WOLSELEY, Ralph

Wolseley was from a very ancient family, which may have been established at Wolseley in the parish of Colwich, a few miles to the east of Stafford, since the Norman Conquest. So, at least, the MP himself believed, proudly proclaiming, in a petition of the 1460s, that ‘he and all his auncitres sythe the conquest hedirto hathe be sesed and possessed of the manour of Wolsley’. Wolseley mss, D(W)1781/7/1/3 (printed in Wm. Salt. Arch. Soc. ser. 3 (pt. 2), 90). This may have been to claim too much, but the family were certainly at Wolseley in the reign of William II. Remarkably, however, even though they acquired property beyond Wolseley, they played little part in public affairs until the fifteenth century. The most notable early member of the family was a cleric, Geoffrey Wolseley (b.c.1270), who founded a chantry in the church of Colwich, which, in what was perhaps an indication of their lack of social ambition, his successors failed to maintain. Wolseley mss, D(W)1781/1/40; CPR, 1334-8, p. 570; 1340-3, p. 253. By 1418 the original endowment, said to have been worth five marks p.a., had so far declined that no willing chantry priest could be found. Bp. Catterick thus sought its appropriation to the nearby chapel of Holy Trinity on the busy bridge over the Trent at Wolseley: CPL, vii. 83. This obscurity ended with the long and contentious career of the subject of this biography, described, by a cataloguer of the family archives in the seventeenth century, as the ‘greatest man that ever was of this Family’. Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. ser. 3 (pt. 2), 94.

Wolseley’s parents were married by July 1419, when his paternal grandfather, another Ralph (fl.1435), settled on them in fee tail his lands outside Staffordshire, that is, at Clifford Chambers and Bridgetown, near Stratford-upon-Avon, in Warwickshire, and, a few miles further south, at Lower Lemington and Dorne (in Blockley) either side of the border between Worcestershire and Gloucestershire. Wolseley mss, D(W)1781/4/27. Our MP was probably born soon afterwards, if one may draw an inference from the long overlap between his career and the very much more modest one of his father. Both men were lawyers, and it is a reasonable speculation that Ralph was a student, probably a senior one, at Middle Temple (of which he is later known to have been a member) when he was elected to represent Newcastle-under-Lyme in the Parliament of 1449 (Nov.). J.H. Baker, Men of Ct. (Selden Soc. supp. ser. xviii), ii. 1699; C219/15/7.

This speculation is indirectly confirmed by a case in the court of common pleas. This shows that Wolseley absented himself from at least part of the third session of the Parliament, and it is a fair speculation that he did so because that session convened at Leicester, inconvenient for an active lawyer, rather than Westminster. On 7 May 1450, when Parliament had already been assembled at Leicester for ten days, he personally appeared in the court of common pleas in Westminster Hall to sue an action of assault. The defendant’s identity may be taken as a further indication of his connexions in the legal profession. He claimed that one of the attorneys of the common pleas, John Vessy, had assaulted and threatened him at Westminster on the previous 13 Mar., that is while he was sitting as an MP (and when Parliament was sitting there). As a result, so he claimed in the formulaic language of such actions, he dared not, for six days, go about his business – in his case, travel to Parliament from his lodgings in the parish of St. Dunstan in the ward of Farringdon Without. CP40/757, rot. 397d (printed in Parliamentarians at Law ed. Kleineke, 338-9).

