SPICE, Clement

The first member of the Spice family of any note was the MP’s grandfather and namesake. A lawyer who served as escheator in Essex and Hertfordshire in the 1390s, this elder Clement was closely linked with the Fitzwalters of Woodham Water, whom he probably numbered among his clients. In 1412 he helped to found a chantry for the welfare of the souls of the late Walter, 4th Lord Fitzwalter, and his first wife, Eleanor, in Little Dunmow priory, and at his death in January 1420 he was in possession of a manor at Fincham in Norfolk, a property which Fitzwalter had granted to him for life. Fincham supplemented his holdings in Essex, consisting of four manors and other lands in Black Notley, White Notley, Willingale Spain and Lexden. Trans. Essex Arch. Soc. n.s. xvi. 89n; Essex RO, Child, Tylney, Long and Wellesley mss, D/DCw/T46/24; Excerpta Historica ed. Bentley, 426; CPR, 1408-13, p. 411; 1413-16, pp. 170-1; CIPM, xxii. 16; P. Morant, Essex, ii. 480; Feudal Aids, vi. 440. Clement was survived by at least two sons, of whom the eldest, Richard, married Isabel, the widow of the London clothier, John Chertseye. The marriage was childless and in due course the Spice estate passed to his younger son, Roger, the MP’s father. Roger made a more prestigious match than his elder brother, for his wife, Alice, was the daughter of Sir Thomas Mandeville of Black Notley, and in 1400 she had succeeded to a share of the Mandeville estate, including manors at Black Notley, Broomfield, Stapleford Tawney and Great Waltham in Essex and Eastwick in Hertfordshire. C141/3/28; CAD, i. A1796; The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 587. The heir to these properties was Thomas Leget, her son by her first marriage, but after she died in April 1420 Roger retained courtesy rights in them, and he was found to enjoy a landed income of some £130 p.a. when assessed for taxation in the mid 1430s. CIPM, xxi. 384, 401; Feudal Aids, ii. 215, 216, 222, 451; vi. 585; H.L. Gray, ‘Incomes from Land in Eng. in 1436’, EHR, xlix. 633. But initially the Crown would allow Roger only short-term possession of Alice’s lands while his rights to them were investigated: CFR, xiv. 357, 372, 382, 395. Leget did not succeed to all of Alice’s lands, since she had settled the manors of Stapleford Tawney and Eastwick on herself and Roger and their son, Clement. As it happened, the latter never inherited Eastwick because his father sold it to Sir William Oldhall in 1447. VCH Essex, iv. 235; VCH Herts. iii. 318; CP25(1)/91/115/139; CCR, 1454-61, p. 390.

Roger Spice survived until 1460, meaning that Clement was at least 40 years old when he came into his own. While Roger was still alive, he clashed with John Fray†, an influential lawyer and former baron of the Exchequer who had a longstanding family connexion with Great Waltham. In 1456 Fray sued Clement in the court of King’s bench at Westminster for the alleged detinue of £40, an action which led to the latter’s outlawry in November 1458. In Easter term 1460, however, Spice obtained a writ of error and succeeded in overturning his opponent’s case, on the basis that his then place of residence (Little Waltham) was not specified in the original writ. The plea rolls do not reveal the background to Fray’s claim against Spice but their dealings with each other may have arisen from their common connexion with the powerful house of Stafford, a family with landed interests in Essex. For most of his career Fray was a servant and counsellor of the Staffords; while the first known reference to Clement is an annuity of ten marks from the Stafford manor at Haverhill in Suffolk that Humphrey Stafford, duke of Buckingham, granted to him in February 1440, in return for his past and future service. During the 1450s, Spice was a member of the duke’s household and in the following decade he was active as a witness and feoffee for the Staffords. In all likelihood, his choice of name for his son and heir, Humphrey, arose out of his attachment to his patron. KB27/796, rot. 29d; The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 124; C. Rawcliffe, Staffords, 234-5; Essex RO, Barrington mss, D/DBa T6/7; E41/332. It is however impossible to tell whether the Stafford connexion explains how Spice came to stand surety for Buckingham’s distant cousin, Humphrey Stafford of Halmond’s Frome, Herefordshire, then imprisoned in the Marshalsea, in 1457. In June that year he, along with this Humphrey and another inmate of that prison, (Sir) Walter Devereux I*, a leading servant of Richard, duke of York, entered a recognizance for 2,000 marks to William Brandon†, marshal of the Marshalsea, and John Wingfield† (Brandon’s brother-in-law), by which they would forfeit that enormous sum should Stafford not be a true prisoner. CCR, 1454-61, p. 190.

