VAMPAGE, John

The Vampages had been established at Pershore, where they were tenants of Westminster Abbey, since the early fourteenth century if not before. The highlights of their early history were few: a daughter of the house was the mother of Sir John Russell†, master of the horse to Richard II, and our MP’s father leased the abbey’s manor of Pershore and served as escheator of Worcestershire in the 1390s.8 T.R. Nash, Worcs. ii. 183, 250, 395; Vis. Worcs. 68-69; B. Harvey, ‘Abbot of Westminster’s Demesnes’, Econ. HR, ser. 2, xxii. 26. John Vampage’s social origins were thus modest and, in this respect, similar to those of many successful lawyers; equally typically, his success transformed the fortunes of the family. The early careers of such men are often obscure, and Vampage’s is more than usually so. When his father was murdered in May 1398, while in office as escheator, John must have been no more than an infant.9 For his father’s murder: A. Gundy, Ric. II and the Rebel Earl, 220-1. Nothing is known of his upbringing, but given his family’s tenurial links with Westminster Abbey, it is probable that he was a ward of the abbey. Perhaps it was Abbot William Colchester (d.1420) who found him a place at an inn of court, for there can be no doubt that he enjoyed a formal legal education and completed his readings. Unfortunately, neither his inn nor the date of his readings is known.10 Baker speculates that he was of Inner or Middle Temple, the inns from which he drew two of his executors, Walter Taylard of Inner Temple and Richard Chokke, who was probably of Middle Temple: J.H. Baker. Men of Ct. (Selden Soc. supp. ser. xviii), ii. 1586-7. He emerges in the records with surprising suddenness as an established and well-connected local lawyer. In February 1422 he was named to the quorum of the Worcestershire bench; in the following May he was appointed escheator there; and a month later he was elected to represent his native county in Parliament in company with John Throckmorton I*, a legal servant of the pre-eminent local magnate, Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick.11 C219/13/1.

Although there is no direct evidence of their connexion until later in the decade, Vampage certainly owed this sudden and complete emergence to the earl’s patronage. This was of greater efficacy locally than that of the abbey, and his successive elections to Parliament in 1426 and 1427 are explicable only in terms of a place in the retinue of that great magnate. Significantly, the attestors to the election of 1427 were headed by three other of the earl’s lawyers, Throckmorton, John Wood I*, and William Wollashull*, who had stood as one of Vampage’s sureties at the previous hustings.12 C219/13/4, 5. Between these assemblies he was named alongside the earl as a feoffee for another of the earl’s men, Hugh Cokesey*: CPR, 1441-6, p. 391; CIPM, xxvi. 409-15. None the less, it is not until soon after his third (and what proved to be his last) appearance in the Commons that there is direct evidence of what can be inferred with certainty from the known facts about his early career. In 1428 Beauchamp, as hereditary sheriff of Worcestershire, chose him as his deputy. It was probably also at about this time that Vampage completed his readings, for in Michaelmas term of that year he took part in a discussion in the Exchequer chamber as an apprentice-at-law.13 Sel. Cases in Exchequer Chamber (Selden Soc. li), 42. Two years earlier he had acted as an arbiter in a land dispute in Mdx. in company with two j.c.p.s and a serj.-at-law: CCR, 1422-9, p. 316. This was the preliminary to a significant promotion. A year later, in October 1429, he was appointed to the important office of King’s attorney-general, and there can be little doubt that the earl, as the King’s ‘governor’, played a part in his nomination.14 CPR, 1429-36, p. 24; PPC, iv. 4-5.