Little else is known of Wolseley’s early career. He first appears in the records in June 1449 when he offered surety in a royal grant to John Talbot, Lord Lisle, and John Newton II*. This implies that he already had useful connexions, as does the royal grant, albeit a minor one, he shared in July 1451 with Rhys Griffith of the keeping of six ‘hays’ in the royal forest of Cannock for 12 years at an annual rent of 40s. Another indirect measure of his early influence is the addition to the quorum of the Staffordshire peace in 1453 of his father, an appointment hardly anticipated by the father’s earlier obscurity. CFR, xviii. 114-15, 213; C66/478, m. 29d. To these years is probably also to be dated Wolseley’s excellent marriage into the wealthy Derbyshire gentry family of Blount. The match had probably taken place by 1456 when he and his wife’s brother, Thomas Blount*, stood surety for a local ally of the Blounts, John Agard of Foston, who was, or was to become, the husband of Wolseley’s sister. Vis. Salop (Harl. Soc. xxviii), 55; S.M. Wright, Derbys. Gentry (Derbys. Rec. Soc. vii), 90, 176; KB27/782, fines rot. 1d. Although the evidence for Wolseley’s marriage into the Blount family depends on the debatable evidence of a visitation pedigree, his frequent association with that family from the mid 1450s provides strong, if indirect, supporting evidence. Further, in Easter term 1458 he and his father sued Sir Thomas Blount’s executors for a debt of £20, and it is not fanciful to suppose that this related to a marriage portion: CP40/789, rot. 206. From this date Wolseley maintained a close connexion with his wife’s family. It was probably through them that he came to the notice of Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, whom, in the late 1450s, Thomas Blount’s elder brother, Walter*, was serving as marshal in Calais. The evidence of Wolseley’s own relationship with Warwick is slight but undeniable. Only a single instance has been found in the records in which they appear in a direct relationship: in February 1462 he received a large assignment in the Exchequer on the earl’s behalf. Yet there can be no doubt of the importance of the connexion for an understanding of his career. In a much later petition, he is said to have been ‘in grete favour’ with the earl in the late 1460s, and the earl’s patronage is the most likely explanation for his sudden emergence to prominence after the Yorkist victory at the battle of Northampton in July 1460. E403/824, m. 8; Wolseley mss, D(W)1781/7/1/3 (printed in Wm. Salt. Arch. Soc. ser. 3 (pt.2), 90). He then became the recipient of royal patronage far beyond the reasonable expectations of a minor local lawyer. On 18 Oct. 1460 he shared a grant of the keeping of certain perquisites due to the constable of Northampton castle. More significantly, a month later he was named as receiver of the honour of Tutbury for life, and it is unlikely to be coincidence that the earl had been named as the honour’s steward two weeks before. CFR, xix. 285-6; Somerville, i. 543; DL37/29/26, 27.

Both these grants were made while Parliament was in session, and it is tempting to conclude that Wolseley was among the Members of this staunchly Yorkist assembly, for which the Staffordshire returns are lost. Significantly, on 3 Dec., two days after the prorogation, he was commissioned in company with two associates of the earl of Warwick, (Sir) John Gresley* and Sir Walter Wrottesley, to arrest a Lancastrian partisan in Staffordshire. Gresley was then MP for Derbyshire, and there must be a strong possibility that Wrottesley was MP for Staffordshire and Wolseley for Newcastle-under-Lyme. CPR, 1452-61, p. 654. Whatever the truth of this, Wolseley’s career flourished yet more strongly after Edward IV’s accession. On 21 July 1461 he joined Thomas Babington II* in farming the alnage of cloths for sale in Nottinghamshire, although the farm was soon surrendered. CFR, xx. 24, 74. More significantly, two weeks later he was named as constable of Newcastle-under-Lyme for life, and three days after that he was appointed as joint receiver of the forfeited estates of John, Lord Lovell. In the following December he regained what he had lost by the Act of Resumption of 1456, namely the keeping of the herbage and pannage of the King’s hays in the forest of Cannock, in which forest he was also granted, at about this date, the office of rider, forfeited by the attainted Lancastrian, Edward Ellesmere. DL37/30/209; CPR, 1461-7, pp. 43-44; Wolseley mss, D(W)1781/6/2/8; CFR, xx. 58. To be set against these gains was a demotion: a more important man, Henry Ferrers†, replaced him as receiver of Tutbury with our MP as the deputy. Somerville, i. 543. Even so, this hardly broke the upward trajectory of his career.

Wolseley’s appointment as receiver of the Lovell lands is an indication that he was already developing the expertise in financial affairs that was to determine the course of his later career. There is no evidence to suggest that he yet had a place in the Exchequer, but he certainly had connexions in that great financial department. His fellow grantee of the perquisites of Northampton castle, John Peke†, was the clerk of the tellers of the receipt; in February 1462 he joined Richard Symson, clerk of Thomas Colt*, deputy chamberlain of the Exchequer, in receiving the assignment cited above on behalf of the earl of Warwick; and in the following May he stood surety for Colt himself in Colt’s acquisition of a manor from the former treasurer, Henry Bourgchier, earl of Essex. CFR, xix. 285-6; E403/824, m. 8; CCR, 1461-8, p. 142. These associations, together with his place in the service of the earl of Warwick, provide the context for two important appointments: early in 1463 he was commissioned to levy and collect tunnage and poundage in the port of London, and, much more importantly, on 4 July 1465 he was named as victualler of Calais, where Warwick was captain, for the term of ten years. CFR, xx. 98; C76/149, m. 13.