Presumably Spice enjoyed the duke’s support when he stood for the Parliament of November 1449, although it is also possible that his wife’s connexions assisted his candidature. Alice was the daughter of Sir John Montgomery of Faulkborn by Elizabeth, sister and eventual coheir of Lord Sudeley, and her brothers, John and Thomas Montgomery, were household men of Henry VI. John Montgomery was to be executed for his complicity in a conspiracy led by the earl of Oxford after Edward IV came to the throne, but Thomas, who earned a knighthood fighting for Edward at Towton, joined the Yorkist household. Shortly before Edward’s accession, Spice featured with Thomas in a whole series of bonds, all of May 1460, that were enrolled in King’s bench in Easter term that year. In one, Spice was bound in £1,000 to Montgomery and two gentlemen from Essex, Thomas Drakes† of Halstead and Robert Parke of Gestingthorpe. In the others, he, Montgomery, Drakes and Parke were bound to William Brandon and John Wingfield. Among these other bonds was one for 1,000 marks, in turn a security that he and the same three associates would pay Brandon and Wingfield 720 marks. All of these bonds were to be void if Thomas Cornwall esquire made a release of all demands and debts to Brandon, Wingfield and to Brandon’s son-in-law, Augustine Cavendish of Trimley, Suffolk. KB27/796, rots. 56-57d, 83; S. Gunn, Charles Brandon, 46-47. Not recorded, however, is the reason for these securities and Cornwall’s identity is uncertain. One possibility is that he was Thomas Cornwall of Burford, Shropshire, the eldest brother of Otto Cornwall* and an esquire of Henry VI’s household. C.G.S. Foljambe and C. Reade, House of Cornewall, 189, 195; E101/409/11; 410/6; 410/9. In the early 1450s Thomas of Burford had quarrelled with the Humphrey Stafford of Halmond’s Frome for whom Spice stood surety, and later in the same decade he was on a grand jury which had laid indictments against Stafford’s other surety, Sir Walter Devereux I, and another prominent Yorkist, Sir William Herbert*, at Hereford. C66/472, m. 10d; CPR, 1452-61, pp. 52, 69; KB9/35/61d. If this identification is correct, the bonds of May 1460 may have had factional or political ramifications. On the other hand, it is worth noting that Thomas Cornwall of Burford had at least one namesake of Haverhill in Suffolk, from where Spice drew his fee as a retainer of the duke of Buckingham. Yet the Cornwalls of Haverhill were very obscure: the will that Thomas Cornwall of that parish made in 1497 is that of a very minor landowner at best. Foljambe and Reade, 164, 282; W. Suss. RO, Shillinglee mss, SHILLINGLEE/28/87; C1/190/35. It is also even possible that the Thomas Cornwall connected with the bonds recorded on the plea roll, where his surname is rendered as ‘Cornwaille’, was Thomas Cornwaleys*.