From this date Vampage’s affairs prospered. Although the annual fee attached to his office was a comparatively modest £10, its holder had a ready access to royal patronage and benefited from frequent ad hoc payments from the Exchequer. Vampage took full advantage. On 5 Dec. 1430 he was one of a syndicate of four entrusted with the keeping of the valuable lands of the Burghs in Shropshire, in the hands of the Crown through the minority of John Burgh III*. The annual rent was fixed at £44, a generous discount to their true value. Less than two years later, on 18 July 1432, he was the leader of a syndicate of three men who were granted the keeping of the large manor of Dymock in Gloucestershire at an annual rent of 40 marks; and on 12 Oct. 1433 he was among a group of Beauchamp retainers, headed by Throckmorton and Wollashull, to whom the Crown committed the keeping of the temporalities of the bishopric of Worcester during a vacancy.15 CFR, xvi. 21-22, 97, 171. The letters patent concerning Dymock were revoked in July 1433 in favour of feoffees headed by Henry Bourgchier, count of Eu: CPR, 1429-36, pp. 281-2.

It is noteworthy that the grant of Dymock was made on the day after the end of a Parliament in which Vampage, as the King’s attorney, had been active on the Crown’s behalf. Frustratingly, the precise nature of his services is unknown. The only evidence is an entry on the issue roll, dated 25 Oct. 1432, recording a payment of five marks to him ‘pro assiduis attendenciis’ on the King’s behalf concerning various matters and petitions in the Parliament. Similar payments followed. On 12 Nov. 1433, once more while Parliament was in session, he shared £2 with two royal serjeants-at-law for labouring, at the treasurer’s behest, ‘in diversis materiis specialibus’; on 2 Dec. 1435 he was paid ten marks, specifically for labouring in Parliament on the King’s behalf; and on 18 Mar. 1437, again during a parliamentary session, he received the same sum for his attendance at London and Westminster about ‘certis negociis Regis ac materiis specialibus’ committed to him by the treasurer and chancellor. These payments imply that, although the attorney-general was not summoned to the Lords along with the judges and royal serjeants, he played an important part in supervising the Crown’s business there.16 E403/706, m. 2; 712, m. 3; 721, m. 7; 725, m. 18.

The profits of Vampage’s successful legal career funded several property purchases and the marriage of his son and heir to an heiress. As early as 1426 his friend William Wollashull granted him property at Wick Burnell, and in 1428 he added a few acres to his property at Pershore.17 C146/5365; CP25(1)/260/27/22. More important were two manorial estates he acquired in the early 1430s. By final concords levied in 1431 and 1435 he completed the purchase of the manor of Colesbourne in Gloucestershire. The other manor came to him through his service to Beauchamp: on 11 Sept. 1432 the earl confirmed a grant of the manor of Wick made by his feoffees to Vampage and his wife. This was a grant in fee, and probably represents a purchase rather than a reward for service, with our MP anxious to acquire a manor so near his home at Pershore.18 CP25(1)/79/89/34, 59; CCR, 1429-35, pp. 226-7; VCH Worcs. iv. 170. Most important of all was the contract he entered into on 10 Aug. 1436 for the marriage of his young son and heir, John, to Wollashull’s only daughter and heiress presumptive, Joan. Wollashull had long to live, but as he had been married since the 1390s he had probably given up hope of a son. His daughter was, in any event, contracted as his heiress: he agreed that immediately after his death all his lands in Worcestershire would descend to Joan and her issue, as too would her mother’s property in Somerset. According to the contract, Vampage offered in return only the promise, routinely made by fathers of grooms in contracts not involving heiresses, that his own lands would descend intact to the groom and his issue saving his wife’s interest. No payment is mentioned, although it would be surprising if none were involved.19 C146/1747. This energetic period of expansion was completed in 1439 when his son joined him in the purchase of several hundred acres in Pershore and the nearby vills of Pinvin and Peopleton.20 C146/1060, 10377; CP25(1)/260/27/33, 38; VCH Worcs. iv. 168.

