SUMPTER, John

More may be added to the earlier biography.2 The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 532-3.

A bitter quarrel over the Brokholes inheritance, comprising estates in Essex, Hertfordshire and Warwickshire, dominated much of the last dozen years or so of Sumpter’s life. His wife Margery was one of the coheirs to the inheritance but did not live to succeed to her share. Her heir was John, her son by Sumpter, but after his death while still a minor in July 1420 the other coheir, Margery’s sister Joan, laid claim to the whole inheritance. Young John’s heirs were his sisters, Christine and Ellen, but Joan asserted that they were illegitimate and had no right to succeed to his moiety of the Brokholes lands. She went so far as to acknowledge that Margery had borne Sumpter a couple of daughters, but claimed that both girls had died at an early age and that the MP had substituted ‘ij bastarde doughters of his owne’ in their place and ‘made the contre beleve that thei were the same that he had by his wyfe’. Joan’s chief supporter was her third husband, the apparently landless Robert Arneburgh (uncle of Reynold*). There was a delay of several years before the holding of young John’s inquisition post mortem in Essex, doubtless because of the controversy. Finally held in October 1426, it found that Christine and Ellen were indeed the boy’s legitimate heirs. In the following May the escheator in Essex received the order to divide Margery Sumpter’s moiety of the Brokholes lands there between them, and to give Christine, already of age and married to Thomas Bernard of Suffolk, seisin of her share. Ellen proved her age in November 1427, by which date she had married James Bellers, the son of Ralph Bellers of Leicestershire and Warwickshire. Both Bernard and the elder Bellers were servants of John Kempe, archbishop of York and chancellor of England, and it is probably no coincidence that the long delayed inquisition took place during Kempe’s chancellorship. It is also worth noting that both William Flete*, the escheator under whom the inquisition was held, and his successor Edward Tyrell*, under whom the girls’ ages were proved, were associates of Sumpter and Bernard. Tyrell was the younger brother of John Tyrell*, one of the Essex gentry friends of Joan, Lady Abergavenny, and a supporter of the Sumpter cause. Lady Abergavenny’s circle included several other allies of the MP, his daughters and sons-in-law, among them Richard Baynard* and Robert Darcy I*. Sumpter was also supported by his fellow burgesses of Colchester, Thomas Godstone*, William Nottingham I* and Simon Mate*, and the Arneburghs accused the three men of illegally using the Colchester town seal to validate a document declaring that Christine and Ellen were young John’s true heirs. Another ally was John Horell, despite the fact that he had grown up in Joan Arneburgh’s household at Radwinter, Essex. In either 1429 or 1430 she wrote Horell a letter full of invective, calling him ‘an vnkynd bird that foulyth his owne nest’ because he had laboured on behalf of Sumpter and ‘hem that haue weddyd his tweyne bastard doughters’. For their part, the Arneburghs were able to find some support in Warwickshire (where the quarrel entangled with local politics) but ultimately they failed to make headway against their opponents in any of the counties in which the Brokholes lands lay. The dispute continued after Sumpter’s death because Joan Arneburgh, who lived until November 1443, never forsook her claim to the whole inheritance. A partisan and vituperative account recording the Arneburghs’ version of events up to about the later 1430s has survived. It claims that Sumpter had met a miserable end, dying ‘out of mynde’ without having received the sacrament or absolution, and that his eldest daughter Christine (who appears to have survived him by only a few months) ‘dyed sodenly’ in a similar state of un-readiness for the hereafter. It also alleges that Bernard’s brother-in-law, Thomas Mylde, lost his sight and that James Bellers had suffered execution for killing several English soldiers in Normandy, where he had gone to seek his fortune after falling into debt. The account derives further satisfaction from the deaths of Godstone, Nottingham, Mate, John Tyrell, Baynard and other friends of the Sumpters. It asserts that God had cut short the lives of Godstone, Nottingham and Mate ‘for theyre vntrewe labour’, even though ‘they were lykly men and lusty to have lyven mony a yere’. As for Baynard, it claims that he had suddenly fallen down and died while out hunting with Lady Abergavenny and that his restless ghost had wandered around the countryside causing ‘moche harme’ ever since. Following arbitration, there was finally a lasting settlement of the Brokholes lands in July 1453. The arbiters adjudged the complete inheritance to Ellen, by now the sole surviving representative of the Brokholes line, and her second husband Ralph Holt of Lancashire.3 Carpenter, 4-11, 13-19, 20-30, 38-39, 61-67, 120-3, 193.