Harrington and Hornby

I believe it was Marie who pointed out hat whatever Richard did wrong or right in this case, he did it as a teenager whose voice likely hadn't even broke yet. I'd like to see how any of us would have done in his shoes. Furthermore, he did it on behalf of a family who were good friends of the Yorkist cause and who were being screwed into the ground by Edward, in a scenario that for me foreshadows what Edward would do to his own sister and her Burgundian subjects - and possibly what Edward would do to George, who like Richard would strongly object to Edward's acting as the Spider King's errand boy. Tamara

Trouble is things are never that easy. The Harrington girls' mother, Maud Clifford, married again to Sir Edmund Sutton and she married one of her daughters from that marriage to a Middleton. So perhaps the dispute was as much about rebuffed Middletons as it was about acquisitive Stanleys with the young Richard being drawn into what he thought was an honourable quarrel about Yorkist loyalties? As for being King Louis's puppets, I think they all unwittingly were. The book I'm currently reading states quite confidently that in 1485 France put Henry Tudor on the throne. And guess what, two years' later the French realised their mistake and conspired to get him off it again - all to do with Breton and Burgundian politics, a much neglected area as David has pointed out. H.

On Saturday, 24 May 2014, 17:06, "khafara@... []" <> wrote:


I believe it was Marie who pointed out hat whatever Richard did wrong or right in this case, he did it as a teenager whose voice likely hadn't even broke yet. I'd like to see how any of us would have done in his shoes. Furthermore, he did it on behalf of a family who were good friends of the Yorkist cause and who were being screwed into the ground by Edward, in a scenario that for me foreshadows what Edward would do to his own sister and her Burgundian subjects - and possibly what Edward would do to George, who like Richard would strongly object to Edward's acting as the Spider King's errand boy. Tamara

Hi Hilary,

Do you know which Middleton family Maude Clifford married her child into?

The Westmorland Middletons were, of course, also close followers of Richard from the 1470s and joined the Yorkist rebellions after Bosworth.

But what you say even further suggests that Maude Clifford - the girls' mother - was not likely to have been in favour of breaking the arrangement for the elder girl to marry Geoffrey Middleton, i.e. not likely to have approved of Edward selling the marriages on to the Stanleys.

I was also very interested to learn from Whitaker that the Harrington brothers had a sister married to Thomas Broughton - perhaps the Sir Thomas Broughton of Broughton in Furness who rebelled with the Middletons and others after Bosworth, or a son of same?

Best,

Marie

Did a Cheddar ever marry a Gorge?

From: [mailto: ] On Behalf Of mariewalsh2003
Sent: 25 May 2014 19:15
To:
Subject: Re: [Richard III Society Forum] Re: Harrington and Hornby

Hilary wrote:

Hi Marie, really struggling to tie all this together. Maud Clifford's daughter Jane Sutton (or Dudley) married Sir William Middleton, High Sheriff of Yorks, who was born about 1475 and was the son of Sir Peter Middleton and Anne Vavasour. After Jane's death he married Isabel Dighton and Joan Robinson and didn't die till 1552.

Marie replies:

I have come across Sir Peter or Piers Middleton but haven't managed to tie him in to any particular family. All I can say is that he definitely belonged to Yorkshire , and was knighted by Northumberland on the Scottish campaign. Confusingly, there are writs of diem clausit extremum for a Sir Piers Middleton in both 1497 and 1500, so I don't know whether there were two Sir Peters or not. There was a William Middleton in Yorks earlier on, associated with Stockeld by Northumberland's castle of Stockeld , and he was quite closely associated with the lawyer Thomas Middleton, who was on of the Westmorland Middletons by birth.

Hilary wrote:

The Geoffrey Middleton mentioned in connection with Hornby is said to have been the son of Thomas Middleton and Margaret Lascelles of Kirkby Lonsdale and married Margaret Kirkham, dying in about 1524.

There are two problems:

Most visitations/databases I can find (and they are sparse) have this Geoffrey being born in 1484 which is far to late?

Marie replies:

Far far too late. The reference to Geoffrey Middleton's payment for Anne Harrington's marriage comes from the Patent Rolls and is dated 24 November 1461. This is the problem with visitations - the information was collected far too late to be reliable for our period, and they frequently confused different individuals with the same name. Incidentally, I recently discovered that Richard organised the earliest known heraldic visitation (of the north of England , in the 1470s) and it is extant though it has never been published. Now, wouldn't that be an interesting project?

Hilary wrote:

There are few, if any Middleton families around at this point so they are more than likely to be linked, particularly as they both appear to have had strong Yorkist family links. Going back very far to tie them together is more than usually difficult. Haven't looked at the NA yet.

Marie replies:

I carried out a trawl for Middletons once, and still have the 10,800-word file to prove it; I found there were oodles of them around, quite how many it was difficult to say as there were probably multiple Middletons bearing the same first name at certain periods and it's often hard to separate them out. A lot of them probably were related to each other but it's an assumption that can't be made without evidence particularly as Middleton is a fairly common place name. It's something I will need to get back to at some point.

