girls would one day each inherit land worth at least £150 a year. Measuring past worth is not easy, but it is relevant to these figures that in fifteenth-century England you could get a spade and shovel for 3d., a spinning wheel for 10d., a sword for 3s. 6d., a bow for the same, a draught horse, an ox or a good linen surplice for £1, a knight’s war horse for £6 and twenty acres of grass, on which twenty cows and their calves could graze for the year, for £10. Land of that kind might cost £80,000 today. The girls were worth over £1 million each in today’s terms.
Everything was tied up. The little girls were securely established as the Plumpton heirs. Sotehill got William to promise he wasn’t lying or committing fraud. He required him to agree in writing not to persuade the tiny Elizabeth or her mother that this marriage was a bad idea. And to pay everything back if it went wrong. Here were the Sotehills, lawyers, small fry, riding high on the Yorkist wave, making their claim on gentry wellbeing. None of it would have been possible unless every single person involved accepted the power of the patriarch to dictate and deal in his family’s lives.
But there was a problem. Plumpton had sold his granddaughters to two up-and-coming lawyers on the understanding that the girls were the joint heirs of all his property. He had taken large amounts of money from those lawyers on the basis of that promise. If those two girls became his heiresses, the name of Plumpton and the great Plumpton inheritance would disappear into other families’ maws. But Sir William wanted to keep his own name and line going and so had embarked on a grand deceit. Since 1452 he had been secretly married to another woman. Very early one summer morning that year, before sunrise, between Easter and Whitsun, a Friday, Sir William and a gentlewoman of Knaresborough called Joan Wintringham came to the parish church of Knaresborough and stood at the door of the chancel. William was wearing ‘a garment of green checkery’, Joan was in a red dress with a grey hood.48 The parish priest came in his vestments and solemnized the marriage between them in the presence of witnesses,
the said Sir William taking the said Joan with his right hand and repeating after the vicar, Here I take thee Jhennett to my wedded wife to hold and to have, att bed and att bord, for farer or lather, for better for warse, in sicknesse and in hele, to dede us depart, and thereto I plight thee my trouth, and the said Joan, making like response incessantly to the said Sir William that the vicar, having concluded the ceremony in the usual form, said the mass of the Holy Trinity in a low voice.49
Immediately afterwards Sir William ‘earnestly entreated those present to keep the matter secret, until he chose to have it made known’.50 The reasons were of vital importance. It is likely that Joan was pregnant at the Maytime wedding because the next year, 1453, she bore a son, Robert Plumpton; and after the death of young William at the battle of Towton in 1461, it was this Robert Plumpton, as the court official in York pronounced in 1472, who ‘was taught to consider himself as the heir apparent of his father’s house, and the future owner of his property’.51
This was the heart of Sir William Plumpton’s deceit: he had been secretly nurturing his own son in the idea that everything the name of Plumpton stood for was to be his. After 1452, every minute of his negotiations with the Cliffords, the Rocliffes and the Sotehills had been a lie. His wife he had forced to live in what the orthodoxy would have viewed as whoredom, their son a bastard. And worse than any of that he left as a legacy to the next generation the prospect of rage and destruction. Everything he had was now to be left, in its entirety, to two separate, competing families.
He seems to have entered his last decade preparing bullishly for death. With legal instruments, he disinherited his granddaughters, leaving the way clear, as he intended, for young Robert to inherit everything. Against the law and without permission, he crenellated Plumpton Hall, perhaps to make it more defensible in the battles to come, perhaps as an assertion of a status that seemed under threat.52 He stole timbers from the royal forest with which to beautify and strengthen the family house and the great barn that stood outside its gates. Illegally he made a private park around the house from the forest grounds. Rich textiles were bought in London to adorn the family chapel and tens of law cases were pursued against his enemies. When William Plumpton finally died in October 1480, it was at the end of a rampaging, brutal and desperate career. A man who had begun his life in the afterglow of Henry V’s triumph at Agincourt ended it with his inheritance mired in the prospect of a long and bitter legal dispute entirely of his own making. His two sets of heirs each felt obliged to defend their name and lands against their own family. Their cousins were their enemies.
Sir William might have hoped that his gamble would pay off. From his own archive he stripped out any evidence that he had once left his patrimony to his two granddaughters. He had lined up a string of gentry connections across the county on which his son and heir could rely. He had strengthened and fortified Plumpton Hall itself. He had loyal retainers supervising his tenants and business arrangements in Nottingham, Staffordshire and Derbyshire. And he had given enough to the church to consider that Providence might be on his side.
But his son Robert, now about twenty-seven, was a softer, gentler man, a recipient of his fate not a maker of it, and perhaps not up to the challenge his father had left him. Gradually over the next thirty-five years, for the whole of his adult life, the effects of Sir William’s machinations slowly and inexorably destroyed the fortunes of that son and his family.
On Sir William’s death, the legal wheels were already turning but Robert’s tenure began well enough. His mother, Joan, had been maltreated by his father, kept as a secret wife for sixteen years while the old man pursued his schemes. Robert did better, immediately giving her the proceeds of the manor of Idle in Airedale, on top of those from Grassington and Steeton, which his father had left her in his will.53 But this sense of ownership was not to last. In 1483, after a dogged pursuit by the two granddaughters and their lawyers, a decision and a division were made. Margaret and Elizabeth were to get Nesfield, Grassington and Steeton and everything in Derbyshire. Robert was to get only Plumpton, Idle and the Nottinghamshire manors. They were the best lands but out of them he was to pay £40 a year to old Elizabeth Clifford, the granddaughter’s mother. His own mother was deprived of those very lands which Robert had designated for her maintenance.54
This might have been the final arrangement. Even as the Wars of the Roses came to an end, and Henry Tudor claimed the throne as Henry VII, this distribution of lands amongst the Plumptons lasted for the next fourteen years, relatively untroubled. Robert, half the man his father was, both in property and resolution, nevertheless pursued the ideal of the knightly squire. He was short of money but he did his best to look after his people. He took on the local government of Knaresborough and its forest. He was a little dilatory, but he kept his correspondence carefully (which is how we know any of this), he served the new Percy Earls of Northumberland in battle against the Scots and was knighted. Tenants and land agents wrote to him, thanking him for the ‘tender mastership shewed me in all causes’.55 He did his best to address his declining financial position, claiming the fees due from the release of bondmen – there were still bound serfs in late fifteenth-century England and their release provided a steady income for landlords feeling short.56 Like his father, Robert was embroiled in long, expensive cases in Chancery, but going to the courts was not cheap and the threat of impoverishment was never far away.
Then, in February 1497, a letter arrived at Plumpton Hall which must have hollowed out a cavity in Robert Plumpton’s heart. It was from his lawyer and cousin Edward Plumpton, writing from the Inns of Court in London.
To my singuler good master, Sir Robart Plompton, kt.
In my right humble wyse I recomend me unto your good mastership, acertaynyng you that ther is in thes partes a great talking of those that belong & medle with Mr Hemson, that he intendeth to attempte matters agaynst you …57
By ‘Mr Hemson’, the lawyer meant Sir Richard Empson, ‘the great man E.’,58 as others referred to him, the most dangerous predator in the tangled wood of late fifteenth-century
