RADCLIFFE, Sir Geoffrey

From a cadet line of a large family of many branches, Geoffrey was the grandson of James Radcliffe of Radcliffe, an enthusiastic supporter of the Lancastrian dynasty. The Commons 1386-21, iv. 155. James’s younger sons included Geoffrey’s father, Henry, and Sir John Radcliffe, the first of the Radcliffes of Attleborough in Norfolk. While Henry is a very obscure figure, Sir John earned great renown in the French wars. According to one authority, the former fought under his more famous brother at Agincourt although it is not established that Sir John did in fact participate in that battle. Henry did, however, serve as Sir John’s lieutenant in south-west France, where the knight was seneschal of Aquitaine from 1423 until 1436. Ibid. 155-6; Hampson, 113; SC8/86/4253. Hampson erroneously suggests that Henry died at the siege of Orléans in 1428. Following the example of his father and uncle, Geoffrey also pursued a military career, through which he must have earned his knighthood. Like Henry, he served under Sir John Radcliffe in France, since he features in a list (probably compiled in 1435) of his uncle’s retainers in Gascony. Letters and Pprs. Illust. Wars of English ed. Stevenson, ii. 437-8; M.G.A. Vale, English Gascony, 98. He also served Sir John back in England, as a feoffee of those Burnell estates which his uncle claimed (largely unsuccessfully in the end) in the right of his second wife. Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. ser. 2, iii. 138, 142.

Unlike Sir John Radcliffe, Geoffrey had a landed inheritance to look forward to when embarking upon his career. Situated in Lancashire, it comprised the manor of Radcliffe, a quarter share of that of Culcheth and 5,000 acres of mainly bleak moorland, of which 4,000 acres lay in Sharples and were known as ‘The Folds’ and the other 1,000, ‘Hordern Soleyns’, were situated in Harwood. Lancs. Inqs. i (Chetham Soc. xcv), 94-95; Hampson, 113, 260. While his father was alive, however, he could not come into his own and in the meantime he settled in Suffolk, the county to which he acquired a connexion through his first marriage. No doubt he had his uncle to thank for this match, since in 1417 the Crown had assigned the wardship of the infant Margaret Morley, the only child of an East Anglian knight, to Sir John Radcliffe, a grant confirmed on extremely advantageous terms in 1419. CFR, xiv. 201, 227. The marriage between Geoffrey and Margaret was not the only connexion forged between the Radcliffes and Morleys (cousins of the Lords Morley), for Henry Radcliffe married Margaret’s widowed mother following the death of his unknown first wife, Geoffrey’s mother. CIPM, xx. 833-4; CPR, 1416-22, p. 182; The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 156; G.A. Carthew, Hundred of Launditch, i. 68; Hampson, 113. Exactly when Margaret was contracted to the considerably older Geoffrey is unrecorded although they had certainly married when she proved her age at Norwich, the city of her birth, in the late autumn of 1430. CIPM, xxiii. 593. On the following 16 Dec. the Chancery issued a writ ordering the escheator in Suffolk to admit the couple to her inheritance, a mandate promptly fulfilled on the following day. CCR, 1429-35, p. 72; SC6/1124/15. Margaret’s inheritance comprised two manors, at Framsden and at Roydon near Diss in south Norfolk. (A third manor at Morley in the latter county passed in tail-male to her uncle Robert Morley.) CIPM, xx. 833-4.

The Roydon estate made Geoffrey and Margaret neighbours of Thomas Cobham of Surrey and his wife Elizabeth, since the latter possessed interests at Diss by virtue of her previous marriage to Walter, Lord Fitzwalter (d.1431). This was far from the only association between the Radcliffes and Cobhams, since in May 1433 Geoffrey’s uncle Sir John Radcliffe obtained the custody of all the Fitzwalter estates – saving Elizabeth’s jointure rights – from the Crown, along with the wardship of Lord Fitzwalter’s heir, his daughter by Elizabeth. To ensure these valuable estates would remain in his own family, Sir John married the girl to his son and namesake. In 1435 the Cobhams brought assizes of novel disseisin against Geoffrey and several associates in defence of Elizabeth’s rights in the Fitzwalter estates. Presumably it was as a feoffee for his uncle that Geoffrey was named as a defendant in these actions although it is not clear whether these were collusive or representative of tensions between the Cobhams and Radcliffes. CP, v. 483-4; The Commons 1386-1422, iv. 158; C66/438, m. 17d. Sir Thomas Morley’s inquisitions post mortem found that Framsden was worth £20 p.a. and Roydon £10, CIPM, xx. 833-4. although the estates that Geoffrey held in Margaret’s right were valued at £54 p.a. for taxation purposes in the mid 1430s. E159/212, recorda Hil. rot. 14 (viii)d. In the late fifteenth century Framsden and Roydon were valued at £40 and £20 p.a. respectively. CIPM Hen. VII, i. 265-6. Framsden was held of the royal honour of Chester, and in July 1437 Radcliffe supplemented his wife’s holdings in Suffolk by obtaining a ten-year farm of all the issues, rents and profits pertaining to the honour in that county, for which he agreed to pay the Crown a rent of 17s. p.a. CFR, xvi. 334. Although the short-lived Margaret predeceased him, he remained in possession of her estates ‘by the courtesy’ since she was the mother of Thomas, his eldest son and heir. According to Hampson, 113, Thomas was one of his children by his 2nd wife, but this is unlikely given that Thomas was to succeed to the Morley lands.

