YELVERTON, William

The son of a second marriage, Yelverton made his name through the law.17 For more details of Yelverton’s career, see Norf. Archaeology, xxvi. 1-51. Originally merchants from Norwich, the Yelvertons had begun to invest in land by the early 1300s,18 Norwich city recs., ‘Old Free bk.’, NCR 17c, f. 55d; Vis. Norf. i. 265; Norf. Archaeology, xxx. 281. but were of no great distinction before the fifteenth century. Yelverton’s father was also a lawyer, although a far less distinguished one than his famous son. John Yelverton served on various ad hoc commissions, became recorder of Norwich and acted as a feoffee of Thomas, Lord Morley. He died in 1408, leaving lands at Rackheath, Yelverton and Saxthorpe to Robert, his eldest son by his first marriage.19 CPR, 1399-1401, pp. 215, 526; 1401-5, pp. 288, 291, 359; 1405-8, pp. 59, 301; CCR, 1402-5, p. 152; Vis. Norf. i. 265; Norwich consist. ct., Reg. Hyrnying, f. 72. The properties John had held in the right of his second wife, Elizabeth, consisting of manors at Rougham in west Norfolk and Bayfield in the north, along with other lands in those parts of the county, comprised William’s limited inheritance. Elizabeth survived John by many years, and she also comfortably outlived her second husband, Robert Clere†. She surrendered possession of Rougham to her son in 1425 (probably not long after he had attained his majority), although it is possible that she retained Bayfield until her death.20 Feudal Aids, iii. 563, 595, 630, 633, 634, 635; Norf. Rec. Soc. mss, 7054, 7231; Vis. Norf. ii. 294; Norf. Archaeology, xxvi. 2-4.

In Easter term 1422 Yelverton acted as a pledge for a London skinner, John Harrys of London, in a suit for a debt upon a bond that the latter was pursuing against Thomas Hoo I*.21 CP40/645, rot. 167. He had certainly begun to practise as a lawyer by the mid 1420s when the corporation of Norwich retained him for his legal counsel. Initially the citizens paid him a fee of two marks p.a. but this rose to 40s. in 1433 and to 50s. after he had become recorder of the city.22 Norwich city recs, chamberlains’ acct. 1384-1448, NCR 18a, ff. 151, 190, 219. He was in Norwich during the controversial mayoral election of May 1437, which took place two days before he was appointed recorder. Members of a faction led by Thomas Wetherby* afterwards alleged that their opponents had prevented them from taking part in the election and had assaulted some of their number as well as Yelverton and others, but these were partisan claims rather than a true account of what had really happened23 KB9/229/1/106.. Yelverton was recorder of Norwich for 16 years, meaning that he retained that office for some time after joining the judicial bench. As a newly appointed judge he was commissioned to investigate the citizens’ long-running jurisdictional dispute with the prior of Norwich. Despite his close links with the city, he probably exercised his commission impartially; when he and a fellow judge, William Paston, held an inquisition at East Dereham in September 1443 the jury declared in the prior’s favour.24 Blomefield, iii. 144; Recs. Norwich ed. Hudson and Tingey, i, p. lxxxii. A year before surrendering the office of recorder, he drew up an agreement (known as ‘Yelverton’s Mediation’) regulating the relationship between the city and its principal guild, that of St. George.25 Recs. Gild St. George, Norwich (Norf. Rec. Soc. ix), 39-43.

Outside Norwich, Yelverton began his career as an ad hoc commissioner in the late 1420s, and he was appointed to the commission of the peace in Norfolk soon afterwards. In the 1430s he represented Great Yarmouth in two consecutive Parliaments, despite having acted as counsel for Norwich in a dispute between the city and that borough a few years earlier. He is not recorded as having had any connexion with Yarmouth before 1435 and it is not known why its burgesses should have elected him to the Parliaments of 1435 and 1437. Possibly the patronage of Sir John Fastolf, with whom he became closely associated and whose family originated from Yarmouth, helped Yelverton to win his seat, although the burgesses must also have appreciated the advantages of having an able lawyer as one of their representatives. Their counterparts in another Norfolk borough, Bishop’s Lynn, certainly appreciated the potential value of Yelverton’s services. When they entered negotiations to purchase the bishop of Norwich’s tollbooth in their town in 1439, he was one of the bishop’s council with whom they dealt. In order to advance their cause, as well as to secure his future counsel in other matters, they offered him a retainer of 40s. p.a.26 Norf. RO, King’s Lynn bor. recs., hall bk. 1431-50, KL/C 7/3, ff. 101v, 105. Soon afterwards, if not already by that date, he was also providing counsel to a lay magnate, William Lovell, Lord Lovell and Holand.27 Northants. RO, Finch Hatton mss, FH3152.

