THRELKELD, Sir Henry

The Threlkelds, well established by the late thirteenth century, were one of the leading gentry families of the counties of Westmorland and Cumberland. They had a long tradition of parliamentary service: between 1330 and 1402 the head of the family represented Westmorland on at least eight occasions and Cumberland at least once. Their main residence lay at Crosby Ravensworth in the former county, where, near the border between the two counties, they held a further manor at Yanwath; but they also held manors at Threlkeld and Ousby in Cumberland, together with an outlying small manor, acquired by marriage in the late fourteenth century, at Firby in the East Riding of Yorkshire. By the standards of the north-western gentry this was a very valuable patrimony. In the subsidy returns of 1435-6 our MP was assessed in Westmorland at an annual income of £80. Of the others taxed in the county only Sir Thomas Strickland* was assessed on a greater income.1 E179/195/32.

Henry Threlkeld was born at an opportune moment for the future of his family. His father’s first marriage to Margaret de le Bowes had produced only two daughters, and, since Sir William was approaching the age of 50 when she died, the probability then was that the patrimony would be divided between them.2 HMC Le Fleming, 3. The situation was, however, transformed by Sir William’s second marriage and the birth, in quick succession, of three sons, the eldest of whom was Henry. The family’s senior male line was thus perpetuated, albeit at the cost of a minority, for Henry was only ten years old when his elderly father died. Even before the routine inquisitions had been held into his father’s lands and heir, the young Henry’s wardship and marriage were granted to Sir Robert Urswyk, brother of Thomas Urswyk I*, and Sir Thomas Strickland, but these arrangements were revised after an inquisition was belatedly held in Cumberland on 14 June 1409. The jurors devalued the wardship by returning that our MP’s mother had a jointure interest in the manor of Threlkeld, and on 23 Feb. 1410 the earlier grant was superseded by a new one to our MP’s immediate neighbour, Roland Thornburgh, for an annual payment of £63 p.a.3 CCR, 1409-13, pp. 16-17, 20-21; CPR, 1408-13, p. 164. Thornburgh was probably acting here in the family’s interest, and he seems to have established a close relationship with his ward. Henry soon took one of his daughters as his bride, settling upon her as jointure the family’s principal manor, that of Crosby Ravensworth; and, on 14 Sept. 1419, while yet legally a minor, he attested the election of his father-in-law to represent Westmorland.4 Cumb. and Westmld. Antiq. and Arch. Soc. n.s. xxiii. 177; C219/12/3. Having proved his age at Penrith on the following 28 Oct., he then appears to have fought alongside his father-in-law during Henry V’s last campaign in France. Direct proof is lacking, but since both he and Roland (who is known to have served) were knighted at about this time, it is probable that their elevation came during the campaign. Henry was certainly a knight by 29 Aug. 1422, two days before Henry V’s death, when described as such in a bond.5 C138/43/84; CCR, 1419-22, p. 31; Cumb. and Westmld. Antiq. and Arch. Soc. n.s. xxiii. 197.

On 16 Sept. 1424 the new knight was at Appelby as a juror in the inquisition post mortem taken on the death of Elizabeth, widow of Thomas, Lord Clifford (d.1391), but it was not until a few years later that his career in local government began in earnest. On 23 Aug. 1428 he was one of six knights who tried a very important assize of novel disseisin at Carlisle arrayed by William Stapleton† against the baronial family of Dacre. Three months later, he was appointed to his first administrative office, that of escheator. While serving he attested both the Westmorland election at Appleby on 1 Sept. 1429 and the Cumberland election at Carlisle 12 days later. In doing so he was in breach of the statute that demanded that attestors only witness the election of the county in which they were resident on the day the writ of parliamentary summons was issued. Yet his landed interests in both shires made the breach merely a technical one, and it may be that he was present at the Cumberland court as escheator. In any event, he did not attest any further election there. While in office he also sat on the jury which met at Appleby on 21 Oct. 1429 to make assessments for the parliamentary subsidy granted in the previous year.6 CIPM, xxii. 306; JUST1/143/2, m. 7; C219/14/1; Feudal Aids, v. 197.

