by Penny Lawne
In February 1352 Thomas resumed his military career. He was appointed captain of Calais Castle, responsible for the castle garrison, with his brother Otto as his deputy.20 This was just the sort of important command for which he had hoped. Calais had been won by Edward III after an extremely costly siege, and had strategic military importance as it provided a haven for English shipping and a safe bridgehead for entrance into France. Its trading role was just as significant, and Edward III intended to repopulate the town with Englishmen.21 The French were anxious to retake the town if they could, and its vulnerability had been demonstrated at Christmas 1349 by Geoffrey de Charny’s raid. The town was almost totally dependent on England for its food, munitions and other supplies, and had a large garrison.22 The king needed to place the defence of the town in the hands of an able, loyal, resourceful and courageous commander, and Thomas’ experience ideally suited him for the post. The appointment was to be until Christmas, and Thomas appointed attorneys to act for him in his absence and to aid Joan in managing his affairs while he was abroad.23 Joan was pregnant with their second child, and when the baby was born he was named John, after her brother, a sign of their affectionate relationship. It is likely that Joan asked her brother to be godfather to the baby John Holand.24 The expenses of Thomas’ new command and the additional family responsibilities stretched his resources and in August 1352 he petitioned the king for financial assistance, reminding Edward III of his relationship with Joan.25 It is possible that Thomas also reminded the king that he had not received the full amount he had been promised for the Count of Eu; if he did there is no written record. Edward III granted Thomas’ request but his response was not particularly generous. The king grudgingly agreed a grant of only 100 marks a year limited to Joan’s lifetime ‘in aid of her sustenance’, stating that the annuity would cease immediately if Joan’s brother John died, and Joan inherited his lands; as John was only twenty-two, this must have seemed most unlikely. The fact that Thomas felt the need to ask for financial assistance, and the king’s reaction, is a clear indication that the king’s attitude remained equivocal towards him. He valued Thomas for his military abilities but this was a separate matter from their personal relationship. Although Edward III had indirectly helped Thomas to achieve the formal recognition of his marriage to Joan, the king was making it plain to Thomas that he did not intend to reward him for this, and did not welcome him with open arms as a new relation.
On 23 December 1352 John was conducting business as usual at his favourite manor of Woking in Surrey, granting his manor of Ryhall in Rutland to Bartholomew de Burghersh, when he was taken ill, and died a few days later on 27 December.26 He was twenty-two years old. His sudden death was a tremendous shock for his widow, Elizabeth, and no doubt for Joan too, as he was her only surviving close relation. Their early shared childhood, their dependence on one another, the unusual difficulties endured by Joan as John was growing up and their more recent closeness meant that his death left a huge gap in her life. John was buried in the Grey Friars church in Winchester. The only known connection John had with the church is the fact that his father was buried there after his execution in 1330. The choice of John’s resting place suggests that despite Margaret’s plans Edmund’s body had never been moved to Westminster, and that John’s widow, Elizabeth, felt it appropriate to bury her husband with his father.27 Elizabeth had evidently loved her husband very much. Shortly after John’s death she took the veil and became a nun, entering Waverley Abbey in Surrey.28 Although Elizabeth later returned to the outside world, her feelings for John remained strong, and more than fifty years later she left instructions in her will that she was to be buried with him.29
Joan’s grief at her brother’s death was overshadowed by the immense implications for her of his death. As John and Elizabeth had no children, Joan was her brother’s heir, and her unexpected inheritance transformed her into one of the greatest and wealthiest landowners in England. When John died the inquisitions post mortem compiled after his death show that he had interests in twenty-three different counties, a mix of landed estates (manors) and a right to income in the form of fee farms (a fixed sum of money due annually), knight’s fees (an annual cash payment made by a knight to lieu of military service) and advowsons (the right to present a clergyman for appointment to a living).30 Forty-three manors are listed: Chesterfield and Ashford in Derbyshire; Kenton, Lifton, Shebbear and Chettiscombe in Devon; Northweald and Lamarsh in Essex, Lechlade, Barnsley, Siddington and Miserden in Gloucestershire; Bedhampton and Alton in Hampshire; Bushey in Hertfordshire; Caldecot in Huntingdonshire; Wickham in Kent; Castle Donington and its manor in Leicestershire; Greetham, Bretby and Beesby in Lincolnshire; Torpel, Upton and Easton in Northamptonshire; Ollerton in Nottinghamshire; Whissendine and Ryhall in Rutland; Somerton, Kingsbury and Queen’s Camel in Somerset; Leyham and Kersey in Suffolk; Woking, Pirbright and Tolworth in Surrey; and Cottingham, Weighton, Buttercrambe, Kirkbymoorside, Cropton, Middleton, Ayton and Hemlington in Yorkshire.31 In many of these counties there was further income from fee farms and knight’s fees as well as advowsons, and in addition an entitlement to rental income in a further six counties: Buckinghamshire, Norfolk, Sussex, Warwick, Wiltshire and Worcestershire.32 By any standard of measurement this was a major inheritance.
