The Suttons were one of the most ancient of Nottinghamshire families, descended from the Lexingtons and established, from the mid thirteenth century, at Averham in the valley of the River Trent.
In 1415 Henry Sutton undertook to serve in France in the retinue of the local magnate, John, Lord Roos, and he did not long survive the campaign. At his death he was still a relatively young man who had but recently married.
This probable link with the Cursons may explain why early in his adult career Richard was drawn into the service of Ralph, Lord Cromwell, whose main Nottinghamshire estates lay near Averham. His stepfather’s elder brother, John Curson*, was closely associated with Cromwell, and he may have provided the young Richard with an introduction. The connexion was formed by February 1433, when Sutton offered surety for Cromwell in a royal grant of the keeping of the Nottinghamshire manors of Mansfield and Linby, and there can be little doubt that Cromwell, as the recently-appointed treasurer, was responsible for his nomination as escheator in the following November. Shortly afterwards, on 12 June 1434, he offered mainprise for two of that lord’s servants, including John Manchester*, when they were granted the keeping of the town of Clipstone, previously granted to Cromwell himself.
None the less, although his career started promisingly, Sutton never attained a prominent place in the affairs of his native county. He was not appointed to the bench until he was an old man and he was named to only one ad hoc commission of local government. This was a poor record for one who, although not wealthy enough to belong to the Nottinghamshire elite, certainly counted among the richer men of the county’s second rank. In the subsidy returns of 1450-1 he was assessed at the respectable income of £47 p.a., and he was distrained to take up knighthood on three occasions.
Personal choice is one explanation for Sutton’s modest role in public life; but it may, alternatively or additionally, have been a product of exclusion. The main distinguishing feature of his career was his near-continual involvement in disputes with his neighbours arising largely from attempts to make good some remote property claims. The first sign of what was to be a recurring pattern dates from the late 1430s, when he unsuccessfully sued the abbot of Welbeck for the advowson of the church of Kelham, the next parish to Averham. He claimed both the manor and advowson as the heir to one Henry Toke, who had presented in the reign of Edward III, and his attempts to realize the claim to the manor were to lead him into difficulties in the 1460s.
One can only speculate as to why Sutton chose to pursue this and other claims. It may be that, in financial difficulty, he looked to the realization of these claims as a solution. The same need to supplement strained financial resources might also explain his dabbling in the wool trade, although, characteristically, this led him into further dispute. In 1453, for example, he purchased 25 sacks of wool from the prominent Nottingham wool merchant, John Ilkeston, but then sued him in King’s bench on the grounds that the wool was defective.
The difficulties of having Sutton as a neighbour are made even clearer in his dispute with Robert Halaye, prior of Thurgarton. Judging from the award returned between the parties the point at issue was a very minor one, namely two selions of land in the tenure of Sutton’s man, John Arnolde, and yet Sutton chose to pursue the matter with little restraint. The award implies that he had launched a campaign of intimidation against the priory, for it required him to find surety, on behalf of himself, his sons, his sons-in-law and his servants, that they would procure no harm to the priory ‘per incendia’ of its property nor by extortion, oppression or by any other illegitimate means. Other evidence shows that one of these ‘illegitimate’ means had been to secure false indictments of felony against the prior and several of his servants. By 12 July 1456 they were languishing in Nottingham gaol when a special commission was issued for their deliverance. Indeed, so serious were Sutton’s offences that they attracted the attention of the Crown in another way: on 12 Mar. 1457 he was obliged to enter into a bond in £100 for his appearance, two months later, before the royal council. The result of this hearing was the referral of the dispute to the arbitration of William Booth, archbishop of York. On 5 July, at Southwell, the archbishop adjudged that Sutton should purge his ‘great’ offences by paying 20 marks to the prior.
While Sutton was making life difficult for a neighbouring priory, he advanced his claim to the manor of Kelham. Here he had one of his few successes as a litigant, although it was to prove a phyrric victory. In July 1456, before the Nottinghamshire assize justices, he recovered seisin of the manor with costs and damages of £20 against John Pilkington and Elizabeth, his wife. Unfortunately for him, however, the Pilkingtons, who did not appear to contest the assize, had already conveyed the manor to powerful feoffees, headed by Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, and the earl’s brother, Sir John Neville. These feoffees showed no willingness to surrender title, initiating actions against him for close-breaking and depasturing.
