The Gentry: Stories of the English. Adam Nicolson

and status, everything in William Plumpton’s life in the early 1460s was vulnerable. His property was being continually raided. Money to fight for legal redress was desperately short. The letters preserved by the Plumptons describe a world in dissolution, full of the difficulties of dealing with people who were ‘right hard and strange’ and shot through with murderous arguments. His men were being ‘dayly threatened’⁴⁰ with beatings or worse. All involved had to navigate the tangled and expensive jungle of late medieval law. Those with something to get out of Plumpton addressed him with imploring and self-abasing humility. Others wanted only ‘a remedy as shall accord with reason’.⁴¹ His lawyers prayed that God would give him ‘good speed against all your enemies’.⁴² He seems to have been surrounded by them. His tenants asked him to show ‘good lordshipp and mastership’,⁴³ their only hope in a world where their own newly increased vulnerability was exposed to the competitiveness and thieving of those in power.

      On top of all this, with his status crumbling, Plumpton was faced with the most intractable of gentry problems: daughters. He had seven of them, most of them coming into marriageable age in the 1460s. To maintain the dignity of the family, daughters had to be provided with dowries. The class average was something near £100 per girl and the deal was usually quite straightforward. The girl’s father would provide the lump of cash (usually payable in instalments over five years or so) and the boy’s father would settle lands on the young couple that would provide an annual income of about 10 per cent of that sum, called a jointure. If the husband died first, his widow enjoyed the jointure for the rest of her life. After her death, the lands would descend to her and her husband’s heirs. It was a civilized and humane arrangement, the equivalent signal in law to the co-presence in every parish church of the knight and his lady laid out side by side in equal honour and with equal dignity. Women were important: they ran estates, they mothered the all-important heirs, they stood as trustees in legal agreements and as widows they became powers in the land. Their arms were quartered equally with their husband’s. It was a given that every father would provide every daughter with an old age that fitted her ‘worship’, her honour. A proper dowry would get a proper husband. The Plumpton coat of arms would continue to be associated with others of equal or better standing. The family corporation would be allied in blood with those who could support it.

      But seven daughters! Figures for the dowries provided by Plumpton have survived for three of his girls: £123 for Elizabeth at some time before 1460, £146 for Agnes in 1463 and £100 for Jane in 1468.⁴⁴ Catherine, Alice, Isabel and Margaret Plumpton were all married in the 1460s, and all to equally distinguished members of the gentry, most of them knights, who would certainly not have accepted girls with less to offer. Somewhere or other William had to find some £900 to give away with his daughters. It was a necessary investment in new plant. The poor man was caught between his catastrophic political circumstances and the demands which the family business required.

      He was no lamb. Beneath the surface, he had plans. Among the many lawyers he was using to fight his legal battles, he employed two from Yorkshire: Brian Rocliffe and Henry Sotehill. Both were rising and brilliant men, making their names and fortunes in the Westminster courts. Both, significantly, were supporters of the great Earl of Warwick. They were Yorkists, Plumpton’s natural enemies, and to each of them, plotting carefully, he sold a granddaughter.

      Lying in bed in Plumpton Hall in 1463, William considers the situation. Daughters need dowries, a drain on resources. Both sons are dead, but William, the younger, slaughtered at Towton, has left Margaret (born in 1459) and Elizabeth (born in 1460). Two tiny girls, the joint co-heirs of the entire Plumpton inheritance. On them would descend all the beautiful manors in the Vale of York and up in the Pennine dales, in the Vale of Belvoir and the limestone uplands of the Derbyshire Peak District. Their hands in marriage are worth money. The two Yorkist lawyers Rocliffe and Sotehill would glow at the prospect of their heirs acquiring the Plumpton riches. And more than that, their connections to the great Earl of Warwick might surely ease some of William’s other pressures. And so in November 1463, Margaret, aged four, was sold to Rocliffe for his son John to marry. The tiny bride went to live with the Rocliffes, where she embarked on her education. ‘Your daughter & myn’, Brian Rocliffe wrote about her to Plumpton that December, ‘desireth your blessing and speaketh prattely and French, and hath near hand learned her sawter.’⁴⁵ Her sister Elizabeth, aged three, was consigned to Sotehill’s son John the following February and went to live with them in Leicestershire. Elizabeth, the poor young widowed mother of these tiny girls, can have had no say in their fate. Too much hinged on it.

      Brian Rocliffe was to pay for Margaret’s wedding and the young Rocliffes were, to start with, to get the poor little hillside manor of Nesfield in Wharfedale, a beautiful place but scarcely of any value. Rocliffe was to give Plumpton £313, more than the annual income from all of his lands. It was agreed ‘that all these couenants are to be performed without fraud or bad faith’.⁴⁶ At the same time Plumpton made a deal for almost £350 with Henry Sotehill for the other granddaughter ‘the which Elizabeth the said Sir William hath deliuered to the said Henry’.⁴⁷ The price for Elizabeth was a little higher because Plumpton also agreed with Sotehill that if, by any chance, Plumpton should have another son by another wife, he would also deliver this son to Sotehill so that he could be married to one of Sotehill’s daughters.

      Hanging behind all this was the knowledge that these little 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