WINGFIELD, Robert

Born into a prominent landed family, Robert was a younger son of Sir Robert Wingfield, the unruly retainer of John Mowbray, 3rd duke of Norfolk, and as a young man he was caught up in the quarrel which took place between the elder Wingfield and Mowbray in the early 1440s. The duke’s men raided the Wingfield manor at Letheringham in the summer of 1443, and Robert took part in his father’s retaliatory attack against the property of one of Mowbray’s servants at nearby Easton in the following October. Shortly afterwards, the Wingfields were reconciled with the duke whom Robert appears subsequently to have served in south Wales, since in 1444-5 he quarrelled with David Mathewe over the stewardship of the duke’s lordship of Gower. In 1447 Sir Robert fell out with the duke for a second time and again Robert was caught up in the bitter quarrel which ensued. Late that year the King sent signet letters to him and his brother-in-law, William Brandon†, commanding them not to come within seven miles of the duke, and it was about this time that Mowbray, acting in his capacity as a j.p., arrested him (perhaps for breaching the royal order). He was imprisoned at Melton in east Suffolk, where he remained until the following January when a band of his father’s men, led by Brandon, broke into the jail and released him. The jail break featured in a series of indictments taken against Sir Robert Wingfield and his followers soon afterwards. The jurors, who were almost certainly briefed by Mowbray beforehand, also accused Robert of participating in his father’s lawless activities in Suffolk.8 KB27/730, rex rot. 51d; 734, rex rot. 3; 735, rex rot. 37; Bull. Bd. Celtic Studies, xxii. 193; DL29/651/10531; L.E. Moye, ‘Estates and Finances of the Mowbray Fam.’ (Duke Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1985), 87, 88, 127-9; KB9/257/44, 53-59. The date of Robert’s rescue from prison is from KB9/257/44, rather than Moye, who states that it took place the previous December.

The Mowbray-Wingfield quarrel came to a head in the summer of 1448 when the duke led an armed attack on Letheringham. Sir Robert afterwards complained to the King’s Council that the duke and his men had hunted his deer and ransacked his house, from which they had taken three chests full of muniments and goods and cash worth some £2,200, some of which belonged to his son and namesake. At the end of August that year Mowbray was sent to the Tower and a few days later a commission of oyer and terminer was appointed to investigate what had happened. In due course he was ordered to pay Sir Robert compensation of 3,500 marks, but it is unlikely that this sum was ever fully paid.9 CPR, 1446-52, p. 236; Moye, 90-91. R.L. Storey, End of House of Lancaster, 226-7, assumes that the assault on Letheringham occurred in 1443, but Moye’s argument (pp. 90n-91n) that it took place in 1448 is more convincing. In 1452 the Wingfields brought a suit against the duke of Norfolk for £3,000: CP40/766, rot. 153d. Not surprisingly, Robert associated with other lords in the years immediately following the attack on Letheringham. In May 1450 he was issued with royal letters of protection prior to joining the duke of Somerset in Normandy and later that year he received similar letters as a member of the retinue which the newly-appointed seneschal of Aquitaine, Richard Wydeville, Lord Rivers, was planning to take to that duchy. In the event the expedition was several times postponed and finally aborted.10 C81/1265/10; CPR, 1446-52, p. 410; R.A. Griffiths, Hen. VI, 529-30.

The Wingfields were still at odds with the duke of Norfolk when Sir Robert Wingfield drew up his last testament and a will for his lands in late 1452. Sir Robert, who was dead by the following May, left the bulk of his estate to his eldest son and heir, John, although Robert succeeded to the manor of Caldwell Hall in Hollesley, Suffolk. The testator appointed the two brothers his executors, alongside his wife Elizabeth.11 Lambeth Palace Lib., Reg. Kempe, ff. 297v-298; PCC 32 Luffenham (PROB11/3, ff. 249v-50). In early 1455 the three faced litigation from John Heydon* and John Andrew III*, two erstwhile adversaries of Sir Robert. The pair sought £20 from the knight’s estate, a debt arising from bonds he had entered into with them at Westminster – the circumstances are unknown – in early 1449.12 CP40/776, rot. 430.

