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I. Northamptonshire

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 October 2009

Extract

Pyel's first acquisitions in his native county took place in 1348. It was in this year that his father, John senior, died, and left to his son a plot of land in Irthlingborough. The details of this and of other purchases in the village were apparently recorded elsewhere, possibly in another register, and so, unfortunately, the cartulary gives no further account of them. In the same year John Pyel junior also began making small purchases in the neighbouring parishes. He bought some nine acres of arable land, meadow, a dovecote and some land held in dower in Little Addington, a settlement lying barely two miles north and east of Irthlingborough. These he increased in desultory fashion over the next few years, as opportunity arose, adding 2½ virgates in 1351, 7½ acres in 1352 and a messuage with a further virgate of land in 1354. He also bought small plots of land in Great Addington and, a little further afield, in the hamlets of Slipton and Twywell. Yet although he continued to buy land in the Addingtons and became a respected patron of Little Addington church, he never acquired the manor itself, content to remain a substantial landholder and rentier. Pyel's piecemeal acquisitions here, however, contrast with his principal purchase of 1348, the manor of Cransley.

Type
Landed Estates
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1993

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References

1 Pro3.

2 P104–107. Pyel was also augmenting his holdings in Irthlingborough at this time (P108–110).

3 Barron, O., ed., Northamptonshire Families (London, 1906), 319Google Scholar. There is some confusion concerning the date of Wake's death. The queen granted Giles Beauchamp the office of falconer which had been held by Thomas Wake, ‘deceased’, in March 1346 (CPR 1345–8, 60Google Scholar). In April 1346 Sir Thomas was given leave not to go north, because he was too ill to move, a condition perhaps consistent with his being dead (ibid., 71), but on 7 July he was recorded in the French Rolls as being ready to embark for France in the service of Robert Ferrars (Wrottesley, G., Crécy and Calais (London, 1898), 114Google Scholar). In October 1346 it was again asserted that he was dead when Robert Seymour was appointed keeper of the forest of ‘Whitlewode’, a post formerly held by Wake.

4 P81–3.

5 P84, 87–8.

6 Ziegler, P., The Black Death (London, 1969), 174–80.Google Scholar

7 Bridbury, A.R., ‘The Black Death’, Econ HR, and Ser., xxiv (1973), 578Google Scholar; Postan, M.M., ‘The Costs of the Hundred Years' War’, Past and Present, no. 27 (1964), 42–4.Google Scholar

8 Ibid., 38.

9 CLRO Recognizance Rolls, 10, f. 3r.

10 P85; Catalogue of Ancient Deeds, 6 vols., (London, 18901915), iii, C3417Google Scholar, from Sir Walter Dalderby, lord of Loddington, Northants.

11 P131–3.

12 VCH Northants iii, 164.Google Scholar

13 PRO Chancery Ancient Deeds C46/10040.

14 P93.

15 P180–1. Keteringge's son later released his rights in the property to Pyel in exchange for tenements in Northampton (ibid., 119, 17 February 1367).

16 P92.

17 A copy of the rental for 1358 of their joint holdings in the county is contained in the cartulary (P247).

18 PRO Feet of Fines CP25(1) 176/68 no. 169; P111–2.

19 VCH Northampton iii, 209.Google Scholar

20 P186.

21 See above, 1 (i).

22 P122, 124. The Woodford lordship was divided between de Boys, Thomas Bosoun and John de la Hay, and the advowson seems to have been shared on a rotational basis. See VCH Northants iii 256–7.Google Scholar

23 P213–4; CCR 1354–60, 659Google Scholar. A household account of Thomas Bosoun survives, recently redated by Woolgar, Christopher (Household Accounts from Medieval England, ii (Oxford, 1993), 695)Google Scholar to 1348, which gives an interesting glimpse of the expenditure and life-style of a minor country landowner of this period. Domestic consumption was remarkably high, suggesting a substantial household to be supported. Sir Thomas was also fond of travelling, making journeys to Northampton for the jousting, to London, to visit his mother-in-law in Bedfordshire, and to Windsor, all within the space of eight weeks. It is hardly surprising that economic conditions after the Black Death made it difficult to sustain such a standard of living without recourse to credit. See Fowler, G.H.A Household Expense Account, 1328’, EHR lv (1940), 630–4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24 P177–8.

25 P68.

26 la quarte partie del moite del eglise de Wodeford.

27 P185.

28 P147, 149, 151, 198–202.

29 P219–20.

30 P248–52.

31 Harvey, Barbara, Westminster Abbey and its Estates, 27n.Google Scholar

32 P45.

33 VCH Northants. iii, 237.Google Scholar

34 Return of the Members of Parliament, part 1(i) (London 1878, reprinted Munich, 1980).Google Scholar

35 P49.

36 CIPM, x, no. 369.

37 P93, 95.

38 For further discussion on Pyel's place in Northamptonshire society, see O'Connor, , ‘Fraunceys and Pyel: perceptions of status’.Google Scholar

39 See above, 1 (ii).

40 P49–50.

41 P157–9.

42 P45.

43 P53, 74–6.

44 CP25(1) 178/85 no. 696; P219, 154–6.

45 P114–6. Launshull, the son of a wealthy burgess of the town who had sat as MP for the borough in 1324 and 1330, had inherited his father's Northampton properties in 1346 (P116).

46 P119.

47 P143–4.

48 McFarlane, K.B., ‘The Investment of Sir John Fastolf's Profits of War’ in England in the Fifteenth Century, (London, 1981), 178–83.Google Scholar

49 Ibid., 192–5.

50 Ibid., 191.

51 On the distinction between peasant holdings, which decreased in value after the Black Death, and manorial land which remained in demand see Carpenter, C., ‘The Fifteenth-Century English Gentry and their Estates’ in Jones, M., ed., Gentry and Lesser Nobility in Late Medieval Europe (Gloucester, 1986), 38Google Scholar, and Raban, S., Mortmain Legislation and the English Church 1279–1500 (Cambridge, 1982), 179.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

52 Thrupp, , Merchant Class, 263–5.Google Scholar

53 Raban, Sandra, ‘The Land Market and the Aristocracy in the Thirteenth Century’, in Greenway, D.E., Holdsworth, C. and Sayers, J., eds., Tradition and Change: Essays in Honour of Marjorie Chibnall (Cambridge, 1985), 260.Google Scholar

54 Below, 2 (ii).

55 1 (ii) above.

56 P247.

57 As in the case of the exchange of land with John de Keteringge; see above.

58 P63–4.