The Gentry: Stories of the English

At Plumpton itself, the towered sandstone hall, with its own chapel of the Holy Trinity, was richly decorated and furnished.21 Some twenty servants worked and lived there. Silver-chased hunting horns and salt cellars were part of the furnishings. The family chapel, where they worshopped with their own full-time priest, had rich silk dressings for the altar and for the priest himself. The Plumptons had beautiful clothes: cloaks ‘furred with martyns’,22 a coverlet of red satin and a canopy of white silk. Men and women wore silvered belts and girdles, amber beads and gold, sapphire and emerald rings. They had books and psalters covered in red satin and red velvet. The little children learned French and could speak it by the time they were four.23 In the great fishponds which are still at Plumpton, bream, tench and pike were raised for the table.24 Rabbits, hares and pheasants came from the Plumptons’ beautiful manor at Grassington in Upper Wharfedale. Game, including venison, came from the wide open stretches of Knaresborough forest. The house was well armed with stocks of bows, swords, shields, armour and the pole arms with which the retained men were fitted out. The hall itself, the heart of the manor, was decorated with those coats of arms which reflected the dynastic and land-gathering enterprise on which the family was embarked: Plumpton quartered with Foljambe (his mother’s family from Nottinghamshire), Plumpton with Stapleton (his own wife’s), Plumpton with Clifford (his son’s).25

In the cold and frozen spring of 1461, catastrophe overtook them all. A letter from the Lancastrian king, Henry VI, on the run at York, was brought by messenger to Plumpton. Edward IV, known to Lancastrians as the Earl of March, had been declared King in London on 3 March and was now on his way north to destroy his rival. Henry and the whole Lancastrian affinity to which Plumpton had pinned his hopes and loyalty were now to fight for their lives. The letter was endorsed on its outer sheet: ‘To our trusty and welbeloued knight, Sir William Plompton.’ Unfolding it, he read:

By the King. R[ex]H[enricus]

Trusty and webeloued, we greete you well, and for as much as we haue very knowledg that our great trator the late Earle of March hath made great assemblies of riotouse and mischeously disposed people; and to stirr and prouocke them to draw vnto him he hath cried in his proclamations hauok vpon all our trew liege people and subjects, thaire wiues, children, and goods, and is now coming towards vs, we therefore pray you and also straitely charge you that anon vpon sight herof, ye, with all such people as ye may make defensible arrayed, come to vs in all hast possible, wheresoeuer we shall bee within this our Realme, for to resist the malitious entent and purpose of our said trator, and faile not herof as ye loue the seurity of our person, the weale of yourselfe, and of all our trew and faithfull subjects.

Geuen under our signet at our cyty of York, the thirteenth day of March.26

Another of the same kind required him to gather the royal tenants from Knaresborough forest. The world of a fifteenth-century court, even in terminal crisis, shines out of these urgent, affecting, courteous and explanatory letters: no fear of violence; an exquisite care in dealing with men of Plumpton’s sort; an underlying brute reality; a dream of Arthurian perfection, already in its fading hours; the prospect of a final battle, a Camlann for real; reliance on the formal, feudal love of a king and dread of his kingdom disintegrating; recognition that ‘the weale of yourselfe’ relied on the bonds of loyalty which, in a kingdom now with two embattled kings, were already broken.

The letters mark the beginning of the crisis in William Plumpton’s life. He gathered the men of his household and those of Knaresborough forest and armed them. The young Lord Clifford, Elizabeth’s brother, and the Earl of Northumberland were doing the same across the whole of the north of England. Young William Plumpton joined his father, and the entire Lancastrian affinity marched south to meet the Yorkists. The huge armies, 40,000 on each side, met in the lanes, on the open fields and in the sharp stream valleys between the villages of Towton and Saxton just south-west of York. It was Palm Sunday, 29 March, and desperately cold. Heavy snow showers blustered between the armies all day. ‘This deadlie conflict’, according to Holinshed, ‘continued ten houres in doubtfull state of victorie, uncertainlie heaving and setting on both sides’.27 Heaving and setting: the seismic movements of a mass of armed men. The dead choked the streams, making dams and bridges in the water, and the river Wharfe ran red with their blood. Fighting men had to drag the bodies out of the way to clear a space so that others could be killed. About 28,000 men died, ‘all Englishmen and of one nation’,28 as Holinshed wrote mournfully, more than the number of British dead on the first day of the Somme, the bloodiest day in English history.