While it appears that Sir Robert Wingfield was never reconciled with the duke of Norfolk, Robert re-entered Mowbray’s service soon after his father’s death. A member of the band which the duke sent to occupy the de la Pole manor at Stockton, Norfolk, apparently in the autumn of 1453, he was also one of those who went to the Exchequer in July 1454, to collect a goblet worth £40 and £200 in cash which the King had granted to his patron.13 C1/26/164; C.F. Richmond, Paston Fam.: First Phase, 148n; E403/798, m. 10. By the mid 1450s, moreover, he was in receipt of an annuity of £5 from the Mowbray manor of Ditchingham in south-east Norfolk, and it was with Mowbray’s support that he was elected to Parliament in 1455. While an MP, Wingfield received a royal pardon as ‘of Framlingham castle’, the Mowbray residence in Suffolk.14 Moye, 431; C67/41, m. 11. The Parliament was summoned at the behest of Richard, duke of York, in the wake of the battle of St. Albans, and as one of York’s allies Mowbray enjoyed much greater influence than hitherto over the East Anglian elections to the Commons. It is nevertheless likely that the election for the county of Suffolk was contested, for it was very well attended and the election of Wingfield’s fellow MP, William Jenney*, was afterwards the subject of litigation. In June 1456, a few months after the Parliament was dissolved, Walter Writtle* (who had sat for Maldon in the same assembly), appeared in the court of the Exchequer, where he alleged that the sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk had returned Jenney illegally because the majority present had actually chosen William Lee‡ as Wingfield’s fellow MP. It is likely that internal rivalries within the Mowbray affinity lay behind the whole affair, since both Jenney and Lee were retainers of the duke of Norfolk, as was the sheriff, Wingfield’s brother, John.15 R. Virgoe, E. Anglian Soc. ed. Barron, Rawcliffe and Rosenthal, 57-58; E13/146, rots. 69-70d, 81d.

There is no evidence for Wingfield’s activities in the late 1450s, save that he stood surety for William Troutbeck in February 1459. A relative by marriage, Troutbeck died fighting for the Lancastrians at the battle of Blore Heath seven months later.16 CCR, 1454-61, p. 354. Troutbeck had married one of Wingfield’s cousins, a da. of Thomas Stanley II*, 1st Lord Stanley, by Joan Goushill (the MP’s aunt): CCR, 1454-61, p. 354; Griffiths, 371, 821; CP, xii (1), 251. It is possible that Wingfield himself took part in one or more civil war battles, since the duke of Norfolk and his retinue fought for the Yorkists at the second battle of St. Albans in February 1461 and again at Towton a few weeks later. Both Wingfield and his elder brother benefited from the accession of Edward IV. John Wingfield was knighted at Edward’s coronation and became a royal councillor and Robert also began to move in court circles early in the new reign. In June 1463 he obtained royal approval for the French esquire, Louis de Breuil, to come to England to joust with him at a tournament,17 C76/147, m. 9. and he probably received his own knighthood at the queen’s coronation in May 1465.

In the following February Wingfield was appointed a j.p. for Norfolk, where he had taken up residence after his marriage. The match, contracted about three years earlier, was an extremely valuable one since his wife, Anne, had inherited a substantial estate from her father, Sir Robert Harling, who had died in France in 1435.18 Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, iii. 157. Her previous marriage to another soldier, Sir William Chamberlain, had proved childless, meaning that any children she bore her second husband would inherit her lands. Anne brought Wingfield at least 19 manors in Norfolk, along with others in Suffolk and Cambridgeshire.19 CIPM, xxiv. 444-8; Norf. Archaeology, x. 296; W.A. Copinger, Suff. Manors, i. 399; v. 10, 13, 23, 50; VCH Cambs. viii. 167; CCR, 1476-85, no. 479. Her principal holding was that of East Harling, and it was of East Harling as well as Letheringham that Wingfield received a royal pardon in February 1472.20 C67/48, m. 7.