Within a year of leaving his second Parliament, Yelverton was ordered to take up the rank of serjeant-at-law, an honour bestowed on him in July 1438. By the following year he had begun working as a justice of assize on the south-western circuit, and he subsequently rode the western and home circuits later in his career. His activities as a justice of assize and a member of numerous commissions were just one aspect of his work as a serjeant-at-law. In the early 1440s he was retained by the duchy of Lancaster,28 Somerville, i. 451. and he was also one of the serjeants summoned to advise the Crown during the Parliament of 1442, in return for which he received ten marks for his services.29 E403/743, m. 15. He subsequently attended the next 14 Parliaments as a law officer, acting as a trier of petitions in at least four of them. Yelverton became a judge of King’s bench after serving five years as a serjeant-at-law and King’s serjeant. Upon his appointment in July 1443, he was granted annual allowances of 110 marks for his salary and over £8 for his robes, sums he was supposed to receive from the clerk of the hanaper or the keepers of the customs in the ports of London, Bristol and Kingston-upon-Hull.30 CPR, 1441-6, p. 183. When he joined the judicial bench he was still owed a substantial amount in fees for his last few months as a serjeant, and shortly after becoming a judge he, along with other judges, serjeants-at-law and the King’s attorneys, petitioned the chancellor for arrears of their wages and allowances.31 CCR, 1441-7, pp. 191-2.

Yelverton’s judicial career lasted for almost 30 years and in common with those of most of his legal contemporaries it was not affected by political upheavals. Despite his membership of several anti-Yorkist commissions late in Henry VI’s reign, he was reappointed a justice of King’s bench after Edward IV came to the throne,32 CPR, 1461-7, p. 14. and knighted on the eve of Edward’s coronation. According to the Suffolk attorney, Thomas Playter, the knighthood was a sop to reconcile Yelverton to his failure to become chief justice of King’s bench, an office granted to Sir John Markham.33 Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 235-6. Early in Edward’s reign he was entrusted with helping to restore law and order in East Anglia. It was in obedience to a direct order from the King that he accompanied the new sheriff of Norfolk, Sir Thomas Montgomery†, to the county in December 1461, and Edward briefed them in person before they set off. Yelverton acted as spokesman when he and Montgomery arrived at the shire-house in Norwich, declaring that the King had heard about the ‘ryotows felawschep’ in Norfolk with great displeasure and was well aware that only two or three people had stirred up the trouble. He also stated that those who wished to present grievances against any man would receive full protection. After Montgomery reminded him that the King had referred specifically to Sir Thomas Tuddenham* and John Heydon* as malefactors, he added that those who wished to complain about their activities would likewise receive protection.34 Ibid. i. 277-8. In the following spring Yelverton was at Cambridge. There he met the King, who thanked him for declaring so well ‘the charge of extorcions doon by shirefes and other officers, &c.’ and, taking him by the hand, asked him to do the same in Norfolk.35 Ibid. ii. 273-4. Later in the decade he was obliged to take part in a controversial judicial episode, for it was before him and his fellow justice, William Lacon I*, that on 18 July 1468 the wealthy Londoner, (Sir) Thomas Cook II*, recently convicted of misprision of treason, registered sureties for the payment of a huge fine of 8,000 marks imposed upon him at the King’s pleasure. Although rewarded in the same month with an assignment at the Exchequer for £10, Yelverton and Lacon may have had some qualms about the whole disreputable affair. The plea roll recorded that the fine ‘non recordatur nec assensum per iusticiarios’, suggesting that they may have disapproved of the size of the penalty and the way it was imposed.36 CP40/802, rot. 49; John Vale’s Bk. ed. Kekewich et al. 90; E403/840, m. 13. Yelverton remained a judge after the Readeption of Henry VI in 1470, although not following Edward IV’s recovery of the throne in the next year. Old age rather than any political consideration is the most likely explanation for his retirement, since by this date he was some 70 years old.37 CPR, 1467-77, pp. 226-7, 229; CCR, 1468-76, no. 582; Norf. Archaeology, xxvi. 42. Presumably it is Yelverton’s omission from the judges’ bench in 1471 which led C.F. Richmond, Paston Fam.: Fastolf’s Will, 101, to assume that he died c.1470. Yelverton features less in the Year Books as a judge than a serjeant-at-law, mainly because the majority of the cases which they record were heard in the common pleas (where serjeants enjoyed a monopoly of pleading) rather than King’s bench. The books nevertheless show that he was a competent judge, well versed in several widely differing aspects of law.38 Norf. Archaeology, xxvi. 8-9, 30-31, 43-46, for a fuller discussion of cases in which Yelverton was involved, both as a serj. and a judge.

