STAPLETON, Sir Brian

By the time of our MP the Stapletons of Carlton (near Snaith in the West Riding), a branch of a family of ancient prominence, were one of the richest knightly families of Yorkshire. They traced their descent from a late 12th-century ancestor, Geoffrey Stapleton of Stapleton-on-Tees (North Riding), through Sir Gilbert Stapleton (d.1321), younger brother of Sir Miles Stapleton, steward of the royal household in 1307-8 and a victim of the battle of Bannockburn in 1314. CP, xii (1), 259-65. Sir Miles was summoned to the Lords in 1313, but that summons was not repeated in his descendants. Sir Gilbert made a notable marriage to one of the two daughters and coheiresses of Brian, Lord Fitzalan (d.1306) of Bedale (North Riding), and the manor of Bedale and other Fitzalan properties descended to their eldest son, Sir Miles, one of the founder members of the Order of the Garter. CP, v. 395-7. Our MP was descended from one of Sir Gilbert’s younger sons, the famous soldier, Sir Brian (d.1394), another Garter knight. On the childless death of his cousin, Thomas Stapleton, in 1373, this Sir Brian inherited, as heir in remainder, the family manors of Kentmere in Westmorland and Carlton, which he made his home. Oxf. DNB, ‘Stapleton, Sir Brian’; CIPM, xvii. 528. He too made a good marriage, in about 1352, to Alice, wid. of Sir Stephen Waleys and sis. of John, Lord St. Philibert (d.1358). On the death of her infant nephew in 1361, she fell common-law coh. to the St. Philibert lands, but these had been alienated to the Crown by her bro.: CP, xi. 367; xii (2), 321-2.

This Sir Brian’s grandson and namesake, our MP’s father, continued the family’s military tradition, and was killed, while still a young man, at the siege of Alençon in the autumn of 1417. In the course of this brief career he had formed a connexion with the King’s brother, John, duke of Bedford, and it was thus natural that the wardship and marriage of the heir should, on 18 Nov., have been granted by the Crown to the duke. CPR, 1416-22, p. 331. The inheritance the duke held as Brian’s guardian was a considerable one. It was described in the inquisitions taken on the elder Sir Brian’s death as comprising, aside for the manors of Kentmere and Carlton, lands at Baumber in Lincolnshire, and the manors of Quarmby and Walkingham in the West Riding with a third of the manor of Farlington in the North Riding. These were valued together at £56 8s. 8d. p.a. but this was a very significant undervaluation of the family inheritance. CIPM, xx. 720-2. In 1403 Carlton was leased at as much as £70 p.a. and Kentmere was notionally valued at £46 p.a.: CPR, 1401-5, p. 253. The family also held the manor of Rufforth (near York) but this was in the hands of Sir Brian’s mother at the time of his death: CIPM, xxiv. 168. Interestingly, our MP’s father, despite the possibility of dying on campaign leaving his son a minor, did not take, or at least he did not renew, measures to keep his lands out of wardship. In June 1412 he had conveyed his principal manors of Carlton and Kentmere to feoffees headed by the duke of Bedford, but on 6 Mar. 1416 he had retaken seisin of at least some of the property he had put into feoffment: Hull Hist. Centre, Stapleton mss, DDCA/37; Yorks. Deeds, iii (Yorks. Arch. Soc. Rec. Ser. lxiii), 88. A better index of the family’s wealth is provided by the large portion of 370 marks provided for the ward’s elder sister in the contract, drawn up shortly before their father’s death, for her marriage to William Plumpton*. Leeds District AO, Plumpton Coucher bk. no. 374 (printed with errors in Plumpton Corresp. (Cam. Soc. iv), pp. xliii-iv).