In the meantime, following the death of the 3rd duke of Norfolk in late 1461, Wingfield continued to serve the Mowbrays in the person of Norfolk’s son and heir, who appointed him marshal of the Marshalsea prison, an office in the gift of the Mowbrays as hereditary Earls Marshal. In May 1469 he was one of those to whom the fourth duke illegally distributed liveries, and by the mid 1470s he was receiving an annuity of ten marks from the Mowbray manor at Great Chesterford, Essex. The duke was sufficiently associated with Edward IV to lose much of his influence in East Anglia when Henry VI was restored to the throne in the autumn of 1470. During the Readeption many of his followers were purged from the commissions of the peace, including Wingfield, who was dropped as a j.p. in Norfolk. Wingfield is not known to have taken part in the military campaigns of 1471, although his younger brothers, Thomas and William, earned knighthoods fighting for the Yorkist King at the battle of Tewkesbury.21 KB27/839, rex rot. 31; Moye, 427; Norf. Archaeology, xxxvi. 312, 314. There is no basis for the claim of HP Biogs. 957 that the MP went into exile with Edw. IV. Within a few months of Edward IV’s return he was restored to the bench, and in Michaelmas term 1471 he delivered to the Exchequer monies collected from those East Anglian lands which the King had confiscated from leading supporters of the Readeption.22 E405/54, rot. 5. On the following 5 Dec. Wingfield was among those who put his name to several bonds given to William, Lord Hastings, Thomas Vaughan*, treasurer of the King’s chamber, and the London alderman, Sir William Hampton†. The reason for the bonds is not clear, although it is possible that he had entered them on behalf of John Bonville, a Devon esquire who had married his sister, Katherine Wingfield.23 CCR, 1468-76, nos. 791, 845-6. On 6 Dec. Bonville conveyed several of his manors to Wingfield and others named in the bonds, apparently as a security: CCR, 1468-76, no. 822.

Wingfield became a member of Edward IV’s household following that King’s restoration, attending Edward as such at Windsor in the spring of 1472.24 C1/59/190. In the following September he was elected to his second Parliament, this time as an MP for Norfolk. As was the case in 1455, his elder brother presided over the election as sheriff and he was returned with the support of the duke of Norfolk. His fellow knight of the shire, (Sir) Richard Harcourt*, enjoyed the backing of John de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, with whom Mowbray had come to an arrangement more than two weeks before the election was held.25 Paston Letters ed. Davis, i. 577. The Parliament was called in anticipation of Edward IV’s expedition to France. In its final session the duke of Norfolk, short of money and facing the expense of the forthcoming campaign, successfully petitioned for permission to settle many of his properties on Wingfield and other feoffees. In due course the lands were conveyed to the feoffees, to hold for five years while they sorted out Mowbray’s finances.26 PROME, xiv. 263-4. Wingfield is not known to have accompanied the King to France, although he was involved in taking a muster of soldiers at ‘Seynt Kateryns Mede’ before they crossed the Channel.27 CPR, 1467-77, p. 526. During the Parliament, Wingfield, by then a royal councillor, became controller of the Household. Unlike his two immediate predecessors, Sir John Scott† and Sir William Parr†, who were sometimes sent on embassies abroad, he appears to have concentrated on his household duties.28 Myers, 253. As controller, he was well placed to secure rewards from the Crown. In March 1474, for example, he procured a licence to trade overseas for one year in a ship of 300 tons.29 C76/158, m. 30.

It was during his second Parliament, which sat until the spring of 1475, that Wingfield was the subject of a complaint from the prior and canons of the Augustinian house of Little Leighs in Essex. In a petition addressed to the King and Lords, they alleged that Sir Robert had seized their manor of Dernford in Sweffling, Suffolk, in the autumn of 1470, on the strength of a conveyance forged by their lessee of that property. Furthermore, in spite of agreeing to arbitration, he had since abused his position as a j.p. to have the prior and one of the canons indicted at the sessions of the peace in that county. Finally, in justification of the petition, they declared that they lacked remedy at common law because of their opponent’s ‘power’ in Suffolk. The outcome of the petition, which bears no endorsement, is unknown but it seems likely that Wingfield had exploited the unsettled conditions prevalent at the end of Edward IV’s first reign to take the property by underhand means.30 SC8/85/4236. Another matter demanding Wingfield’s attention during (or very shortly after) the Parliament was a dispute with his wife’s cousin John Radcliffe†. Radcliffe held Attleborough in Norfolk, a manor that had once belonged to Anne Wingfield’s paternal grandmother, Cecily, and in 1473-5 the MP and Anne sued him in the Chancery, as part of an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to oust him from that lordship.31 C1/48/238, 292; E13/160, rots. 14-16d, 36d-38d. Cecily had married Radcliffe’s grandfather, Sir John Radcliffe*, KG, after the death of her first husband, Sir John Harling.

