RUFFORD, Robert

It is only thanks to Exchequer records that we know Rufford sat in the Commons. The Bedfordshire election return for 1455 is no longer extant but a writ of error recorded in the roll of the King’s remembrancer for 1457-8 shows that he was one of those elected. E159/234, brevia Trin. rot. 23d. By means of the writ, dated 14 Oct. 1458, the King ordered the treasurer and barons of the Exchequer to send the records of a lawsuit that Rufford had brought in that court against (Sir) Thomas Charlton*, to his council chamber for examination. In his suit Rufford had alleged that Charlton, the sheriff of Bedfordshire in 1455-6, had failed to pay him the wages of £8 16s. due to him as an MP. He must have won the case, Of which there is now no record: it does not feature in the Exchequer ct. rolls for 1454-6 and the rolls for the remaining years of Hen. VI’s reign are no longer extant. given that the former sheriff obtained the writ of error recorded in the remembrancer’s roll.

By the time Robert entered the Commons, the Ruffords were well established although not longstanding members of the gentry. His great-grandfather, William Rufford alias Belyeter of Toddington, Bedfordshire, was a bell-maker, probably the son of John de Rughford, ‘belleyetere’, whom Edward III appointed royal bell-founder in 1367. John’s appointment suggests he resided in London, although he is believed to have made bells for churches in Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Cambridgeshire, Hampshire, Hertfordshire and Leicestershire. It appears that William first came to Bedfordshire in the employ of Thomas Pever†, lord of the manor of Toddington. William married his son and heir Thomas to Katherine, daughter and coheir of Thomas Bullok of Edlesborough, and in October 1390 Bullok settled a messuage, lands and a rent in that parish on the couple, properties which later constituted the manor of Eastbury. Bucks. Recs. x. 283-5; A.H. Cocks, Church Bells of Bucks. 10-12; VCH Bucks. ii. 118; iii. 352-3; CIMisc. viii. 90; CPR, 1388-92, p. 305.

Thomas Rufford must have entered the family business (in the late fourteenth century he was sometimes known as a ‘belmaker’), VCH Beds. iii. 439. although the Ruffords were well on the way to becoming gentry when he died in July 1420. During his lifetime, Thomas had augmented his properties at Edlesborough and at his death he also held lands in Toddington, Potsgrove and Westoning in Bedfordshire and at Chalgrove in Oxfordshire. Not all of these holdings, which included a couple of small manors at Potsgrove and Westoning, were in a good state of repair, since his inquisition post mortem in Buckinghamshire found that his messuage in Edlesborough brought in no income because it had fallen into a ruinous state. Thomas was succeeded by his son and namesake, then in his mid twenties. Feudal Aids, vi. 397; CIPM, xxi. 440-2. The younger Thomas Rufford enjoyed the status of an ‘esquire’, and he was among the Buckinghamshire gentry sworn to keep the peace administered throughout the country in 1434. CPR, 1429-36, p. 397. He died on 20 Sept. 1439 when his son and heir Robert, the future MP, was still a few years short of his majority. CIPM, xxv. 366.

The Ruffords were tenants in chief, so the young man must have become a ward of the Crown. By reason of his mother’s longevity, he did not come fully into his own until late in life. Joan Rufford, who married John Fitzgeffrey* after the death of Thomas Rufford and survived until 1465, retained a life interest in much of her son’s inheritance, although in 1450 she and Fitzgeffrey settled Northall, a small Rufford manor at Edlesborough, on Robert, his wife Margaret and their children. CCR, 1435-41, p. 319; C140/17/25; CP25(1)/22/123/21. It is likely that this arrangement was made about the time of the younger couple’s marriage. Margaret was almost certainly a daughter of Thomas Rokes of Wing, Buckinghamshire, who in his will of 1458 referred to Robert as his ‘son’ and appointed him one of his executors. PCC 12 Stokton.