These acquisitions, at least those made before 1436, are reflected in the subsidy returns of that year: Vampage was assessed on the considerable annual income of £70. Even though this was not all derived from land – there were professional fees to be considered – it was sufficient to make him a man of standing in his native shire. Indeed, only three male landholders in the county were assessed on greater sums.21 E179/200/68. None the less, his post as attorney-general can have left him little time for purely local matters. The numerous payments to him recorded on the issue rolls testify to the demands as well as the rewards of his office with its responsibility for the conduct of all of the King’s litigation in the central courts. On 30 June 1435, for example, he was paid as much as £20 because his labour in two cases pending in the Exchequer had been to the King’s particular benefit. Nor was his attendance at Westminster required only during law terms. As we have seen, his presence was also expected when Parliament was in session there, and other royal business also detained him during vacations: in 1435, for example, he received £5 for remaining at the seat of government between Trinity and Michaelmas terms.22 E403/719, m. 12; 723, m. 8. Such payments made his office far more profitable than is implied by the annual fee attached to it, but after his early years as attorney he gained little from other grants of royal patronage. Although, in June 1437, he shared with his neighbour Norman Washbourne a grant of the custody of the Gloucestershire lands of the alien abbey of Beaubec for a term of seven years at £11 p.a., this grant was surrendered in 1439 for the benefit of a senior Household servant, Sir Robert Roos.23 CFR, xvi. 362.

Vampage continued to serve his first patron even after the Earl Richard’s death on 30 Apr. 1439, representing the interests of both the dowager countess and the executors. Very soon after the earl’s death, he was among those to whom the custody of unenfeoffed lands of the earldom was committed by the Crown during the minority of his heir, Henry Beauchamp, later duke of Warwick. This grant represented a mark of favour to the countess, who had nominated the keepers, for they were to hold the property without rent to her use and that of the executors.24 CPR, 1436-41, p. 279; CFR, xvii. 77. At the same time Vampage was involved in negotiations with the Crown over sums owed to the late earl for his service as captain of Calais and lieutenant of France and Normandy. On 25 May, by an indenture to which Vampage was party as representative of the countess, the King agreed that the executors should have £2,175 in satisfaction of the debts due from Calais in return for a repudiation of sums owed in respect of the earl’s time as lieutenant.25 E403/734, m. 7. The countess died on the following 27 Dec. and less than a month later Vampage was among those Beauchamp servants to whom the King, for the payment of £1,000, entrusted the keeping of her lands during Henry’s minority.26 CFR, xvii. 122; E159/227, brevia Mich. rot. 11. Later he was one of the short-lived Henry’s feoffees, and in 1444-5 he acted as his deputy in the hereditary shrievalty of Worcestershire.27 Nash, ii. 450.

Although Earl Richard’s patronage had been central to Vampage’s early career and that of his young successor was an inadequate and brief substitute for it, Vampage was too well established by 1439 for its loss to have a discouraging effect upon his standing. On the contrary, in the early 1440s he was a more prominent man than he had previously been. On 15 Mar. 1440 he was one of five distinguished figures, headed by John Kemp, archbishop of York, to whom the abbot and convent of Westminster granted an annual rent of 200 marks from their lands in Worcestershire and Gloucestershire: this grant was to terminate with the death of Abbot Richard Harweden and may have been intended as a pension for him. Ten days later he acted for the unfortunate Robert Arderne*, who had once been a Beauchamp servant, in his damaging dispute with Sir Thomas Erdington*.28 Westminster Abbey mun. 5902; CPR, 1436-41, p. 422; CP40/742, rot. 314. Later in the same year his son John was named as escheator in Worcestershire, and at about the same time he himself was retained at a fee of £2 p.a. as legal counsel to Humphrey, earl of Stafford.

This latter connexion may explain why, on 16 July 1444, Vampage was among those commissioned as an itinerant royal justice in south Wales, where Stafford’s influence was strong.29 C. Rawcliffe, Staffords, 221; DL37/11/149. However this may be, Vampage would have received several such appointments had he not avoided the next natural step for his career, namely promotion to the degree of serjeant-at-law. Such promotion for the King’s attorney was far from invariable, but three of his recent predecessors had become serjeants and, having already held the office for longer than was customary, Vampage expected that he was about to be called to follow them. Accordingly, on 5 Feb. 1442, shortly after Parliament had assembled, he sued out letters patent exempting him from taking the degree. Since such elevation would have entailed the loss of the attorneyship, his desire to retain that position is the most likely explanation for this apparent reluctance to advance further in the legal profession.30 CPR, 1441-6, p. 95.