In spite of his appointment as controller of the Household, Wingfield continued to pursue his own interests in East Anglia. In May 1475 he and his wife obtained a royal grant permitting them free warren in her demesne lands at East Harling and elsewhere in Norfolk and Suffolk, and several weeks later he obtained a charter awarding him and his heirs the right to hold weekly markets and two annual fairs at East Harling.32 CPR, 1467-77, p. 562; CChR, vi. 243. He was also able to make the best of the loss of his patron the duke of Norfolk. Within a year of Mowbray’s death in January 1476, he secured from the Crown the offices of steward of the duke’s lands in Norfolk and Suffolk and parker of Lopham, to hold during the minority of Mowbray’s infant daughter and heir. Mowbray’s death prompted Sir John Paston† to seek the recovery of Caister castle, which the duke had seized from his family several years earlier. As Paston was preparing to set off for London to petition for its return, his mother, Margaret, sent him word to sell a ‘clothe of gold’, perhaps to finance the expenses he was bound to incur. Wingfield intervened with an offer of 20 marks, but Sir John’s younger brother and namesake delayed the sale while he sought Margaret’s approval. In spite of his previous connexions with the Mowbrays and a minor property dispute between him and the Pastons in the late 1460s, Wingfield was sympathetic to Paston’s cause and prepared to offer him advice.33 Paston Letters ed. Davis, i. 491, 596-7; C.F. Richmond, Paston Fam.: Fastolf’s Will, 212n. Relations with another family, the Knyvets, were far more problematic. During the second half of the 1470s Wingfield and his wife filed a bill in Chancery against Sir William Knyvet†, one of the feoffees of the Harling lands, alleging that he had refused their request to release his interest in them to her.34 C1/54/219; Norf. RO, Wodehouse mss, KIM 2M/9. This was not the first time that Wingfield had clashed with the Knyvets, supporters of the Readeption, for he had sued William and his father, John Knyvet, earlier in the same decade, for trespassing on his property at New Buckenham, a few miles north-east of East Harling.35 KB27/842, rot. 34; 843, rot. 32.

In February 1478 Sir Robert was one of the officers of the Household assigned the task of examining accounts relating to the lands confiscated from the disgraced George, duke of Clarence, and a few weeks later he was appointed to a commission instructed to inquire into Clarence’s holdings in Norfolk and Suffolk. At the end of the same year, he became steward for life of the lands of the honour of Richmond in the two counties (an office which brought him ten marks p.a. in fees alone) and in March 1480 he witnessed a charter on behalf of John de la Pole, duke of Suffolk. By then he must have enjoyed a good relationship with the duke, who had made his wife, Anne Wingfield, godmother of one of his sons, Edmund de la Pole.36 CAD, ii. A3355; Test. Ebor. iv. 149-54. Wingfield obtained his last known royal grant in the following August, custody of the lands of Ralph Briston, a mentally incapacitated gentleman from Norfolk.37 CPR, 1476-85, pp. 64, 132, 211.

In spite of his continued participation in East Anglian affairs, Wingfield inevitably spent a great deal of his later years at Court, for he retained the office of controller of the Household until his death in late August or early September 1481. He died childless, so his heir was his nephew, John Wingfield†, the son and namesake of his eldest brother.38 C140/81/60. On the following 13 Nov. the King granted John, an esquire of his household, the stewardship of the honour of Richmond in Norfolk as well as the custody of Ralph Briston’s estate.39 CPR, 1476-85, p. 285. Sir Robert Wingfield was buried in the chapel of Rushworth College in south Norfolk, an institution established by his wife’s ancestor, Edmund Gonville (founder of Gonville Hall, Cambridge), but he is also commemorated in a stained-glass window in East Harling church. Bearing the inscription ‘Fili redemptor misere nobis’, this depicts him in armour and wearing the Yorkist collar of suns and roses. Wingfield’s will no longer survives, but deeds show that his widow was his sole executrix and that he left the manor of Brettenham to Rushworth College.40 Norf. Archaeology, x. 297, 367-71; xxiv. 256, 259; Blomefield, i. 286. Although his wife’s estate had comprised the vast bulk of his holdings, he is known to have acquired the manor of Little Bittering in Norfolk, and another at Chalcombe in Northamptonshire, a former Mowbray property. In December 1481 his nephew and heir John Wingfield devised Chalcombe to the widowed Anne for life. It was taken from her by the then duke of Norfolk, John Howard*, in Richard III’s reign, but she petitioned for its return after Henry VII came to the throne.41 CP25(1)/170/193/63; CPR, 1485-94, p. 208; CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 987, p. 592.