The latter appointment was something of a mixed blessing, welcome as a mark of a new and higher status but unwelcome for its burdensome duties. The financing of Calais and its garrison was a perennial problem for the Exchequer, and these recurrent financial difficulties posed challenges for the victualler. So heavily dependent was the garrison’s funding on the anticipation of future revenues that the holder of that office was likely to have to call on his own resources to meet immediate expenses before later reimbursing himself. Thus, on the day of his appointment, Wolseley had licence to take over to Calais wool with a customable value of £300, employing that sum in the victualling of the garrison; on 15 Feb. 1466 he had a further licence to do the same in respect of wool with a customable value of as much as £1,100; and on the following 23 June he was licensed to trade free of customs to the value of £700 in discharge of money due to him as victualler. C76/149, m. 13; CCR, 1461-8, pp. 419-20; CPR, 1467-77, pp. 160-1. The difficulties of such ad hoc arrangements explain why Wolseley, in his brief term in the office, had to raise funds privately. Between 8 Mar. and 9 Aug. 1466 he entered into at least three large bonds: the first was in the sum of £358 16s. 5d. to Nicholas Sharp, receiver-general of the duchy of Lancaster; the second, in £600 to the London alderman, Robert Basset*; and the third in £346 to another wealthy Londoner, (Sir) Hugh Wyche*. E13/153, rot. 29; 154, Mich. rot. 7; C241/251/8. All three of these bonds gave rise to litigation because Wolseley defaulted upon them, and no doubt there were others now unknown because they were discharged.

A Chancery case concerning the last of these bonds provides evidence of Wolseley’s efforts to take advantage of his licences. He joined with a London mercer, John Middleton*, in the purchase of wool worth £1,038 from Wyche. Middleton was to be responsible for selling the wool, but in the meantime both he and Wolseley were to repay Wyche in three instalments of £346 each, hence our MP’s bond of 9 Aug. 1466. In his petition, delivered in the autumn of 1469, after Wyche’s death, Wolseley alleged that Middleton and Wyche’s widow, Alice, had tried to defraud him by taking out actions of debt in the Exchequer of pleas in respect of two of the instalments, even though Middleton had satisfied Alice of the debt. C1/44/198-9; E13/154, Mich. rots. 5(c)d, 7; 155, Mich. rot. 2; C253/42/75. This suggests that Wolseley failed to profit from his own personal trade in wool, and it was logical that he should have used his licences as collateral to borrow from those better placed to exploit that trade. Hence it was that he surrendered to Middleton his licence of June 1466. Yet even Middleton seems to have experienced difficulty in profiting from it, for, some years later, the Crown paid Middleton’s executors £700 for the surrender of the licence. CPR, 1467-77, pp. 160-1.

In short, the office of victualler was financially undesirable, and Wolseley is likely to have welcomed the new arrangements for the financing of the garrison introduced by the so-called ‘Act of Retainer’ (an agreement between the Crown and the merchants of the Calais staple, later confirmed in Parliament). Under its terms the staplers took responsibility for financing the garrison, reimbursing themselves from the customs revenue, something they were much better placed to do than an individual victualler like Wolseley. Hence, on 13 Dec. 1466, he and the Calais treasurer, his brother-in-law Thomas Blount, surrendered their offices to the mayor of the staple, John Thirsk*. The grant of the victuallership was to take retrospective effect from the previous Michaelmas, but in the event Wolseley accounted up to 13 Dec., when he received a renewal of the licence to export free of customs to recover costs of £300 sustained in the office. E101/197/1; PROME, xiii. 347-8; C76/150, m. 5.

Wolseley is unlikely to have regretted the loss of his Calais office, for he still retained royal favour. On 7 Apr. 1467 he had licence for a period of seven years and for a payment of £100, to fell and sell the King’s woods in Hopwas, one of the hays of Cannock forest where he had earlier farmed the King’s rights of herbage and pannage. This licence was probably more important than it first appears, given Wolseley’s dispute with his neighbours in the environs of the forest, for it showed he had a call on the King’s local patronage. CPR, 1467-77, pp. 12, 14-15; E405/47, rot. 3. The grant may also have been intended as compensation for the loss of his herbage grant in July 1466: Rowney, i. 198-9; CFR, xx. 185. More significant, however, was his appointment in the following September as one of the junior barons of the Exchequer in place of John Ingoldesby. There may have been some irregularity about this appointment. Barons, in common with the justices of King’s bench and common pleas, were rarely removed save in the event of voluntary retirement or death, but this was not the case with Ingoldesby. CPR, 1467-77, pp. 31-2. However this may be, viewed retrospectively this appointment marks the highpoint of Wolseley’s career, for, although he later regained the office having lost it, he never achieved a higher one.

