The Seytons were a family of ancient distinction, numbering among their ancestors a c.j.c.p. of the 1270s, Master Roger Seyton. They had long held lands in Northamptonshire, Rutland, Leicestershire, Oxfordshire, Essex and Buckinghamshire, a significant part of which had come to them through the marriage of the judge’s brother, Sir Richard Seyton, to the heiress of Simon de Maidwell.
On John’s death early in 1430 he left a patrimony burdened by the interests of our MP’s stepmother, Joan, daughter of Sir James Bellers† of Eye Kettleby (Leicestershire).
Matters improved for the young Thomas in 1437 when he came to an agreement with his stepmother. She accepted a life interest in the family’s outlying manor of Barford St. Michael in Oxfordshire with other lands in that county, Buckinghamshire and Leicestershire, as her dower and jointure entitlement, thus leaving the heart of the inheritance, principally the two manors of Maidwell (‘Wolverton fee’ and ‘Rabas fee’), in his hands. Thereafter he did not have to wait long to reunite his patrimony: the date of Joan’s death is uncertain, but by 6 Feb. 1441 she had surrendered, either by death or otherwise, all the Seyton lands she held. On that date Thomas conveyed the family patrimony (save his wife’s jointure) to a group of 15 feoffees that included several of the leading gentry of Leicestershire, Rutland and Northamptonshire – Sir Laurence Berkeley* and his son, Thomas†, Sir William Trussell†, John Bellers* and his son, Anthony, William Beaufo*, Edmund Dyve and Everard Digby*, the son of Seyton’s stepmother – together with the ubiquitous Chancery clerk, Nicholas Wymbissh, and Sir William St. George of Hatley St. George (Cambridgeshire).
For some unknown reason the Seytons had come into conflict with their feudal overlords at Draughton, the Staffords. In the 1420s Anne, dowager countess of Stafford, had seized both their manor and some property there known as ‘Bestons’, which John Seyton had purchased in 1417 from the Northamptonshire lawyer, Thomas Beston of Sywell. John had successfully petitioned the countess’s son, the young Humphrey, earl of Stafford, for restoration and had been rewarded on 9 May 1429 with a confirmation of his estate in the manor, but ‘Bestons’ remained in the hands of the countess, who proved impervious to John’s entreaties. At an unknown date between the dowager’s death in October 1438 and the earl’s elevation to the dukedom of Buckingham in September 1444, Seyton made a renewed effort, asking that ‘Bestons’ be restored to him. The probable success of this petition meant that the Seyton patrimony was entirely reunited in his hands.
The value of this united inheritance can only be roughly estimated. In 1412 Seyton’s father had been assessed upon an income of £40 p.a., drawn equally from the counties of Northamptonshire and Rutland. This was certainly an underestimate as far as the former county was concerned: a surviving account for 1419-20 has cash liveries of over £20 with receipts (excluding arrears) of over £24 from Maidwell with further liveries of a little less than £10 from neighbouring Draughton. Moreover, to this has to be added the income derived from counties for which the 1412 assessments do not survive. A damaged rental of 1392 lists rents of £24 from Barford St. Michael and over £7 from Hallaton (Leicestershire), to which has to be added the value of the family’s large manor at Ellesborough (Buckinghamshire) and other lesser properties. In short, it is unlikely that our MP had an annual income of less than £100.
With such an income, even if it was less than the family had once enjoyed, Thomas looked set fair to resume the prominent place the Seytons had once enjoyed in local affairs. On 30 May 1441 he secured a papal indult to have a portable altar, and on the following 28 Dec. he began his recorded public career by attesting the Northamptonshire parliamentary election. Late in the autumn of 1442 he acted as a feoffee for the influential Leicestershire lawyer, Thomas Palmer*, and on 6 Apr. 1443 he was named as one of a distinguished group to whom Everard Digby entrusted the manor of Offord Cluny in Huntingdonshire. More significantly, on the following 17 July he was one of the many Northamptonshire landholders who mustered at Portsdown in the retinue of John Beaufort, duke of Somerset, and he presumably remained on campaign until the end of the year.