Like other lawyers, Yelverton performed much of his work outside the courts. Occasionally he was called upon to arbitrate in private disputes, most notably with regard to the estates of the Lords Berkeley in the late 1440s.39 CCR, 1422-9, p. 459; 1435-41, pp. 382-3; C1/19/246. He was also employed by various ecclesiastical and lay figures. A councillor of Thomas Brown, bishop of Norwich, he served Brown’s successor, Walter Lyhert, as well as the prior of West Acre as a steward. Among the lay nobility, he served Ralph, Lord Cromwell, as an estate official, and both Humphrey Stafford, duke of Buckingham (who retained him with a fee of £2 p.a. in 1442), and John Mowbray, third duke of Norfolk, as a legal adviser. He also enjoyed close contacts with several prominent members of the East Anglian gentry, not least Sir Simon Felbrigg, whom he served as a feoffee, as well as those for whom he acted as an executor: Oliver Groos (the father of his first wife), Sir Thomas Kerdiston*, Sir William Oldhall*, Ela, the mother of (Sir) Thomas Brewes*,40 KL/C 7/3, f. 127v; Norwich consist. ct., Regs. Wylbey, f. 137, Aleyn, f. 186, Brosyard, ff. 23-24; Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, ii. 215; Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 23; C. Rawcliffe, Staffords, 221, 238; CP25(1)/168/182/48; Norf. Rec. Soc. mss, 7139, 7054; Test. Vetusta ed. Nicolas, i. 245; J.S. Roskell, Speakers, 360; CAD, i. B1244. and, most significantly, Sir John Fastolf. A veteran of the wars in France, Fastolf had built up a sizeable estate in East Anglia. In his later years he resided at Caister castle near Great Yarmouth, but Yelverton had known him for some considerable time before he finally returned to England, since the knight asked him to witness deeds for him as early as 1433. He soon became one of the principal feoffees of the knight, who in the mid 1430s retained him as a legal adviser with a fee of 13s. 4d. p.a.41 CCR, 1429-35, p. 257; A.R. Smith, ‘Sir John Fastolf’ (Oxf. Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1982), 113n.