Naturally, Wolseley’s local influence increased as his career flourished in the 1460s. His addition to the Staffordshire bench in 1463 is one indication of his new status. Another is the marriage he made for his daughter: in 1465 she was contracted to Nicholas, son and heir apparent of one of the leading Derbyshire gentry, Nicholas Montgomery (d.1466) of Cubley, a few miles from Wolseley. HMC Hastings, i. 110; C140/17/20. Curiously, in 1468 Wolseley made a conveyance of Montgomery’s castle and manor of Caverswall, Staffs., as though it were his own: Wolseley mss, D(W)1781/4/24. He was able to make this match even though he was yet to inherit the family patrimony. His father lived until 1478; none the less, it is clear that Ralph assumed complete control of the family’s estates in that decade. A writ of diem clausit extremum for his fa. was issued on 2 June 1478, but, for an unknown reason, went unexecuted, and new writs were issued in 1481 and 1483: CFR, xxi. 448, 623, 773. Ralph’s mother was still alive late in 1478, for a rental, perhaps drawn up to mark his formal inheritance of his patrimony, mentions rents held by her in dower: Wolseley mss, D(W)1781/6/3/2. On 15 Jan. 1461 the father had conveyed all the family’s Staffordshire lands to four family servants, with the probable intention of insuring the lands against a recovery in Lancastrian fortunes, as the son was by then committed to the Yorkist cause. The father was again formally seised of the manor of Wolseley in 1465, but by the autumn of 1468 all the family’s lands were in Ralph’s hands. On 22 Sept. he conveyed them, together with his own acquisitions, to feoffees, headed by his fellow baron of the Exchequer, Brian Roucliffe, Sir Walter Wrottesley and his own father. Wolseley mss, D(W)1781/4/20, 24.

Even before this, however, Wolseley was the effective head of the family. This is apparent from a sustained quarrel with his neighbours that began in the mid 1460s and in which Ralph, a man of apparently uncompromising temperament, was the aggressor. The origin of the trouble appears to have lain in his determination to make his family’s ancient home a fitting residence for a man of his enhanced status. To this end, he and his father enclosed some 1,000 acres of ‘Wolseley Wood’ to provide themselves with a park. This act, if the later complaints of his opponents are to be believed, deprived his erstwhile friend and the kinsman of his first wife, Sir John Gresley, and others, notably Gresley’s brother-in-law, (Sir) John Stanley II*, and John Hales, bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, of their rights of common pasture. The long dispute that ensued is well documented because of several petitions and counter petitions preserved among the Wolseley papers. The first of these, presented by Gresley, seemingly to the royal council, provides a vivid ex parte account of the dispute’s early stages. He claimed that ‘the first begynnyng’ of the quarrel was an assault, ‘on good Fryday’ when the Wolseleys’ men assaulted Gresley’s servant, William Sydall, as he made his way home from church. This was the prelude of a campaign of intimidation against his servants and tenants sponsored by our MP’s father, who, as a j.p., was able to thwart the execution of a warrant of the peace against the miscreants. No year is given for the assault on Sydall, but it almost certainly took place on 4 Apr. 1466, for the petition makes clear that both our MP and Gresley were, at the time, in the service of the earl of Warwick in Calais. In their absence, Richard Bagot, one of the leading Staffordshire gentry, prevailed upon Thomas Wolseley and Gresley’s wife Anne to put the dispute to the arbitration of Ralph and Gresley on their return home. All this, or so Gresley claimed, took place without his knowledge, and thus, when he did return to London from Calais, he still viewed his colleague as a friend. He was thus unprepared when the latter ‘of malice and evyll disposicion’ laboured to have him arrested and slandered his wife, alleging that she had led an assault on Thomas and other ‘suche behavynges not goodly nouther accordyng to be affermed on eny Gentilwoman’. Shortly thereafter, in Gresley’s account, the disputants had entered bonds to keep the peace and abide the arbitration of Walter Blount, now Lord Mountjoy, who as a friend of both parties was well qualified for such a role, but that Ralph had forfeited his bond by the continued harassment of Gresley’s tenants. Further, while this award was pending, he had ‘vexed and sued’ more than 50 of Gresley’s servants and tenants, ‘aswele by writes supplicacions as by prevy sealx’. Ibid. D(W)1781/4/25 (printed in Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. ser. 3 (pt. 2), 82-86).