These promising early beginnings, however, did not prove to be the start of a successful career. The next reference to Seyton is suggestive of considerable financial difficulties, perhaps because he had been captured by the French and ransomed (although this can only be a speculative suggestion). On 4 Nov. 1445 he and his wife granted the manor of Grove in Ellesborough with nearly 1,000 acres of land to Cardinal Kemp and a group of Kentish men, including Gervase Clifton* and Hugh Pakenham, closely connected with the cardinal. This was clearly either a sale or a mortgage and it proved a permanent alienation. In small part this marked a rationalization of his interests (for at the same time he acquired over 100 acres of farmland at Little Bowden, a few miles from Maidwell), but debt is the only convincing explanation for the alienation of a manor which had so long been part of the Seyton patrimony.
Seyton had another more valuable resource to solve his apparent difficulties. On 1 Feb. 1450 he entered into a contract for the marriage of his young son and heir to Joan (b.1441), daughter of Thomas Boughton* of Little Lawford in south Warwickshire. Boughton was a servant of Edward Grey, Lord Ferrers of Groby, as too was William Feldyng, and this indirect connexion between the two fathers is the best available explanation for the marriage. Whatever drew the parties together, however, Boughton was prepared to pay handsomely for the match: he undertook to pay a portion of either 325 or 365 marks (erasures in the surviving document leave the amount ambiguous), as much as 200 marks of which was to be paid on or before the day of the marriage, scheduled for the following 15 June. He also agreed to bear all the costs of the marriage celebrations save for the ‘weddyng clothes’ of the groom. In return, our MP undertook to convey to Boughton and others lands in Seaton and elsewhere in Rutland (said in an erasure to be worth 20 marks p.a.) so that Boughton might take the issues for the maintenance of the couple until the groom should come to the age of 18, at which time the property was to be settled on them and the groom’s male issue. Seyton also agreed to ensure his patrimony to the groom, entering into a separate indenture that his feoffees of 1441 would continue their legal estate in his lands until his death when, provided his son was then of full age, they would settle the lands on him in tail-male.
Nothing of what is known of Seyton’s career to this point prepares us for his next appearance in the records: his election to the politically contentious Parliament of 1450-1. In Northamptonshire, as in other counties, the hustings were the subject of some active electioneering on the part of Richard, duke of York. At about Michaelmas 1450 the duke’s auditor, Thomas Willoughby, rode from his place at Wardington in Oxfordshire to Milton and Harringworth in Northamptonshire ‘ad loquendum’ with William, Lord Zouche, and Henry Green* (and also to the place of William Vaux* and then to Minster Lovell ‘pro colloquio habendo’ with William, Lord Lovell) ‘mandato domini pro suis amiciciis habendis in ellecione militum comitatus in eisdem comitatibus hoc anno’.
While serving as an MP, Seyton joined with his wife Joan in conveying their recently-acquired property at Little Bowden to Robert Isham and others in what appears to have been a sale.
When in October 1452 a powerful royal commission of inquiry came to Peterborough as part of the campaign against the Dartford rebels of the previous February, Seyton sat on the county grand jury. This jury endorsed as true several bills against Mulsho and other Yorkists. It would, however, be wrong to see this as necessarily indicative of anti-Yorkist sympathies on the part of our MP and his fellow jurors. Nor need there be any political explanation for the order issued on 30 May 1454, during York’s first protectorate, for Seyton’s replacement as one of the verderers in the forest of Rockingham on the obviously spurious grounds that he was ‘too much busied elsewhere’. It is much more likely that that our MP petitioned for his own removal than that the Yorkist government was seeking the replacement of a perceived opponent in what was a very minor office. Indeed, his election in 1450 and his attestation of the parliamentary election of 6 June 1455, held in the aftermath of the Yorkist victory at the battle of St. Albans, strongly suggest that he was not identified with the duke’s opponents.