Furthermore, developments during our MP’s minority ensured that he would be even richer than his father. The first of these concerned the Aldeburgh inheritance of the young ward’s paternal grandmother, Elizabeth (d.1417), sister and coheiress of Sir William Aldeburgh (d.1391) of Harewood, some 20 miles to the north-west of Carlton. In one sense, this inheritance represented for the Stapletons a frustrated expectation. After the death of our MP’s grandfather at about the time she fell coheiress, Elizabeth took as a second husband the influential Sir Richard Redmayne†. This match resulted in the diversion, by a fine levied in 1401, of the principal part of her share of her inheritance (a moiety of the valuable manor of Harewood) from her son, our MP’s father, to her issue by Redmayne. Harewood was only to pass to the Stapletons on the failure of the male issue of Elizabeth’s two sons by Sir Richard: CPR, 1399-1401, p. 476; CP25(1)/279/149/36. This settlement was made while our MP’s father was a minor and the keeping of his estates in Redmayne’s hands by royal grant. Yet it does not seem to have been unduly resented by the Stapletons and all was not lost. Redmayne did much to advance the career of our MP’s father – he was probably responsible for finding him a place in Bedford’s service – and, further, in his will of 1 May 1425 he made a partial redress, instructing his feoffees to settle the two Aldeburgh manors in Kirkby Overblow (a few miles from Harewood) on our MP in tail male on condition that neither he nor his heirs disturbed the Redmaynes in their possession of Harewood. W. Greenwood, Redman of Levens and Harewood, 248; H.E. Chetwynd-Stapylton, Stapletons of Yorks., 141.

To the acquisition of these two, admittedly modest, West Riding manors, Stapleton soon added more significantly to his expectations. At the time of his parents’ marriage, his mother had not been an heiress. Two brothers stood between her and a share, with her two sisters, of the combined inheritance of her father, Sir John Godard, who had built up an estate through purchase using the profits of a successful career, and her mother, Constance, one of the three sisters and coheiresses of Sir Thomas Sutton of Bransholme. During our MP’s minority, however, her material status was dramatically improved by the childless death of her young nephew, John Godard, in 1430. She then inherited, expectant on the termination of life interests, a third share of her father’s lands together with a ninth share of the more extensive landholdings of the Suttons. CIPM, xxiii. 433-4, 666; xxv. 244-7; CFR, xvi. 91-92; xvii. 66-67. The extent of that inheritance is very imperfectly revealed in the inquisitions taken on John Godard’s death, but other evidence shows that the Stapletons eventually inherited the manors of Cockerington and Conisholme (Lincolnshire) and a share of the manors of Cranswick, Wassand, Atwick and Lund (Yorkshire). CP40/692, rot. 179; 706, rot. 338. In addition, Stapleton’s coming of age marked the recovery of the family manor of Rufforth which his father had settled on Elizabeth Aldeburgh. On her death it had been retained by Redmayne, presumably to keep it out of wardship, but Stapleton recovered it on the findings of an inquisition on 1 Mar. 1434. CIPM, xxiv. 168.

The survival of Stapleton’s mother until 1448 meant these many manors were not immediately united in his hands. When he proved his age at an inquisition taken at Selby on 2 Apr. 1434, her inheritance remained in her possession as did her significant interest in the Stapleton patrimony. According to her inquisitions post mortem, she held, of the Stapleton patrimony, a moiety of the manor of Kentmere together with the manors of Quarmby and Walkingham and a third of that of Farlington. Her own inheritance was described, in the same inquisitions, as two-thirds of the Lincolnshire manors of Conisholme and Cockerington, but was certainly more extensive than that. C139/130/14. These manors were burdened by the dower interest of Isabel, wid. of Sir John Godard and wife of Richard Curson. She also had a life interest in the Godard share of the Sutton of Holderness inheritance under the terms of a fine of 1423: CP25(1)/291/65/16. She was alive as late as 1452: CCR, 1447-54, pp. 352-3. The delay in acquiring these lands may have informed the early stages of Stapleton’s adult career when he served in France and then in the royal household, but a more important determining factor was probably the patronage of his guardian, Bedford. Although his military career is almost un-documented, he is known to have been present at Rouen on 10 Sept. 1435 when he witnessed the duke’s will. Test. Vetusta ed. Nicolas, i. 241-3. He may already have been in France for some time, since he is conspicuously absent from the list, returned into Chancery by 1 May 1434, of Yorkshire landowners who were to be required to take the parliamentary oath not to maintain peace-breakers. CPR, 1429-36, pp. 378-9. He may also have remained in France for a period after Bedford’s death, for he was knighted in the summer or autumn of 1436, perhaps during the campaign for the relief of Calais. The date of his knighthood is not clear. It is implied in the list of witnesses to Bedford’s will that he was then a knight, for he is named immediately before a man who is described as such. Yet, according the inq. post mortem taken on the death of his brother-in-law, Sir William Ingleby, he was still an esquire when nominated as one of Ingleby’s feoffees on 9 July 1436, and he is not known to have been a knight until his election to Parliament on 17 Dec. following: CIPM, xxv. 158; C219/15/1.