One of these allegedly vexatious suits can be dated: on 23 June 1466 Wolseley brought a writ of trespass in the court of King’s bench, claiming that Gresley, Anne and many others, including Sydall, had broken his close at Wolseley and assaulted his servants to his damage of £200. KB27/822, rot. 61d (partially printed in Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. n.s. iv. 146). Gresley must, therefore, have presented his petition after this date, and perhaps very shortly after. Significantly, he makes no reference to an important episode in the dispute: on 31 July 1466, at a session of the peace before the royal justice, Richard Bingham, Wolseley and his father were indicted for forcibly enclosing 1,000 acres at Wolseley on 12 Mar. 1465. But, whether or not this indictment narrowly preceded his petition, it prompted Wolseley to petition the chancellor with a tale of woe of his own. He asserted that those who claimed to have lost by his enclosure had agreed to take pasture in the equivalent acreage in another place, but that, notwithstanding, Gresley had broken down his fences. Further, he alleged that when he had countered by suing Gresley at common law for trespass Gresley had conspired to have him, then absent in the King’s service in Calais, and his aged father indicted of felony, a clear reference to the indictment of 31 July. He asked that the indictment be called before the chancellor or into King’s bench and that no process be made upon it until he was back in England. On 24 Sept. 1466, in accordance with the petition’s request, the indictment was duly called into King’s bench. C1/32/300 (printed in Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. n.s. vii. 258-9); C244/103/19. The indictment was not sent into KB until the octave of Trin. 1467: KB9/317/129.

This account cannot be reconciled with the chronology implied in Gresley’s petition. The former shows Gresley acting against Wolseley when he was still absent in Calais, whereas Gresley claimed that, in their mutual absence in Calais, he knew nothing of the cause of enmity between them at home. In short, if Gresley is telling the truth here, then Wolseley is lying in implicating him in the allegedly false indictment of July 1466. Such contradictions are beyond resolution on the surviving evidence. None the less, the dispute was clearly an important one, and if our MP and his father were the victims of false indictment they appear to have brought it upon themselves by disregarding the interests of their neighbours. Later in the 1460s, Wolseley attempted to increase the pressure on his opponents by bringing further actions of trespass against Gresley and, more significantly, suing out a royal licence as a retrospective justification for the actions his neighbours had found so unappealing. In his petition to the chancellor, he claimed that the King had licensed him to make a park by enclosure at Wolseley. This may have been true, but no such licence is recorded on the patent roll until 3 July 1469. Its acquisition was a victory for our MP, but his success was to prove short-lived. CP40/827, rot. 369; CPR, 1467-77, p. 184; Wolseley mss, D(W)1781/4/25, 26.

Wolseley’s neighbours must have taken comfort in the decline in his fortunes from about 1470. His association with the earl of Warwick may explain why Ingoldesby was appointed to replace him as a baron of the Exchequer in June 1470, when the earl was exiled in Calais. CPR, 1467-77, p. 211. Although this removal appears not to have taken effect, and, even if it did, Henry VI’s restoration, engineered by the earl, brought his reappointment, the respite was brief. A month after his supposed removal a merchant of Calais sued a bill of debt against him as though he was still in office: E13/156, Trin. rot. 3. On the following 9 Oct., at the beginning of the Readeption, he had a writ of liberate in respect of his fee as baron for the previous Mich.: E404/71/6/6. Five days later he was one of the four junior barons (Ingoldesby not among them) who had new patents of appointment: E159/247, recorda Mich. rot. 1. On Edward IV’s restoration Wolseley was not reappointed. It is an open question whether this was because, as a former adherent of the earl, he was considered persona non grata by the restored regime. The alternative explanation is that the new government was anxious to reduce the cost of the legal establishment, and he was simply a victim of the reduction of the number of junior barons from four to two. E.W. Ives, Common Lawyers: Thomas Kebell, 233, 486-7. Indeed, his appointment to the Staffordshire commission of the peace in July 1471 and his retention of the constableship of Newcastle-under-Lyme shows that he was not totally out of favour. Curiously, he had been removed from the peace commission during the Readeption, when the number of Staffs. j.p.s was reduced by nine: CPR, 1467-77, p. 630.

