WELFORD, John

Welford was the most prominent man to represent Hereford during Henry VI’s reign, although his prominence largely post-dates his recorded parliamentary career. From a family settled in Worcester, he was a lawyer who, by committing himself to the cause of York in the 1450s, rose to a place in local affairs that he would not otherwise have obtained. He first appears in the records in 1432 when he leased a messuage in Worcester from his stepfather, Richard Veyly, at 12d. p.a. for 12 years.3 KB27/728, rot. 79. By 1441 he had acquired another stepfa. in Henry Comyn, bailiff of Worcester in the early 1440s. Later, in November 1436, when, described as ‘of Worcester’, he appeared personally in the Exchequer of pleas to accuse Robert Nelme* of trading in wine and oil worth as much as 145 marks, when barred by statute from doing so as keeper of the town’s assize.4 E13/140, rot. 12. Perhaps pursuing such penal actions, where the party who brought the alleged offence to the Crown’s attention was rewarded with part of any fine or forfeiture (in this case with a third of the value of the goods illegally traded), was a means by which a young lawyer like Welford added to his income. However this may be, it is clear that Welford prospered in this early obscure part of his career. By the autumn of 1441 he was established enough to rent something more substantial than a borough tenement. He leased from one of his clients, Richard Walwyn of Lugwardine, the manor of Broadfield in the parish of Bodenham, about six miles north of Hereford, at an annual rent of £7 6s., the lease to expire with Walwyn’s death.5 Herefs. RO, Walwyn mss, G37/II/14. In 1442 he was attorney for Walwyn in the ct. of c.p.: CP40/725, rot. 25. In the same year he added to his resources in another way, by marriage. His wife, from Hereford, may have been both heiress and widow. In the late 1450s he complained to the chancellor that William Monnington, a feoffee in property in Hereford to his wife’s use, had refused to convey to her nominees, strongly implying that her interest in that property was more than simply for life. Its extent is uncertain; it is known only that Welford was assessed on an income of £5 p.a. in Hereford in 1451.6 CP40/723, rot. 118d; 730, rot. 190; C1/26/138; E179/117/64.

His wife’s lands prompted Welford to transfer his interests from Worcester to Hereford, where he quickly established himself among the leading citizens. On 24 Jan. 1447 the city electors returned him to the Parliament originally summoned to meet at Cambridge but then re-summoned to Bury St. Edmunds. The unusual venue, together with the divisive nature of the Parliament’s likely business as the royal court moved against Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, may have been a deterrent to candidature. Welford was perhaps elected in absentia: the Hilary law term had begun the day before the election, and he is known to have personally pursued at least one action during the term.7 C219/15/4; CP40/744, rot. 251. None the less, the fact he was re-elected to the next Parliament suggests that he was not an unwilling MP. Interestingly, on 15 June 1449, the day before the Commons reassembled at Winchester for their final session, he entered into an indenture with Walwyn, which reduced the annual rent he paid for the manor of Broadfield to £6. If he concluded this agreement in person, he must have been absent from the Commons for at least part of this session.8 C219/15/7; Walwyn mss, G37/II/15.

Welford’s readiness to accept election as mayor of Hereford in the following October implies that his concern for city affairs now took precedence over his practice as an attorney in the Westminster courts. His first term in the office, however, came at a very difficult time. The politics of the city was becoming factionalized as the dominance of the leading burgesses, of whom he was one, came to be actively resisted by lesser men, who found a leader in John Weobley*. This had already led to a disturbance at the mayoral election of the previous year, October 1448, when our MP had been among the electors threatened by Weobley, and tension heightened during Welford’s mayoralty. On 8 Mar. 1450 he arrested one of Weobley’s adherents, Philip Corveser, only to have the prisoner violently freed from his custody. This, according to an indictment before commissioners of oyer and terminer in August 1452, was the prelude to a major disturbance as Weobley called upon the marginalized Welsh in the city to rise up against the mayor and citizens. Further problems, according to the same indictment, arose on the following 19 Oct., when, as the citizens assembled in the Tolsey to elect Welford’s successor as mayor, a gang of 200 broke in and threatened them with death unless they filled the office with a man of their choosing. If this intervention did occur, it did not prevent the election of one of the leading citizens, John Fuster, to the mayoralty, but Weobley’s faction enjoyed better success at the parliamentary election held only four days later. The election indenture gives no hint of irregularity (the attestors were leading citizens, including Welford), and yet Weobley was one of those returned.9 KB9/34/1/5; C219/16/1; R.L. Storey, End of House of Lancaster, 229; A. Herbert, ‘Herefs., 1413-61’, in Patronage, Crown and Provinces ed. Griffiths, 109-11.