Archaeologists have excavated a mass grave on the edge of the battlefield. It was hastily dug, only eighteen inches deep, and held 43 bodies tightly packed into a space six feet by twenty. In the words of the archaeological report, they were the ‘casualties of an extremely violent encounter’.29 Most of the Towton dead had been hit over and over again, suffering ‘multiple injuries that are far in excess of those necessary to cause disability and death’. The cuts, chops, incisions and punctures all clustered around the men’s heads and faces.

Ears had been sliced away, eye sockets enlarged and noses deliberately cut off. Very few of the wounds were below the neck, on parts of the body protected by armour. The archaeologists thought that the wounds had probably been delivered when the victims were already on the ground, helpless, dead or dying ‘in a position that did not allow them to defend themselves’. It was savage and enraged mutilation. ‘Many were left in a state that would have made identification difficult.’30 Nor were these men – who as usual had been stripped of their armour after they were killed but before they were thrown in the grave – a crude peasant horde. Analysis of their skeletons has shown that they were stronger than the medieval norm, ‘appearing similar to modern professional athletes’.31 Many had clearly trained in lifting, thrusting and throwing. Several had old, healed wounds. Their upper bodies were developed symmetrically, the result of having been trained from childhood in the longbow, which requires strength in both the string-pulling and the bow-holding arms. The trace elements in their bones have also revealed that they had been fed on the best medieval diet: plenty of protein, much of it from fish. These were the best young men the country had. But there was nothing polite, graceful or chivalric about their dying. The Towton mass grave is a monument to brutality, terror and rage, a frenzy of killing and destruction, a dirty desecration of defenceless victims, among the elite warriors of late medieval England. It is a world in which Sir William Plumpton would have been entirely at home.

The Lancastrian cause was broken at Towton and Plumpton’s world collapsed with it. Each side knew this was a fight whose victors would not spare the defeated – ‘This battle was sore fought,’ the chronicler Edward Hall wrote, ‘for hope of life was set on side on every part’32 – and that alone explains the scale of destruction. Plumpton’s son William, aged twenty-four, was killed, lying anonymous among the thousands of Lancastrian dead, drowned or mutilated in his grave. The young Lord Clifford, his brother-in-law, aged twenty-six, a brutal warrior and murderer of prisoners, known as the Butcher, lay there with him, thrown like others into some anonymous body pit, stripped and unrecognized, after he had been killed by an arrow in the throat. The Earl of Northumberland, their feudal lord, mortally wounded, staggered off the field and made his way to York, where he died too. An affinity was destroyed that day, between sons and brothers, cousins and brothers-in-law, the whole spreading set of connections that made up a political-social-familial world. It was a community, as Gawain says in the Morte Darthur, which had ‘gone full colde at the harte-roote’.33 The Lancastrian peers were attainted, their heirs deprived of lands and titles. This was revolution by butchery, no less traumatic than the events of the 1640s and just as deep a cut into the body of England.

Sir William himself, who at fifty-seven was certainly too old to have been in the thick of battle, fled from Towton field, down the roads of the frozen north, escaping the frenzy of the Yorkist killing machine, and remained on the run for some weeks. But the levers of power were in other hands now. By the middle of May he was up before the new régime, being interrogated by a judge in York, who as a means of maintaining law and order demanded of him a bond guaranteeing his acceptable behaviour for £2,000, more than thirty years’ income from his manor at Plumpton, equivalent perhaps to £5 million today. The bond was set at a level Plumpton could not meet and by July he was a prisoner in the Tower of London, held there as an enemy of the Yorkist state. His decade of suffering had begun.34

