Younger Sons, Illegitimate Sons and the Law: A Study of Three Yorkshire Gentry Families, 1480-1540

Younger Sons, Illegitimate Sons and the Law: A Study of Three Yorkshire Gentry Families, 1480-1540 Emma Hawkes This article examines the experiences of younger and illegitimate sons in three gentry families, arguing that their lives and even their legal activities were marked by their liminal positions in their families. I explore the ways in which the activities of these m e n can be distinguished from those of their fathers and the heirs by charting the differences in their legal undertakings in the latefifteenthand early sixteenth centuries. It is important to examine the lives of younger and illegitimate sons because gentry families were not, in some sense, undifferentiated units. The positions of members of gentle families varied - patriarchs and heirs were privileged while younger sons, illegitimate children, daughters and wives were relatively less favoured. The focus here is on the younger and illegitimate sons of three gentle families, rather than on the patriarchs w h o are often discussed as though their activities and interests were synonymous with those of their families as wholes or on the w o m e n 1 For instance, G.E. Mingay's estimates of the wealth of the gentry were without accounting for the division of land within families. G.E. Mingay, The Gentry: The Rise and Fall ofa Ruling Class (London: Longman, 1976), pp. 11-1 126 Emma Hawkes whose undertakings have begun to receive critical attention in recent years. By examining the undertakings of these minor m e n I hope to open up something of the diversity of the lives and legal experiences of the Yorkshire gentry. I focus on the younger and illegitimate sons of three gentle families of the fertile valley of York: the Gascoigns of Gawthorpe and Harewood, the Plumptons of Plumpton and Idle, and the Vavasours of Hazlewood and Spaldington. While I also call on anecdotal evidence of the legal activities of their Yorkshire neighbours, I concentrate on a detailed reading of these three particularly well-documented gentle families. This approach falls into neither the well-established tradition of individual biographies nor the very useful statistical histories of the late-medieval 2 David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Tuscans and their Families: A St of the Florentine Catasto of 1427 (1978, new edn, London: Yale University Pre 1985); Maria L. Cioni, Woman and Law in Elizabethan England with particu reference to the Court of Chancery (New York: Garland Publishing, 1985); Judi Bennett, Women in the Medieval English Countryside: Gender and Household Brigstock before the Plague (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Beatr Gottlieb, The Family in the Western World from the Black Death to the Industr Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 3 The Plumptons left a collection of letters which focussed on an inheritance dispute; the Gascoigns and Vavasours both left sizeable collections of deeds; and of course members of all three families went to the courts regularly. An examination of every term of King's Bench records between 1480 and 1530 shows that the three families were involved in four Rex side and thirty-three plea side disputes. In the same period there were at least nine Rex side and sixty-six plea side actions at C o m m o n Pleas, and twenty-four Star Chamber cases. Between 1461 and 1540 there were 137 petitions sent to Chancery naming members of these families. 4 M.A. Hicks, False, Fleeting, Perjured Clarence: George, Duke of Clarence, (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1980); Bertram Wolffe, Henry VI (London: Eyre Methuen, 1981); Colin Richmond, John Hopton: A Fifteenth Century Suffol Gentleman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); E.W. Ives, The Common Lawyers of Pre-Reformation England, Thomas Kebell: A Case Study Cambridge Studies in Legal History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Gerald Harriss, Cardinal Beaufort: A Study of Lancastrian Ascendancy Decline (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). AStudy ofThree Yorkshire Gentry Families, 1480-1540 127 gentry as a whole, but it means that I focus on about fifty people (of w h o m twenty were younger or illegitimate sons) and that I a m thus able to compare the lives of the younger and illegitimate Plumptons, Vavasours and Gascoigns with those of the patriarchs and heirs of...