Yet, undaunted, Sutton then embarked on a more ambitious claim. He sought to take advantage of the death, in 1458, of the famous soldier, Sir Thomas Rempston†, one of the county’s leading figures, to win a valuable estate, centred on the manor of Bingham, a few miles to the south of Averham. This estate had a complex recent history. The knightly family of Bingham had failed in its main line at about the time that Richard II was dethroned and the property had been treated as escheat. By a final concord, to which the deposed King was party (as a pure fiction), it was settled in fee on Sir Thomas’s father, another Sir Thomas†, clearly as his reward for supporting Henry IV. The Rempstons had enjoyed the property undisturbed, but when the second Sir Thomas died leaving three daughters as his coheiresses Sutton claimed the property under the terms of another fine levied as long before as 1327. By this conveyance the manors of Bingham and Clipston on the Wolds, together with the advowson of Ruddington, 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. He first tested the claim in Easter term 1459 by claiming the advowson of Ruddington against John, prior of Durham. This ended in failure: in Trinity term of the following year the prior argued that Sutton, if he was heir under the fine, had a title barred by the collateral warranty raised by a deed of 1398, by which a clerk, Edmund Bingham, grandson of Sir Richard Bingham, had granted and warranted the advowson to the priory.
This customary failure notwithstanding, Sutton may have seen the disturbed political conditions of the late 1450s and early 1460s as a new opportunity to forward his claims. He had connexions, albeit not particularly close ones, with partisans of both Lancaster and York. On one hand, his brother-in-law, Edmund Fitzwilliam, was a former household servant of the duke of York’s stepmother, Maud, countess of Cambridge; on the other hand, his son Robert’s wife was a sister of (Sir) John Stanley II*, knighted fighting for Lancaster at the battle of Blore Heath. His sympathies may have been with his Fitzwilliam kin. This, at least, is consistent with his decision to stand for election for Nottinghamshire to the Parliament summoned by the Yorkists in the wake of their victory at the battle of Northampton. Unfortunately, however, for his prospects of a successful return, there were three other candidates – Sir Robert Strelley*, John Stanhope* and William Babington* – all drawn from the ranks of the county’s gentry elite. Even worse, Strelley and Stanhope were standing jointly, and Stanhope could call on the support of the numerous small freeholders of the large wapentake of Bassetlaw. As a result, when the poll was held at Nottingham on 6 Oct. 1460, it was headed comfortably by these two candidates, Strelley with 160 and Stanhope with 150 votes. Sutton came third with a comparatively modest 56.
Nothing more is known of Sutton’s part in the great events of 1459-61. Since he did not benefit from the change of régime, one must suppose that his support for York was no more than passive. After Edward IV’s accession he continued his increasingly futile attempts to secure what he considered to be his own. With regard to the manor of Kelham, he received a setback, probably a decisive one, at the Nottinghamshire assizes in July 1462: a jury found that he had disseised the earl of Warwick and the other Pilkington feoffees, awarding costs and damages of as much as £100 against him. A few months earlier he had conceded defeat in his dispute with the prior of Durham, quitclaiming his right to the disputed advowson.
As this action was making its slow way through the court of common pleas, Sutton resumed his long discontinued and desultory administrative career. In 1463 he was one of those entrusted with the unpopular task of assessing a royal subsidy, an appointment he shared with several who laboured under the political taint of Lancastrianism. Three years later, however, the Crown surprisingly showed itself ready to entrust him with a more honourable and popular duty. He was named to the county bench late in 1466.
Sutton did not, however, live long enough either to see a jury pronounce on this question or to revel in his new-found status as a j.p. He died on 25 July 1468. In view of his advanced age it is curious he left no will. On 13 Oct. administration of his goods was committed to William Cantrell of Averham, presumably one of his servants. He seems, however, to have divested himself of his estates, perhaps as a precaution against creditors. A jury, sitting on 30 Oct. only six days after the issue of the relevant writ of diem clausit extremum, returned that he held no lands.