In subsequent years Yelverton played an important part in Fastolf’s legal battles with the allies and retainers of William de la Pole, earl (later marquess, then duke) of Suffolk, as well as with Suffolk himself. Whatever the plausibility of the hypothesis that he and Fastolf led an ‘East Anglian movement’ against local misgovernment by the duke’s followers after their master’s downfall and death in 1450, there is no doubt that he was a useful ally during the knight’s disputes with these men. During the autumn of 1450 he advocated approaching Richard, duke of York, then contemplating a visit to Norfolk, to seek his support against the leading de la Pole retainers, Tuddenham and Heydon, and he and Fastolf sought to secure the nomination of a sheriff who would see ‘justice’ done in Norfolk and Suffolk.42 CAD, i. A637; Smith, 168; Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 47-49, 50-52. In November that year efforts were made (or so it was alleged) to prevent Yelverton from travelling to Norfolk in pursuit of a commission of oyer and terminer, and upon his arrival in the county he wrote to Fastolf to ask the knight to defend him against slanderous tales which their enemies were putting about at Westminster.43 Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, ii. 188; Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 523. Yelverton and a fellow commissioner, the earl of Oxford, presided over sessions of oyer and terminer at Norwich, before moving to Lynn in January 1451 and back to Norwich the following March, but Tuddenham and Heydon enjoyed the support of a third commissioner, Thomas, Lord Scales.44 KB9/272/2-5; Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, ii. 196, 203; Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 60-63. The de la Pole affinity, helped by the likes of Scales and friends at Court, proved resilient, and it was rumoured in Norwich in the spring of 1451 that a jury in Kent had indicted Oxford, Yelverton and others for maintenance of the oyer and terminer commission in Norfolk.45 Paston Letters ed. Davis, i. 238, 67-68. In late April indictments taken by this commission were brought before John Prysote*, c.j.c.p., and Yelverton, sitting at the Norwich guildhall. According to Fastolf’s servant, Thomas Howes, the chief justice provoked protests from Yelverton by openly favouring Tuddenham and Heydon. Prysote had the sitting adjourned to Walsingham, where the de la Pole affinity enjoyed particularly strong support.46 Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, ii. 238-9. The outcome of the proceedings at Walsingham is not recorded, but there is no doubt that it was favourable to the de la Pole men. Yelverton also clashed with Tuddenham, Heydon and their associates in later years. In 1454, for example, his clerk was apprehended in Westminster Hall, after Henry Tuddenham*, Sir Thomas’s illegitimate son, alleged that the clerk, William Wayte, was a defendant in a lawsuit brought by Lord Scales, but with his master’s help Wayte obtained a writ of habeas corpus from King’s bench, claiming privilege as an attorney of that court and a clerk of one of its judges.47 Norf. Archaeology, xxvi. 18-19. In July 1455 it was claimed that Yelverton, John Paston* and ‘Mayster Alyngton’ were preparing to have Tuddenham, Heydon and the bishop of Norwich accused of treason in the Parliament of that year, but Paston angrily dismissed the rumour as a ‘slawnderus noyse’ intended to discredit him and the other two men.48 Paston Letters ed. Davis, i. 84-85; ii. 124-5.

Along with Yelverton and William Jenney*, Paston was one of Sir John Fastolf’s principal legal advisers, counsellors and trustees, and the knight held all three men in high esteem during his irascible old age. On one occasion in the mid 1450s his factotum, William Worcestre, appealed to Paston to wait upon his master as soon as possible, for it was beyond the ‘simple wyttes’ of the household servants at Caister to ease his spirits. He added that when Fastolf ‘spekyth wyth Maister Zeluerton, yow, or wyth William Geney, and such othyrs as be autorised yn the law ... he ys content and haldeth hym pleased wyth your aunsuers and mocions ... . So wold Jesus one of yow iij or som such othyr yn your stede myzt hang at hys gyrdyll dayly to aunsuer hys materes’.49 Ibid. ii. 156-7. Following Fastolf’s death in November 1459 Yelverton, accompanied by his wife and 13 servants, attended his funeral.50 Richmond, 71. From the knight’s goods he was given (or obtained) a ‘crosse wyth a cheyn & of the holye crosse thereynne that Sir Jon Fastolf dyd were dayly aboute hys nek’, worth £200, a ‘boke clepyt Josephus’ and ‘a grete Bible cum historia scolastica yn Frensh’.51 K.B. McFarlane, Eng. in the 15th Cent. 190-1. Before Fastolf’s death he and Jenney had enjoyed at least a cordial relationship with Paston, but they fell out spectacularly with him over the knight’s will. By the spring of 1460 this was becoming a source of friction between Yelverton and Paston, both of whom were among Fastolf’s executors, prompting Yeverton to recall wrongs Paston had committed against him in the past. These included an assault on William Wayte and, much more seriously, the killing of another of his servants. He also accused Paston of speaking unfavourably about him earlier that year (even though he, Yelverton, was as ‘worschipful a justise and as kunnyng in lawe’ as Paston’s father ever was) when they met at the abbey of St. Benet of Holm.52 Richmond, 96; Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 332-5.

