Catalogue description THE DRAYTON INHERITANCE

The Drayton inheritance passed to the Lovets (BCM/G/5) through the marriage of Thomas Lovet (d. 1492) with Anne sister and heir of Richard de Drayton, who died chidless in 1479. Anne's inheritance also included part of the Cranford inheritance (BCM/G/4), to which her grandmother Anne had been coheir, and the Prayers inheritance (BCM/G/3), through her great-great-grandmother Alice. The Drayton family's estate had grown through acquisitions, some evidently planned and some fortuitous, by marriages to heiresses. The family came from Drayton, in Lowick (Northants.), where it held the manor, along with Slipton, from the mid 12th century. The manors passed from father to son through Walter (d. 1210-11) and Sir Henry (d. 1253) to Baldwin (d. 1278), who acquired the manor of Botolph Bridge, in Orton Longueville (Hunts.), on his marriage in 1259 to Idonia, daughter of Robert de Gimiles, and died holding Drayton and Botolph Bridge. [VCH Hunts. iii. 196; CIPM ii, no. 260.] His son and heir John died in 1291-2 holding the same two manors and leaving a son Simon aged 9 or 10 [CIPM iii, no. 17.] Simon married Margaret, sister of Gilbert de Lindsey of Molesworth (Hunts.), and between 1330 and 1354 he acquired the manor of Cranford St. John (Northants.), also known as FitzRanes manor. At his death in 1357 aged 75 he left a son John, who married his cousin Christine, daughter and coheir of Gilbert de Lindsey. Simon had made some major settlements. [VCH Northants. iii. 190; CIPM x, nos. 369, 446.] Cranford had been granted to feoffees in 1354 and may have been passed then to John since it is not mentioned in Simon's inquisition post mortem. Simon and Margaret held Molesworth for life, the reversion belonging to Gilbert de Lindsey's coheirs (his daughter Christine, wife of John de Drayton, and Thomas Dacre, son of Christine's sister Isabel), and Botolph Bridge and Drayton were held in jointure by Simon and Margaret. Margaret consequently held all the lands except Cranford until her death in 1358, when Molesworth was divided, half passing to John and Christine, Drayton to John, and half of Botolph Bridge to John's son Baldwin. [The remainder of the other half of Botolph Bridge had been settled on the Paynel family; in 1340 John Paynel had bound himself in an annual rent of 40 marks to Simon de Drayton from his manor of Boothby Pagnell (Lincs.): below, BCM/G/2/4/1 [GC 2969].] In 1360 Christine sold her half of Molesworth and there is no mention of it among the charters at the Castle. [VCH Hunts. iii. 93.] John died presumably between 1358 and 1360. In 1362 Drayton and Slipton passed to John's sister Katherine on her marriage to the Chief Justice Henry Green. [VCH Northants. iii. 237, 243-4.]

Baldwin de Drayton married Alice de Prayers, sister and eventually heir of Thomas de Prayers (d. 1388 x 1391) [Bridges, Northants. ii. 197.] Alice brought the manors of Dorsington (Glos.) and Strixton (Northants.) to the Drayton family. In 1394 Baldwin and Alice granted Dorsington and Cranford to their son John, and in 1400, after Baldwin's death, John granted them back to Alice for her life, at the same time as Alice granted Botolph Bridge to him. Strixton presumably passed to John on his father's death, and he paid an aid to the earl of Warwick for half a fee in Dorsington in 1424. John's son and heir apparent, another John, married Anne, daughter and coheir of Robert de Cranford (d. 1454?) of South Newington (Oxon.), but died in 1429 in the lifetime of his father. In Nov. 1429 the elder John granted the manor of Botolph Bridge to Anne for life, and ten years later he settled the other manors of Dorsington, Strixton and Cranford on himself and his wife Margaret and their issue. [Margaret may not have been the mother of the younger John. In 1443 she and her son William de Drayton quitclaimed all actions to one of the feoffees of the 1439 settlement: below, BCM/G/3/1/12 [GC 4235]. If the settlement was designed to transfer the bulk of the family holdings to the younger son by a later wife, it evidently failed; possibly William died without issue.] Margaret was a widow in June 1445. The inheritance of Robert de Cranford was partitioned in April 1454 between Anne, then the widow of Thomas Halle, and her sister Alice, wife of John Barry; Anne was to have South Newington and Alice all the other lands, with Anne paying 8 marks a year to Alice in addition. [The Cranford inheritance included lands in Wigginton and Barford (Oxon.) as well as South Newington, and Robert de Cranford's wife Alice had inherited lands in Berkshire and Oxfordshire from her father Walter Dauntsey.] Anne paid the rent to the Barrys in 1459, but by 1465 it was paid by her son William de Drayton. [By 1480 the Barrys' purparty had passed to Richard Halle and his wife Elizabeth, who sold the rent to Thomas Lovet and his wife Anne in that year.] William died soon after, leaving a son Richard who died without issue in 1479, and a daughter Anne, who married Thomas Lovet of Astwell. Thomas died in 1492 holding Botolph Bridge, Dorsington, South Newington, Cranford St. John and Strixton as well as Astwell. [CIPM Hen. VII, i, nos. 749-51, 753.]

Most of the charters in this section are concerned with Botolph Bridge, which was acquired by Baldwin de Drayton on his marriage in 1259 to Idonia, daughter of Robert de Gimiles, and became the family's principal manor.