None the less, there can be no doubt that in the 1470s Wolseley cut a far less impressive figure than he had in the previous decade. On four occasions before 1476 he was outlawed on pleas of debt, a humiliation that did not generally befall men whose affairs were flourishing. Moreover, in 1474 he was finally replaced as constable of Newcastle-under-Lyme by Hugh Egerton, the nominee of William, Lord Hastings, as steward of Tutbury. CPR, 1467-77, pp. 383, 577; Somerville, i. 550; DL37/43/15. To add to his discomfiture process was resumed in King’s bench on the indictment of 1466. In November 1474 he and his father appeared by attorney to deny that they had abrogated their neighbours’ rights of common pasture and asserted their historic right to make enclosures in ‘Wolseley Wood’, parcel of their manor of Wolseley. Ralph later complained that the bishop of Coventry and Lichfield had then prevented the matter coming to trial by persuading the Staffordshire sheriff, (Sir) John Stanley II (another of those supposedly discomforted by the enclosure), to disavow the jury panel the same sheriff had returned into King’s bench, an indication, perhaps, that Wolseley’s local influence was not what it had been. KB27/853, rex rot. 52; Wolseley mss, D(W)1781/6/2/8. The delay in holding the trial gives colour to this complaint. It was not scheduled to be heard until 4 Mar. 1482. The verdict is not recorded, but on 15 Nov. 1481, just after the hearing had been put out nisi prius to the local assize justices, Wolseley sued out a royal exemplification of the KB record to that point. Since no more is heard of proceedings on the indictment, the verdict must have gone in his favour: KB27/880, rex rot. 7; Wolseley mss, D(W)1781/7/1/2.

More difficult to explain than the decline of Wolseley’s fortunes in the early 1470s is their recovery later in the decade. His second marriage, in about 1473, to the widow of his neighbour, John Kynnersley, and, if the pedigrees are correct, of the knightly family of Aston, brought him jointure and dower lands worth 20 marks p.a. C1/98/54. This marriage had taken place before Mich. term 1474, when they were joint plaintiffs in a plea of debt: William Salt Arch. Soc. n.s. iv. 210. Yet this can hardly have brought about any recovery of his political fortunes. Nor is there any evidence that he succeeded in finding a patron to replace the earl of Warwick. None the less, whatever the reason, a sign of confidence regained came in the autumn of 1477 when he resorted to what appears to have been an act of spite against his supplanter as constable of Newcastle-under-Lyme. The two men were clearly on hostile terms. On 10 Nov. 1476 Egerton, according to a bill brought by Wolseley, made threats against him, but these threats, if such they were, were not enough to deter our MP from taking the offensive. On the following 15 Oct. he appeared before his erstwhile colleagues as barons to accuse Egerton, then sheriff of Staffordshire, of six separate counts of letting to farm the hundreds of the county against the statute of 1445; and added to the pressure by claiming personal damages of £400 in the Exchequer of pleas against him for assault. E207/20/17; E13/162, rot. 35. A few months later his restoration to prominence was confirmed when he won a seat in the forthcoming Parliament for the Surrey borough of Gatton. He was presumably a royal nominee, for the borough was in royal hands during the minority of the daughter and heiress of the last Mowbray duke of Norfolk, and he must have gone on to acquit himself to the King’s satisfaction in the Parliament that brought down the duke of Clarence. This, at least, is the implication of his reappointment on 8 Mar. 1478, only ten days after the end of the Parliament, as fourth baron of the Exchequer during good behaviour. C219/17/3; CPR, 1476-85, p. 94.