By the second half of 1461 Yelverton and Jenney (who was an attorney for the executors) were openly disputing a version of the knight’s will which made Paston the heir to the Fastolf estates in Norfolk and Suffolk and gave him authority over his fellow executors. Refusing to accept the validity of this document, dated 3 Nov. 1459 (just two days before Fastolf’s death), they referred instead to a will of the previous June.53 Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, iii. 147-66; H.R. Castor, Blood and Roses, 125. In September 1461 they seized possession of Cotton and other former Fastolf manors in Suffolk, and over the next few years both they and the Pastons entered and re-entered these and other properties. During the quarrel Jenney took it upon himself to sell Cotton to Gilbert Debenham I* and he and Yelverton pursued a lawsuit in King’s bench against Paston’s servant, Richard Calle.54 Paston Letters ed. Davis, i. 99-102, 529-33; ii. 247-50, 253-6, 285-6, 369-71. In September 1464 Paston managed to obtain a royal licence permitting him to establish the religious community or college which Fastolf had wished to see founded at Caister, as well as a promise from the King of immunity from legal actions brought by Yelverton and Jenney while their accusations were investigated. Paston also trusted that his friendship with William Calthorpe*, then sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk, would protect him from outlawry at the hands of his opponents, but he was committed to the Fleet prison in November 1464 after Calthorpe failed to live up to his promises.55 Ibid. ii. 299; Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, iv. 113-17. In the following year Yelverton was accused of conniving in the seizure by John, duke of Suffolk, of the former Fastolf manors at Hellesdon and Drayton. Although the duke was the son of Tuddenham and Heydon’s late patron, Yelverton no longer had any reason for antagonism towards the de la Poles, and on one occasion (probably in the early 1460s) it was alleged that he had formed an alliance with Heydon against the Pastons and their friends.56 Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, iv. 208; Paston Letters ed. Davis, i. 311-14; ii. 264. By the mid 1460s he and Heydon were acting together as legal counsellors of the dowager duchess of Suffolk, Alice de la Pole,57 KB27/826, rot. 105. and his servant, William Wayte, was a member of her son the duke’s council.58 Paston Letters ed. Davis, i. 305. Furthermore, when the duke’s men held a court at Drayton in August 1465 Yelverton’s grandson and namesake presided over the proceedings as Suffolk’s steward.59 Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, i. 226. Later in the same decade, Yelverton and Heydon were again associated with each other, as the overseers of the will of Robert Toppe* of Norwich.60 Norwich consist. ct. Reg. Jekkys, ff. 97-99.

Along with Fastolf’s other executors, Yelverton was also drawn into controversies, not solely with the Pastons, over property that the testator had purchased in Southwark. Late in life Fastolf had faced claims to some of his holdings there from Richard Weltden*, the son-in-law of the vendor. Weltden continued to press his claims after Sir John’s death, exploiting to his own advantage differences between the knight’s executors and feoffees and the wider dispute over the settlement of the Fastolf estates. In response to a suit that he and his wife brought in Chancery in the early 1460s, Yelverton and William Jenney denied any knowledge or responsibility for the matter, stating that John Paston and Thomas Howes had possession of Fastolf’s will and the evidences relating to it. Although both Paston and Howes subsequently appeared in Chancery to refute Weltden’s allegations, the plaintiffs won their case.61 Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 180; C1/29/277; CCR, 1461-8, p. 327. This was not, however, the end of Yelverton’s involvement with the Fastolf holdings at Southwark. In February 1464 he, Jenney and William Worcestre, another of Fastolf’s executors, appointed Robert Kirton surveyor and receiver of various properties which the knight had held in Southwark and elsewhere in Surrey. It was agreed that Kirton should occupy the properties in question and receive a fee of six marks p.a., along with all reasonable costs he might incur in keeping the Pastons out.62 William of Worcestre, Itins. ed. Harvey, 387-8. Moreover, in late 1466 Yelverton and Weltden were among those who agreed that the matter of a messuage and two mills at Southwark should go to arbitration,63 Magdalen Coll. Oxf., Southwark deeds 54c. and in about 1467 another of Fastolf’s executors, William Waynflete, bishop of Winchester, sued him in Chancery for failing to make a release of the Boar’s Head, the knight’s inn there.64 C1/33/214.