By the summer of 1443 Radcliffe had married his second wife, another Margaret. Later that decade, she and Radcliffe applied to the Papal Curia for licence to keep a portable altar in their household, a petition which was granted by means of an indult of April 1447. CPL, x. 302. They must have required a previous dispensation from the Church to wed, since she was his first cousin, being the daughter and heir of his aunt Elizabeth (sister of Henry Radcliffe) by Sir John Radcliffe of Chadderton. Apparently a distant relative of the Radcliffes of Radcliffe, Sir John had been a comrade-in-arms with Geoffrey in Gascony. It is unlikely that Margaret brought lands of any significance to the match, for her father’s estates descended to his son and heir, Richard, and then to Richard’s three daughters. Hampson, 113; VCH Lancs. v. 117; Wars of English, ii. 437-8.

A few months after he and Margaret had acquired their papal licence in the spring of 1447, Radcliffe was among those commissioned to inquire into the status of those estates lately held by the recently deceased Sir John Clifton, one of the wealthiest gentry landowners in East Anglia. The Crown had issued the commission at the suit of Clifton’s nephew and heir at law, John Knyvet, who was challenging the validity of the will his uncle had made shortly before his death. In this will Clifton had awarded his wife Joan an interest for life in the bulk of these estates and had left Knyvet no more than a few manors in west Norfolk. To make matters worse for the Knyvet family, just days before he died Clifton had made a codicil in which he declared that he had sold the Norfolk manor of Wymondham and most of his purchased lands, along with the reversion of those holdings he had settled upon Joan, to his son-in-law Sir Andrew Ogard*. As it happened, Ogard and his supporters managed to stymie the commission with a writ of supersedeas, meaning that Radcliffe and his fellow commissioners were prevented from holding any sessions, but the dispute over the Clifton estates was to last for decades. Circumstances turned in the Knyvets’ favour in 1450 when Ogard’s powerful patron, the King’s chief minister, William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, fell from power. Joan Clifton died in the same year, meaning that the lands she had held in her widowhood should have reverted to Ogard, but the Knyvets were able to reactivate the commission of 1447. When the commissioners reconvened in the second week of November 1450, Radcliffe and John Intwood, supporters of the Knyvet cause, took it upon themselves to preside over a hearing at Intwood’s house in Diss, a venue which also lay near Radcliffe’s manor of Roydon and was deliberately chosen to hinder the attempts of Ogard’s servants to serve another supersedeas upon them. Inevitably the jury found against Ogard and the order was made for the lands to be seized for the Crown, although it appears that the Knyvets were able to enter upon at least some of them. This was not the end of the matter, for Ogard’s trustees, who included the then Speaker of the Commons, Sir William Oldhall*, helped him to complain about the conduct of the commission of inquiry. As a result, Ogard’s men, the commissioners and their clerk were called into Chancery, where they were examined on 27 Nov. During the examinations, Ogard’s servants declared that Radcliffe and Intwood had deliberately locked themselves in at Intwood’s house to avoid having to receive the supersedeas. At length, Radcliffe had opened the door of the house and asked them: ‘Felawes, what wole ye with me?’ He had then refused to accept the proffered writ which one of them had eventually placed on Intwood’s shoulder. When he himself was examined, Radcliffe acknowledged refusing to receive the writ, adding that he did not know whether it had been a supersedeas. He also claimed that the commissioners had sat openly in the hall of an inn at Scoles near Diss, and that they had held their inquisition after the attempted serving of the writ. Within three weeks of the examinations, Ogard’s trustees traversed the findings of the inquisition. In mid 1451, following further legal proceedings in the court of King’s bench, the properties were assigned to the trustees. They were licensed to convey them to Ogard, who retained them for the rest of his life. The Knyvets would renew their claims a few years after his death in 1454 but Radcliffe is not known to have played any part in the renewed dispute. A family connexion might have caused Radcliffe to lend his support to the Knyvets, since it would appear that the first wife of his father-in-law, Sir John Radcliffe of Chadderton, was none other than John Knyvet’s aunt. R. Virgoe, E. Anglian Soc. ed. Barron, Rawcliffe and Rosenthal, 25-30, 161; CPR, 1446-52, pp. 421-3; CFR, xviii. 184. It also happened that the Knyvets’ legal counsel, John Jenney*, was a retainer of John Mowbray, 3rd duke of Norfolk, but there is no evidence that Mowbray, to whom Radcliffe was also attached, played any part in the quarrel.