Secure in his office, Vampage again played an active part in the Parliament of 1442. While it was in session, he joined Chief Justice Fortescue* and Speaker Tresham* in witnessing the important deed by which Edmund, Lord Grey of Ruthin, concluded a dispute with a wealthy London grocer. The dating and Tresham’s involvement suggest that this settlement had been brokered in Parliament, and this matter was no doubt only one of those in which the attorney was employed during this assembly. On 28 Mar., the day after it concluded, he received ten marks as a reward for his attendance there on unspecified royal business; and soon after he was added to the ranks of the apprentices-at-law retained by the duchy of Lancaster, receiving a fee of £2 p.a., the same rate as the serjeants-at-law, compared with the two marks given to the other apprentices.31 CCR, 1441-7, p. 55; E403/743, m. 15; DL28/5/2, f. 120; 6, f. 11. There is reason to believe that he had made himself indispensable to the Crown during parliamentary sessions, for to the next Parliament, which met in 1445, he was personally summoned to the Lords in right of his office along with the judges and the royal serjeants. This was the first occasion on which an attorney-general had received such a summons, and thereafter the summons was to become the invariable practice. Taken together with the earlier evidence of Vampage’s role in conducting the King’s parliamentary business, this implies that during his tenure his office had increased in importance. Whether this was due to his own energies and abilities can only be a matter for speculation, but the fact that he held the post for longer than any other attorney in the medieval or early-modern period suggests that he was particularly well-suited to its exercise.

In the late 1440s Vampage’s office led him to become closely identified with the unpopular regime of William de la Pole, marquess and then duke of Suffolk. As the King’s attorney it was inevitable that he should have played some part in planning the proceedings to be taken against Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, in the Parliament summoned to Bury St. Edmunds in February 1447. Two months after the end of that controversial assembly, he was paid £10 for his great costs in prosecuting certain undefined matters for the King’s profit. The trust placed in him by Suffolk’s government was further exemplified in January 1448, when he was granted his attorneyship for life rather than during pleasure.32 E403/767, m. 6; CPR, 1446-52, p. 131. It is very unlikely that he is to be identified as the duke of York’s receiver of arrears in Dorset in 1448, although this may have been his son: P.A. Johnson, Duke Richard of York, 239. In these circumstances it is not surprising to find his name among the 32 supporters of Suffolk’s regime said to have been indicted in August 1450 in the wake of Cade’s rebellion.33 C.L. Kingsford, Eng. Hist. Lit. 364-5; R. Virgoe, ‘Ancient Indictments in K.B.’, in Med. Kentish Soc. (Kent Rec. Ser. xviii), 216n.; I.M.W. Harvey, Jack Cade, 133. Early in the following summer he was among the lawyers who accompanied the King on a punitive judicial perambulation of the southern counties, designed to punish rebels: at the sessions at Salisbury in July he was paid £5 by the hand of Edmund, duke of Somerset, and he received the same sum from the duke for unspecified service to the King in the previous Parliament of 1450-1.34 E404/68/176.

