PEYTO, Sir William

More may be added to the earlier biography.4 The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 67-68.

In 1420, soon after coming into his inheritance (of which his mother had held the bulk until her death in 1418), Peyto charged his manor of Wolfhampcote with an annual rent of £10 to be paid, for a period of nine years, to the Coventry merchant, William Botener.5 Warws. RO, Peyto of Wolfhampcote mss, L4/32-4. This suggests that the financial problems that were the central feature of the last years of his career may have begun earlier.

Peyto’s part in the disputed Warwickshire election of 1427 is open to more than one interpretation. He was accused of having come to the county court at the head of an armed band to set aside the election of John Mallory* in favour of his own. This has been seen in terms of a struggle amongst the local baronage: in Mallory the county court elected an MP inimical to the interests of the leading local magnate, Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, then absent in France, and Peyto, as one of the earl’s leading men, acted in the earl’s interest to supersede the election.6 C. Carpenter, Locality and Polity, 385-7. The central difficulty with this interpretation lies in associating Mallory with the earl’s opponents, namely his aunt, Joan Beauchamp, Lady Abergavenny, and John Mowbray, duke of Norfolk. Indeed, in 1431, Mallory was named as one of several local gentry corruptly empanelled as jurors by the sheriff, (Sir) Humphrey Stafford I*, precisely because they were hostile to Lady Joan.7 E13/139, rot. 12. Clearly another explanation is required, and the surviving documents generated by the dispute suggest one. Significantly, the election did not come to the Crown’s attention through the allegation that Peyto had forcibly intervened. Rather, it was Peyto himself who complained to the Crown. He claimed that he had been duly elected, along with Sir William Mountfort*, and his return attested in an indenture made by Edmund Colshill, under sheriff of Sir Richard Hastings*; but that Hastings had then falsely returned Mountfort and Mallory. Faced with this accusation, Hastings replied that, on the contrary, Peyto, ‘cum multitudine hominum pomposorum’ of the borough of Warwick had violently set aside Mallory’s election with the connivance of the under sheriff. The terms of this defence are revealing: the sheriff asserted that the borough returned its own MPs and thus the townsmen had no voice in the election of the knights of the shire. A jury agreed with him. This looks like a quarrel over a poll, with Peyto’s return depending on the disputed validity of the votes of the townsmen. In any event, there is nothing to suggest that either Peyto or his supporters in the borough were acting to maintain the local interest of an absent lord.8 C219/13/5; CIMisc. viii. 28; Parliamentarians at Law ed. Kleineke, 108-15; S.J. Payling, ‘Identifiable Motives’, in The Fifteenth Century VI ed. Clark, 95.

The best years of Peyto’s career were dominated by the war in France. His military career was yet more distinguished than suggested in the earlier biography. In addition to the commands cited there, he held lieutenancies under his principal patron, the earl of Warwick, at Aumale, and under John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, at Neufchâtel-en-Bray and Rouen. More notably still, he was briefly Shrewsbury’s deputy as marshal of France in the period just before he fell into the hands of the French at the siege of Dieppe.9 Pollard, 80; Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, fr. 25771/859; 25776/1559, 1605; Archives Nationales, Paris, K67/12/64. His subsequent ransom overshadowed the rest of his career.

By the summer of 1454, Peyto’s son and heir, John, had married Eleanor, daughter of Robert Manfeld*. Manfeld was an important figure – an esquire of the royal body and master of the mint – and the match must have owed something to our MP’s connexion with Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset, then the dominant figure at the royal court. The marriage portion was used to redeem the manors of Sowe and Great Wyrley, which had been mortgaged in 1451 for redemption at Midsummer 1454, and probably also that of Chesterton.10 CPR, 1452-61, p. 159; Warws. Feet of Fines (Dugdale Soc. xviii), 2652; Carpenter, 100. With this redemption it might have been thought that the ill consequences of Sir William’s ransom had largely worked themselves through, but this was not the case. Lingering and severe financial difficulties are the only obvious explanation for the great misfortune that befell him in the late 1450s. This misfortune had its origins in June 1451, when Peyto had assaulted his Warwickshire neighbour, John Hathwick of Harbury, in London. Hathwick, a former j.p. in the county, was a servant of Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, but this only partially explains why the consequences proved much more serious for Peyto than was generally the case in respect of such offences. Initially the proceedings were routine: on 3 Nov. 1451 Sir Maurice Berkeley I* and Edmund Mountfort* stood surety for him and thereafter he enjoyed letters of protection as part of the Calais garrison under the duke of Somerset.11 KB27/762, rot. 30d, rex rot. 35; 777, rex rot. 17; CP40/762, rot. 316d; CPR, 1452-61, p. 231. For Hathwick as a servant of Neville: CP40/762, rot. 300d. His problems only began in earnest on his return. On 19 Nov. 1453 a London jury awarded costs and damages of £60 against him for the assault, and in Michaelmas term 1454 he unwisely defaulted when summoned into King’s bench to answer for payment.12 KB27/774, rot. 21d; 796, rot. 20d. To make matters worse, the Crown took the erroneous view that the surety he had found in the names of Berkeley and Mountfort was forfeit despite the protection, and as a result Peyto was confined in the Marshalsea between October 1454 and June 1455, when he was allowed to plead a pardon.13 KB27/777, rex rot. 17.