From this point the narrative of Wolseley’s career resolves principally around the renewal of the dispute over enclosure. No doubt this is, in part, a trick of the sources, a distortion occasioned by the survival of the petitions and counter-petitions among the family’s extant papers, but it is, none the less, noteworthy that few of his appearances in the records are unconnected with this apparently central matter. It is perhaps also significant that the dispute resumed its earlier intensity just as Wolseley began to recover his influence, implying that, despite his protestations to the contrary, he was the aggressor in the 1470s as he had been in the 1460s. In 1477 he sued three of Gresley’s servants for assaulting one of his own at Rugeley, and three years later he brought an action of maintenance against Gresley himself in respect of another plea of trespass. CP40/871, rot. 322; Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. vi.(1), 117, 123-4. Now, however, it was Bishop Hales rather than the elderly Gresley who was his main opponent. Indeed, if a bill sued against the bishop by Wolseley in the late 1480s is to be taken at face value, it was the bishop’s, rather than Wolseley’s, acts of enclosure that were provoking local discord. Wolseley claimed that on 14 Apr. 1482 Hales had enclosed 2,000 acres of pasture at Cannock and thereby abrogated the rights of common pasture pertaining to him and his neighbours. An undated award made by the King’s chamberlain, William, Lord Hastings, was probably made at about the time of this alleged offence. This was, to say the least, a less than whole-hearted attempt to resolve complicated issues. Finding himself without leisure to make more than an interim settlement, Hastings decreed simply that the disputed rights of common pasture and pannage were to be maintained as they had been when Hales became bishop (as long before as 1459) and that this state of affairs was to be maintained until either the bishop or Wolseley, both old men, died, when a new settlement would be put in place. Wolseley mss, D(W)1781/7/1/2; 5/12/1 (printed in Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. ser. 3 (pt. 2), 91-93).

This ruling could be viewed as a victory for the bishop, in that the dispensation preceding the enclosure of 1465 was restored, but it was soon disregarded. In Michaelmas term 1483 Wolseley brought actions of trespass in the court of King’s bench asserting that on the previous 27 June, the second day of Richard III’s reign, some 100 of the bishop’s men, led by his kinsmen, John Hales of Great Haywood and Robert Hales of Colwich, and including, interestingly, Gresley’s old servant, William Sydall, had broken his close at Wolseley, thrown down a fence recently erected (described in a later petition as a remarkable 400 rods long, that is, 2,200 yards) and taking 100 cartloads of underwood. At the same time Wolseley used his privilege as a baron of the Exchequer to sue a bill in the Exchequer of pleas against a similar group of men for infringing his rights of pannage in ‘Wolseley Wood’. The defendants claimed to be acting in preservation of the common pasture rights of the bishop and John Aston, one of the leading Staffordshire gentry (who may have been Wolseley’s brother-in-law), and one likely interpretation of Wolseley’s action is that, in contravention of Hastings’s award, he had made a new enclosure and thus provoked this hostile reaction. KB27/889, rot. 22; 890, rots. 43, 47; William Salt Arch. Soc. vi (1), 151-2; E13/169, rot. 56(b)d.

Early in Henry VII’s reign Wolseley resorted to a new tactic, seeking to put the dispute in a longer context. He drew up a long schedule for presentation to the royal council of the wrongs allegedly committed against him by the bishop over a period of over 20 years. This litany of complaint begins with an alleged event in the early 1460s. Wolseley alleged Edward IV had granted him the office of rider of Cannock forest, forfeited by the bishop’s grantee, Edward Ellesmere; but that the bishop had allowed his servants to assault his deputy in the office and then granted it to his kinsman John Hales. Wolseley goes on to describe, in dramatic but standardized language, a campaign of intimidation designed to drive his tenants and servants from their tenures, including an assault (assigned no date as with most of the other alleged offences in the petition) on his father in the hall of the manor at Wolseley. No doubt this is an exaggerated account: the supposed hostility between the two men did not, for example, prevent the bishop employing our MP as a rent collector in the early 1470s. Whatever the truth, the petition is the last record of the dispute, which was, in any event, brought to an end by Bishop Hales’s death in 1490. Wolseley mss, D(W)1781/6/2/8; Rowney, ii. 441.

The dramatic events in national politics that took place at the same time as Wolseley and the bishop were busy petitioning against each other appear to have had little impact on Wolseley’s fading career, now affected more by advancing age than changing regimes. On the first day of Richard III’s reign he was confirmed in his office as an Exchequer baron, but on 24 Sept. 1484 he was replaced by John Holgrave†. CPR, 1476-85, pp. 360, 473. Curiously, in the Shrewsbury bor. accts. for 1486-7, he is described as baron of the Exchequer when, on a visit there on 6 Oct. 1486, he was entertained with wine by the authorities: Salop Archs. Shrewsbury recs., bailiffs’ accts. 3365/948. There is, however, no evidence that he regained the office of 4th baron, which Holgrave appears to have held until his death in 1487 and then remained vacant until Thomas Roche’s appointment in Dec. 1488: Ives, 494. His appointment to the array commission in the following December and his retention as a Staffordshire j.p. suggests he was not out of favour. Although he lost his place on the local bench on the accession of Henry VII, he quickly regained it and continued to serve, albeit not continuously, as a j.p. and to be appointed to occasional ad hoc commissions until his death on 25 Mar. 1504, when he must have been not far short of 80 years old. CIPM Hen. VII, ii. 840. He remained active until near the end of his life, sitting as a commr. at Stafford as late as Sept. 1502: C142/16/30.

