Cylchgronau Cymru

HENRY, LORD STAFFORD (1501-63) AND THE LORDSHIP OF CAUS HENRY STAFFORD, the sole legitimate son of Edward, duke of Buckingham, was born in September 1501. The fall of Buckingham in 1521 left him corrupted in blood until his restoration to the peerage in 1547. Only fragments, the least desirable portions, of the family estates were returned to Stafford in 1522 and 1531. Manors in Staffordshire, Shropshire and Cheshire, the Yorkshire lordship of Essington and the Welsh marcher lordships of Caus and Hay Anglicana combined to bring him a nominal annual income of barely £ 500, the equivalent of his marriage settlement of 1518.1 Stafford was a naturally kindly man, deeply impregnated with the prevailing notions of responsibility towards his tenants and social inferiors.2 He was intelligent, well versed in law and endowed with a deep-rooted antiquarian enthusiasm. Less happily, he was pedantic, devoid of a sense of proportion when in pursuit of his due and perpetually harassed by the problem of stretching a fixed income to embrace a mounting expenditure. His estates had steadily declined in financial productivity. The lordship of Caus had a clear annual value in 1447-48 of £ 165 13s. 61d., of £ 126 4s. 7d. in 1498-99 but of only £ 89 6s. 101d. in 1524. Buckingham had deplored the unoccupied condition of many of his tenements and, under Stafford, decayed holdings still abounded in Causland and were present in Staffordshire. Buckingham, however, had made a sustained attempt to increase his revenue from rents and entry fines. The result was a strong opposition throughout the ducal lands and Buckingham was forced to admit partial defeat. In January 1520, he empowered his com- missioners to set and let all vacant farms and copyholds at the old rents and Stafford issued similar instructions in June 1527. For the 1 Historical Manuscripts Commission Reports, R. R. Hastings (1928), I, 308; App. to 7th Report Manuscripts of G. A. Lowndes Esq., p. 584: his marriage to Ursula Pole, daughter of Margaret, countess of Salisbury. 2 County Record Office, Stafford (henceforward C.R.O.), D1721/1/10, pp. 195, 312; L. Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy (1965), pp. 303-6. 3 British Museum, Add. MSS. 36542, ff. 62-64; T. B. Pugh, The Marcher Lordships of South Wales, 1415-1536 (1963), pp. 117, 251-52. C.R.O., D1810, ff. 54-55, 58, 60, 63-64, 129-30; J. R. W. Whitfield, 'The Lordship of Cause, 1540- 1541', Transactions of the Shropshire Archaeological Society (1951-52, 1953), LIV, part I, 50, 51 Barbara J. Harris, 'Landlords and Tenants in the Later Middle Ages: the Buckingham Estates', Past and Present, No. 43 (1969), 147-49; for the probably static condition of the scanty Staffordshire population in the sixteenth century, cf. Collections for a History of Staffordshire (1915), lxix-lxxii; E. E. Rich, 'The Population of Elizabethan England', Economic History Review, 2nd series, II (1950), 254; F. J. Fisher, 'Influenza and Inflation in Tudor England', ibid., 2nd series, XVIII (1965), 127.