Welsh Journals

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of Mary to plead his poverty and make good the lands alienated to meet his debts. I have lived most poorly he wrote in 1553, (having but £ 315 18s. Id. to live on) And this last year declaring to the whole council in writing particularly how in one year my charges amounted to one m.li whereof if any penny were vainly or wastefully spent I refused all relief at their hands And was at the last answered by the duke of Northumberland that I must tarry till the king came to years Standing at this time in no little misery my living not able to find me meat drink and clothes and not a little in debt .50 The queen restored Stafford to Thornbury and other Gloucestershire lands of his father and relieved him of the worst of his financial strain. It was said of Humphrey, duke of Buckingham, that he was 'a most miserable covetous grinding man'.51 Stafford shared some- thing of this unhappy reputation, exploiting what he could of his landed position, exacting heriots and other casualties, herbage money and ancient rents, amercements and fines of court. In this he was continuing a family tradition, although at the same time and for similar, if vastly more complex, reasons Henry VIII and his ministers practised on a grand scale what Stafford and other land- lords were attempting upon their own estates. Moreover, the amounts of Stafford's ancient rents and herbage money were far from excessive. His principal opponents, Richard Goodall, Thomas Draper, Nicholas Purcell and John ap Nicholas among them, were men prosperous by border standards, freeholders and the owners of herds of sixty animals or more. Their opposition drew its roots from the situation within the lordship under Buckingham and found a ready response from their humbler fellows for more basic reasons. The enclosing of forest pastures, the sharper definition of forest boundaries, the reduction of common of herbage and the rigid preservation of trees became a fertile cause of conflict upon the Welsh and border uplands, and they were an obvious threat to the traditional way of life.62 Moreover, from Edward Ill's reign the Welsh freeholders were able to sell their tenements, and already by 1540 Reynold Williams, deputy-steward of the courts, had so used P.R.O., Entry Books of Recognizances, L.C. 4/188, f. 74; State Papers, Domestic, 1547-80, 1, no. 17, ff. 37-38, B.M., Add. MSS. 36542, f. 141; Cal. Pat. Rolls, 1550-53, p. 18; Coll. Hist.Staff.,XII, 212-13; 1938, pp. 96-97. Stafford became heavily in debt to the London merchant John Maynard, selling him his recently acquired lands of the deanery of the collegiate church of St. Mary in Stafford, entering upon a recognisance of £ 2,000 in November 1552 to abide by the terms of Maynard's re-lease of the lands to him. Stafford was a member of the Court of Star Chamber on four recorded occasions between April 1550 and October 1551. 11 Pugh, op. cit., p. 240. Jeffreys Jones, op. cit., pp. 32, 166-67, 227, 234, 273-74, 282-84.