All offices were taken from him. The Cliffords and Northumberlands, in whom he had invested every penny of his political capital, were dead meat. A world that had been running in Plumpton’s favour was now a bed of shards set against him and he had to wriggle for his life. He managed to get himself released from the Tower but was confined to London and prevented from returning to the north. Large pockets of Lancastrian resistance were still holding out against the Yorkists, even then being suppressed by Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, the ‘proud setter-up and puller-down of kings’,35 as Shakespeare called him. Warwick was at the height of his powers, in his mid-thirties, arrogant, ruthless, by far the richest member of the nobility England has ever seen, personally responsible for killing the old Lord Clifford in 1455 and so tied by blood-hatred to destruction of the Lancastrian cause. He mopped up all the rewards: Great Chamberlain of England, Master of the King’s Horse, Warden of the Cinque Ports and Constable of Dover Castle. Government of the whole of the north of the country was given to him and his brother. Those great estates which had belonged to his enemies were now handed over, including most of the Percy lands in Yorkshire and the Clifford lordship of Skipton. Yorkshire became Warwick’s fiefdom. A Frenchman joked about the country under Edward IV: ‘They have but two rulers: M de Warwick and another whose name I have forgotten.’36 Plumpton could have found no refuge in that unforgiving, Warwick-dominated world.

Deprived of his offices and their income, kept away from his own lands in the north, Plumpton found himself exposed to his enemies. Arms were stolen from his house at Plumpton, precious household goods and even a surplice from his chapel was taken. The monks of a monastery sieved his fishponds for bream, tench, roach, perch and ‘dentrices’. His timber trees and underwoods were cut down and taken away. Oxen were stolen from his lands at Spofforth and stones already cut for houses were carted off. In his manors up in the limestone dales of the Pennines, his hay was mown and stolen in the early summer, and rabbits and hares were taken from his warren at Grassington.

From his lodgings near Hounslow outside London, he was conducting secret negotiations with his co-Lancastrians in the north but was caught by Yorkist informers and denounced to the authorities. They had been watching him, the way he ‘had receyved, red, and understaud false, damnable, diffamatory, and slaunderous writing, traiterously by pen and other forged and ymagined against the honor and welfare of our said soveraigne, and the same sent to other suspicious persons to corage and comfort them by the same’.37 There had been comings and goings, agents had arrived at his house and Plumpton had ‘secretly cherished them, succored, forbored, and their secrets concealed’.38 Foolishly, he had not concealed his true feelings. ‘When any turble or enterprise was leke to fall hurt or scaythe to the Kings people, the said Sir William Plumpton, with oder suspected, rejoyced, and were glad in chere and countenance.’39

The pressure did not let up. In a world where legal standing was so dependent on personal strength and status, everything in William Plumpton’s life in the early 1460s was vulnerable. His property was being continually raided. Money to fight for legal redress was desperately short. The letters preserved by the Plumptons describe a world in dissolution, full of the difficulties of dealing with people who were ‘right hard and strange’ and shot through with murderous arguments. His men were being ‘dayly threatened’40 with beatings or worse. All involved had to navigate the tangled and expensive jungle of late medieval law. Those with something to get out of Plumpton addressed him with imploring and self-abasing humility. Others wanted only ‘a remedy as shall accord with reason’.41 His lawyers prayed that God would give him ‘good speed against all your enemies’.42 He seems to have been surrounded by them. His tenants asked him to show ‘good lordshipp and mastership’,43 their only hope in a world where their own newly increased vulnerability was exposed to the competitiveness and thieving of those in power.

On top of all this, with his status crumbling, Plumpton was faced with the most intractable of gentry problems: daughters. He had seven of them, most of them coming into marriageable age in the 1460s. To maintain the dignity of the family, daughters had to be provided with dowries. The class average was something near £100 per girl and the deal was usually quite straightforward. The girl’s father would provide the lump of cash (usually payable in instalments over five years or so) and the boy’s father would settle lands on the young couple that would provide an annual income of about 10 per cent of that sum, called a jointure. If the husband died first, his widow enjoyed the jointure for the rest of her life. After her death, the lands would descend to her and her husband’s heirs. It was a civilized and humane arrangement, the equivalent signal in law to the co-presence in every parish church of the knight and his lady laid out side by side in equal honour and with equal dignity. Women were important: they ran estates, they mothered the all-important heirs, they stood as trustees in legal agreements and as widows they became powers in the land. Their arms were quartered equally with their husband’s. It was a given that every father would provide every daughter with an old age that fitted her ‘worship’, her honour. A proper dowry would get a proper husband. The Plumpton coat of arms would continue to be associated with others of equal or better standing. The family corporation would be allied in blood with those who could support it.