Elizabeth, as John’s widow, was entitled to a third share of John’s estates as her dower; on her death these would revert to Joan or her heirs. Although the valuations given in John’s inquisitions post mortem are incomplete, a calculation of the income to which Joan became entitled on his death can be estimated from the dower grant to Elizabeth, which carefully lists the properties and annual income she received.33 Elizabeth’s dower income comes to nearly £1,800 a year, and so the remaining two-thirds inherited by Joan can be estimated conservatively as nearly £3,500 a year. This was a huge income at a time when £1,000 a year was considered necessary to support the style of an earl, and with the exception of the Earl of Lancaster it is difficult to find any other noble who enjoyed such an income. As a point of comparison, contemporaries considered Joan’s cousin Margaret Brotherton extremely wealthy with an estimated income of £3,000 a year, likewise an older cousin of Joan’s, Elizabeth de Burgh, who enjoyed between £2,000 to £2,500 a year. Thomas and Joan’s income previously had been under £200 a year. Thomas had probably never thought that his gamble in marrying Joan would pay off in such a lucrative fashion.
Thomas was still in France when news of John’s death reached him, and he immediately returned to England. As Joan’s husband he would take responsibility for, and have control over, all of the estates and income to which she would be entitled. This was not a matter which could be dealt with by his attorneys. The first business which needed to be agreed was to sort out Elizabeth’s dower. John had left a will and his executors were Elizabeth, Gerard Braybrooke – a knight and justice of the peace in Kent, Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire and a distant relative and long-standing family friend who had known Edmund and acted for Margaret over many years – and James Beaufort, a clerk and another long-time family friend.34 Elizabeth’s dower was quickly agreed with Thomas and Joan in January 1353 and on 15 February the dower estates were formally vested in Elizabeth, while on 22 February the escheators were ordered to deliver the remaining estates, and the tenants ordered to pay their rents, to Thomas and Joan.35 The ease and speed with which Elizabeth’s dower was agreed would undoubtedly have been helped by Joan’s knowledge of the family estates, enabling Thomas to recognise the immense practicality of the split which was suggested, probably by the executors. Elizabeth was given a geographically composite group of holdings; all of the holdings in the south-west in Devon and Gloucestershire, and those in the south-east in Hampshire and Surrey. Joan took possession of the remaining twenty-seven manors, which were spread over twelve counties.
An inheritance of this magnitude completely changed Thomas’ status. He took immediate advantage of his newfound wealth to ease his penurious position, and on 23 February 1353 he a
cknowledged a debt of 200 marks to Richard, Earl of Arundel, and on 12 March a debt of 400 marks to Sir Ralph Neville.36 He repaid these debts quickly but cash flow remained a problem for a while as a year later, in February 1354, he was granted a six-month respite from his obligation to pay debts and produce accounts to the exchequer.37 Naturally, now the king would not be paying the promised annuity to Joan. Official recognition of Thomas’ new status came swiftly with a summons to Parliament. However, as Joan’s husband, Thomas was not entitled to become Earl of Kent until the king granted him the title, and Edward III made no move to do so.38 While this was not necessarily an unusual delay on the king’s part, it is possible that Edward III continued to have reservations about rewarding Thomas for having won Joan, despite his acceptance and endorsement of their marriage. Nevertheless Thomas had every anticipation that the king would grant him the earldom in time, and by 1354 his seal included a flowering tree with his shield of arms suspended by a strap, closely resembling part of John’s seal, while on the left-hand or sinister side he had a helmet out of a ducal coronet (a feature shared by Otto Holand in his shield of arms) and a plume of ostrich feathers (the ostrich feathers were adopted by Prince Edward after Crécy).39
The most important individual estate now owned by Thomas and Joan was Castle Donington in Leicestershire, and they would quickly have moved themselves, with their two boys, into residence.40 The castle occupied a strong position to the west of the town itself, above the Trent, dominating the river crossing and overlooking a wide stretch of low-lying land, with its own chapel, park, fishery and ferry to cross the river, and it was surrounded by its own woodland, meadows and pasture land on which cattle grazed. The original castle was Norman, but it had been dismantled on the orders of the king in 1216 during the First Barons’ War and then rebuilt later that century, probably by the Earl of Lincoln and using some of the materials from the earlier castle.41 The castle had its own chapel, and at the nearby church of St George in Stamford, Thomas’ relation, John Holand, had been the vicar since 1349.42 Castle Donington was reasonably centrally located in relation to the other estates, and within easy travelling distance of Blanche Wake at Bourne Castle in Lincolnshire and Robert Holand at Thorpe Waterville in Northamptonshire.