Such speculation aside, Stapleton was back in England by January 1437 when, despite his youth and the consideration that he held only the lesser part of his inheritance, he sat as MP for Yorkshire. His motive for standing almost certainly lay in the close connexion he had formed with the famous soldier, Sir Thomas Rempston. It is possible that he was already Rempston’s son-in-law (and, if he was, it was a marriage he owed to Bedford), although it may be that the marriage did not take place until the 1440s. The couple’s eldest son, or at least the eldest that survived to Stapleton’s death, was not born until 1454: C140/54/68. Further, the eldest of Rempston’s three daughters seems to have remained unmarried until as late as 1449, when she married Cheyne. In any event, the two men were linked through Bedford’s household, where they had both served, and their close mutual relationship with Sir William Plumpton, who was Stapleton’s brother-in-law and Rempston’s nephew (of the half-blood). At the time of the 1437 Parliament, Rempston was languishing in French captivity pending the payment of the unrealizable ransom of some £3,000; and Stapleton, Plumpton and Rempston’s old friend, Sir Thomas Chaworth*, were the probable sponsors of the Commons’ petition presented in this assembly complaining of the Exchequer’s refusal to pay 1,000 marks promised by the Crown to the discharge of that ransom. SC8/137/6844.

By the time of his early election to Parliament Stapleton had probably already found a place in the Household, again, no doubt, through his status as one of the late duke of Bedford’s former wards. A series of grants made to him in the early 1440s show that he was held in high favour. On 4 Apr. 1440 he secured a lease from the Crown of small parcels of land in Yorkshire, Essex and Lincolnshire to hold at an annual rent of £8 2s. 3d. during the minority of his nephew, John, the son of his sister Joan by Sir William Ingleby (d.1438) of Ripley (Yorkshire), but in so doing he infringed the rights of another royal grantee and his patent was cancelled. On 1 Dec. 1439 one William Dales, who, through his ‘suggestion and diligent suit’, had shown that Ingleby died seised of other property than specified in his inqs. post mortem, had been granted the wardship. On 2 Mar. 1440, when he was with the King at Rochester, our MP, perhaps resenting this intervention in his sister’s affairs, secured letters of privy seal overturning Dales’ grant, but Dales persisted and secured a new grant of his own in Oct. 1441: CFR, xvii. 47-48, 72-73, 125-7, 151; CPR, 1441-6, p. 24. He had, however, little reason to resent so small a loss, for other much more substantial grants came his way. On 9 Mar. 1441 he joined the elderly controller of the household, John Feriby, in a grant in survivorship of the manor of Witley and the parkership of the royal manor there. CPR, 1436-41, p. 511. This benefit proved the means of acquiring others. Feriby died in the following October, and Stapleton and another senior Household man, James Fiennes*, began negotiations for an exchange of grants. This was completed in February 1443: on 8 Feb. the Crown licensed Sir Brian to surrender his life interest in Witley to Fiennes; and on the following day Fiennes’s interest in the constableship of Rochester was bestowed upon our MP, described as a ‘King’s knight’. The exchange seems to have favoured Stapleton: Witley was valued at £40 p.a. (although perhaps no more than notionally) while the constableship brought with it fees of 40 marks p.a. with the addition of a further £36 p.a. expectant on the death of Sir John Steward. CPR, 1441-6, pp. 83, 140, 161, 169. Stapleton enjoyed Steward’s £36 p.a. from 20 Jan. 1450, if not before: E159/226, brevia Hil. rot. 6d. Further, a few days earlier Sir Brian had been additionally granted the reversion of the constableship of the duchy of Lancaster castle of Hertford, worth a more modest ten marks p.a., expectant on the death of the existing patentees, Fiennes and the elderly Herefordshire knight, Sir Roland Lenthall. Somerville, i. 604; DL37/10/6.

Stapleton’s election to the Parliament of 1445 is probably to be seen as an aspect of his Household service, and it may be that he spent much of his time at court. This might be taken to explain why he played so little part in the administration of his native county. Yet that inactivity continued throughout his career. He was never named to the Yorkshire bench and was never pricked as sheriff there, although, in November 1442, he was one of the three names on the pricked list. His shrieval appointments, when they came later, fell rather in Lincolnshire. CFR, xvii. 326, 331; C47/34/2/4. He was also only an occasional appointee to ad hoc commissions, whether in Lincolnshire or Yorkshire. This is all the more surprising given his great wealth, particularly after his mother’s death in 1448. The reason may lie in his own reluctance to serve. Indeed, on 20 Feb. 1449 he sued out an exemption from office, and, more interestingly, in the following November he refused, initially at least, to take the shrievalty in Lincolnshire, which his recent inheritance of two manors there had qualified him to hold. CPR, 1446-42, pp. 239, 283.

