John Roos presents an interesting contrast to those younger sons of prominent gentry families who rose to influence through the generosity of their fathers. For every younger son who gained more than his due there was a son and heir whose expectations were disappointed. Roos’s father had been the victim of a particularly extreme act of partiality to a younger son on the part of his own father, Sir Robert Roos† (d.1393) of Ingmanthorpe in the West Riding. In 1384 he was disinherited of the bulk, if not all, of the family patrimony in favour of his younger brother, Thomas (d.1399). It seems that Sir Robert intended this disinheritance to be complete, but in 1396 his eldest son sued successfully for the manors of Steeton and North Deighton in the West Riding on the grounds that they were entailed to the main line of the family. Nevertheless, the family’s caput honoris, the manor of Ingmanthorpe, and other lands remained in the hands of the junior branch.
Roos gained some compensation for his father’s loss by marriage to an heiress, but here again his expectations were frustrated, albeit only in part. Although his wife was the common-law coheiress of both her grandfather and grandmother, most of her grandfather’s Yorkshire lands, including the castle and manor of Gilling, were bound by entails which excluded her and her sisters. Moreover, her father had improperly settled her mother’s manor of Kirkburn in the East Riding on his second wife, Elizabeth, mother of John Pygot*. Isabel and her sisters had to be content with their mother’s inheritance – the manors of Laxton, Egmanton and North Leverton in north Nottinghamshire, that of Kipling Cotes and the reversion of the manor of Kirkburn – and the small manor of Cawton in Gilling which her father appears to have purchased. In July 1433 the escheators of Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire were ordered to partition these lands into four parts, allowing reasonable dower to their stepmother. It is not known how the division was achieved, only that, as the eldest of the four coheiresses, Isabel was assigned the largest of the manors, that of Laxton. Until 1439 this property was charged with an annuity of 22 marks in favour of Joan, widow of her great-uncle, Sir Reynold Everingham (d.1398), but this was a small price to pay for more than a fair share of the inheritance.
Isabel’s lands probably brought Roos a greater income than his own, and this probably explains why the couple settled at Laxton rather than on his Yorkshire estates. In the tax returns of 1451 he was assessed on an annual income of only £30, and this low estimate of his income is supported by the exclusion of his name from the comprehensive list of those distrained to take knighthood in 1457-8.
While the survival of a collection of deeds relating to the family allows something to be said of Roos’s private concerns, his career is not well documented. It is possible that he fought in France. A John Roos is found serving there between about 1417, when in the garrison at Harfleur under Thomas Beaufort, duke of Exeter, and the summer of 1441, when in the retinue of William Neville, Lord Fauconberg, at Pontoise.
Roos’s return to Parliament in company with Richard Illingworth* on 13 Jan. 1449 and the fact that the only two elections he attested, those of 1447 and 1450, also saw his companion’s return, raise the possibility that he, like Illingworth, was a servant of Ralph, Lord Cromwell. Such an association would explain why Roos, a man of lesser rank than most of those who represented Nottinghamshire during the fifteenth century, was returned, but more direct evidence of that association is hard to find. In several pleas of debt pending in 1453 and 1454 he was Cromwell’s co-plaintiff, but this is suggestive rather than conclusive.
Cromwell was not the only powerful man with whom Roos could claim at least a passing connexion. In Easter term 1450 he was a co-plaintiff with Sir John Talbot, son and heir-apparent of the earl of Shrewsbury, and Sir Thomas Percy, the notorious younger son of the earl of Northumberland, in an action against William Meryng and many other men for depredations against their property at Darlton. It is probable that it was these offences that had, on the previous 16 Feb., prompted the issue of a royal commission – to which Roos himself was appointed – to inquire into Meryng’s offences and to arrest him and his confederates.
There is little evidence of firm associations with the gentry of either Roos’s adopted or native shire, although, in 1449, he was named as one of the many feoffees of the famous Nottinghamshire soldier, Sir Thomas Rempston†, and, as such, found himself the recipient of a writ to appear in Chancery when, in 1453, the feoffees became drawn into the dispute between the feoffor and his mother.
Little is known of the last years of Roos’s career. The last certain reference to him in an active role dates from July 1458 when he was appointed to only his fifth ad hoc commission of local government, and he may have been dead by 11 Nov. 1459, when a writ of diem clausit extremum in respect of his Nottinghamshire lands issued out of Chancery. No inquisition survives, and it is possible that the writ was issued prematurely, for it was not until 20 Oct. 1461 that administration of his goods was granted to his younger son, William, a chantry chaplain.
The later history of the family is undistinguished. The career of Roos’s son, Robert, did not even attain to the modest success of his own. One reason was the long survival of his widow in whose right our MP had held a significant proportion of his estates. She was alive at least as late as 1484 and this no doubt contributed to the crippling financial difficulties under which Robert appears to have laboured.
Later the two branches of the family, divided in the late fourteenth century, were reunited on the marriage of Bridget, daughter and heir of Robert Roos† (d.1583) of Ingmanthorpe, to Peter Roos of Laxton. Unfortunately, however, this did not prove the prelude to a new period of prosperity for the family but rather ended in its dissolution. The Nottinghamshire antiquarian, Robert Thoroton (d.1678), provides an interesting account: Bridget ‘by her own misfortunes and the wicked unthriftiness of her son, Gilbert, the last lord of Laxton of this noble race, was reduced to so great poverty that she gleaned corn among other poor people in Laxton field’.