Apart from his newfound status and wealth, Joan’s inheritance had also made Thomas a major landowner, and their son Thomas was now heir to the Kent earldom and all its assets. This meant not simply a change of lifestyle for Thomas, but the potential for a completely different career. Previously Thomas had shown little interest in land, and with only a lifetime interest in the Broughton and Yoxall manors he had done no more than ensure he received their income on a regular basis. Now he controlled his wife’s enormous inheritance, and had an incentive to take an active interest in the estates, assess their condition, plan their future, looking at improving and consolidating them, with the aim of preserving and enhancing his son’s inheritance. It is difficult to know what condition the estates were in when John died, but many would still have been suffering from the devastating effects of the plague. When Margaret died in 1349 the escheator noted that the value of her dower manors at Torpel, Upton and Easton in Northamptonshire, and the extensive Wake manors in Yorkshire, were ‘showing great decreases in value because of the pestilence’.43 John’s escheators give a grim description of the deprivations wrought on other parts of the estates. In Derbyshire, the water mill, fulling mill and lead mine at Ashford manor, formerly worth £20 a year, were valued at 100s, as they had been ‘stopped for want of workers’, while the town of Ollerton in Nottinghamshire is described as ‘remain[ing] mostly without inhabitants and the dwelling houses broken down and empty, and none will hire them’.44 The general picture is of land left untended, properties empty and in poor repair, a lack of labour and tenants, resulting in rents at risk. This of course was a national problem, but recovery on the Kent estates may have been hindered by a lack of effective management. Edmund’s death and John’s long minority had meant that many of the estates had been managed for twenty years by Margaret and various nominees of the Crown. This did not apply to the Wake estates, which Thomas Wake had enjoyed from 1317 up to his death in 1349, but much of his land was held in border areas and had suffered considerably from the Scots’ frequent incursions. John was swift to grant the reversion of the Cumberland barony to Edward III (who then granted it to John of Gaunt in 1357) but it was hardly a loss as it was described by the inquest jury as ‘worth nothing … because it is totally laid waste … by the Scots’.45
If Thomas and Joan were not to spend all their time in estate management they would need to place more than usual reliance on the people whom they entrusted to run the estates on their behalf. The management of the many estates comprised in the Kent earldom required a complex and hierarchical structure.46 Overall supervision would have been placed in the hands of a council, comprising the lord himself, advisers chosen from among his entourage (usually his leading knights) and the officials who had charge of the day-to-day management of the manors; his receivers, stewards and auditors. The administrative centre for the council would have been at Castle Donington, and the chief officials probably resided there with Thomas and Joan. The council’s job was to act as a central advisory body, making decisions and giving advice, hearing petitions and giving judgment on them. As the Kent earldom consisted of estates spread over so many counties, it would have been necessary to geographically divide the manors into convenient groups for administrative purposes, each with their own steward or bailiff and accounting to the same receiver who was in turn responsible to the council. The individual steward’s duties extended to presiding over the manorial and hundred courts – each manor had its own court and each hundred (administrative districts within a shire) its own judicial court. Beneath the stewards were the officials representing the lord on each individual manor, including the reeve, whose duties covered collecting the rents due and accounting for them as well as speaking for the interests of the tenants. Reeves were exempt from labour services but the duality of the role meant it was not an easy one to discharge well and was often an unpopular duty imposed rather than sought after. The rents received were collected up and delivered to the lord’s receiver, who in turn distributed the money to each part of the household. Beneath the reeve were the tenant farmers, the people who actually cultivated the land and tended the livestock.
It is unfortunate that the extensive records which Thomas and Joan’s council would have kept for each individual manor, detailing its extent and its value, every tenancy, the rents received and payments made, have not survived.47 The lack of these papers means that reliance has to be placed on incomplete information, much of it gleaned from the inquisitions post mortem completed after John’s death and then after that of Thomas Holand, and Joan herself. Management of large estates was inevitably complicated but Joan’s inheritance, notably so because of certain fairly unique features. It was, firstly, unusual to have two dowager interests. Naturally Thomas and Joan would have considered it important to be on good terms with Blanche Wake and Joan’s sister-in-law Elizabeth, especially as one day their dower interests would fall back into the Kent estates. In 1352 none of them could have foreseen that both dowagers would live for as long as they did; Blanche Wake died in July 1380, while Elizabeth outlived Joan by more than twenty years, and died in 1411.48 Secondly, in contrast to most large landowners, the Kent estates had no obvious geographical concentration. The Earl of Lancaster’s estates, for example, were located largely in the north and the Midlands, the Earl of Salisbury’s (William Montague) in the West Country. Thomas Brotherton’s estates, inherited by Joan’s cousin Margaret, were mainly in Norfolk and Suffolk. In contrast, the Kent estates were spread widely over different counties, with very few holdings in the county of Kent, and had Thomas and Joan wished to visit every estate they now owned it would have taken them weeks to do so.
Many of the Kent manors were rented out rather than managed directly, an example being the manor of Ryhall
in Rutland which was leased to Sir Bartholomew Burghersh.49 There were obvious advantages for a landlord in leasing and receiving annual rent rather than being directly involved in cultivation, harvesting and selling the produce, increasingly so after the Black Death had decimated the labour market. Renting was an attractive and obvious option for Thomas Holand, with his lack of experience and knowledge of estate management, and he had no incentive to alter any such arrangements that John had already made. Nevertheless, careful and extensive management was needed in order to realise the wealth of Joan’s inheritance. Rents had still to be collected and accounted for, and when these were not forthcoming it was necessary to pursue those in dispute or arrears. When tenants died, new tenants had to be found. Margaret’s experience had shown that some tenants, especially the ecclesiastical tenants, were prompt to find excuses not to pay and tardy in making payment when ordered to do so.