WINNESLEY, Richard

Winnesley’s career fits the typical type of the minor local lawyer. His family had been resident in Leominster for at least one generation. In 1408 he secured licence for his father’s burial in the priory church, a privilege extended without charge in recognition of his father’s service to the priory. J. Price, Leominster, 94-95; J. and C. Hillaby, Leominster Minster, Priory and Borough c.660-1539, 190. By this date he had already established himself as an attorney in the court of common pleas, where he was employed by 1405, and at the Herefordshire assizes. In the common pleas he acted, among others, for Sir John Chandos†, John Merbury* and the borough of Leominster’s lord, the Benedictine abbey of Reading. CP40/576, rot. 140, att. rot. 1d; 583, att. rot. 6; 590, rot. 315d. His services were also employed by Thomas Holgot†, who named him as a surety in 1406. Holgot was one of several Herefordshire lawyers working at this date, the most important of whom was John Russell I*, also a surety for Holgot on this occasion. CCR, 1405-9, p. 132. In 1418 he stood surety for payment of a fine by Russell’s half-brother, another John Russell: KB27/630, fines rot. 2. These men may have served as early patrons, but his closest associate was another of the sureties, Edmund Morris†, with whom he was frequently associated between 1406 and the early 1420s. The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 782.

To the advantage of his legal education, Winnesley added a modest inheritance. This is largely undocumented, but it included property at Winsley (from where his family took their name) in Hope-under-Dinmore, a few miles to the south-east of Leominster. Much later this property was described as 200 acres of land and 20 acres of meadow: CP40/848, rot. 464d. The early profits of his career allowed him to add to this holding: by a final concord levied in 1412 he acquired a messuage, 70 acres of land and 2s. of annual rent at nearby Bodenham. This small country estate justified his appearance as an attestor to the Herefordshire election on 29 Apr. 1413. He may have also acquired further modest holdings through his first marriage. This, at least, is one interpretation of a final concord of 1417, by which he and his wife conveyed an annual rent of 29s. 10d. in Hereford to John Fuster, perhaps as an alienation of part of her inheritance. CP25(1)/83/52/37; 53/9; C219/11/1.

Nearly all the other references to Winnesley in the second decade of the century concern his practice in the central courts. In 1413 he was mainpernor when a writ of supersedeas was awarded to a Herefordshire esquire, Roger Bodenham; two years later he offered surety of the peace in the court of King’s bench for a Leominster man; and in 1417 he appeared in the same court with his kinsman, William Winnesley, to offer mainprise for a Herefordshire gentlemen pardoned for a brutal murder. CCR, 1409-13, p. 436; KB27/618, rex rot. 34d; 625, rex rot. 16. More interestingly, he twice provided surety for local lollards: in 1418 he put at hazard £100 that a chaplain, William Harald, and the chaplain’s brother, would not make unlawful assemblies; and 1420 he risked twice that sum in undertaking that a clerk, Richard Wyche, who much later was to be burned as a heretic, would appear before the royal council. CCR, 1413-19, p. 459; 1419-22, p. 82; Lollardy and Gentry ed. Aston and Richmond, 143. There is nothing to suggest that he shared heretical sympathies, but on at least one occasion he found himself on the wrong side of the law. On 26 Sept. 1412, before the Shropshire j.p.s at Ludlow, he and his friend Morris were indicted for conspiracy to promote a false appeal of murder, an indictment found insufficient at law when it reached the court of King’s bench. Salop Peace Roll ed. Kimball, 113.

At the start of the following decade Winnesley appears as a man of greater substance. By November 1420, when he conducted the borough’s parliamentary election, he had succeeded Thomas Hevyn as the abbot of Reading’s bailiff in Leominster. C219/12/4. At about the same time he added to his responsibilities that of under sheriff of the county during the shrievalty of Sir Richard de la Bere of Kinnersley. C219/12/5. Later, in 1434, he offered surety in KB for one of de la Bere’s servants: KB27/693, rex rot. 4d. In this capacity he delivered into Chancery the return for the Parliament of May 1421. After the end of his term he was himself elected for Leominster on 2 Nov. 1422. As the bailiff of the abbot’s liberty his position was anomalous in that he was returning officer for his own election: the indenture was drawn up between the sheriff, John Merbury, on one part, and our MP as bailiff and 26 attestors on the other. C219/13/1. By 1427 he was acting as Merbury’s attorney in the c.p.: CP40/667, rot. 83.

In view of his legal practice in the court of common pleas, it is surprising that Winnesley should have allowed himself, when sued for debt, to incur a minor outlawry, for which he sued out a pardon in November 1423. A month later, he entered into a bond in 200 marks to the wealthy Herefordshire knight, Sir Roland Lenthall of Hampton Court (just outside Leominster), an undertaking which led to litigation in the late 1430s. CPR, 1422-9, p. 145; CP40/713, rot. 102d. His relations with Lenthall appear in a different light in 1430, when he offered surety in a royal grant to the knight: CFR, xv. 327. Further, the fact that he gave his son the unusual name of Roland raises the possibility that Sir Roland was the boy’s godfather. But although he was occasionally a defendant in debt actions, he was much more frequently a plaintiff. Some suits arose out of his role as the abbot’s bailiff. On 10 June 1424, for example, he took a bond in £20 from a leading townsman, John Hood*, who undertook that a man who our MP had arrested at the sheriff’s order would appear in court. CP40/662, rot. 193d.