Can I say at this point that the Hornby dispute is not my area of expertise (if any is). I've only read of it in Hipshon and was responding to David's point about legal issues. You are far more knowledgeable about it than me. H

Marie replies:

I still have a lot more questions than answers. One day perhaps I'll research the subject properly - it really interests me and I don't live a million miles from Hornby, but my guess is that the full unabridged story does not survive and that even when all the extant documents have been turned over and mined for details there will still be a lot of leeway for interpretation, particularly with regard to Richard's role in 1470. That's the way of it with most 15th-century history - we have bits of the jigsaw only, and so the temptation to try to ram the pieces we have into a picture even if they don't really fit together very well.

Hilary wrote:

PS Whilst you were away I did manage to tie the early Stillingtons to the Inglebys though, and his relations the Newtons and Gorges to the Twynyhos in a legal land document.

Marie:

Ah, now I know there was a link with the Gorges because Ankarette's younger son William was granted the wardship and marriage of Marmaduke Gorges and it ended up in a Chancery case, but I haven't got any document linking the Twynyhos to any Newtons so would be very interested to see. Could you possibly email me a copy?

Did a Cheddar ever marry a Gorge?

From: [mailto: ] On Behalf Of mariewalsh2003
Sent: 25 May 2014 19:15
To:
Subject: Re: Re: Harrington and Hornby

Hilary wrote:

Hi Marie, really struggling to tie all this together. Maud Clifford's daughter Jane Sutton (or Dudley) married Sir William Middleton, High Sheriff of Yorks, who was born about 1475 and was the son of Sir Peter Middleton and Anne Vavasour. After Jane's death he married Isabel Dighton and Joan Robinson and didn't die till 1552.

Marie replies:

I have come across Sir Peter or Piers Middleton but haven't managed to tie him in to any particular family. All I can say is that he definitely belonged to Yorkshire , and was knighted by Northumberland on the Scottish campaign. Confusingly, there are writs of diem clausit extremum for a Sir Piers Middleton in both 1497 and 1500, so I don't know whether there were two Sir Peters or not. There was a William Middleton in Yorks earlier on, associated with Stockeld by Northumberland's castle of Stockeld , and he was quite closely associated with the lawyer Thomas Middleton, who was on of the Westmorland Middletons by birth.

Hilary wrote:

The Geoffrey Middleton mentioned in connection with Hornby is said to have been the son of Thomas Middleton and Margaret Lascelles of Kirkby Lonsdale and married Margaret Kirkham, dying in about 1524.

There are two problems:

Most visitations/databases I can find (and they are sparse) have this Geoffrey being born in 1484 which is far to late?

Marie replies:

Far far too late. The reference to Geoffrey Middleton's payment for Anne Harrington's marriage comes from the Patent Rolls and is dated 24 November 1461. This is the problem with visitations - the information was collected far too late to be reliable for our period, and they frequently confused different individuals with the same name. Incidentally, I recently discovered that Richard organised the earliest known heraldic visitation (of the north of England , in the 1470s) and it is extant though it has never been published. Now, wouldn't that be an interesting project?

Hilary wrote:

There are few, if any Middleton families around at this point so they are more than likely to be linked, particularly as they both appear to have had strong Yorkist family links. Going back very far to tie them together is more than usually difficult. Haven't looked at the NA yet.

Marie replies:

I carried out a trawl for Middletons once, and still have the 10,800-word file to prove it; I found there were oodles of them around, quite how many it was difficult to say as there were probably multiple Middletons bearing the same first name at certain periods and it's often hard to separate them out. A lot of them probably were related to each other but it's an assumption that can't be made without evidence particularly as Middleton is a fairly common place name. It's something I will need to get back to at some point.

Can I say at this point that the Hornby dispute is not my area of expertise (if any is). I've only read of it in Hipshon and was responding to David's point about legal issues. You are far more knowledgeable about it than me. H

Marie replies:

I still have a lot more questions than answers. One day perhaps I'll research the subject properly - it really interests me and I don't live a million miles from Hornby, but my guess is that the full unabridged story does not survive and that even when all the extant documents have been turned over and mined for details there will still be a lot of leeway for interpretation, particularly with regard to Richard's role in 1470. That's the way of it with most 15th-century history - we have bits of the jigsaw only, and so the temptation to try to ram the pieces we have into a picture even if they don't really fit together very well.

Hilary wrote:

PS Whilst you were away I did manage to tie the early Stillingtons to the Inglebys though, and his relations the Newtons and Gorges to the Twynyhos in a legal land document.

Marie:

Ah, now I know there was a link with the Gorges because Ankarette's younger son William was granted the wardship and marriage of Marmaduke Gorges and it ended up in a Chancery case, but I haven't got any document linking the Twynyhos to any Newtons so would be very interested to see. Could you possibly email me a copy?