In the late 1450s Seyton was drawn into a dispute with the Cistercian abbey of Pipewell over the advowson of the church of St. Mary at Maidwell. It seems unlikely that the abbey had an historic claim to something that had so long been in the hands of the Seytons, and it may be that the dispute turned on a mortgage which our MP had failed to redeem. It was no doubt in connexion with this quarrel that, on 30 June 1458, his feoffees granted to the abbey £10 p.a. from the manor of Draughton for the term of eight years, perhaps as the means of discharging a debt. On the following day the feoffees gave the disputed advowson to the abbey’s nominees, headed by Robert Wesenham (brother of Thomas Wesenham*), and our MP bound himself in £100 to Wesenham. The condition of this bond was that he would reveal to the abbot all evidences concerning the advowson so that the abbey might make secure its legal estate. Clearly Seyton had, at least for the moment, lost the advowson of the church in which at least one of his ancestors was buried.
In the course of his dispute with the abbey, Seyton took another more promising step to resolve his financial difficulties. Through connexions now lost, he took as his second wife the widow of the Oxfordshire esquire, William Wykeham. She had a life interest in a significant part of the valuable Wykeham estate, including its principal property, the manor of Broughton in Oxfordshire. Unfortunately for our MP, however, the anticipated benefits of this match proved hard to accrue. Joan’s daughter, Margaret, the heiress of her father, was the wife of William Fiennes, Lord Saye and Sele, and Fiennes was reluctant to concede his mother-in-law her due. On 15 Aug. 1457 he forcibly entered the manor of Broughton and held it against her. In the following Hilary term, Seyton and Joan sued him by bill in King’s bench, claiming damages of as much as 900 marks for that offence and the plunder of goods.
There is no evidence to show that Seyton played any active part in the dramatic events of 1459-61. His absence from the ad hoc commissions of these years implies that he was an insignificant figure with no strong connexions (although, despite his financial difficulties, he was wealthy enough to have been otherwise). Most of what is known of him in the 1460s concerns his family affairs. His first appearance in the records in the wake of Edward IV’s accession dates from 20 Apr. 1462 when he granted to his two younger sons, William and John, lands he had lately acquired in Maidwell and Draughton; and, at some date before the spring of 1464, he took a third wife, identified in the historical record only by her Christian name. Better documented is the match he made for his second son, Everard, who had become the Seyton heir with the death of his elder brother.
Little is known of Seyton’s remaining years. On 19 July 1465 he joined with his third wife in leasing to Philip Neel of London, a former household servant of Henry VI, the manor of ‘Moynesthyng’ with other lands in Draughton at an annual rent of £5. In the following year Salisbury’s promised aid in the recovery of the lost advowson bore fruit. On 11 Aug. 1466 the agents of the abbot of Pipewell delivered seisin of the advowson to a group of our MP’s nominees headed by Billing.
Seyton’s appointment, at an advanced age, to the office of escheator during the Readeption is almost as puzzling as his earlier election to Parliament, but, like the marriage of his eldest son in 1450, it may have owed something to William Feldyng, one of the leading gentry supporters of the restored regime. Indeed, it may be that our MP’s son Everard is also to be numbered among the Readeption’s active supporters. This, at least, is one interpretation to be placed on an indictment taken at Northampton before the j.p.s on 6 Aug. 1471. A jury claimed that, on the previous 2 Oct., that is, the day Edward IV fled into exile, Everard with others unknown had assaulted Anne, wife of Sir Ralph Hastings†, and several of his servants, and stolen his goods to the considerable value of £40. Since Sir Ralph was among those who fled into exile with Edward IV, it is possible that some political motive underlay this offence. On the other hand, among those assaulted was Freman, and it is at least as likely that Everard was simply taking advantage of disturbed conditions to pursue a private quarrel. In any event, he was soon able to put himself on the right side of the law, personally pleading a pardon in the court of King’s bench in Trinity term 1472.
Soon thereafter the ancient family came to an abrupt end in the main male line. Everard died in January 1476, leaving two infant daughters as his common-law heirs. Their wardship passed into the hands of their maternal grandfather, George Longville, who, in 1477, sold the wardship and marriage of the elder to John Catesby, serjeant-at-law. By 6 Feb. 1488, when the lands were partitioned between the coheiresses, Anne had married Euseby Catesby and Joan, Francis Metcalfe of Nappa (Yorkshire).