Much about this episode in Hereford’s politics is obscure, not least because knowledge of it depends exclusively upon indictments taken after the duke of York’s rising in 1452. These trace a link between the disaffected in the city and the strong Yorkist faction among the county gentry, headed by (Sir) Walter Devereux I*, by naming Weobley and other Hereford tradesmen as illegally receiving livery from Devereux in January 1452. What is known of Welford’s later career suggests that he too was a supporter of Devereux, and there is some evidence that, despite his clashes with Weobley during his mayoralty, the two men were not on bad terms. Other evidence shows that Weobley was not the outcast the indictments portray him, and in the same month as Devereux allegedly distributed livery he was named as an arbiter in a dispute between our MP and a local brasier.10 KB27/787, rot. 75. In any event, whatever the tensions in the city’s politics, they quickly abated.

Welford was once again elected to Parliament on 2 Mar. 1453. On 8 Apr. 1454, during the last session of this long Parliament, he joined Walter Hood* in offering surety for a lease by the Crown to two of the county’s gentry, Thomas Parker and John Dumbulton.11 C219/16/2; CPR, 1452-61, p. 152. Later he had considerable difficulty in securing the wages due to him, probably because of the unusual length of the assembly. As late as February 1457 he was suing out writs ordering John Chippenham, who had been the city’s mayor at the end of the Parliament, to make payment, and in the following Michaelmas he took advantage of Chippenham’s imprisonment in the Marshalsea to sue him by bill in King’s bench for the £16 10s. owed. He later secured a judgement in his favour, but it is probable that he was never paid.12 Parliamentarians at Law ed. Kleineke, 278-85.

In the meantime Welford’s career as a local lawyer advanced, culminating in June 1458, when a new commission of the peace was issued for Herefordshire with the sole purpose of adding him to the quorum.13 CPR, 1452-61, pp. 666-7. More importantly, however, for the course of his future career, he became identified with the Herefordshire Yorkists. The first evidence of this connexion dates from Easter term 1457 when he stood mainprise for William Mayle of Weobley, a confederate of Devereux. Thereafter he quickly became closely identified with that cause, and it may be that this adherence to York was the context of a quickly-abandoned appeal sued in Hilary term 1459. Alice, the widow of one David Beelte, claimed that Welford, described as ‘of Broadfield, gentleman’, and a local esquire, Roland Lenthall of Hampton (near Leominster), had been accessories to the murder of her husband.14 KB27/791, rots. 18, 19; 792, rot. 5d. However this may be, on 13 Aug. 1460, when the Yorkists were in control after their victory at the battle of Northampton, Welford was appointed to a commission charged with the arrest of four Herefordshire Lancastrians, including the former mayor who had failed to pay him his parliamentary wages. In these circumstances it is not surprising that he should have been elected to represent Hereford in the Yorkist Parliament of October that year.15 KB27/784, rex rot. 6; CPR, 1452-61, p. 612; C219/16/6.

It is not known whether Welford played any active part in the campaigns of 1459-61, but the trust placed in him by the new government is exemplified by his striking pricking as sheriff of Herefordshire on 15 July 1461, an office to which his local standing hardly qualified him, and his nomination, three months later, to three important commissions in South Wales and Herefordshire.16 CPR, 1461-7, pp. 38, 65, 98. His Yorkist sympathies were further expressed by his involvement in the foundation of a chantry in the parish church of Lugwardine. He and his wife, Isabel, were named on the bede roll alongside leading local Yorkists, Walter Devereux II*, Lord Ferrers, and Thomas Brydges*.17 CFR, xx. 34-5; CPR, 1461-7, p. 151; C143/453/1.

