The Vampages had been established at Pershore, where they were tenants of Westminster Abbey, since the early fourteenth century if not before. The highlights of their early history were few: a daughter of the house was the mother of Sir John Russell†, master of the horse to Richard II, and our MP’s father leased the abbey’s manor of Pershore and served as escheator of Worcestershire in the 1390s.
Although there is no direct evidence of their connexion until later in the decade, Vampage certainly owed this sudden and complete emergence to the earl’s patronage. This was of greater efficacy locally than that of the abbey, and his successive elections to Parliament in 1426 and 1427 are explicable only in terms of a place in the retinue of that great magnate. Significantly, the attestors to the election of 1427 were headed by three other of the earl’s lawyers, Throckmorton, John Wood I*, and William Wollashull*, who had stood as one of Vampage’s sureties at the previous hustings.
From this date Vampage’s affairs prospered. Although the annual fee attached to his office was a comparatively modest £10, its holder had a ready access to royal patronage and benefited from frequent ad hoc payments from the Exchequer. Vampage took full advantage. On 5 Dec. 1430 he was one of a syndicate of four entrusted with the keeping of the valuable lands of the Burghs in Shropshire, in the hands of the Crown through the minority of John Burgh III*. The annual rent was fixed at £44, a generous discount to their true value. Less than two years later, on 18 July 1432, he was the leader of a syndicate of three men who were granted the keeping of the large manor of Dymock in Gloucestershire at an annual rent of 40 marks; and on 12 Oct. 1433 he was among a group of Beauchamp retainers, headed by Throckmorton and Wollashull, to whom the Crown committed the keeping of the temporalities of the bishopric of Worcester during a vacancy.
It is noteworthy that the grant of Dymock was made on the day after the end of a Parliament in which Vampage, as the King’s attorney, had been active on the Crown’s behalf. Frustratingly, the precise nature of his services is unknown. The only evidence is an entry on the issue roll, dated 25 Oct. 1432, recording a payment of five marks to him ‘pro assiduis attendenciis’ on the King’s behalf concerning various matters and petitions in the Parliament. Similar payments followed. On 12 Nov. 1433, once more while Parliament was in session, he shared £2 with two royal serjeants-at-law for labouring, at the treasurer’s behest, ‘in diversis materiis specialibus’; on 2 Dec. 1435 he was paid ten marks, specifically for labouring in Parliament on the King’s behalf; and on 18 Mar. 1437, again during a parliamentary session, he received the same sum for his attendance at London and Westminster about ‘certis negociis Regis ac materiis specialibus’ committed to him by the treasurer and chancellor. These payments imply that, although the attorney-general was not summoned to the Lords along with the judges and royal serjeants, he played an important part in supervising the Crown’s business there.
The profits of Vampage’s successful legal career funded several property purchases and the marriage of his son and heir to an heiress. As early as 1426 his friend William Wollashull granted him property at Wick Burnell, and in 1428 he added a few acres to his property at Pershore.
These acquisitions, at least those made before 1436, are reflected in the subsidy returns of that year: Vampage was assessed on the considerable annual income of £70. Even though this was not all derived from land – there were professional fees to be considered – it was sufficient to make him a man of standing in his native shire. Indeed, only three male landholders in the county were assessed on greater sums.
Vampage continued to serve his first patron even after the Earl Richard’s death on 30 Apr. 1439, representing the interests of both the dowager countess and the executors. Very soon after the earl’s death, he was among those to whom the custody of unenfeoffed lands of the earldom was committed by the Crown during the minority of his heir, Henry Beauchamp, later duke of Warwick. This grant represented a mark of favour to the countess, who had nominated the keepers, for they were to hold the property without rent to her use and that of the executors.
Although Earl Richard’s patronage had been central to Vampage’s early career and that of his young successor was an inadequate and brief substitute for it, Vampage was too well established by 1439 for its loss to have a discouraging effect upon his standing. On the contrary, in the early 1440s he was a more prominent man than he had previously been. On 15 Mar. 1440 he was one of five distinguished figures, headed by John Kemp, archbishop of York, to whom the abbot and convent of Westminster granted an annual rent of 200 marks from their lands in Worcestershire and Gloucestershire: this grant was to terminate with the death of Abbot Richard Harweden and may have been intended as a pension for him. Ten days later he acted for the unfortunate Robert Arderne*, who had once been a Beauchamp servant, in his damaging dispute with Sir Thomas Erdington*.
