Patrick Comerford
One of my early reasons for wanting to visit Stoke Bruerne and Shutlanger, neighbouring small villages in Northamptonshire, was a Comberford family connection dating from the 15th and 16th centuries. Three of visited both Stoke Bruerne and Shutlanger last week, and so I decided to return again yesterday in search of those Comberford family links and to see whether there were any traces of the Parles and Comberford times there 500 yars ago.
William Comberford was entrusted with the Northamptonshire estates of Margaret Catesby, the widow of John Parles (1419-1452), when she died in 1459. Those estates included lands in Watford, Stoke Bruerne and Shutlanger, and her daughter Johanna Parles became William Comberford’s ward.
Johanna Parles was an heiress and in time she married William’s son, John Comberford (1440-1508). The marriage added more land and wealth to the Comberford family estates.
Their son, Thomas Comberford, sold much of the former Parles estates, including almost 400 acres in Stoke Bruerne, Shutlanger, Alderton and Wappenham, to Richard Empson of Easton Neston. But the Parles family had a lasting influence on the fortunes of the Comberford family, reflected even in the changes made to the Comberford family coat of arms over the generations.
I had already been to Watford in search of the former Parles and Comberford manor there, and to Yelvertoft, where the families had exercised their patronage of the parish or the right to nominate the rector. The Rectors of Yelvertoft appointed by the Comberford family included Canon Henry Comberford (1499-1586) of Lichfield Cathedral, who was Rector of Yelvertoft from 1546 to 1560.
However, to explore any remaining signs of the former Parles and Comberford estates in the Stoke Bruerne area, I needed to spend some additional time in the small village of Shutlanger, just a mile west of Stoke Bruerne.
I caught a bus from Northampton to Blisworth yesterday (3 September 2024), and then walked through the countryside, almost parallel to the canal route, to Shutlanger. The village is part of the parish of Stoke Bruerne and half-way between Northampton and Stony Stratford.
Shutlanger first developed on either side of a south-flowing stream but it may have shrunk in the late mediaeval period. Since it was neither a parish nor a lordship in its own right, it lacked both a church and a manor house in the Middle Ages.
Two houses in the village are associated with the story of the Parles and Comberford families and the history of the manor in Shutlanger: the Monastery on Water Lane has been identified as the home in the early 15th century of the Parles family, although it was first built in the 14th century; and the Manor House on Showsley Road has been a guest house until recently.
Apart from the Monastery, the older houses in Shutlanger appear to date from the period of the Great Rebuilding and are of coursed rubble limestone, presumably originally with thatched roofs.
Shutlanger was always a smaller village than Stoke Bruerne and later in time it was without the visual focus and economic stimulus provided by the canal.
William Brewer, a prominent crown servant of the reigns of Richard I and John, held lands in Stoke and Shutlanger by 1210-1212 was found to as successor to Gerard de Mauquency, but by what service was not known. The Brewer family in turn gave their name to Stoke Bruerne, and William Brewer was succeeded by his son, also William Brewer.
When the younger William Brewer died in 1232, his heirs were his five sisters and their representatives. By the early 14th century, Robert de Harrowden held an estate in Stoke Bruerne, Shutlanger, Alderton and Shaw, described in 1315 as consisting of eight messuages, two mills, 17 acres of meadow, 6½ acres of pasture, 44 acres of wood, and various rents, including one for 7½ virgates of land.
Robert’s heir was his nephew, also Robert de Harrowden. The estate was sold in 1364 by Robert’s successor, John Harrowden of Chislehampton, Oxfordshire, to Ralph Parles of Watford, Northamptonshire, and his wife Katherine. It then amounted to nine messuages, two mills, 11 virgates of land, 18 acres of meadow, 10 acres of pasture, 100 acres of wood and 40s. rent in Stoke, Shutlanger, Shaw and Alderton.
Ralph Parles was living in Shutlanger in 1411 when he, his wife Alice, their son Ralph and daughter-in-law Alice were granted a licence to celebrate divine service in the chapel or oratory within his manor at Shutlanger.