But seven daughters! Figures for the dowries provided by Plumpton have survived for three of his girls: £123 for Elizabeth at some time before 1460, £146 for Agnes in 1463 and £100 for Jane in 1468.44 Catherine, Alice, Isabel and Margaret Plumpton were all married in the 1460s, and all to equally distinguished members of the gentry, most of them knights, who would certainly not have accepted girls with less to offer. Somewhere or other William had to find some £900 to give away with his daughters. It was a necessary investment in new plant. The poor man was caught between his catastrophic political circumstances and the demands which the family business required.

He was no lamb. Beneath the surface, he had plans. Among the many lawyers he was using to fight his legal battles, he employed two from Yorkshire: Brian Rocliffe and Henry Sotehill. Both were rising and brilliant men, making their names and fortunes in the Westminster courts. Both, significantly, were supporters of the great Earl of Warwick. They were Yorkists, Plumpton’s natural enemies, and to each of them, plotting carefully, he sold a granddaughter.

Lying in bed in Plumpton Hall in 1463, William considers the situation. Daughters need dowries, a drain on resources. Both sons are dead, but William, the younger, slaughtered at Towton, has left Margaret (born in 1459) and Elizabeth (born in 1460). Two tiny girls, the joint co-heirs of the entire Plumpton inheritance. On them would descend all the beautiful manors in the Vale of York and up in the Pennine dales, in the Vale of Belvoir and the limestone uplands of the Derbyshire Peak District. Their hands in marriage are worth money. The two Yorkist lawyers Rocliffe and Sotehill would glow at the prospect of their heirs acquiring the Plumpton riches. And more than that, their connections to the great Earl of Warwick might surely ease some of William’s other pressures. And so in November 1463, Margaret, aged four, was sold to Rocliffe for his son John to marry. The tiny bride went to live with the Rocliffes, where she embarked on her education. ‘Your daughter & myn’, Brian Rocliffe wrote about her to Plumpton that December, ‘desireth your blessing and speaketh prattely and French, and hath near hand learned her sawter.’45 Her sister Elizabeth, aged three, was consigned to Sotehill’s son John the following February and went to live with them in Leicestershire. Elizabeth, the poor young widowed mother of these tiny girls, can have had no say in their fate. Too much hinged on it.

Brian Rocliffe was to pay for Margaret’s wedding and the young Rocliffes were, to start with, to get the poor little hillside manor of Nesfield in Wharfedale, a beautiful place but scarcely of any value. Rocliffe was to give Plumpton £313, more than the annual income from all of his lands. It was agreed ‘that all these couenants are to be performed without fraud or bad faith’.46 At the same time Plumpton made a deal for almost £350 with Henry Sotehill for the other granddaughter ‘the which Elizabeth the said Sir William hath deliuered to the said Henry’.47 The price for Elizabeth was a little higher because Plumpton also agreed with Sotehill that if, by any chance, Plumpton should have another son by another wife, he would also deliver this son to Sotehill so that he could be married to one of Sotehill’s daughters.

Hanging behind all this was the knowledge that these little girls would one day each inherit land worth at least £150 a year. Measuring past worth is not easy, but it is relevant to these figures that in fifteenth-century England you could get a spade and shovel for 3d., a spinning wheel for 10d., a sword for 3s. 6d., a bow for the same, a draught horse, an ox or a good linen surplice for £1, a knight’s war horse for £6 and twenty acres of grass, on which twenty cows and their calves could graze for the year, for £10. Land of that kind might cost £80,000 today. The girls were worth over £1 million each in today’s terms.

Everything was tied up. The little girls were securely established as the Plumpton heirs. Sotehill got William to promise he wasn’t lying or committing fraud. He required him to agree in writing not to persuade the tiny Elizabeth or her mother that this marriage was a bad idea. And to pay everything back if it went wrong. Here were the Sotehills, lawyers, small fry, riding high on the Yorkist wave, making their claim on gentry wellbeing. None of it would have been possible unless every single person involved accepted the power of the patriarch to dictate and deal in his family’s lives.