Yet, although there can be no doubt that Welford was advanced by the change of monarch, he did not benefit directly from royal patronage, even though he continued to be appointed to commissions of gaol delivery and continued his service on the quorum of the Herefordshire bench, from which he was briefly removed during Henry VI’s restoration. Little is known of his career in the 1460s, although it is a reasonable speculation that he sat for Hereford in one or both of the Parliaments of 1461 or 1463, for which returns are lost. In the early 1470s, for reasons that are unclear, Welford was more prominent. Despite his advancing years – he must have been about 60 years old in 1470 – he continued to involve himself in Hereford affairs, serving a second term as mayor, was appointed to several ad hoc commissions, most notably the important oyer and terminer in South Wales in the wake of Edward IV’s restoration, and was briefly added to the quorum of the Gloucestershire bench. He also benefited from a lease from the Crown, albeit a very minor one – on 13 Mar. 1472 he rented a parcel of a ditch next to the wall of Hereford castle at an annual rent of 12d. – and it is a further measure of his status that he should have been named as high as third among the attestors to the Herefordshire parliamentary election held on 27 Dec. 1477. 18 CPR, 1467-77, p. 289; CFR, xxi. no. 114; C219/17/3. A Hereford yeomen, John Clement, offered surety for him in the grant of the ditch, and yet, oddly, in Jan. 1473 this yeoman was indicted, before Welford himself, sitting in the guildhall as mayor and j.p., for the felonious theft of 40s. from our MP in Mar. 1471: KB27/874, rex rot. 4d. It is also worth observing that, in the 1470s, he was more active as a litigant than he had previously been, probably because his landed resources were now greater. He brought several actions for close-breaking at Broadfield and Bodenham, and, in Easter term 1474 alone, he had actions for debt totalling £32 against five men, including Philip Corveser, whom he had arrested long before.19 CP40/850, rot. 275d, 276d; 858, rot. 90; 862, rot. 267; KB27/874, rots. 16, 19; 875, rot. 41, 41d. More interestingly, in May 1472 he brought a bill against several clerks, headed by Richard Rudhale, claiming damages of £40 against them for assaulting him at Westminster a month before.20 KB27/843, rot. 31.

Welford was too old for this Indian summer of his career to last very long. His removal from the Herefordshire bench in 1476 was the prelude to retirement, although he was named to two gaol commissions as late as 1489 when he must have been about 80 years of age. He did not long survive this last appointment, making his will on 7 Mar. 1490 and dying a few days later. Describing himself as of the parish of St. Owen, he wanted to be buried in Hereford cathedral in the aisle of the Blessed Virgin ‘de pitte’ next to his first wife, Isabel. The will reveals much about his family. He named, among those for whom a priest was to pray for two years, his parents, wives and brother, and, less predictably, his two stepfathers, Richard Veyly and Henry Comyn, and he made a bequest to his elderly sister, Alice, who was to have two crofts in Hereford should his son and heir, Richard, die without issue. Despite his great age, this son and heir appears to have been a minor. One can only suppose that his second wife, whom he had married by 1477, was much his junior, even though it is clear from the will that she did not survive him. He instructed his executors to provide for the young heir first ‘ad scolas’ at Oxford and then ‘ad London ad curiam’, presumably intending to provide him with a legal education like his own. The heir was to have nearly all his property in Worcestershire and Herefordshire (not specified in detail), provided that he married by ‘consilium amicorum suorum’. Welford’s plate, however, was to be divided between the heir and a family servant. The generosity to this servant is a curious feature: aside from a share of the plate, he was to have a messuage in St. Thomas’s Street and the bed in which Welford slept. It is a reasonable speculation that the servant was the MP’s bastard son, particularly as he too was named John. The executors charged with implementing these bequests included the heir, despite his youth, but, more significantly, also Sir John Lingen and Ralph Lingen. They were to be rewarded, rather ungenerously, with 20s. each for their labour.21 PCC 38 Milles (PROB11/8, ff. 303v-304).

One curious episode throws an unflattering light on Welford’s character. On 18 Nov. 1451 a brasier of Hereford, Henry Man, had complained before the barons of the Exchequer that he, as mayor of Hereford in 1449-50, had fabricated process and judgement against him in the city’s piepowder court. Man was one of Hereford’s more substantial men – he is almost certainly to be identified with Henry Brasier, assessed in the city with an income of £5 p.a. in 1451 – and his temerity in bringing this action provoked Welford’s tenacious hostility. After a failed attempt at arbitration early in 1452, he would not let the matter rest. In the same year he brought an action in King’s bench against Richard Green, mayor of Hereford in 1447-8, for maintaining Brasier’s plea, and much later in 1465 he accused John Gloucester II*, an Exchequer official at the time of Brasier’s action, of the same offence.22 E13/145A, rot. 16; KB27/766, rot. 37d; 817, rot. 100; CP40/823, rot. 330. Gloucester was Brasier’s attorney, and Welford, in his allegation that Gloucester had paid 40d. of his own money to have the plea enrolled, was cynically attempting to portray as maintenance the normal disbursement any attorney might make on the part of a client. Between these two actions of maintenance he pursued Brasier for debt of £20 on a bond of 1452, had him condemned for debt and damages, outlawed and then imprisoned at Hereford, where he died in 1467.23 CP40/784, rot. 63d; 789, rot. 6; KB27/862, rex. rot. 7.