Filling that particular shrievalty had been a recurring problem for the Crown in the 1440s, presumably because there was even greater difficulty there than in other shires in raising the county farm. This difficulty explains its readiness to bargain with potential appointees, and thus, after Stapleton had refused to act ‘for certaigne grete causes by hym alleggid’, an agreement was reached three months later. On 25 Feb. 1450, Stapleton agreed to serve on condition that he be charged only with that part of farm which, ‘with his trewe diligence’, he could collect. E159/227, brevia Mich. rot. 19d. But his reservations about serving, beyond his general ones, may have been more than financial.

Lincolnshire appears to have been particularly disturbed in the late 1440s, largely due to the depredations of the lawless Household esquire, William Tailboys*, but also as the result of a dispute in the south of the county between the duchy of Lancaster tenants of Spalding and Pinchbeck, on one part, and the tenants of Lionel, Lord Welles, at Deeping and Maxey. J. Mackman, ‘Lord Welles’s attacks on Spalding and Pinchbeck’, in Foundations of Med. Scholarship ed. Brand and Cunningham, 183-96. By the time Sir Brian agreed to accept the shrievalty, Tailboys’s activities had been curtailed by his imprisonment in the Tower of London on 25 Nov. 1449, but the dispute in the south was to culminate during his term of office with the murder at Spalding on 1 Apr. 1450 of a prominent duchy tenant, John Ankys, by Welles’s servants. This was to pose a difficulty for our MP. On 7 June, after the tenants of Spalding and Pinchbeck had complained of Welles’s oppressions in Parliament, he was ordered, on pain of £200, to make proclamation for the appearance in King’s bench of those accused of the murder and other assaults (although not of Welles himself). This he duly caused to be done ten days later, but, perhaps for fear of further offending Welles, he made a false return to the advantage of the defendants when ordered to institute proceedings on an appeal sued by Ankys’s widow. She later sued him for damages of £40 in the Exchequer of pleas, but it is unlikely that she was successful. KB27/758, rot. 72; E13/145A, rot. 31. In general, Stapleton’s status as a Household knight prevented him incurring penalties for his financial and legal defaults in the conduct of a difficult office. On 13 Dec. 1450, ten days after he was replaced by a new sheriff, he was pardoned the £10 fine he had incurred for failing to appear to account at the previous Michaelmas, and some years later he was able to plead a pardon to avoid a fine for allowing some of Tailboys’s servants to escape from his custody. CPR, 1461-7, p. 415; KB27/778, rex rot. 42d.

The next significant event of Stapleton’s life was his election to Parliament on 5 Mar. 1453 by attestors headed by his first cousin, Sir Robert Ughtred*, and Sir James Pickering*, with whom he appears to have been on friendly terms. C219/16/2. According to the proof of age of Stapleton’s son, Sir Brian despatched a servant to tell Pickering of the baby’s birth on 24 June 1454: C140/54/68. Stapleton later had difficulty in securing his wages for a Parl. that did not end until 18 Apr. 1454. On 26 Nov. 1455 he brought a bill against Sir John Melton, as former sheriff, for wages of £34 12s. No resolution is recorded: E13/146, rot. 24d. Given the high number of Household men elected to this Parliament, it is not surprising that he should have been chosen. It is a more open question as to whether he should also be identified as a supporter of the Percys in their developing dispute with the Nevilles. Two of his near-kinsmen were Percy men: his brother-in-law, Sir William Plumpton, was steward of the Percy lordship of Spofforth, and his cousin, Sir John Stapleton of Wighill (Yorkshire), may have fallen in the Percy retinue at the first battle of St. Albans in May 1455. C.E. Arnold, ‘Political Study of the W. Riding 1437-1509’ (Manchester Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1984), 137. Sir Brian, however, seems to have been a supporter of neither of the two great northern families. Had he been identified with the Percys, it is unlikely that he would have been entrusted with an important task during the Neville-supported first protectorate of Richard, duke of York. On 24 July 1454, together with his father-in-law, Rempston, and Sir John Melton*, then sheriff of Yorkshire, he was commissioned to guard Henry Holand, duke of Exeter, who had rebelled in company with Thomas Percy, Lord Egremont, and was then imprisoned in Pontefract castle. PPC, vi. 218.