Thereafter the drudgery of such routine service was briefly broken by a resumption of Threlkeld’s military career. On 23 Apr. 1431 he entered into an indenture with Richard Neville, earl of Salisbury, undertaking to serve the earl with the large retinue of eight men-at-arms and 22 archers for a period of six months from 5 June. On 1 June, in preparation for his departure to France, he conveyed his lands in Cumberland to feoffees headed by William*, son and heir of William Stapleton, and another leading member of the local gentry, Robert Bellingham.7 Cumb. and Westmld. Antiq. and Arch. Soc. n.s. ix. 283-4; xxiii. 178. He was, in all probability, at the coronation of Henry VI in Paris in the following December and may be assumed to have returned with the young King early in 1432.8 His return at that date is consistent with the release made on 8 Apr. 1432 by Stapleton and his other feoffees to two of his intimates, Henry Gawthorn, vicar of Threlkeld, and a chaplain, William Kellet: Cumb. and Westmld. Antiq. and Arch. Soc. n.s. xxiii. 178. He was certainly home by 25 Sept. that year when, at Appleby, he headed the jury assembled to inquire into the estates of his old friend Stapleton, and quickly thereafter he resumed his domestic career. On 2 July 1433 he was elected to represent Westmorland in Parliament in company with Sir Richard Musgrave*, to whose daughter Mabel he was later to marry his eldest son, William.9 CIPM, xxiv. 85; C219/14/4. The marriage is likely to have taken place in the early 1440s. On 18 Mar. 1442, probably as part of the settlement, Threlkeld entered into a bond in £100 to Musgrave: CP40/737, rot. 331.

Threlkeld’s prominent public position did not deter him from involvement in the wave of disorder which overtook his native county in the early 1430s. According to a petition presented by the victim to the earl of Salisbury, probably in the earl’s capacity as warden of the west march, a group of prominent Westmorland gentry – led by our MP and his brother-in-law, William Thornburgh*, and acting at the behest of Katherine, Thornburgh’s stepmother and now wife of Sir John Lancaster† of Rydal –attacked the house of John Cliburn at Cliburn, ‘at which assawte thei shot a ml arrowes’. They desisted only upon the arrival of three of the county j.p.s, Sir Christopher Moresby, Hugh Salkeld† and Robert Crackanthorpe*, a prominent local lawyer. This, however, was not the end of Cliburn’s ordeal. Soon after, as he made his way to the earl to seek his aid, he and his son-in-law, John Borell, were assaulted as a prelude to the plunder of Borell’s shop in Appleby and Cliburn’s imprisonment.10 Since the petition is found among early Chancery proceedings, it has been dated to Salisbury’s chancellorship of 1454-5. But, although it has the same form as the standard Chancery petition, the earl is addressed as ‘my lord’ rather than ‘the lord’ and he is not described as chancellor: C1/24/227. Internal evidence dates it to the early 1430s, and one can only speculate that it came to rest among the Chancery petitions because the earl passed it to the chancellor for action: Cumb. and Westmld. Antiq. and Arch. Soc. n.s. lxiii. 178-83. The petition and the events it describes are undated, but an action brought by Borell in the court of King’s bench dates the raid on his shop to 13 Mar. 1434. This in turn provides another date. A second undated petition complains that, at a session of the peace held at Appleby on the previous 23 Mar., our MP and Thornburgh successfully intimidated the jurors into refusing to reveal the truth about the ‘graundes et outragiouses riotes’ in which they had been involved. It thus appears that the j.p.s. met ten days after the attack on Borell’s property.

While, however, the dating is clear, the context of these crimes can only be very partly reconstructed. Seemingly they were an episode in the quarrel over the division of the lands of Sir John Lancaster between his heirs male and his four daughters, one of whom was married to Robert Crackanthorpe. This culminated on 25 Aug. 1438 with Crackanthorpe’s murder at the hands of the Thornburghs and Lancasters.11 CPR, 1441-6, p. 191; KB27/711, rot. 36d. Our MP had a very peripheral interest here. Part of manor of Yanwath, which had been the jointure of his father’s first wife, had come to Sir John through marriage to our MP’s half-sister, and, in 1425, our MP had paid £20 to each of the husbands of Sir John’s four daughters to buy out their interest.12 HMC Le Fleming, 3; Cumbria RO, Kendal, Le Fleming of Rydal mss, WDRY/92/79. Perhaps the daughters and their husbands now sought to repudiate this arrangement, and this prompted Threlkeld to ally himself with their enemies. There is, however, nothing to implicate him in Crackenthorpe’s murder, nor is there anything to show why the victims of 1434, Cliburn and Borell, should have attracted the enmity of Threlkeld and William Thornburgh. Later events imply that Threlkeld’s principal opponent was Borell rather than the Lancaster daughters. On 7 Feb. 1436 he led an assault on the merchant at ‘Skydergate’, and it may be that, in 1434, two separate quarrels had become conflated into one with our MP calling on the lawless Thornburghs in pursuance of a feud only peripherally linked with the main dispute over the Lancaster inheritance. However this may be, Sir Henry was caused only relatively minor legal difficulties by the petitions and suits against him. Before the justices of assize sitting at Appleby on 14 Aug. 1437 he was convicted of the assault on Borell, and costs and damages of a modest ten marks were awarded against him. Ten months later he and 13 of his servants purged the Crown suit against them by each making fine in 6s. 8d.13 KB27/703, rot. 33d; 707, rot. 9d; 709, fines rot.