Ralph and Alice Parles re-settled their estate in 1415, and when he died in 1420 his heir was his 11-year-old grandson, also Ralph Parles. As well as the manors of Watford and Byfield, Ralph had four messuages, three tofts, 200 acres of land, 30 acres of meadow, 40 acres of wood, 100 acres of pasture and a water-mill in Shutlanger; another messuage, 23 acres of land, 1 acres of meadow and a water-mill in Stoke; and two messuages, 30 acres of land and 2 acres of meadow in Alderton – an estate of 430 acres or more.
The younger Ralph Parles died a few years of his grandfather, and his brother William Parles, the next heir, was still under age when he died in 1430. The surviving heir of that generation, John Parles, who born in 1419, did not recover the estate from a lengthy wardship until 1440.
John Parles died in 1452, and was survived by his widow Margaret and a five-year-old daughter and heir, Joan or Johanna, who was to inherit the estate when her mother died death. Margaret remarried almost at once, but her second husband Robert Catesby died within a few years. Margaret died in 1459, and their son William Catesby was then aged seven.
The Manor of Watford and the Parles estates in Shutlanger and Stoke Bruene were to descend to Margaret’s daughter Joan Parles, who came of age two years later. Joan’s wardship and marriage had been granted in 1454 to William Cumberford of Comberford Hall and John Lynton. She then married William Comberford’s son John Cumberford, who witnessed a deed relating to Shutlanger in 1477.
In a complex legal arrangement in 1482, Joan and John Comberford conveyed the Manor of Byfield, with extensive premises there and in Watford, Murcott, Shutlanger, Stoke Bruerne, Shaw, Alderton and Wappenham, along with half an acre of land in Yelvertoft and the advowson of the church there, to feoffees or trustees. These trustees were to hold the estate for the use of John and Joan Comberford for their lives, and then for their heirs or the rightful heirs of Joan.
In 1504, after his wife had died, John Cumberford, his son Thomas Comberford and daughter-in-law Dorothy, sold the former Parles estate in Stoke Bruerne, Shutlanger, Alderton and Wappenham to Sir Richard Empson (1450-1510) of Easton Neston. The sale included eight messuages, six tofts, one mill, 200 acres of land, 24 acres of meadow, 100 acres of pasture, 40 acres of wood and 14 shillings rent.
However, the Comberford family held onto its other interests in Northamptonshire for another 60 years, including the Comberford Manor in Watford and the advosom of Yelvertoft. When Thomas Comberford sold the Comberford Manor in Watford to Sir John Spencer in 1563, the Comberford family interest in Yelvertoft parish came to an end.
Meanwhile, Sir Richard Empson’s purchase of the former Parles and Comberford estate from the Comberford family in 1504 was one of a number of purchases he made in Shutlanger as he built up a large estate centred on his mansion at Easton Neston.
Earlier, Empson had bought lands in Shutlanger and the surrounding area from Henry Bacon in 1476-1480, from Thomas Bosenhoe in 1484, from John Claypole in 1488-1489, from John Shefford in 1492, from John Jones in 1499, and from Edmund Grey, Lord Grey de Wilton and John Grey, Lord Grey de Wilton.
Soon after he had bought the Comberford estate in Shutlanger, Sir Richard Empson was arrested with Edmund Dudley. He was convicted of treason in Northampton in October 1509, and was executed on Tower Hill on 17 August 1510.
Empson’s estates were granted to William Compton in 1512, when Shutlanger was described as a manor. The manor was said then to be ‘late Comberford’ and included 20 acres of coppice called Parles Park.
The estate passed with Easton Neston to Richard Fermor, and Sir John Fermor of Easton Neston held a court for what was described as his Manor of Shutlanger in 1554. After his death in 1571, however, the family’s estate in Shutlanger ceased to be regarded as a manor. The ‘Manor of Shutlanger’ remained for generations in the hands of the Fermor family – later the Fermor-Hesketh family and Earls of Pomfret.
Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, most of the Fermor estate in Shutlanger appears to have been let in four farms. By the 1830s, the 5th Earl of Pomfret owned about 530 acres in Shutlanger.