Vampage’s success is also reflected in the continued acquisition of property. On 16 Mar. 1445, the day after the first prorogation of this long Parliament of 1445-6, the three sons of John Eburton of Milcombe in Oxfordshire granted him the manors of Pebworth and Long Marston in Gloucestershire; and a year later, in the last session of the assembly, Sir Robert Corbet, whose cousin and namesake had held the property before Eburton, acknowledged his right in the manor.35 Northants. RO, Thornton (Brockhall) mss, Th 860; CCR, 1441-7, pp. 295, 434. The addition of two manors to an already impressive estate gave Vampage the resources to contract an impressive second marriage. By a final concord levied in Easter term 1448 he settled his two newly-acquired Gloucestershire manors together with the manor of Wick on himself and his new wife, Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Richard Vernon, in joint tail-male.36 CP25(1)/293/71/333; C146/2084, 10007. This match marked an important social and political advance for our MP. Vernon, then serving as treasurer of Calais, was head of one of the great gentry families of the Midlands. It would be an exaggeration to describe the marriage as representing a disparagement for his daughter, but her sisters had been contracted with greater social advantage and, for her father, Vampage’s attractions may have lain in his financial resources. Although the Vernon estates were extensive, Sir Richard’s Calais office had led him into serious debt and it seems he had borrowed money from the attorney-general. On 15 June 1447 he and his son, Fulk*, had entered into a bond in 400 marks to Vampage, contracting to make a conditional estate to him, John Talbot, Lord Lisle, and others, of the manor of Aylestone in Leicestershire. The condition was that the grantors might re-enter after the grantees had enjoyed undisturbed possession for five years, and there can be no doubt that it represents a mortgage. Vernon may simply have been raising money to discharge his debts, but his daughter Elizabeth’s presence among the feoffees suggests another explanation, namely that the mortgage was intended to raise her portion.37 CCR, 1441-7, p. 493.

In the last years of his career Vampage made further significant land acquisitions, taking advantage of the financial difficulties of the hapless Robert Arderne, for whom he had acted as arbiter in 1440. On 10 Mar. 1447 he took from him a bond in 200 marks, and a little under two years later, on 1 Jan. 1449, Arderne granted him and his son John a manor ideally placed to supplement the family’s existing holdings, namely that of Nafford in Birlingham near Pershore. Curiously, on the following 24 Mar., the grantor entered into a further bond in as much as £400, undertaking not only to assure the grantees title to Nafford but also to purchase for them, within the term of seven years, lands worth another 20 marks p.a.38 CCR, 1441-7, p. 475; 1447-54, pp. 189, 197-8. It is a reasonable inference that the latter were intended to stand in place of the former and that Nafford had been mortgaged rather than sold. A little over a year later Arderne was obliged to make another surrender to Vampage. By a final concord levied in the Cheshire county court, he granted the manor of Dorfold and other lands in Cheshire to the two Vampages and others. As two of these others were friends of the grantor this looks like another mortgage. Arderne’s affairs were desperate, and our MP had every reason to hope the pledged property would not be redeemed.39 CHES31/32, 28 Hen. VI, no. 1. His hopes were realized in respect of Nafford: VCH Worcs. iv. 27.

Vampage’s wealth was enhanced by the many fees he enjoyed from individuals and corporations. From early in his career he had fees from Westminster Abbey and the London company of Merchant Taylors, who admitted him to their fraternity in the early 1430s. Later he was similarly retained by, amongst others, Richard Neville, earl of Salisbury, William, Lord Lovell, the corporations of Tewkesbury, York, Exeter and Southampton, the wealthy Humphrey Stafford III*, the abbey of Peterborough and the new foundation of King’s College, Cambridge.40 Baker, ii. 1586-7; SC6/1122/3, m. 4; E403/767, m. 4; Devon RO, Exeter city recs. receivers’ accts. 1447-8, mm. 2-3; Southampton City Archs., Southampton recs. SC5/1/7, f. 23v. Not surprisingly, he was also in great demand as a feoffee and arbiter. To quote only the most notable instances, in 1444 he acted for Ralph, Lord Cromwell, in his purchase of the great manor of Ampthill, and in 1448 he was named among the feoffees of William Fitzalan, earl of Arundel.41 CCR, 1441-7, pp. 222-3; CP25(1)/293/71/330. As an arbiter he must often have been acting as an agent of the Crown, but he was also a natural choice by disputing parties in his own locality. In the early 1440s he returned an award in the dispute between Robert Catesby and (Sir) Humphrey Stafford I* of Grafton over a Warwickshire manor, and in 1446 he resolved a quarrel between the Verneys and an executor of his former patron, Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, over another manor in the same county.42 C. Carpenter, Locality and Polity, 126, 429n; Shakespeare Centre Archs., Willoughby de Broke mss, DR98/497A. The pattern and range of his connexions compares closely with that of those who progressed to the higher reaches of the legal profession. So too does the extent of his land purchases, and this provides a further reason for the belief that the office of attorney increased in importance during his long tenure.