At this date, however, the bailiff had much more important matters with which to concern himself. The most striking fact about his career is his remunerative and mysterious second marriage, which had taken place by the summer of 1426. CCR, 1422-9, pp. 448-9. The marriage may have taken place a few years earlier, for the couple’s son, Roland, appears to have been of age by 1444: CP25(1)/293/70/285. The bride was one of the four grand-daughters of Sir Hugh Cheyne† (d.1404) of Cheyney Longville and coheiress of her mother, Margaret Devereux. The bride’s pedigree is uncertain, but she was coheiress of the ancient family of Devereux of Stoke Lacy: CP, iv. 302-6. In 1419 she had been the wife of the soldier, Sir Thomas Bowet: CP40/634, rot. 102d. With her two sisters and nephew, she was a significant heiress. Their right to part of that inheritance went uncontested, but that was not the case in respect of the valuable manor of Lyonshall, once the property of the branch of the Devereux family represented by Margaret. On 3 July 1426 the bride’s maternal grandfather, Thomas Devereux, quitclaimed his right in that manor to powerful feoffees, headed by Humphrey, duke of Gloucester. Our MP’s wife was Devereux’s coheiress, and if one may judge by what happened later the purpose of this quitclaim was to keep this important property out of the hands of Thomas’s heirs, probably to the advantage of his young kinsman, Walter Devereux I*. In any event, in Easter term 1433 Winnesley and his wife joined her sister and brother-in-law, Henry Chadderton, in suing the feoffees for the manor as heirs-in-tail under the terms of a final concord of 1301. How seriously our MP intended this action must be open to doubt, for he soon defaulted, leaving Chadderton to pursue the action fruitlessly alone. CCR, 1422-9, pp. 448-9; CP40/689, rot. 110; 693, rot. 116. None the less, although the greatest prize was denied our MP’s wife and her sisters, they divided between them other property. In 1431 Winnesley was said to be seised (in her right) of a fifth of a knight’s fee at Lawton in Kingsland, a few miles to the west of Leominster, and half a knight’s fee at Stoke Lacy, about 14 miles to the south-east of the town. Feudal Aids, ii. 417, 420.

In April 1432 Winnesley, now very much one of the county gentry, attested the Herefordshire election, and himself accepted election for Leominster. The form of the indenture implies an awareness of the tension between his twin roles as returning officer and elected MP in that it was drawn not between the county sheriff and Winnesley but between the sheriff and the town bailiff, John Bradford. Another possible explanation for this variation in form is that Winnesley was again in office as under sheriff, on this occasion to Walter Hakluyt of Eaton, near Leominster. C219/14/3; E5/497. With Winnesley’s increased prosperity went an even more active role as a litigant. To take a term at random, in Hilary term 1435 he had suits pending in the court of common pleas for the abduction of one of his servants at Winsley, for house-breaking at Leominster, for leaving his service against the ordinance of labourers, for hunting in his free warren at Stoke Lacy and for a variety of debts. All these actions he pursued in person. CP40/696, rots. 6, 194, 234, 287, 320d. Much more rarely did he appear as a defendant, but in this term the wealthy London mercer Henry Frowyk I* sued him for a debt. The matter was not pleaded in 1440, when Winnesley, quite outrageously, claimed that when the bond on which he was being sued, dated at London in 1431, was sealed, he was a prisoner of Frowyk at Leominster. This obvious falsehood was a mere device to have the matter tried before a Leominster jury. CP40/719, rot. 130d; 721, rot. 330d.

Winnesley was again returned for Leominster on 4 Jan. 1442 by an indenture between himself, as the abbot’s bailiff, on the one part, and the town bailiff and the attestors on the other. C219/15/2. This was the last recorded act of his career. He died either later in the same year or early in the next for, by January 1444, his widow had married Makelin Walwyn*. He was succeeded by Roland, his son by his second wife. A fine levied in Hilary term 1444 embodied what appears to have been an agreement for the division of Katherine’s lands between herself and her second husband, on the one hand, and her son and daughter-in-law, Isabel, on the other: the manor of Lawton in Kingsland (Herefordshire) with annual rents of 13s. 4d. in Lower Hayton (Shropshire) and 12s. in Hanley Child (Worcestershire) were settled on Roland and Isabel and their issue with remainder to Katherine and her heirs; and two manors in Stoke Lacy with eight acres of meadow in Wharton were settled on Makelin and Katherine with successive remainders to Roland and Isabel and their issue and Katherine’s right heirs, with the proviso that, should Makelin survive Katherine, he was to retain only one of the manors. The acquisition of these holdings makes it puzzling that Roland was assessed to the subsidy of 1451 on a modest income of £3. CP25(1)/293/70/285; E179/117/64. Although he was alnager of Salop in the early 1450s, Roland had a much less notable career than his father: CFR, xviii. 193.

The family ended in sorry circumstances. In a petition to the chancellor, Roland’s two daughters claimed that after their mother’s death, their father, by then blind, had taken a second wife, and that, notwithstanding the entail of the family’s lands on Roland’s issue by their mother, this new wife had persuaded him to disinherit them in favour of two local lawyers, John Monnington of Westhide and John Wynne. To this end, Roland suffered a common recovery in 1473. From a legal point of view their petition is of great interest, in that the basis of their complaint was that the process of common recovery was itself an unwarrantable fraud. In this they were attempting to swim against a strong-running legal tide: the common recovery was certainly a fraud (in that the compensation it supposedly offered to the disinherited heir-in-tail was a fiction), but the fraud was a practical and useful one. C1/56/270; CP40/848, rot. 464d. The women argued that the vouchee, that is, the strawman required by the judgement to compensate them, had died before that compensation was forthcoming. Had the chancellor conceded them remedy then numerous entails would have sprung back into legal life as vouchees died. They asked too much.