HASTINGS, Sir Edmund

More may be added to the earlier biography.2 The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 317-19.

A petition, almost certainly to be dated to the early years of Henry V’s reign, alleged that Sir Edmund Hastings had commissioned an atrocity. William Bercher of Kingthorpe (near Pickering), where our MP was lord of the manor, complained to the King that a gang of ten men, headed by one William Campion and acting on the orders of Hastings, had assaulted him there, putting out his eyes and cutting away most of his tongue (‘sez oyles ousterent et graunde partie de sa lange trencherent’). Later his attackers, learning that he could still speak, had taken to disguising themselves as women (‘en arraie des femmes’) and, at diverse places in Yorkshire, laying in wait to kill him. The King responded to the petition by summoning the ten to appear before him in Chancery, but, unfortunately, no more is known of the matter.3 SC8/295/14747.

Sir Edmund appears to have been on closer terms with the great northern families of Neville of Raby and Percy than allowed in the earlier biography. His grandson, Edmund, son of his elder son, Sir John, was born in 1431 at Brancepeth, presumably at the castle of Ralph Neville, earl of Westmorland.4 Sir William Elmden* (also a Member of the Commons in 1422 and 1427) was one of Edmund’s godfathers: C139/151/49. Less direct is the further evidence of his connexion with Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland. In 1427 Thomas Poynings, Lord St. John of Basing (d.1429), entrusted his lands in Kent and Sussex to feoffees largely drawn from his friends and neighbours, but also including, alongside the earl of Northumberland, two northern knights, Sir John Bygod and our MP.5 CP25(1)/292/66/51.

The death of Sir Edmund’s elder son in the summer of 1440, led to a dispute over the wardship and marriage of his grandson Edmund. In November 1440 one of the leading northern gentry, Sir William Euer*, who had sat with our MP for Yorkshire in the Parliament of 1422, paid the Crown £100 for the marriage, a sum, given the heir’s expectations, that was far less than it was worth. Almost immediately, however, two of Sir John Hastings’s feoffees, William Garth and William Hoton, acting, according to Euer, at the behest of Sir John Middleton, son and heir of Sir John Middleton* of Belsay (Northumberland), contested the Crown’s right to the wardship. After they lost at law, Middleton abducted the ward, and Euer successfully sued him for damages. Why Middleton should have behaved in this way is not known, but it is to be assumed that our MP was also favourable to the feoffees’s claim.6 See the account in the biography of Euer. If so, it would explain why he later acted to ensure that Euer’s ward would inherit very little until he came of age. On 23 Jan. 1445 he conveyed his manor of Edlingham and other of the Felton estates in Northumberland, the palatinate of Durham and Northamptonshire to feoffees headed by his younger son, William Hastings, and they were seised at his death in 1448.7 Northumb. RO, Swinburne (Capheaton) mss, ZSW/3/16; DKR, xliv. 409; C139/134/24. The boy remained in Euer’s custody until he proved his age in 1453. He went on to enjoy a career as notable as our MP’s own, serving four terms as sheriff of Yorkshire between 1464 and 1484 and serving as a knight of the royal body in the 1470s.8 C139/151/49; A.J. Pollard, North-Eastern Eng. 159, 166.