By the early 1450s Vampage was approaching old age, and on 27 June 1452 he made his will. He wished to be buried in the abbey of Pershore beside the tomb of his first wife. His religious bequests reflect his wealth: he left 50 marks for a chaplain to pray for his soul in the parish church of Pershore; £20 to Hailes abbey, Gloucestershire, for the purchase of two silver basins for the high altar; ten marks to the Evesham abbey; and an unspecified sum for the building of an ‘oleystowe’ for the burial of the dead at Wick. His widow was bequeathed a considerable quantity of plate, part of which she had brought with her in marriage, together with various household goods. Lesser bequests of plate were made to his brother, Richard, his eldest son, John, and his daughters and their husbands, John Butler* and John Greville. He named his wife as his executrix, to be assisted by four executors, headed by John Carpenter, bishop of Worcester, and including Richard Chokke, a rising young lawyer from the West Country, and another lawyer, Walter Taylard*. The making of his will was one of his last acts for he was dead by 30 June (although the will was not proved until 12 Sept.).43 PCC 17 Rous (PROB11/1, ff.134v-135); CPR, 1446-52, p. 556. Its provisions appear to have led to only one difficulty. Vampage had acquired the manor of New Town in Gloucestershire from the abbey of Hailes, and he bequeathed an annual rent of £4 6s. 8d. to the abbot and convent to be held until they could be provided with lands in fee to that value. This compensation was slow in coming, and in 1463 the abbot gained a judgement in Chancery requiring one of Vampage’s executors to pay him a lump sum for the manor of New Town.44 C1/29/53.

Although Vampage had wanted to be buried in Pershore abbey, for reasons that are unclear he was entombed some miles away in the Oxfordshire church of Minster Lovell. Perhaps he died there while visiting the lord of the manor, Lord Lovell, one of the many who had employed his legal services.45 He had been one of many leading lawyers paid for counsel by Lovell in Trin. term 1440: Northants. RO, Finch Hatton mss, 3152. It was there that a brass was laid to his memory and that of his first wife. He is described as ‘Ad regis causas attornati prius annis’ and his first wife as ‘Prima que vita felix fuerat sibi nupta’.46 Trans. Mon. Brass Soc. xvii. 251-5. In the absence of an inquisition post mortem, the disposition of Vampage’s estates at his death is uncertain. His Worcestershire lands, or at least the bulk of them, appear to have been put in feoffment before 1445 to his old friends, John Throckmorton, who died in that year, and William Wollashull; part of his Gloucestershire estate was in the hands of another group of feoffees, headed by two lawyers of that county, John Langley II* and Thomas Deerhurst*; other property there was jointly enfeoffed to him and his son John; and yet other lands in both counties formed the jointure of his second wife. Later, in 1456, his eldest son complained in Chancery against the failure of the vicar of Pershore to make estate to him of property he held as the last survivor of the first group of feoffees; it is hard to accept this at face value (the vicar replied that he had been attorney to deliver seisin not a feoffee), and the petition was probably merely another tactic in the younger John’s long dispute with his stepmother and her new husband John Stanley II*over her dower.47 KB27/828, rot. 93; CPR, 1452-61, p. 288. It may also have been aimed at his young half-brother, William, who stood to benefit from the jointure settlement made in 1448. Curiously, our MP’s will makes no mention of this son, but he did eventually inherit the lands his father had intended for him and became a far more prominent man than the heir. In 1470 he was admitted to Lincoln’s Inn, and went on to enjoy a very successful career. Knighted at the battle of Stoke in 1487, he was appointed chirographer of the court of common pleas in 1493 and was later one of Henry VII’s knights of the body.48 Baker, ii. 1587; CPR, 1494-1509, p. 245.