Nothing is known of the part Stapleton played in the events of 1455. On 12 May that year the Exchequer was ordered to pay him the relevant fee as constable of Hertford, even though he had secured no exemption in respect of that office in the Acts of Resumption of either May 1450 or March 1451. DL37/24/24; PROME, xii. 312-13. Ten days later he may, like his cousin Sir John, have fought ex parte Regis at the battle of St. Albans, but little is known of him in the late 1450s. The impression is that, although he was an important member of the royal household in the early 1440s, his importance diminished over time. The main event in his life in these years was the further augmentation of his wealth through the death of his father-in-law on 15 Oct. 1458. This left the combined inheritance of the families of Rempston and Bekering of Laxton, the family of Rempston’s long-dead wife, to be divided between Stapleton’s wife and her two sisters, the one the wife of John Cheyne II* and the other of Richard, son and heir-apparent of Justice Bingham. The relevant inquistions were duly taken in Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and Huntingdonshire, and delivered into Chancery by Thomas Bingham on 15 Nov. On the following day the escheators of these counties were ordered to divide the inheritance in three. C139/171/14; PSO1/64/31; CFR, xix. 225-6. The total value of the estate was put at £54 12s. 4d. but this was a significant underestimate. Leaving aside any question of the undervaluations of the specified properties, some other properties, most notably the valuable manor of Bingham, were not included in the findings. One manor was, however, lost. In Easter term 1460 the Rempston coheirs conceded the title of the heir male, Robert, bro. of Sir Thomas Rempston, to the manor of Arnold (Notts.): CP40/797, rot. 136d. The windfall was, in short, a worthwhile one, and explains, when added to the Godard inheritance, why our MP’s grandson, another Sir Brian, was said to be worth as much as £400 p.a. in 1501. Arnold, 82.

Unsurprisingly, given his anonymity in the late 1450s, there is little to indicate Stapleton’s political affiliations during the civil war of 1459-61. Long service in Henry VI’s household might have disposed him to take up arms for Lancaster, but there is no evidence that he did so (for it would be going too far to infer from the fact that he made a will a few months after Towton that he had suffered some debilitating injury there). His appointment to a commission of arrest in Lindsey on 24 Nov. 1460, when the Yorkists were in control of government after victory at the battle of Northampton, might be taken to suggest that his sympathies lay with York. Yet the commission also contained the names of men, notably William, Viscount Beaumont, and Lionel, Lord Welles, who were to show themselves as irreconcilable partisans of Lancaster. CPR, 1452-61, p. 652. All that can be said of his affairs in the crucial months of early 1461 is that, on 21 Mar., eight days before the decisive battle of Towton, he and his wife sued out a papal indult to have a portable altar each. CPL, xii. 162.

The change of regime had little apparent effect on the calm pattern of his career, although, if he did retain the constableships of the castles of Rochester and Hertford through the 1450s, he lost them on Edward IV’s accession. In November 1461 he was named to a commission, headed by the prominent Yorkist, Humphrey Bourgchier*, Lord Cromwell, to rally the men of Lindsey against the Lancastrians. On 20 May 1462 he sued out a general pardon, and on the following 3 July he and his wife obtained another as tenants of the Rempston lands, no doubt as insurance against any finable irregularities in the process by which these lands had been sued out of royal hands. CPR, 1461-7, p. 101; C67/45, mm. 22, 28. Stapleton’s difficulties with respect to his wife’s inheritance were, however, to come not from the Crown but from a rival claimant. In 1463 a Nottinghamshire esquire, Richard Sutton‡, attempted to establish title, on the basis of a final concord levied as long before as 1327, to that part of the Rempston inheritance that had been assigned to the Stapletons. It is not known when the inheritance was divided. At some date probably soon after the appointment of George Neville, bp. of Exeter, as chancellor on 25 July 1460, John Cheyne II and Elizabeth, his wife, brought a petition in Chancery, claiming the manor of Bingham against Rempston’s feoffees under the terms of the agreement made between Cheyne’s father, Laurence*, and Rempston: C1/29/498. By that fine the manors of Bingham and Clipston in south Nottinghamshire had been settled on Sir Richard Bingham and Alice, his wife, in tail male, with, after various remainders, a final remainder to the right heirs of Sir Richard. Sutton sued in right of this final remainder as Sir Richard’s heir through Alice, his great-great-grandmother and Sir Richard’s daughter. Whether this claim posed any serious threat to the Stapletons’ tenure must be doubtful, but the matter was not quickly resolved. It was still being sued against our MP’s widow in 1472, although the family’s continued tenure of the manors shows that it was never made good. CP40/793, rot. 450; 814, rot. 139; 822, rot. 322.