The quarrel over the Fastolf lands continued after John Paston’s death in May 1466. In the following year Yelverton took part in a sale of Hellesdon and Cotton to the duke of Suffolk and his mother, Alice de la Pole, and later that decade he supported their claims to Cotton and other Fastolf lands.65 Richmond, 147-8; Magdalen Coll. Oxf., Fastolf pprs., 88 (1-2); Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 391. Another of those who participated in the sale was William Worcestre, with whom Yelverton was associated as a co-defendant in a Chancery suit of the later 1460s. The plaintiffs, Richard Wydeville, Earl Rivers, and his wife Jacquetta, formerly the wife of John, duke of Bedford, sought to make good her claim to West Thurrock in Essex, a manor that Bedford had left to her for life and of which Fastolf had been one of the duke’s feoffees.66 C1/38/302. Later in life, however, Worcestre fell out with Yelverton. He came to refer to the judge as ‘cursed’ (maledictus) and claimed that Yelverton had encouraged the temporary seizure of Caister by the King’s brother-in-law, Anthony Wydeville, in 1465.67 William of Worcestre, 189. Wydeville seized Caister after it was claimed that the Pastons were of servile origin. There is no proof to support the assumption (for which see Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, i. 225) that Yelverton was the author of a paper outlining these claims which was then in circulation. By August 1467 it appeared that the quarrel between the Pastons and their opponents was nearing an end. That month, the ecclesiastical court hearing the dispute over Fastolf’s will arrived at a compromise by which Paston’s eldest son and heir, Sir John Paston†, was permitted to keep Caister and a number of other properties in Norfolk and Suffolk, and in the following January Yelverton was party to a formal release of these lands to him.68 Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, iv. 292. Ibid. 101-4, 236-41 for the court’s earlier examinations of Yelverton’s witnesses.

Any hopes that this agreement represented a final settlement soon proved premature, for shortly afterwards Thomas Howes, one of Fastolf’s executors and hitherto an ally of the Pastons, formally declared that the version of the knight’s will promoted by the family was a forgery. Following his dramatic declaration, he joined Yelverton in recommending to the court that John Mowbray, fourth duke of Norfolk, should buy Caister and other parts of the Fastolf estate, and that the money raised from the sale should go to charity, for the good of the dead man’s soul. In October 1468 he and the MP, along with Jenney and others, took it upon themselves to sell the properties in question to the duke, who in the following year made good his claim to Caister by seizing it by force.69 Paston Letters ed. Davis, i. 487-9; ii. 431-2, 561-70; William of Worcestre, 187-91. By early 1470, however, Sir John Paston had reached some sort of ‘treaty’ with Yelverton, and in the summer of that year Bishop Waynflete attempted to end the controversy over the knight’s estates once and for all. He drew up a settlement by which these were divided between himself, taking sole responsibility for administering Fastolf’s estate, and Sir John Paston. At the same time he vouched to establish a religious community at Magdalen College, Oxford, in place of Fastolf’s proposed college at Caister. Soon afterwards the duke of Norfolk, in return for 500 marks, made a release to the bishop of the Fastolf lands in his possession.70 Paston Letters ed. Davis, i. 414; Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, v. 76-77, 81, 91, 92, 94; CCR, 1468-76, nos. 622-3. The Pastons were able temporarily to recover Caister castle during the Readeption, but the duke retook possession in 1471. It was not until after his sudden death in January 1476 that they finally managed to recover it for good.71 William of Worcestre, 253; Paston Letters ed. Davis, i. 496.

Yelverton’s opposition to the Pastons has harmed his reputation, since he occurs as an enemy in much of their famous correspondence. It is now impossible to tell for sure who was in the right with regard to the Fastolf estate although, unlike the Pastons, Yelverton had nothing to gain personally from either version of the knight’s will. In the event, he came to terms with the Pastons before they recovered Caister, since negotiations for a marriage between Yelverton’s grandson and namesake and Anne Paston, one of the daughters of John Paston, were taking place by 1472. Yet, perhaps as a result of residual distrust between the two sides, these negotiations became both protracted and contentious, meaning that the marriage did not occur until shortly after the MP and his feoffees set aside a manor at Caister St. Edmund near Norwich for the couple on 16 Nov. 1476.72 Paston Letters ed. Davis, i. 574; C142/34/32. By then the younger William was the MP’s heir, for his father, John Yelverton, had not lived to see the marriage take place.