It was as ‘of Northall’ that Rufford stood surety in 500 marks for Edmund, Lord Grey of Ruthin, in September 1452, to guarantee that Grey would appear before the King and council to answer accusations of treason. CCR, 1447-54, p. 398. Very probably, the charges were connected with a bitter dispute between Henry Holand, duke of Exeter, and Grey’s friend, Ralph, Lord Cromwell, over the Ampthill estate in Bedfordshire. Grey’s accuser, who had levelled like allegations against Cromwell and Sir John Fastolf, was a priest from Kent, but it is almost certain that he had acted at Exeter’s bidding. S.J. Payling, ‘Ampthill Dispute’, EHR, civ. 888-9. Rufford probably owed his attachment to the Greys and his consequent involvement in the politics of Bedfordshire to his stepfather, rather than to his own interests in that county, for John Fitzgeffrey was one of their leading followers there. It was in Bedfordshire that Robert attended his only known parliamentary election, witnessing the return of William Herteshorn* and John Laurence* to the Parliament of 1450. Herteshorn was from a family associated with the Greys and Laurence was certainly one of their followers. Whether Grey (who did not throw in his lot with the duke of York until 1460) lent his support to Rufford when the latter stood for the Parliament which met in the wake of the Yorkist victory at the first battle of St. Albans is impossible to tell. Rufford may nevertheless have depended on the backing of a patron to gain election, since he was far from a figure of any great significance in Bedfordshire.

Rufford continued to prosper following the accession of Edward IV. Early in the new reign he was made a customs collector in London and escheator in Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire. Presumably he owed the first of these offices to his patron, since customers were appointed by bill of the treasurer of England, a position then occupied by Lord Grey. In the spring of 1464 Grey sent Rufford to the receipt of the Exchequer to collect an assignment of the wages due to him as treasurer. Presumably it was at his lord’s command that Rufford returned to the Exchequer in July that year, to collect certain expenses due to the Gascon-born Barthelot de Rivière, who served both Edward IV and the king of Naples as a messenger and agent. E403/832, mm. 2, 6; C.D. Ross, Edw. IV, 213, 363; C.L. Scofield, Edw. IV, i. 401-2. It is likely that Rufford remained attached to Grey, created earl of Kent in May 1465, for the rest of his life. He was certainly still associated with the earl in 1467-8, when he took delivery of a small sum of money from Grey’s bailiff and parker at Great Brickhill, Buckinghamshire. Grey of Ruthin Valor ed. Jack, 113.

