DANVERS, William

More can be added to the earlier biography.2 The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 748-9.

In the summer of 1439 the sheriff of Oxfordshire was ordered to distrain Richard Quatermayns*, the former sheriff of Berkshire, to appear in the Exchequer to answer the charge that he had failed to pay Danvers the balance of £9 owing for his expenses (amounting to £14) as a knight of the shire in the Parliament of 1437. Danvers claimed £20 in damages, but there is no record that he was ever satisfied.3 E5/513, printed in Parliamentarians at Law ed. Kleineke, 371-2.

According to the assessments for taxation made in 1436, Danvers had then been in possession of land in Berkshire worth as much as £95 p.a.4 E179/238/90. By that date, near the end of his long life, he had already made arrangements for the disposition of his estates after his death. Nine years earlier he had put his manors of Winterbourne Danvers, Winterbourne Grey, Aston Tirrold, Chilton and Stainswick into the hands of feoffees so they might be settled on himself and his wife Joan for their lives, and then used for the implementation of his will,5 Magdalen Coll. Oxf., Stainswick deeds, 10, 66, 67, and he dealt with Leckhampstead in a similar way.6 Harl. Chs. 49 C 16, 52 G 9. But then, in 1434, he enfeoffed a different group of well-wishers, headed by Thomas Bekynton, the future bishop of Bath and Wells, and including William Warbleton*, of the same properties, which in July 1438 were entailed to the effect that if the issue of Danvers and his wife failed they were to pass to Robert Symeon esquire in tail. Undoubtedly, the bond in £1,000 which Symeon entered to Danvers at this time was the price for his purchase of this reversionary interest. Evidently, at this stage Danvers was not intending that his estates should be sold or donated for religious purposes.7 Lincs. AO, Earl of Ancaster mss, 1ANC2/A/18/18; Stainswick deeds, 69. However, the new plans went awry when Symeon died childless while on military service in France.8 C1/16/297. Danvers had been a feoffee of his estates: C1/16/296-7, 19/45. The sale to Symeon also casts doubt on the supposition that Isabel wife of Thomas Haines was Danvers’s daughter. More likely she was a distant kinswoman and merely the heir-general of his estates, and it was in this capacity that in the 1440s, after Danvers’s death, she relinquished her interest in Leckhampstead, Chilton, Winterbourne Danvers and Aston.9 VCH Berks. iv. 62; Cott. Ch. xxix 19; CP25(1)/13/85/5, 14. Indeed, she was specifically called ‘cousin and next heir’ of William Danvers when she sold her remainder interest in certain of our MP’s holdings to the marquess of Suffolk in 1446.10 Earl of Ancaster mss, 1ANC2/A/18/26.

The widowed Joan Danvers’s dealings concerning the manor of Stainswick were somewhat confusing. In October 1440 she leased it to John Harris for 17 years, but then, at Michaelmas 1443, she agreed that John Roger I* might farm it for 30 years at an annual rent of £14 13s. 4d. Roger, finding himself unable to take the revenues of the property because of Harris’s tenancy yet nevertheless bound by contract to pay the rent, brought an action against her in the court of common pleas in 1453, claiming damages of £200.11 CP40/770, rot. 406. Having expelled the feoffees of Stainswick named by her late husband Danvers and replaced them with her own nominees, in the previous year Joan had made arrangements for the manor and the advowson of the chapel there to go to Winchester College for the performance of her obit, although she was to keep the profits for life.12 Stainswick deeds, 19, 26, 37; C139/174/46. The conditions of the grant were apparently not met, and Stainswick, along with other of her holdings eventually passed instead to Magdalen College, Oxford.13 Stainswick deeds, 65; VCH Berks. iv. 508.