STANSHAWE, Nicholas

More may be added to the earlier biography. The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 458.

Both Nicholas Stanshawe and his elder brother, Robert, entered Lincoln’s Inn before 1420, and probably some years before for Nicholas is described as an apprentice-at-law as early as November 1414. J.H. Baker, Men of Ct. (Selden Soc. supp. ser. xviii), ii. 1451-2; L. Inn Adm. i. 3; CP40/602, rot. 68. By 1420 he already had a worthwhile estate, both by grant of his parents and by marriage. As early as 1389 his father had settled a remainder interest in some parcels of property in south Gloucestershire at Chipping Sodbury and Old Sodbury (valued at as much as ten marks p.a. in 1458) on Nicholas, then a mere boy, and this remainder fell in at some date before the death of Nicholas’s mother in 1412. She had added to this endowment by entailing on him in April 1407 the nearby manor of Kingrove (in Winterbourne), valued in her inquisition post mortem at a modest £3 p.a. C139/173/27; CIPM, xix. 961. These settlements no doubt aided Nicholas in making a profitable marriage. By the summer of 1415 he had married a minor heiress who brought him three small manors in the same vicinity, valued at £10 8s. 4d. p.a. in her inquisition post mortem of 1435. CIPM, xxiv. 438.

It was unfortunate for Stanshawe that his wife’s title was subject to challenge. In a petition to the lords in Parliament, presented after the end of his parliamentary career, the couple complained that, on a bill presented to the royal council by William Widcombe (perhaps a kinsman of the Bath MP, Richard Widcombe†), they had been put to answer for their title to her manors of Hempton and Stourden, even though the complainant had remedy at common law. The matter had been adjourned from term to term from Michaelmas 1423, and they asked the duke of Gloucester and lords to be discharged. SC8/341/16080. For an earlier assertion of Widcombe’s claim: C1/16/86. Thereafter the rival claims were put to arbitration. At Westminster on 15 Feb. 1428 two arbiters, Nicholas’s brother, Robert, and Thomas Drew*, awarded that our MP should pay £100 to Widcombe, in the Wiltshire church of Malmesbury; in return, Widcome was to surrender his rights. Given the relatively small value of the inheritance, this was a significant sum. Widcombe was put to the trouble of suing for it in the court of common pleas, but, although there may have been a delay, payment was finally made. On 6 Apr. 1433 Widcombe quitclaimed his rights to the Stanshawes. Bristol RO, Ashton Court mss, AC/D/3/10-12; CP40/672, rot. 461d.

The settlement of this dispute was the prelude to a further expansion of Stanshawe’s estates. Like his elder brother, he was attached to the service of the local peer, James, Lord Berkeley, and on 31 May 1429 Berkeley granted him the manor of Flecknoe (Warwickshire) rent free for the life of the lord’s wife, Isabel, who held the manor by grant of her brother, John Mowbray, duke of Norfolk. Cat. Muns. Berkeley Castle, i. 810. In 1434 he was a feoffee for Lord Berkeley in the manor of Talgarth: ibid. i. 662, 670. A further extension came after his wife’s death in 1435. He continued to hold her lands by right of courtesy, and he also contracted another profitable marriage. His second wife was the widow of a Gloucestershire esquire, Edward Brugge, and brought him dower lands in that county and Worcestershire. CIPM, xxiv. 632-5.

In 1442 Stanshawe, in company with his son Robert, was sued by Humphrey, earl of Stafford, for illegally hunting in the earl’s park at Thornbury in south Gloucestershire. CP40/725, rot. 283d. Yet his relations with his neighbours were usually more harmonious. In April 1443 his kinsman, John Horton, rector of Trowbridge (Wiltshire), bequeathed him his second-best silver bowl, the best being reserved for Nicholas’s elder brother. Later, on 18 Mar. 1447, this brother left him the modest bequest of a silver cup and named him among his executors. PCC 15 Rous (PROB11/1, f. 118v); Lambeth Palace Lib. Reg. Stafford, f. 159v. Nicholas’s son, Robert, was said to be 15 at his mother’s death in 1435 and had joined his father, uncle and first cousin, another Robert, as a member of Lincoln’s Inn by 1442. He, however, predeceased his father, and on Nicholas’s death in 1457 his Stanshawe estates passed to this first cousin, the MP’s nephew. Lincoln’s Inn, London, Black Bk. 1, f. 54; C139/173/27.

It is curious that almost all that is known of Stanshawe’s career post-dates his brief parliamentary career. As remarked in the earlier biography, his four successive elections for the Westmorland borough of Appleby, so distant from his own landed interests, was a function of connexions made within Lincoln’s Inn, particularly with the influential Robeert Crackenthorpe*. If, however, these associations enabled Stanshawe to find a seat, they do not explain why his parliamentary service should have been confined to so brief a period. The connexion of the Stanshawes with Lord Berkeley, for whom his brother Robert was acting as chief steward by 1421, suggests an explanation. He may have sought a seat to support his lord in the great dispute over the Berkeley inheritance, then in its early stages as the new Lord Berkeley as heir-male sought to defeat the claims of the heir general, his niece, Elizabeth, wife of Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick. There was certainly a correlation between the progress of the dispute and Nicholas’s second Parliament in May 1421: nine days after this assembly gathered an attempt was made to conclude the dispute by arbitration. Cat. Med. Muns. Berkeley Castle, i. 562; A.F. Sinclair, ‘Great Berkeley Law-Suit’, Southern Hist. ix. 41.