By the second half of the 1460s, private matters occupied much of Rufford’s time. In Michaelmas term 1465 he was a plaintiff in suits for debt in the court of common pleas, as an executor of both his putative father-in-law, Thomas Rokes, and his stepfather, John Fitzgeffrey. CP40/817, rots. 178d, 492d. More significantly, his mother had died on 1 June that year, so finally allowing him to come fully into his own at Edlesborough and Potsgrove. C140/17/25. In May 1466 Rufford witnessed a charter on behalf of Bernard Brocas, lord of the manor of Horton, Buckinghamshire. CCR, 1461-8, pp. 93, 466. His association with the Brocas family was a long standing one, for he and William Brocas* had taken part in a conveyance on behalf of William’s nephew, Thomas de la Mare†, in 1449. CPR, 1446-52, p. 245. Later in 1466, a suit Rufford had brought in the common pleas against Robert Purchas, a husbandman from Buckinghamshire, came to pleadings. He alleged that he had taken a bond for £40 from Purchas in November 1464, a security the husbandman had subsequently forfeited after failing to abide by the terms of an arbitration award made later in the same month. CP40/821, rot. 607. In the late 1460s or early 1470s, Rufford was sued in the Chancery by means of bills brought by Robert Marshall, who alleged breach of trust on the part of the MP and other feoffees of his late father, William Marshall of Toddington. Among the holdings claimed by Marshall was a property in Toddington known as ‘Belmaker’, a name which suggests that it had once belonged to one of Rufford’s ancestors. It is not known whether there were any further proceedings after Marshall filed his bills, since there is no other extant evidence relating to these suits. C1/20/66; 38/136. In the same period, Rufford was also involved in a Chancery case brought by Richard Smyth, a tenant of the London Charterhouse, to which the rectory of Edlesborough belonged. Smyth alleged that the MP’s servant, John Aunceys, and other ‘malefactors’ had attacked his own employees, one of whom, William Hammond, had killed Aunceys with a ‘pesehoke’ in self-defence. According to Smyth, Rufford and his men, holding him responsible for Aunceys’s death, had come round to his house. Fearing for his life after they had smashed up his gate, he had fled into a chamber. He had suffered no further violence only because the Charterhouse’s proctor had arrived on the scene and had persuaded Rufford not to break the law. On the following day, however, the MP had sent him, ‘fettered to the belly of a horse’, to Aylesbury gaol, where he had languished ever since. The purpose of Smyth’s bill was to secure his release from imprisonment and to have the dispute between him and Rufford brought before the chancellor. Again, the outcome of the case is not known, since the bill is the only record relating to it to have survived. C1/46/80; VCH Mdx. i. 169. In the summer of 1470 Rufford and John Fitzgeffrey of Sandon, a relative of his late stepfather, forfeited 100s. in fines to the court of King’s bench. They did so as pledges for the MP’s relative, John Rufford, perhaps in connexion with a quarrel between the latter and Thomas Arblaster. Shortly after the Readeption of Henry VI later that year, a commission was issued for John Rufford’s arrest, so that he might appear in Chancery to provide securities that he would do Arblaster no harm. E405/54/6; CPR, 1467-77, p. 248. Probably the MP’s younger brother, John Rufford was of Pitstone, Bucks., where Arblaster, the s. and h. of Thomas Arblaster*, held a manor in the right of his wife. He also pursued a career in London as a mercer and served Edw. IV as a yeoman of the Crown. Walter Rufford was another minor Household man of the later 15th century, but he was connected with Worcs. and it is not known if he was related to the Ruffords of Edlesborough: CCR, 1469-76, no. 932; VCH Bucks. iii. 409; CPR, 1461-7, pp. 25, 434, 456-7; 1476-85, pp. 54, 126, 224; 1485-94, pp. 198, 456, 471; 1494-1509, p. 527; CFR, xix. 102.

By now nearing the end of his life, Rufford was placed on two ad hoc commissions by the government of the newly restored Edward IV in the spring and early summer of 1471. Just days after the issuing of the second of these commissions, he was appointed a j.p. in Buckinghamshire for the first time. His service on the bench was brief because he died in the following October. Although not a prominent landowner, he was of sufficient status to be buried in the fashionable church of the Greyfriars in London. According to a register of monumental inscriptions in the church in Hen. VIII’s time Rufford died on 11 Oct., but his inq. post mortem records that he died on the 14th: Collectanea Topographia et Genealogica ed. Nichols, v. 389; C140/38/49. At his death his wife was still alive and Thomas, his eldest son and heir, was a minor. C140/38/49. In November 1472 the Crown committed Thomas’s wardship to John Holcote, a member of the King’s household, and two years later the young man, still short of his majority, indented with Edward IV to accompany him on his expedition to France. CPR, 1467-77, p. 363; E101/72/2/1041. It was not until October 1478, some considerable time after attaining his majority, that Thomas obtained licence from the Crown to enter his inheritance. CPR, 1477-85, pp. 116-17. He scarcely had time to enjoy it, for he died in the following October. He was succeeded by his younger brother, John. C140/72/59; CIPM Hen. VII, ii. 748, 970. According to the inqs. post mortem held for Thomas in Dec. 1479, John was then aged 25, but this does not accord with those held after the MP’s death, which found that Thomas was 16 in the autumn of 1472. The inqs. of 1479 must have got John’s age wrong, given that Thomas was certainly a minor when their father died.