Little else is known of the last few years of Stapleton’s career. His appointment as sheriff of Lincolnshire in 1464 presumably reflects a lack of willing candidates among the county’s resident gentry, and it is again curious that he was appointed neither to the county bench nor to any ad hoc commissions. He did not long survive his term of office, dying on 7 Sept. 1466 at the age of only 43. C140/20/28. Shortly before his death he and his wife had been admitted to the guild of Corpus Christi at York: Reg. Guild Corpus Christi, York (Surtees Soc. lvii), 67. He had made his will some years before on 4 Aug. 1461. Yorks. Deeds, iii. 153-5. He wanted to be buried in the Carthusian priory of Beauvale, of which his grandmother, Elizabeth Aldeburgh, had been a benefactress. VCH Notts. ii. 105. His religious and charitable bequests were extensive: the house of Beauvale was to have £20 in return for prayers, 20 marks was bequeathed to those local churches which, in the judgement of his executors, were in the greatest need, ten marks were to be distributed among the poor on the day of his burial and he left further funds to pay for 1,000 masses to be said as soon as possible after his death. He left his large breviary to the church that should most need it, in return for prayers for the souls of his parents. Stapleton’s personal bequests reveal something of the range of his connexions. He was clearly on good terms with the Redmaynes with no ill will lingering in respect of his loss of the manor of Harewood. He left £10 to Richard Redmayne of Bossall (Yorkshire) and a crimson gown furred with marten to Richard’s son, his own godson, Brian. His god-daughter and niece, Isabel, wife of Stephen Hammerton and daughter of Sir William Plumpton, was to have ten marks to pray for his soul; another godchild, Brian Smyth, was to have 40s. Since his son and heir, another Brian, was still a minor, he could afford to allow his widow a generous provision. He instructed his feoffees to settle all his lands, with the exception of the manor of Quarmby, set aside for his younger son, Thomas, on his widow for her life. He named as his executors his wife and sister, Joan Ingleby, together with Master Hugh Tapton, chancellor of Lincoln cathedral, the Lincolnshire lawyer, Thomas Fitzwilliam II*, and Thomas Leek.

The inquisitions taken after Sir Brian’s death give only a cursory description of his estates. He was said to have died seised only of the two principal manors of his patrimony – those of Kentmere and Carlton – and no reference was made to any of the property that had come to him through his mother or wife. The inqs. were delivered into Chancery by the lawyer John Saynton† on 24 Oct. 1466: C140/20/28. With the heir liable to royal wardship, these findings were important. The significant omissions were in the interests of the family, but what may have been the true situation, namely that all the family’s lands were in feoffment, would have been even more so. The stipulation in Sir Brian’s will of 1461 that his wife was to have his lands, ‘secundum voluntatem meam scriptam mea propria manu’, certainly implies that the bulk, if not all, his lands were in feoffment. In Aug. 1452 he had conveyed his manor of Cockerington with lands at Quarmby and Rufforth to feoffees headed by his aunt, Maud, wid. of Robert Waddeslay, and his cousin, Richard Redmayne*, but it is not known whether they were the feoffees charged with implementing the settlement on his widow: Stapleton mss, DDCA(2)/47/5. This raises another possibility, that the findings of the inquisitions were the product of an agreement between his widow (who, although she had a life interest in her own inheritance, had an obvious interest in keeping her late husband’s lands out of wardship) and a prospective royal grantee of the wardship. By letters enrolled under the date 26 Nov. 1466 that wardship with the marriage of the heir was granted to a rising star of the Yorkist court, Sir Thomas Burgh† of Gainsborough (Lincolnshire), for 250 marks, notwithstanding ‘the fact that no inquisition has been taken and returned into the Chancery’. CFR, xx. 194. A letter written from London on the previous 16 November by a lawyer, Thomas Middleton, to his father-in-law, Sir William Plumpton, shows that this grant followed a period of negotiation between the heir and the widow: ‘if ye speake with my Lady Stapleton’, wrote Middleton, ‘let hir understand that I delivered hir letters that she sent me, and that Mr. Borough desired hir in any wise that she shold kepe it secret and let no person have knowledge[e]; but that he shold kepe still the ward of my master hir son, notwithstanding he is and wil be redy to kepe all appoyntements that ar made in every article’. Plumpton Corresp. 17. This shows that Burgh’s grant was made or agreed some time before the letters patent. Since these letters refer to the fact that no inquisitions had yet been held, he presumably acquired the wardship, or the promise of it, before the inquisitions were delivered into Chancery on 24 Oct. It might, therefore, be further inferred that the inquisition findings had themselves been compromised between Burgh and the widow, who was naturally anxious to keep as much as possible of her son’s inheritance in her own hand. This would explain the reference in the letter to ‘appoyntements’. Burgh seems to have been ready to leave unchallenged a feoffment made to the widow’s use by Stapleton in return for two manors, albeit the family’s principal ones.

