that this triumph stood William Plumpton in good stead. Within two years his feudal superior, the young Harry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, had put him in charge of all the Percy estates and castles in Yorkshire. The crown had rewarded him with a gift of twenty mature oak trees, felled and trimmed, delivered to Plumpton Hall. He was now steward of the castle at Knaresborough and a Justice of the Peace, and was to become Sheriff or chief law officer of Yorkshire and a few years later of both Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, each appointment for a separate year. The violence at Brafferton was a mark of Plumpton’s willingness to impose his authority, even if it was at the cost of murdering gentleman and yeoman prisoners. That entrepreneurial virility, in the unravelling word of mid-fifteenth-century England, was the most valuable quality a man could have.15
The Plumptons were loyal followers and tenants of the Percy Earls of Northumberland. They had even imitated the Percy coat of arms (yellow lozenges on a blue background), merely differencing it, as the heralds said, with five red scallop shells. Visually and heraldically the Plumptons bound themselves to their feudal overlords. They were gentry; they had no claim on nobility, but were part of the same knightly world inhabited by the truly great.
But as gentry they were heavily involved in the dirty details of local government. They had held and ruled the manor at Plumpton since the twelfth century, and others higher in the Pennines, including the beautiful limestone woods and meadows at Grassington in Upper Wharfedale, and the Airedale manors of Steeton and Idle. William’s father had married an heiress who brought still more and richer lands in Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and Staffordshire. Like many of the medieval gentry families, the Plumptons had their place, their centre, but were attached to others across the country. They were lords in their own country but tied to their feudal superiors. They could be summoned at will by the earls or by the King. They travelled, as Justices of the Peace, and as Sheriffs of all the counties in which they held their lands and as Members of Parliament in Westminster. They were local grandees but with a national perspective. They pursued without hesitation their inferiors. And they were fuelled by ambition, a desire not only to preserve the name of Plumpton but to enhance it and enlarge it, to insulate it from the shocks of mortality and the failure to breed.16
The Brafferton affray was symptomatic of this gentry life: it borrowed from the world of martial glory; it asserted lay and royal authority in the face of the church; it required competence in command; it played fast and loose with legal niceties; it relied on a sense of local loyalty; and it did not hesitate to do dreadful deeds. It may also have looked at the time like the beginning of Plumpton’s ascent to greatness.
From the 1440s onwards William’s public career could not have been clearer. He stayed loyal to the Northumberlands and to the Lancastrian crown which he and his father had both served with such honour in France. He acquired local office and with it influence and riches. And at least to begin with, his policy for his family and its name followed the same well-defined path. He had been married when he was twelve in 1416 to a local gentry girl, Elizabeth Stapleton, and on his return from the French wars in 1430, a son, Robert, had been conceived, born the following year. A younger brother, William, was born four years later. With this male inheritance, the future of the Plumptons seemed secure and Sir William took a mistress to whom a further two sons were born. So powerful was the patriarchal mandate in this class that they too were called William and Robert.17
This phenomenon, which was common to the gentry throughout the centuries, was especially marked in the Plumptons: William Plumpton’s father was called Robert, his grandfather William, his younger brother Robert and his eldest son William, his younger son Robert, his elder bastard son William, his younger bastard son Robert, yet another son Robert – of whom much more below – and his grandson William. It is as if these people’s genes did not belong to them. They were no more individualized than pieces on a chess board, all Plumptons but there to play a role. In an age both obsessed with the transmission of value from one generation to the next and struggling with the erosion of knightly values, each successive Robert and William must have felt that burden more acutely than the last.
Elizabeth Stapleton, the boys’ mother, died in the early 1440s and in 1446 Sir William embarked on elevating the prospects of the next generation. His eldest son, Robert, now fifteen, was married to Elizabeth, the six-year-old daughter of a great Yorkshire and Westmorland magnate, Lord Clifford. They were ‘wedded at the chappell within the castell at Skypton’.18 The Cliffords’ castle remains complete, a muscled, stony northern fortress at the head of Skipton market, but the chapel in which these children were married is now a bruised and broken wreck, the mouldings on its roof timbers still there but with later windows and doors crudely knocked through its walls. In the 1440s, it was glorious, a family shrine to northern warlords. Here, a Clifford retainer ‘John Garthe bare [Elizabeth Clifford] in his armes to the said chappell’, where her young Plumpton husband was standing waiting for her. It is the most poignant image in this story: a small girl carried into her marriage and her destiny, no choice, little understanding, the men of the cloth, a blessing, a party, smiles, drinks, toasts in the great hall of the castle, the stranger of a boy, a young man, her husband, smiling down at her. It was agreed, as usual, that they were not to ‘ligg togedder till she came to the age of xvi yeres’.19
Sir William Plumpton settled wonderful lands on the pair: manors and estates in Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, including among many others Edensor, where Chatsworth now stands. For the privilege, he also paid Lord Clifford a fee of £40, two-thirds of a year’s income from his manor at Plumpton.20 For William, this was an elevation: the knight’s dream of transition to the nobility was made more likely by such an alliance. The descendants of young Robert and Elizabeth might at least have the money to support the status and dignity of a barony. For old Lord Clifford, his daughter’s marriage to such a boy was not only profitable but politically useful. The marriage of a peer’s daughter to a knight’s son required less of a dowry than would be asked for by a peer, as the increase in status made up for the lack of cash. And Plumpton, with his undoubted vigour, and a connection which Clifford valued with the Lancastrian Earls of Northumberland and the Percy family, was a form of mutual insurance, an element in the power grouping set against the other great northern family, the Yorkist Nevilles, with their power base in the north-west, hated by the Cliffords and with whom the Percys were on the point of a long and brutal feud. Political, martial, personal, dynastic, financial, status conscious, courtly, handsome and splendid: the Clifford marriage can only have warmed Sir William Plumpton’s heart.
The bridegroom was dead within three years, aged eighteen, from an unknown illness, and the marriage of course was unconsummated. But too much was riding on the alliance with the Cliffords for the boy’s death to alter the arrangements. The young Elizabeth Clifford, now aged twelve, was married again in 1453 to Robert’s younger brother, William Plumpton, now aged seventeen, the same terms applying. That is how it had to be: girls did not walk to their weddings; boys stepped up when their brothers died; Williams followed Roberts; and girls complied.
All apparently remained well with the Plumpton enterprise. England was drifting into civil war, but civil war might be an opportunity for a man of his stamp. Sir William was pursuing his personal enemies through the courts both in Yorkshire and in Westminster with unparalleled toughness, crushing his victims with teams of expensive and effective lawyers. He took part in 1459 in the English battles on the Scottish border and emerged from them with martial credit. In the same year a granddaughter, Margaret, was born to Elizabeth and two years later another granddaughter, another Elizabeth, joined her. Daughters and granddaughters were poor currency compared with a male heir, but they were at least a sign of fertility. All might yet be well. There was no reason the Plumpton name would not continue happily into the future.
At Plumpton itself, the towered sandstone hall, with its own chapel of the Holy Trinity, was richly decorated and furnished.21 Some twenty servants worked and lived there. Silver-chased hunting horns and salt cellars were part of the furnishings. The family chapel, where they worshopped with their own full-time priest, had rich silk dressings for the altar and for the priest himself. The Plumptons had beautiful