While involved in these disorders Sir Henry did not neglect other affairs. In August 1434 he leased the rectory of the church of Crosby Ravensworth from its patron, the abbot and convent of Whitby in north Yorkshire, at a rent of as much as £22 p.a.14 Cumb. and Westmld. Antiq. and Arch. Soc. n.s. xxiii. 179. He remained active in local administration: on 20 Oct. 1434 he headed juries at Appleby charged with inquiring into the lands of Sir John Lancaster and making a further inquiry into those of Stapleton; he was again present at the Westmorland elections to the Parliaments of 1435 and 1437; and, in the meantime, he sat on the jury assembled at Appleby on the death of John, Lord Greystoke, from whom he held the manor of Yanwath.15 CIPM, xxiv. 391, 403, 497; C219/14/5; 15/1. More importantly he also made a prestigious second marriage into the ancient family of Lumley. On 14 Sept. 1438 he agreed with Sir Thomas Lumley (from 1461, Lord Lumley) to settle a rent of £20 on Lumley’s sister, Maud, and in return to receive from his new brother-in-law either 300 marks or a rent of £20 to be held for 10 years.16 Le Fleming of Rydal mss, WDRY/92/87. His 1st w. was still alive on 15 Mar. 1435: ibid. WDRY/92/85. Although the marriage proved to be only brief, with this new connexion Sir Henry’s career appeared to be flourishing.

From this point on, however, Threlkeld’s level of recorded activity diminished. His involvement in local administration appears to have ended in 1437. Although he appears on jury panels in 1438, 1439 and 1443, he did not serve.17 KB9/230B/95; JUST3/70/12, 15. This effective retirement may have been a matter of personal choice; none the less, it is still worth remarking on the marked contrast between his own office-holding career and that of his father. In view of Sir Henry’s early administrative activity, his place in the Neville retinue and his family’s high standing, it is striking that, beyond nomination to the subsidy commission of 1436 and an array commission of the following year, he was excluded from office for the last 20 years of his life. By contrast, his father, besides sitting in at least four Parliaments, was named to both the county bench and numerous ad hoc commissions of local government, and served, albeit briefly, as chief forester in the forest of Inglewood. Perhaps Sir Henry’s own career did not follow a similar course because of his participation in the disturbances of the early 1430s.

Conflict, albeit of a less violent kind, also compromised the last years of Threlkeld’s declining career. In the early 1440s he became involved in a dispute with the wealthy and influential Richard Restwold* over property at Tebay and Borrowdale Head, a few miles to the south of Crosby Ravensworth.18 KB27/727, rot. 56. More serious and longer-lasting were the quarrels that were provoked, in part at least, by his third marriage. It is not known precisely when this took place but it had almost certainly done so by 18 May 1444, when he called on the assistance of his former guardian, Sir Thomas Strickland, to reconcile him to his son and heir, Lancelot. The rift had no doubt arisen because the latter feared that this third marriage would be very much to his detriment, and the main point at issue is likely to have been the size of the new wife’s jointure. The details of Strickland’s award are not known, although a clue is provided by the terms of a final concord levied in 1446. This settled the manor of Yanwath together with over 400 acres of land in Threlkeld, together valued in a later award at 25 marks p.a., upon our MP and his third wife. While this represented a potential loss to Lancelot, it is likely to have been acceptable to him because it made no provision for any issue his father might have by the new wife; on her death the lands were to pass to Sir Henry’s heirs.19 Cumb. and Westmld. Antiq. and Arch. Soc. ix. 307; CP25(1)/293/71/307; Le Fleming of Rydal mss, WDRY/92/93. In another quarrel of the same date the interests of father and son were in better alignment. Lancelot’s elder brother, William, had died without issue, and on 9 Aug. 1445 his widow, Mabel, arrayed an assize of novel disseisin against our MP, claiming 20 messuages and nearly 500 acres of land and meadow in Threlkeld. The pleadings do not make it explicit, but there can be little doubt that Sir Henry had deprived her of the property settled upon her in jointure. She won the verdict with damages and costs of ten marks, which she released to her father-in-law. This was the prelude to an arbitrated settlement: on the following day a powerful group of arbiters – (Sir) Henry Fenwick*, Sir Thomas Strickland, William Stapleton, Robert Warcop, Alexander Heighmore, and Thomas Burgham* – awarded that Mabel was to surrender her claim in return for an annual rent of £10.20 JUST1/1544, rot. 44; Le Fleming of Rydal mss, WDRY/92/91, 92.