But there was a problem. Plumpton had sold his granddaughters to two up-and-coming lawyers on the understanding that the girls were the joint heirs of all his property. He had taken large amounts of money from those lawyers on the basis of that promise. If those two girls became his heiresses, the name of Plumpton and the great Plumpton inheritance would disappear into other families’ maws. But Sir William wanted to keep his own name and line going and so had embarked on a grand deceit. Since 1452 he had been secretly married to another woman. Very early one summer morning that year, before sunrise, between Easter and Whitsun, a Friday, Sir William and a gentlewoman of Knaresborough called Joan Wintringham came to the parish church of Knaresborough and stood at the door of the chancel. William was wearing ‘a garment of green checkery’, Joan was in a red dress with a grey hood.48 The parish priest came in his vestments and solemnized the marriage between them in the presence of witnesses,

the said Sir William taking the said Joan with his right hand and repeating after the vicar, Here I take thee Jhennett to my wedded wife to hold and to have, att bed and att bord, for farer or lather, for better for warse, in sicknesse and in hele, to dede us depart, and thereto I plight thee my trouth, and the said Joan, making like response incessantly to the said Sir William that the vicar, having concluded the ceremony in the usual form, said the mass of the Holy Trinity in a low voice.49

Immediately afterwards Sir William ‘earnestly entreated those present to keep the matter secret, until he chose to have it made known’.50 The reasons were of vital importance. It is likely that Joan was pregnant at the Maytime wedding because the next year, 1453, she bore a son, Robert Plumpton; and after the death of young William at the battle of Towton in 1461, it was this Robert Plumpton, as the court official in York pronounced in 1472, who ‘was taught to consider himself as the heir apparent of his father’s house, and the future owner of his property’.51

This was the heart of Sir William Plumpton’s deceit: he had been secretly nurturing his own son in the idea that everything the name of Plumpton stood for was to be his. After 1452, every minute of his negotiations with the Cliffords, the Rocliffes and the Sotehills had been a lie. His wife he had forced to live in what the orthodoxy would have viewed as whoredom, their son a bastard. And worse than any of that he left as a legacy to the next generation the prospect of rage and destruction. Everything he had was now to be left, in its entirety, to two separate, competing families.

He seems to have entered his last decade preparing bullishly for death. With legal instruments, he disinherited his granddaughters, leaving the way clear, as he intended, for young Robert to inherit everything. Against the law and without permission, he crenellated Plumpton Hall, perhaps to make it more defensible in the battles to come, perhaps as an assertion of a status that seemed under threat.52 He stole timbers from the royal forest with which to beautify and strengthen the family house and the great barn that stood outside its gates. Illegally he made a private park around the house from the forest grounds. Rich textiles were bought in London to adorn the family chapel and tens of law cases were pursued against his enemies. When William Plumpton finally died in October 1480, it was at the end of a rampaging, brutal and desperate career. A man who had begun his life in the afterglow of Henry V’s triumph at Agincourt ended it with his inheritance mired in the prospect of a long and bitter legal dispute entirely of his own making. His two sets of heirs each felt obliged to defend their name and lands against their own family. Their cousins were their enemies.

Sir William might have hoped that his gamble would pay off. From his own archive he stripped out any evidence that he had once left his patrimony to his two granddaughters. He had lined up a string of gentry connections across the county on which his son and heir could rely. He had strengthened and fortified Plumpton Hall itself. He had loyal retainers supervising his tenants and business arrangements in Nottingham, Staffordshire and Derbyshire. And he had given enough to the church to consider that Providence might be on his side.

But his son Robert, now about twenty-seven, was a softer, gentler man, a recipient of his fate not a maker of it, and perhaps not up to the challenge his father had left him. Gradually over the next thirty-five years, for the whole of his adult life, the effects of Sir William’s machinations slowly and inexorably destroyed the fortunes of that son and his family.

On Sir William’s death, the legal wheels were already turning but Robert’s tenure began well enough. His mother, Joan, had been maltreated by his father, kept as a secret wife for sixteen years while the old man pursued his schemes. Robert did better, immediately giving her the proceeds of the manor of Idle in Airedale, on top of those from Grassington and Steeton, which his father had left her in his will.53 But this sense of ownership was not to last. In 1483, after a dogged pursuit by the two granddaughters and their lawyers, a decision and a division were made. Margaret and Elizabeth were to get Nesfield, Grassington and Steeton and everything in Derbyshire. Robert was to get only Plumpton, Idle and the Nottinghamshire manors. They were the best lands but out of them he was to pay £40 a year to old Elizabeth Clifford, the granddaughter’s mother. His own mother was deprived of those very lands which Robert had designated for her maintenance.54