The connexion between Radcliffe and the duke of Norfolk dates from at least 1450. It is scarcely surprising that Sir Geoffrey should have become a retainer of the Mowbrays, given that Framsden was situated just a few miles south-west of the duke’s seat of Framlingham castle. Mowbray presided over a lawless following and Radcliffe was involved in the clashes which broke out between the Mowbray and de la Pole affinities after the downfall of William de la Pole. When (Sir) John Prysote* and other commissioners of oyer and terminer arrived in Suffolk in early 1453, the widowed duchess of Suffolk accused him and other prominent Mowbray men, including John Howard* and the ruffianly Charles Nowell†, of having raided her parks at Eye, Wingfield, Rishangles and elsewhere in October 1450. Among the enormities she laid at their door was the killing of no fewer than 600 of her deer. At the same time, several of her leading retainers took the opportunity to seek securities of the peace from the duke of Norfolk and some of his men, Radcliffe among them. Yet the duchess and her supporters were likewise enjoined to keep the peace towards Howard, suggesting that the Mowbray affinity was far from solely culpable for the disorder. KB9/118/2/17, 23, 25, 30, 35, 49, 75, 136, 145, 351. It is unclear whether the ‘Radclyff’ said in June 1455 to have been among several Mowbray retainers supporting (Sir) Philip Wentworth* in his quarrel with Sir John Fastolf was the subject of this biography or a relative from Attleborough: Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 118. It is possible that Radcliffe owed his attachment to the Mowbrays to his famous uncle, for before his death in 1441 Sir John had chosen as one of his executors Robert Lethum of Witton, a gentleman who incurred considerable notoriety as an unruly retainer of the dukes of Norfolk. As executor, Lethum fell into dispute with Henry Radcliffe, prompting Henry to petition the King and the Lords in the Parliament of 1449-50. In the petition, submitted just before the dissolution of that assembly in June 1450, he recounted his time as his late brother’s lieutenant in Aquitaine. He claimed that he and his men were still owed a considerable sum in unpaid wages for their service there and complained that Lethum had failed to pay them from the testator’s estate. Presumably it was also about this time that Henry sued Lethum in the Chancery over the same matter, by means of a bill in which he claimed that the sum owed was a very considerable 2,000 marks. E159/219, brevia Mich. rot. 18d; H.R. Castor, King, Crown and Duchy of Lancaster, 172-3; SC8/86/4253; C1/73/76.

It was to the very same Parliament that Sir Geoffrey had unsuccessfully sought election as a knight of the shire for Suffolk just over seven months earlier. When the shire court met at Ipswich on 27 Oct. 1449, no fewer than 159 electors returned John Howard and Thomas Cornwallis*, a number indicating a disputed election. While they were to take up their seats in the Commons, it was not without protest on the part of Radcliffe who afterwards complained that he should have sat alongside Howard. He did so through a lawsuit he brought against Giles St. Loe, the sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk at the time of the election. In pleadings heard in the court of common pleas in Michaelmas term 1450, he accused St. Loe of having breached the statutes of 1429 and 1445 regulating the sheriffs’ conduct of parliamentary elections. Through his attorney, John Bury, Radcliffe asserted that a majority of the electorate had selected him as Howard’s fellow MP but that the sheriff had unlawfully returned Cornwallis instead. He therefore demanded that St. Loe should pay him £100, the sum awarded by the statutes against sheriffs who made false returns, and sought damages of £200. St. Loe, likewise represented by an attorney, contradicted these claims, declaring that a majority of the 40s. freeholders attending the shire court had in fact elected Cornwallis. The parties agreed to refer the matter to a jury, but further legal process ensured that the intended trial was postponed. It had yet to take place in the autumn of 1452 when the court discharged St. Loe, because Radcliffe, for reasons now unknown, would no longer prosecute his suit. CP40/759, rot. 433.