The manor had come to the Yelvertons through John Yelverton’s marriage with Margaret, daughter and heir of William Morley.73 Blomefield, v. 47. John, the MP’s heir, was his eldest son by his first wife, Jane Groos. Despite Jane’s early death, the MP had remained connected with the Groos family as a feoffee and continued to take an interest in its affairs. During the 1450s and 1460s there was a prolonged dispute between the family’s heir male, John Groos, and its heir general, Robert Ashfield, and in the early 1450s Yelverton was one of several feoffees who sued John and others for forcibly disseising them of the Groos manor of Sloley. Ashfield based his claim on a deed of 1368, but faced the challenge of proving that it existed. He was helped in April 1459 when William Wayte formally declared that he had once made a copy of the document for his master, who was alive to the possibility that his children by Jane might have a claim to the Groos lands in the future. It would also appear that Yelverton brought the deed itself into Chancery, so proving its existence and helping Ashfield to win his case.74 KB27/773, rot. 32; C.F. Richmond, Paston Fam.: First Phase, 188n; CCR, 1461-8, pp. 86-87; C1/31/213-19. Yelverton also had several children by his obscure second wife, Ela, among them Eleanor, who was married to John, son of Sir Robert Conyers* in about 1460. This match with ‘a knytes sone’ is known to have given her father particular pleasure. On one occasion shortly before the marriage, having dined a little too well at Norwich’s Franciscan friary, he could not refrain from boasting about it to Friar Brackley, creating a scene which the friar, a friend of the Pastons, afterwards wrote about at his expense.75 Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 333.

While Yelverton’s brass in Rougham church is still extant, it is damaged and no longer bears the date of his death. He was however still alive in the spring of 1478, since he conveyed all his goods and chattels to William Yelverton of Rougham, probably his son of that name by his second marriage, on 8 May that year.76 John Rylands Univ. Lib., Manchester, Rylands chs., RYCH/54; Norf. Rec. Soc. mss, 6476. Both Baker, ii. 1732, and Order of Serjts. at Law, 546, wrongly state that Yelverton died on 27 Mar. 1476. The MP was certainly dead by 20 Oct. 1486: CIPM Hen. VII, i. 173. The brass supports the argument that Edward IV did not dismiss Yelverton from the judges’ bench for political reasons, since it depicts him wearing the Yorkist collar of Sun and Roses.77 Norf. Archaeology, xxiv. 259. His widow, Agnes, who lived until 1489, chose to be buried beside him at Rougham, rather than at the parish church at Barking, Essex, where her previous husband, John Randes, lay.78 PCC 29 Milles. Yelverton’s will has not survived, but a Chancery suit brought after his death by the London alderman, Sir William Hampton† shows that William Yelverton of Rougham, his son by his second marriage, was one of his executors. Hampton sued the younger William for £6 6s. 8d., claiming that this sum was due to him for a tun of red wine he had sold to his father. 79 C1/60/117.

The lack of a will or an inquisition post mortem for Yelverton means that the evidence for his lands is limited. Apart from the manors he had inherited at Rougham and Bayfield, it appears that he succeeded to three others at Rackheath, given that they were settled on his grandson and Anne Paston. The Rackheath properties had once belonged to the senior branch of the Yelverton family, which had become extinct upon the death of the childless Thomas Yelverton (son of the MP’s elder half-brother, Robert) some time after 1435.80 CIPM Hen. VII, ii. 353; Reg. Hyrning, f. 72; Vis. Norf. ii. 266. Blomefield, v. 490, states that the MP also held a manor at Yelverton, but his acct. of this property is confused. Elsewhere in Norfolk, Yelverton had purchased the ‘Music House’ in Norwich, a residence previously owned by Sir Simon Felbrigg’s widow,81 Norf. Archaeology, xxviii. 36. and the records of King’s bench suggest that he had acquired property at Wiveton in the north of the county as well. An entry in that court’s plea roll for Michaelmas term 1451 shows that he had come into conflict with a gentleman named Thomas Brigge over a water-mill in that parish. Believing that Yelverton had ‘falsely and extortionately’ expelled him from the mill, Brigge had publicly and unwisely voiced his grievances in Westminster Hall and elsewhere at Westminster on three consecutive days in late May that year, referring to the MP as ‘a false justice, and one of the most false justices of the realm of England’. As a result, a presentment was laid against him in King’s bench, which cannot have looked kindly upon the aspersions he had cast upon one of its justices. According to this, Brigge had intended to ‘excite and move the King’s people’ against Yelverton with his ‘lies and false scandals’.82 KB27/762, rex rot. 39. Although one modern authority has suggested that the MP was a man of ‘probity’,83 Richmond, Fastolf’s Will, 96. it is hard to believe that he had been entirely innocent of sharp practice in his dealings with Brigge, given the strength of feeling vented by the latter.