One of the striking features of the history of the Stapletons is the frequency with which they failed to make good the claims to property that fell to them by marriage. Another instance of this disjunction between hope and reality occurred in the immediate aftermath of Stapleton’s death, which coincided with that of his distant kinsman, (Sir) Miles Stapleton*, who survived him by only 23 days. This latter death was a significant event for our MP’s young son and heir. Sir Miles had held part of his estate – namely the manor of Cotherstone and moieties of the manors of Bedale and Askham Bryan in Yorkshire and the manor of North Moreton in Berkshire – in tail-male under the terms of a fine of 1354. That fine had limited a remainder in tail-male to our MP’s great-grandfather, Sir Brian (d.1394), and thus, when Sir Miles died leaving only daughters, our MP’s son fell heir under that remainder. Sir Miles, however, had anticipated that eventuality, and to prevent that remainder falling in had, in Michaelmas term 1463, suffered recoveries and then had the entailed property resettled on himself and his wife, Katherine, and their issue. In Trinity term 1469 Sir Brian’s son and heir, although still a minor, brought an action against the widow and her second husband, (Sir) Richard Harcourt*, for Cotherstone and Bedale. His claim was a technical one, namely that the recovery was no bar to the remainder because the ancestor through whom the recoverer, a clerk named Richard Fryston, had traced seisin, had not been seised prior to the creation of the entail. Such a plea would soon be ineffectual against the barring effect of the common recovery, but, as the legal doctrine surrounding such recoveries was still developing, it must have still have remained an arguable one at this date. CP40/810, rot. 436; 835, rot. 318; J. Biancalana, Fee Tail and Common Recovery, 266-7. No verdict is recorded, and, in February 1474, Stapleton resorted to another action against the Harcourts, an assize of novel disseisin for Askham Bryan. This may have brought him some success, for later evidence shows that Stapleton accepted the moieties of Bedale and Askham Bryan in return for surrendering his claim to the other properties. C66/532, m. 10d; CIPM Hen. VII, i. 165; VCH Berks. iii. 493; VCH Yorks. (N. Riding), i. 294.

The heir probably owed to Burgh his marriage to Joan, daughter of John, Lord Lovell, by Joan, sister of William, Viscount Beaumont. Remarkably this marriage too gave rise to a frustrated claim to property, a claim far more significant than any other that had previously fallen to the Stapletons. On the childless deaths of Joan’s brother, Francis, Viscount Lovell, and her uncle Viscount Beaumont, in 1507, the issue of this marriage, yet another Sir Brian Stapleton (d.1550), fell coheir to the baronial families of Lovell and Beaumont. Unfortunately, however, all was lost to the attainders suffered by Lovell in 1485 and 1495 and a legal sleight of hand (that is the false pretext that Lovell was the heir of Beaumont in 1507 because he was not known to be dead) that brought the Beaumont lands into the hands of the Crown. CP, ii. 64-65; De Antiquis Legibus Liber (Cam. Soc. xxxiv), pp. ccxxvii-xxxiv. None the less, such disappointments aside, the Stapletons of Carlton remained an important family until their failure in the main male line in 1707, although latterly they were compromised by their Catholicism. Oxf. DNB, ‘Stapylton, Sir Robert’; Chetwynd-Stapylton, 149-72, 309.