Another quarrel soon arose to trouble Sir Henry. Early in his career his relationship with his first wife’s numerous kin, the Thornburghs, had been close; by 1447, however, the two families had fallen out, perhaps in part because the tie between them had been removed by her death. On 9 Nov. 1447 the influential knight of Lancashire, (Sir) Thomas Haryngton I*, returned an award after the Threlkelds and Thornburghs had entered into mutual bonds in 300 marks. If its terms are an accurate guide, the matter dividing them was a petty financial one: Haryngton awarded that Thornburgh pay our MP seven marks in cash in discharge of a debt together with a further mark for the purchase of a black gown.21 Cumb. and Westmld. Antiq. and Arch. Soc. n.s. xxiii. 198-9. This was almost the last episode of Sir Henry’s troubled career. He last appears in the records in August 1450 when the Yorkshire lawyer, Henry Thwaites, recovered £20 in costs and damages against him and others for disseising him of the manor of Firby. This looks like the outcome of a failed repudiation on our MP’s part of a conveyance made in the previous year: by a final concord levied early in 1449 he had conveyed this manor, peripheral to his main interests, to Thwaites in what was probably a sale. His precise date of death is unknown, but he had been dead for at least a few months by Michaelmas term 1451, when an action of debt sued against his widow, Alice, as his administratrix had gone beyond first process.22 CP25(1)/281/160/7; JUST1/1544, rot. 27; CP40/763, rot. 272.

Sir Henry’s death resulted in open dispute between his widow and heir. This prompted the intervention of Thomas Percy, Lord Egremont, acting in the role of peacemaker for which his violent temperament hardly suited him. Early in 1453 the disputants swore an oath to abide his arbitration before an impressive gathering of the Percy retinue, headed by (Sir) Thomas Curwen*, Sir Henry Fenwick, (Sir) John Pennington*, (Sir) William Martindale*, John Huddleston*, John Broughton* and William Leigh*. The award marked a further reverse for Lancelot. Egremont decreed that he was not to trouble his stepmother in her jointure, and on 5 Feb. she named Pennington as her attorney to receive certain tenements for her put-upon stepson. Since she had probably already married Pennington’s son, Thomas, Lancelot may have had cause to resent Egremont’s intervention.23 HMC Le Fleming, 3-4; Le Fleming of Rydal mss, WDRY/92/93, 94. In any event, he did not leave the couple in peace. In 1458 he sued them for making waste in the property in Yanwath that they held for Alice’s life, and he continued to litigate with Pennington into the 1460s.24 CP40/791, rot. 89d; PL15/27, rots. 27d, 31d.

Lancelot’s early difficulties perhaps explain the obscurity of his career in the 1450s (although he did serve a term as escheator in 1457-8), and there is nothing to show where his loyalties lay in the civil war of 1459-61. In the early 1460s, however, his standing was significantly enhanced by marriage to Margaret (d.1493), daughter and heiress-presumptive of Henry Brounflete, Lord Vessy (d.1469), and widow of John, Lord Clifford (d.1461). By 1468 he had wealth enough to marry their infant daughter, Anne, to Hugh, grandson and heir of Hugh Lowther*, with the handsome portion of 420 marks.25 P. Booth, ‘Landed Soc. in Cumb. and Westmld.’ (Leicester Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1997), 98; CP, xii (2), 288n.; Bodl. Dodsworth mss, 74, f. 113. Thereafter the family’s estates did not long remain intact in the hands of the male line. His eldest son, another Sir Lancelot, who served as sheriff of Cumberland in 1491-2, died leaving three daughters as his common-law heiresses. This brought about the division of the family estates that had been threatened at our MP’s birth more than a century before. By a settlement of 1510 the three daughters were awarded the bulk of the estates against the heir male, the younger Sir Lancelot’s brother, Christopher.26 Cumb. and Westmld. Antiq. and Arch. Soc. n.s. xxiii. 182-4, 199-203.