The circumstances of this dispute are hard to fathom, and it is unclear whether it was linked to wider quarrels, whether national or local. The Parliament, called at a time of serious political crisis for the royal court, was particularly dramatic since it impeached the King’s discredited chief minister, William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk. Howard was a retainer of the duke of Norfolk, but Cornwallis was probably linked with Richard, duke of York, rather than Mowbray or de la Pole, and he is known to have quarrelled with de la Pole’s widowed duchess not long afterwards. As for St. Loe, there is no evidence that he was a de la Pole retainer, but he was firmly identified with the Lancastrian Court: an esquire of Henry VI’s hall and chamber in the early 1440s, he fled with Henry VI and his queen to Scotland after Edward IV seized the throne and he was attainted in the Parliament of 1461. Following his attainder, his manor of Merton Hall in Norfolk was granted to none other than John Howard, whose household his disinherited sons joined. Westminster Abbey muns. 12165; Virgoe, 53-54; Egerton Roll, 8779; E101/409/11; Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, iii. 307; C.F. Richmond, Paston Fam.: Fastolf’s Will, 102n; CPR, 1461-7, p. 111.

While failing to pursue the suit against St. Loe, Radcliffe did not give up hope of gaining satisfaction for the wrong he believed was done to him in 1449. Just as the common pleas dismissed St. Loe sine die, he was in the process of initiating another action, this time in the court of King’s bench, against Cornwallis. He accused the latter of having breached statute by maintaining the cause of St. Loe in the common pleas suit against him, to the damage of the King as well as himself. When the case came to pleadings in Trinity term 1454, Radcliffe alleged that on 20 Aug. 1452 Cornwallis had illegally maintained St. Loe at Wickham Market, Suffolk, where the trial of the commons pleas suit was to have taken place. Cornwallis pleaded that there was no case to answer because St. Loe had retained him for his legal counsel, and that he had quite legitimately shown members of the jury panel certain evidences in support of his client. In response, Radcliffe alleged that Cornwallis lacked the qualifications to act on St. Loe’s behalf, meaning that the outcome of the suit now hinged upon whether Cornwallis was, as he claimed, ‘homo in lege temporali Anglie eruditus’. The matter was referred to a jury but there is no record that a trial took place. KB27/766, rot. 47d; 770, rot. 38d; 771, rot. 63; 773, rot. 47d; 775, rot. 17d; 786, rot. 82.

There is little evidence of Radcliffe’s activities after the mid 1450s although he was appointed to an ad hoc commission in September 1457 and received a royal pardon, in which he was referred to as ‘late of Framlingham castle’, in the following February. C67/42, m. 19. In November 1459 he attested the return of Suffolk’s knights of the shire to the notorious Coventry Parliament, an assembly in which his patron, the duke of Norfolk, swore an oath of loyalty to Henry VI. As his attendance at the Parliament indicates, the duke, who remained in the political background during the later 1450s, had yet to commit himself to the Yorkist cause, in spite of having allied himself with the duke of York earlier in the decade. In the summer of 1460, however, Mowbray finally threw in his lot with the Yorkists, and he fought for Edward IV at Towton. Whether the by now elderly Radcliffe accompanied his lord to this or any other civil-war battle is open to question. Less than two months after Edward IV took the throne, the new government issued a commission for the arrest of his sons John and Thomas Radcliffe and two other men. Three relatives, Roger, William and James Radcliffe, were among those placed on the commission but it is not known whether their appointment indicates a family rift. Whatever the case, it is unlikely that the commission had any political connotations since Thomas Radcliffe is said to have been a strong supporter of the Yorkist cause. Castor, 185; Oxf. DNB, ‘Mowbray, John (VI)’; CPR, 1461-7, p. 30; Hampson, 114.

If still alive at the accession of Edward IV, Radcliffe cannot have lived for very much longer. It was perhaps as early as 1465 that his widow found another husband in Robert Fitzsymond, a landowner with estates in several counties in East Anglia and southern England. Fitzsymond died in August 1473, C140/45/33. but it is not clear whether Margaret was still alive at that date. During their marriage, Margaret and Fitzsymond sued Edward Bybby in the Chancery over a messuage and 40 acres of land in Framsden. They claimed that she and Radcliffe had conveyed this holding to Bybby to hold to their use, a trust Bybby was now betraying by refusing to re-convey it to her and Fitzsymond. Presumably the property in question comprised part of her jointure from her previous marriage. C1/31/362 (a bill dating from the period 5 Edw. IV-49 Hen. VI). Radcliffe’s heir was his son Thomas, who survived until 1488. In the brief will he made on his deathbed, Thomas asked to be buried in Framsden parish church, perhaps also the last resting place of his father. His own heir was the eldest of his three sons, another Geoffrey Radcliffe. Nine years old in 1488, this younger Geoffrey died, still a minor, in 1505. He was the last of the male line of the Radcliffes of Framsden, for his heirs were his three daughters, all still children at this date. PCC 22 Milles (PROB11/8, f. 175); CIPM Hen. VII, i. 265-6; iii. 848.