After 1461 Spice was appointed to only one ad hoc commission but he had not played a significant role in the administration of Essex before that date. His connexion with Sir Thomas Montgomery must nevertheless have enhanced his standing in the county and he was often involved in local affairs in his capacity as a feoffee or witness for his fellow gentry, including the Montgomerys. CAD, v. A11888-9, 13127; Essex RO, Hatfield Peverel and Kelvedon deeds, D/DLm/T3/12; Barrington mss, D/DBa T6/7-8; deeds of Rivenhall and other parishes, D/DXa/10; Haynes and Harrison mss, D/DU 161/1, 24; CCR, 1454-61, p. 51; 1468-76, no. 38; 1476-85, pp. 364-5. In the late 1460s he became embroiled in a quarrel with Raphael Vannell, a fellow descendant of the Mandevilles. In the spring of 1466 Vannell laid claim to Spice’s manor of Stapleford Tawney and organised a conveyance of it to himself and his heirs. Spice responded by drawing up a bill to submit to the Chancery. In this he described how the manor had descended to his mother as part of her share of the Mandeville lands and asserted that the ‘conveyance’ was a fraud on the part of Vannell and two associates, Sir William Pyrton of Little Bentley and Peter Langley. It is not clear whether Spice actually filed his bill, since there is no copy of it in the surviving Chancery records, but he succeeded in retaining the manor until he sold it to William Scott III* in 1480. Essex Feet of Fines, iv. 62; VCH Essex, iv. 235; Soc. of Antiquaries, London, Stapleford Tawney mss, SAL/MS/556. Vannell, who had a Lombard father, was the gds. of Joan, the sis. of the MP’s mother, Alice.

Late in life, Spice pursued a lawsuit in King’s bench against William Brandon, now a knight. In a bill that he presented there in person on 22 June 1482, he referred to an earlier suit he had won against the Herefordshire esquire, Edmund de la Mare, in that court 20 years previously. It had concerned a debt of £1,000 arising from a bond that he had taken from de la Mare in London on 17 May 1457, and in mid 1462 a jury had awarded him the debt and costs and damages of £13 6s. 8d. In the autumn of 1480 de la Mare had been committed to the Marshalsea for non-payment of this sum, still unpaid when Brandon, in his capacity as marshal, had set him free in February 1481. In his bill Spice held Brandon liable to pay him his debt, costs and damages, amounting to £1,013 6s. 8d. The case was still pending in early 1483, just months before the Spice’s death. KB27/883, rot. 79. The circumstances in which he had received the bond in 1457 are unknown, meaning that it is unclear whether it had any connexion with the recognizance he himself had entered into on behalf of Humphrey Stafford of Halmond’s Frome a little over a fortnight later.

Just weeks before his death, Spice was pursuing another matter, this time as a feoffee of the late Richard Parker†, at one time a neighbour of his at Great Waltham. Among Parker’s holdings were lands at Felstead, likewise in Essex, which he had settled on his grandson Lancelot Penycoke in 1444. In spite of this settlement, a royal inquiry of 1467 declared that Lancelot’s father, John Penycoke*, had held the estate, a finding that Spice, as a Parker feoffee, challenged in a petition to the Crown. Evidently the petition was of 1483, since it was in response to it that the government issued a commission of inquiry to his brother-in-law, Sir Thomas Montgomery, and others on 16 July 1483. CPR, 1476-85, pp. 364-5.

As his inquisition post mortem records, Spice died on 31 July that year. If he made a will it has not survived but according to the inquisition, held in November 1483, he died seised of the three manors in Black and White Notley and Lexden his grandfather and namesake had once held. He was succeeded by his son, Humphrey, who also inherited the Spice manor of Willingale Spain (not mentioned in the inquisition). Ironically Humphrey, who was born in about 1453, married a daughter of Sir William Pyrton. He did not long survive the MP, for he died in October 1485. He was succeeded by his infant daughter and heir, Philippa, whose wardship Sir John Fortescue† acquired from the Crown three years later. Fortescue secured her inheritance for his own family by marrying her to his son and namesake, although afterwards the younger John Fortescue and his wife sold the whole Spice estate, save Lexden, to Joan, widow of Thomas Bradbury† of London, for some £800. After the MP’s death, his widow married Robert Langley, whom she also survived, and then Edmund Wiseman. In 1495 she succeeded to the estates of her childless brother, Sir Thomas Montgomery, and when she herself died in September 1508 these lands passed to her next heir, her grand-daughter, Philippa Fortescue. C141/3/28; Trans. Essex Arch. Soc. n.s. xv. 49-50; CIPM Hen. VII, i. 61; iii. 1040; Med. London Widows ed. Barron and Sutton, 231; CPR, 1485-94, p. 237; The Commons 1509-1558, ii. 158-9; LP Hen. VIII, i. 438 (3), m. 1.