It was in accordance with her husband’s will that Anne Wingfield conveyed the manor of Brettenham to Rushworth College in May 1485. In return, the college undertook to maintain a perpetual chantry, served by a chaplain called ‘Wyngefeldispreste’, for the good of Wingfield’s soul. By this date Anne had already acquired licence from the Crown to alienate her manors of Rushford and Larling to the college. The purpose of the endowment was to support several priests and poor children resident there, and she ordered that five of these children, to be known as ‘Dame Annys childeryn’, should receive grammar lessons from one of the priests. She also provided for daily masses and other services at the college, including two annual obits, one to mark Wingfield’s anniversary and the other her own death, on whatever day that might fall.42 Norf. Archaeology, x. 367-71; CPR, 1476-5, p. 308.

The widowed Anne was a lady of some standing, sufficiently so for Henry VII to stay a night at East Harling when he visited Norfolk in the spring of 1489.43 Paston Letters ed. Davis, i. 654. She attracted a third husband in the person of John, Lord Scrope of Bolton, whom she married in about 1492. She also outlived Scrope, if only by a month. In his will of 1494 he left her all his goods and chattels south of the Trent, in part repayment of £100 which he had borrowed from her before their marriage and of other costs she had incurred on his behalf. The will also reveals that he had bought the reversion of her manors and lands in Blundeston, Oulton and Flixton in north-east Suffolk, with the intention that his grandson, ‘litill John Scrop’, should succeed to these properties. On 28 Sept. 1498, 11 days after Scrope’s death, Anne drew up her own will, a document which superseded an earlier will of 1479. She asked to be buried beside her first husband, Sir William Chamberlain, in East Harling church, in accordance with a promise she had given to him. In the will she made bequests to numerous parish churches and other religious institutions, among them the Augustinian priory at Chalcombe in Northamptonshire, which was to have a chalice inscribed with the names of Wingfield and herself. She also ordered a chalice for the Augustinian priory at Letheringham, in return for prayers for herself and the MP, and a vestment embroidered with the arms of Wingfield for Thetford priory, Lord Scrope’s burial place. In addition, she provided for various parish churches to have like windows or vestments commemorating herself and her three husbands. Her nephew by marriage, Robert Wingfield (a younger son of Sir John Wingfield), whom she had raised in her household since the age of three, was to have a bed, tapestries, plate and other household goods. She left her godson, Edmund de la Pole, earl of Suffolk, a trefoil-shaped broach garnished with precious stones, along with a primer given to her by Edward IV. The earl of Surrey, Thomas Howard†, received a French book called the ‘Pistill of Othia’ (a treatise on wisdom). Anne left the manor of Stanford in south-west Norfolk to her nephew, Robert Wingfield, whom she had appointed one of her executors, and a moiety of that of Barnham Broom in the same county to her ‘cousin’, Elizabeth, the widow of Sir Robert Chamberlain†. She also disposed of three of her manors in Cambridgeshire by leaving those at Foxton and Newton to John Scrope, her third husband’s grandson, and that at Newnham to Gonville Hall, Cambridge, where a chaplain was to sing for the souls of the MP and her other husbands.44 CP, xi. 544-5; Test. Ebor. iv. 94-97, 149-54; CCR, 1476-85, no. 479; J.M. Wingfield, Wingfield Fam. 21. She died on 18 Sept. 1498. Her heir was Thomas Bedingfield, a descendant of Sir Robert Harling’s sister, Margaret. Some eight years before her death, Anne sold the reversion of her manors at East Harling and Quidenham to Thomas’s father, Sir Edmund Bedingfield, although Sir Edmund afterwards conveyed the East Harling reversion to Sir Thomas Lovell†.45 CIPM Hen. VII, ii. 114, 193; Blomefield, i. 319; Norf. RO, Misc. docs., deed of 1490, MC 49/8.