This latter connexion may explain why, on 16 July 1444, Vampage was among those commissioned as an itinerant royal justice in south Wales, where Stafford’s influence was strong.
Secure in his office, Vampage again played an active part in the Parliament of 1442. While it was in session, he joined Chief Justice Fortescue* and Speaker Tresham* in witnessing the important deed by which Edmund, Lord Grey of Ruthin, concluded a dispute with a wealthy London grocer. The dating and Tresham’s involvement suggest that this settlement had been brokered in Parliament, and this matter was no doubt only one of those in which the attorney was employed during this assembly. On 28 Mar., the day after it concluded, he received ten marks as a reward for his attendance there on unspecified royal business; and soon after he was added to the ranks of the apprentices-at-law retained by the duchy of Lancaster, receiving a fee of £2 p.a., the same rate as the serjeants-at-law, compared with the two marks given to the other apprentices.
In the late 1440s Vampage’s office led him to become closely identified with the unpopular regime of William de la Pole, marquess and then duke of Suffolk. As the King’s attorney it was inevitable that he should have played some part in planning the proceedings to be taken against Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, in the Parliament summoned to Bury St. Edmunds in February 1447. Two months after the end of that controversial assembly, he was paid £10 for his great costs in prosecuting certain undefined matters for the King’s profit. The trust placed in him by Suffolk’s government was further exemplified in January 1448, when he was granted his attorneyship for life rather than during pleasure.
Vampage’s success is also reflected in the continued acquisition of property. On 16 Mar. 1445, the day after the first prorogation of this long Parliament of 1445-6, the three sons of John Eburton of Milcombe in Oxfordshire granted him the manors of Pebworth and Long Marston in Gloucestershire; and a year later, in the last session of the assembly, Sir Robert Corbet, whose cousin and namesake had held the property before Eburton, acknowledged his right in the manor.
In the last years of his career Vampage made further significant land acquisitions, taking advantage of the financial difficulties of the hapless Robert Arderne, for whom he had acted as arbiter in 1440. On 10 Mar. 1447 he took from him a bond in 200 marks, and a little under two years later, on 1 Jan. 1449, Arderne granted him and his son John a manor ideally placed to supplement the family’s existing holdings, namely that of Nafford in Birlingham near Pershore. Curiously, on the following 24 Mar., the grantor entered into a further bond in as much as £400, undertaking not only to assure the grantees title to Nafford but also to purchase for them, within the term of seven years, lands worth another 20 marks p.a.
Vampage’s wealth was enhanced by the many fees he enjoyed from individuals and corporations. From early in his career he had fees from Westminster Abbey and the London company of Merchant Taylors, who admitted him to their fraternity in the early 1430s. Later he was similarly retained by, amongst others, Richard Neville, earl of Salisbury, William, Lord Lovell, the corporations of Tewkesbury, York, Exeter and Southampton, the wealthy Humphrey Stafford III*, the abbey of Peterborough and the new foundation of King’s College, Cambridge.
By the early 1450s Vampage was approaching old age, and on 27 June 1452 he made his will. He wished to be buried in the abbey of Pershore beside the tomb of his first wife. His religious bequests reflect his wealth: he left 50 marks for a chaplain to pray for his soul in the parish church of Pershore; £20 to Hailes abbey, Gloucestershire, for the purchase of two silver basins for the high altar; ten marks to the Evesham abbey; and an unspecified sum for the building of an ‘oleystowe’ for the burial of the dead at Wick. His widow was bequeathed a considerable quantity of plate, part of which she had brought with her in marriage, together with various household goods. Lesser bequests of plate were made to his brother, Richard, his eldest son, John, and his daughters and their husbands, John Butler* and John Greville. He named his wife as his executrix, to be assisted by four executors, headed by John Carpenter, bishop of Worcester, and including Richard Chokke, a rising young lawyer from the West Country, and another lawyer, Walter Taylard*. The making of his will was one of his last acts for he was dead by 30 June (although the will was not proved until 12 Sept.).
Although Vampage had wanted to be buried in Pershore abbey, for reasons that are unclear he was entombed some miles away in the Oxfordshire church of Minster Lovell. Perhaps he died there while visiting the lord of the manor, Lord Lovell, one of the many who had employed his legal services.