The text of Wolseley’s inquisition post mortem, not held until the following November, is of a piece with the rest of his career, in that it reads as an assertion of rights. The jurors, no doubt simply repeating information put before them by Wolseley’s son and heir, John, detailed the rights appertaining to the lord of the manor of Wolseley, notably free warren and free fishery in the Trent within the precinct of the manor ‘without the intrusion of any other to fish there’. It also stresses the limitation of the King’s rights as lord of the forest of Cannock: ‘Wolseley Wood’ of 500 acres and 1,500 acres of pasture was said to lie outside that forest and the boundaries separating the one from the other are exhaustively set down. CFR, xxii. 805; CIPM Hen. VII, ii. 840. Regrettably, no inquisitions were held in the other shires in which Wolseley held property, since this makes it difficult to form an accurate assessment of the land acquisitions that he made during the course of his long and fitfully successful career. On the available evidence these appear to have been individually minor. Very early in his career he either bought or leased property in the legal quarter of London in the parish of St. Dunstan in the ward of Farringdon Without. It was while travelling from there to Parliament at Westminster that he was allegedly assaulted in the spring of 1450. When he made a feoffment in 1468 he still held this property, to which he had added land at Rotherhithe and Deptford (Surrey) and Dover (Kent), and at an unspecified place in Essex. These purchases were no doubt determined by his interests in London and Calais. Less easy to explain is why, in 1480, he bought property in Shrewsbury. Wolseley mss, D(W)1781/4/24; Salop RO, Shrewsbury assembly bk. 3365/67, f. 33v. These acquisitions aside, however, his others were in the near vicinity of Wolseley (and went unrecorded in his inquisition post mortem). As far as the surviving record goes, these were concentrated in the early 1480s when there appears to have been a reordering of his estate. In 1481 he sold his Gloucestershire manor of Lower Lemington to another lawyer, Thomas Lymryk†, and at about the same time he acquired a series of small parcels of land in Colwich, Chartley, Colton and other vills in the immediate or near vicinity of his ancestral home. The most interesting of these purchases had a motive rooted in the local politics of enclosure: he purchased from the royal justice, Sir Thomas Lyttleton, an annual rent of 22s. issuing from property in Colton in the tenure of Sir John Gresley. CP25(1)/79/94/55; William Salt Arch. Soc. xi. 241-2. 134.

Judging from this record of Wolseley’s career, he was an uncomfortable neighbour, as keen to protect and record his own supposed rights as he was to disregard those of others. His long dispute with Sir John Gresley and Bishop Hales reflects no credit upon him, nor does the underhand method he employed to compromise Hugh Egerton, his rival for the constableship of Newcastle-under-Lyme. In this context, it is all to easy to believe the complaint made against him in 1489 by his stepdaughter, Elizabeth, that he had denied her the annuity of two marks and the marriage portion of £40 bequeathed to her by her father. C1/98/52-54. This ruthless dedication to the furthering of his own interests serves to explain, in part, his success, but he must also have been a man of some ability. Although his initial advance owed something to the patronage of the Neville earl of Warwick, he succeeded in gradually rebuilding his career in the 1470s when he was seemingly without powerful patronage. Further, he greatly advanced his family, and as recent archaeological evidence shows was responsible for building the long-lost manor house at Wolseley, for which he sued a licence to crenellate in 1469. A. Emery, Greater Med. Houses, ii. 435. His successors built on the social and material foundations he had laid, although none of them are known to have been returned to Parliament until Sir Charles Wolseley† (d.1714), a Cromwellian and pamphleteer in the cause of religious toleration, was returned for Oxfordshire in 1653. Remarkably, the family survived at Wolseley until bankruptcy claimed them in 2008. Daily Telegraph, 3 Jan. 2008.