Stoke Bruerne and Shutlanger each had their own common fields and common meadow in the Middle Ages. Most of these survived until 1844, when the parish was the last in south Northamptonshire to be inclosed. They appear to have shared a large area of common woodland or wood-pasture in the north of the parish, which was gradually cleared.
The 14th century house in Shutlanger later known as the Monastery is an impressive house on Water Lane on the south-east edge of the village. It may have been built by one of the freeholders, and became known as the Monastery, through a supposed association with the Cistercian nunnery of Sewardsley in Easton Neston.
The house become the capital messuage, the principal house or equivalent of a manor house, of the Parles estate Although the original owner cannot be identified for certain, it was the home of the Parles familiy by the early 15th century. However, it is not clear whether the Parles family bought the house, built it, inherited it through marriage to a local heiress, or acquired it when they bought the Harrowden estate.
The house has an almost complete medieval roof structure and a two-storey entrance porch. This seems to have been added to the main building, which appears to date from the first half of the 14th century, although the windows in the south elevation of the main range, and also the porch, perhaps date from the late 15th century or the beginning of the 16th century. The house was modernised in the 17th century by inserting a staircase in the cross-passage and a fireplace in the service bay.
A chapel licensed in 1411 occupied the upper floor of the two-storey entrance porch to the Monastery that appears to be a later addition to the main structure.
The house was surrounded by extensive grounds, with fishponds and a dovecote, while an adjoining close formed a small park, described in the 1540s as 20 acres of coppice known as Parles Park. The family name was still recalled in the 18th and 19th centuries in the field named as Parles Park.
The Monastery later became a farmhouse on the Fermor estate. It was included in an exchange between the trustees of the 5th Earl of Pomfret and the 5th Duke of Grafton at the time of inclosure in 1844.
When the Grafton estate in Shutlanger was sold off in 1919, the Monastery was bought by the sitting tenant and remodelled as a private house. The Monastery extended to 3½ bays, including a two-bay hall, with a half-bay below the spere truss containing the cross-passage and a service bay beyond. An east solar or parlour bay was demolished.
The Monastery was first listed Grade I in 1951 and was restored in 1965. In recent years, it was the premises of Monastery Stained Glass, dealers in antique stained glass and panels of glass from the Middle Ages to the 20th century. But when I visited it this week it seems to have returned to use as a family home.
The layout of Shutlanger village was altered at inclosure when the new road to Heathencote at Towcester was built and older lanes running down to the Tove were stopped up. The avenue from Easton Neston survived inclosure, although it was severed by the new road and by the 1880s trees were beginning to be felled at its east end.
The only industrial development in Shutlanger came in the early 1870s, when Sir Thomas Fermor-Hesketh leased the ironstone and other minerals beneath most of the estate to Samuel Lloyd, the Birmingham ironmaster. Both the Grafton and Pomfret or Fermor-Hesketh estates built a few new cottages in Stoke Bruerne and Shutlanger in the 19th century.
Today there are light industrial units on the Monastery Lakes Farm.
An infants’ school was built in Shutlanger in 1884 on land given by Sir Thomas Fermor-Hesketh. It was designed by Matthew Holding and opened in 1885. It had a reserved chancel that allowed the building to be used as a chapel of ease, and it was licensed for divine worship. A chancel with a stained glass east window was added in 1886.
The school closed in 1916, but the building, dedicated to Saint Anne, remained in use as a chapel of ease to Saint Mary’s Church. It is now the village hall.
A Wesleyan Methodist chapel built in Shutlanger in 1844 was extended in the 1870s and enlarged in 1889, but it had closed by the 1980s.
Shutlanger once had two pubs: the Horseshoe and Plough. The Horseshoe closed in 1917 when the number of pub licences was cut back during World War I. The Plough today has a good reputation as a gastropub, although it is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays, so I had to walk on to Stoke Bruerne, where I had lunch once again at the Bavigation by the banks of the canal.
Meanwhile, services continue to be held in Saint Anne’s Chapel or the village hall at 9:30 am on the third Thursday of the month, followed by a coffee morning.