Peyto’s freedom was, however, brief for he was again committed to the Marshalsea in the following June, on this occasion pending payment to Hathwick. Remarkably, if the legal record is to be taken literally, he remained confined until 16 May 1459, when William Brandon†, as marshal of the Marshalsea, illegally released him.14 This act of apparent generosity cost Brandon dear. In 1462 the relentless Hathwick recovered against him the £60 owed by Peyto with damages of a further £20: KB27/796, rot. 20d. Men of Peyto’s rank rarely suffered such long periods of incarceration, and when they did it was generally because they were notorious criminals, like Sir Thomas Mallory* and William Tailboys*. There is nothing to suggest Peyto shared their criminal propensities, nor is it possible to suggest a political motive for his detention, for he was imprisoned when the Lancastrian faction was in the ascendant, and this was a cause he may have favoured – if one may extrapolate from his connexion with the Beauforts and his son’s marriage to Manfeld. One can only assume his imprisonment was another result of his financial difficulties, in other words, that his credit was exhausted and he was simply unable to raise the £60 owed to Hathwick. This explanation is supported by an action brought against him while he was imprisoned. In Michaelmas term Thomas Carter, a Warwickshire yeoman, successfully brought a bill against him for a debt of £90 on a bond of April 1453. Since Carter had previously acted for him in the raising of money, this implies that even his friends were deserting him, at least in respect of extending him financial support.15 KB27/784, rot. 81d. Carter had raised money for his ransom: C1/11/232; Peyto of Wolfhampcote mss, L4/36. Since his financial problems began with, or at least were exacerbated by, his ransom in 1443, this sad state of affairs was hardly an advertisement for the benefits of long military service.

Soon after winning his freedom Peyto made a further curious financial undertaking. On 9 June 1459 he entered into a statute staple at Westminster in £100 to his own son, John. Perhaps the latter had belatedly come to his aid, but it is much more likely that the purpose of the statute was to defraud the family’s creditors. John already had his father’s manors of Sowe and Great Wyrley, and the statute raised a potential charge on his other manor at Chesterton. That charge was placed four years later when John sued execution on the statute. An inquisition held at Warwick on 5 Nov. 1463 found that Sir William was seised of that manor, and its issues were duly put to paying John. Sir William himself, however, avoided the arrest that was part of the execution process when the sheriff returned that he was too infirm to be removed from Chesterton to the gaol at Warwick. Whether by fraud or not, Peyto’s lands were now beyond his creditors and death soon afterwards meant that he was also.16 C131/72/1; 238/9; C241/248/34. His place of burial is unknown. The tomb of William Peyto, observed in the collegiate church of Warwick by the Tudor antiquary, John Leland, was almost certainly that of his father: J. Leland, Itin. ed. Toulmin Smith, v. 151; W. Dugdale, Warws. i. 379.

The confusion in Peyto’s affairs raised an obvious difficulty on his death, namely how was his widow, Katherine, to be provided for, since all his lands were now in the hands of their son. An inquisition on 4 Jan. 1466 asserted her right to jointure in the manor of Chesterton under a settlement made in 1429; whereas another, held on 6 Aug. 1467, found that Peyto died seised of the manor under a settlement made before their marriage, although Katherine had, none the less, taken the issues since his death. These contradictory findings suggest a dispute between mother and son.17 C140/12/19; 24/18.