on 21 Mar. 1469, he was indicted at Oundle before the county j.p.s, headed by John Dyve*, for breaking into the close and house of a yeoman, one Nicholas Freman, at Arthingworth (near Maidwell) two years earlier with the intention of killing him. This offence seems to have been the culmination of a long-running quarrel, but, however this may be, the indictment occasioned Seyton little difficulty. In the following Hilary term he ended process at the cost of a small fine.26 KB27/835, rex rot. 4d. He also sued Freman for hunting in his free warren at Maidwell and Draughton as long before as 1458. Freman pleaded an award of Feb. 1460 which had purged his offence by awarding Seyton 20s.: CP40/832, rot. 172d. In August 1470 he made further conveyances of his estates, presumably in preparation for death and after his heir’s coming of age had released him from one of the undertakings of 1464. The new body of feoffees, which included several of the old, were a distinguished and numerous group, headed by Billing, Catesby, Berkeley, St. George and (Sir) Thomas Tresham*.27 Add. Ch. 22295.

Seyton’s appointment, at an advanced age, to the office of escheator during the Readeption is almost as puzzling as his earlier election to Parliament, but, like the marriage of his eldest son in 1450, it may have owed something to William Feldyng, one of the leading gentry supporters of the restored regime. Indeed, it may be that our MP’s son Everard is also to be numbered among the Readeption’s active supporters. This, at least, is one interpretation to be placed on an indictment taken at Northampton before the j.p.s on 6 Aug. 1471. A jury claimed that, on the previous 2 Oct., that is, the day Edward IV fled into exile, Everard with others unknown had assaulted Anne, wife of Sir Ralph Hastings†, and several of his servants, and stolen his goods to the considerable value of £40. Since Sir Ralph was among those who fled into exile with Edward IV, it is possible that some political motive underlay this offence. On the other hand, among those assaulted was Freman, and it is at least as likely that Everard was simply taking advantage of disturbed conditions to pursue a private quarrel. In any event, he was soon able to put himself on the right side of the law, personally pleading a pardon in the court of King’s bench in Trinity term 1472.28 KB27/844, rex rot. 7d. By this date he may already have inherited the family estates. Our MP had been among the escheators removed on Edward IV’s restoration (perhaps because of his son’s activities) and he makes no further appearances in the records.29 His successor was appointed on 4 June 1471 but accounted from 8 May: E136/150/16. He was certainly dead by 3 Mar. 1473 when his feoffees of 1470 demised property in Maidwell to one Thomas Wattes of Clipston at an annual rent of six marks payable to his son and heir.30 Add. Ch. 22297.

Soon thereafter the ancient family came to an abrupt end in the main male line. Everard died in January 1476, leaving two infant daughters as his common-law heirs. Their wardship passed into the hands of their maternal grandfather, George Longville, who, in 1477, sold the wardship and marriage of the elder to John Catesby, serjeant-at-law. By 6 Feb. 1488, when the lands were partitioned between the coheiresses, Anne had married Euseby Catesby and Joan, Francis Metcalfe of Nappa (Yorkshire).31 C140/57/63; Add. Ch. 19865; CP40/971, rot. 425. There followed a lengthy dispute between these two couples, on the one hand, and ,on the other, the heir-male, Everard’s younger brother, John Seyton. John exploited the influence of his master, the notorious Sir Richard Empson†, to impede his rivals, and in 1507 prevailed upon the Northamptonshire escheator to hold an inquisition which found, probably falsely, that Metcalfe was a natural fool. Later, in 1511, he prevailed upon Joan, to whom nearly all the family’s Northamptonshire property had been assigned, to sell him her right in it, and this sale was confirmed by a fine levied three years later.32 Finch Hatton mss, 616, 693; C1/339/82; C4/58/124; CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 1006; CP25(2)/31/211, Mich. 6 Hen. VIII. This conveyance was, however, quickly challenged, and an award made in 1516 by a powerful group of arbiters, headed by Thomas Grey, marquess of Dorset, granted the two manors in Maidwell to the heirs general and the manor of Draughton to the heir-male. John Seyton (d.1525) may have successfully resisted this reduction of his entitlement, for, according to his inquistion post mortem, he died seised of all the Seyton property in Maidwell, Draughton and Kelmarsh.33 Finch Hatton mss, 1933; E150/689/4. He presented to the church of St. Mary in 1524: Bridges, ii. 48. But his son, Thomas, was unable to defend the title of the heirs-male, losing what his father had gained to a lawyer, Edmund Hasilwood, warden of the Fleet, to whom the heirs-general had surrendered their claim.34 Finch Hatton mss, 472, 1800; Add. Ch. 22307; J.H. Baker, Men of Ct. (Selden Soc. supp. ser. xviii), i. 832; C1/571/15.