Patrick Comerford
Since moving to Stony Stratford over three years ago, I have been fascinated to find how the Comberford family had so many links with these parts of north Buckinghamshire and Northamptonshire in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries.
These links have included a share in the Manor of Watford, and a manor and properties in the neighbouring villages of Stoke Bruerne, as well as some high-profile engagement with Church life in this area.
As a judge and the Bishop of Lincoln’s commissary, John Comberford held the courts of the Archdeacon of Buckingham, probably from 1497 until at least 1507, and he died in 1508. At the time, the Bishop of Lincoln was William Smith, previously Bishop of Lichfield, where he had re-founded Saint John’s Hospital in Lichfield.
The connections between Smith and the Comberford family were far-reaching, for in 1507 John Comberford, as patron, presented the bishop’s nephew, also William Smith, as Rector of Yelvertoft. Later, John Comberford’s grandson, Canon Henry Comberford (1499-1586), Precentor of Lichfield Cathedral, was appointed Rector of Yelvertoft by his brother Humphrey Comberford in 1546.
John Comberford had acquired extensive interests in Northamptonshire and Buckinghamshire through his marriage to his father’s ward, Johanna or Joan Parles, the only daughter and heir of John Parles of Watford Manor and of Shutlanger Manor, near Stoke Bruerne, five miles south of Northampton.
Quite separately, John Comberford’s father, Judge William Comberford, had bought properties in Newport Pagnell and Tickford in 1470-1471. I was reminded of these connections on a recent afternoon when I was in Newport Pagnell and Tickford. When I first visited Tickford three years ago, it was a dull and dreary afternoon. So, I decided to revisit Tickford Abbey last Friday and to recall once again the Comberford family links with Newport Pagnell that go back almost six centuries, to 1442 or earlier.
Newport Pagnell is one of the towns in north Buckinghamshire that have been absorbed into Milton Keynes. Newport Pagnell is separated from the rest of Milton Keynes by the M1, and the Newport Pagnell Services was Britain’s second motorway service station.
Newport Pagnell is first mentioned in the Domesday Book in 1086 as ‘Neuport,’ an Anglo-Saxon name meaning the ‘New Market Town.’ The suffix ‘Pagnell’ was added later when the manor passed into the hands of the Pagnell or Paynel family.
This was the principal town of the ‘Three Hundreds of Newport,’ and at one time Newport Pagnell was one of the largest towns in Buckinghamshire, with the assizes of the county held there occasionally.
William Comberford (ca 1403/1410-1472), along with Humphry Starky and Thomas Stokley, was granted lands and other properties in Newport Pagnell and Tykford (Tickford), Buckinghamshire, by Geoffrey Seyntgerman (St Germain), in 1471-1472. By then, William Comberford was in his 60s, but already he had substantial property and political interests in the area.
From 1442 or earlier, William was a key political ally of Henry Stafford (1402-1460), Earl of Stafford and later 1st Duke of Buckingham. Stafford was the key political figure in Buckinghamshire at the time, and they shared a political ally in John Talbot, 2nd Earl of Shrewsbury.
William was an important landowner in south Staffordshire in the mid-15th century, with land in Comberford, Wigginton and Tamworth, and he was also a trustee of the manors of Whichnor, Sirescote and other estates. He built Comberford Hall, a new house at Comberford, between Tamworth and Lichfield, in 1439. He may also have been one of the early members of the Comberford family to own the Moat House on Lichfield Street, Tamworth.
Three years after he built Comberford Hall, William Comberford became one of the two MPs for Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire, on 27 March 1442, on the nomination of the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. He was a judge and one of the Duke of Buckingham’s retainers, and h e remained an MP until 3 March 1447.
William was first appointed to the Staffordshire bench in 1442, and was a Justice of the Peace (JP) until 1471. He became an attorney for the Duchy of Lancaster in the Court of Common Pleas in 1446. Soon afterwards, through the patronage of the Duke of Buckinghamm he became the second protonotary or chief clerk in the Court of Common Pleas.
The Duke of Buckingham was killed at the Battle of Northampton on 10 July 1460. Nevertheless, Comberford continued to play an important role in the political, civil and judicial life of Staffordshire. In addition, as ‘Will’s Combford,’ he was admitted to membership of the Guild of Saint Mary and Saint John in Lichfield in 1469, along with Ralph FitzHerbert, father-in-law of William’s grandson, Thomas Comberford.
From 1452, William Comberford’s ward was Joan Parles, the daughter of John Parles (1419-1452) of Watford and of Shutlanger, near Stoke Bruerne, five miles south of Northampton and about 13 miles north-west of Newport Pagnell, Stony Stratford and Milton Keynes.
Joan Parles came of age in 1461 and she later married William’s son and heir, John Comberford (ca 1440-1508). The marriage was so important for the Comberford family, both politically and financially, that the Parles coat-of-arms, with its cross and five red roses, was quartered with the Comberford arms, and sometimes even substituted for the arms of the Comberford family.
Meanwhile, Henry Stafford (1455-1483), 2nd Duke of Buckingham, and Richard Plantagenet, Duke of Gloucester and later King Richard III, met the uncrowned 12-year-old ‘Boy King’, Edward V, at the Rose and Crown Inn in Stony Stratford on the night of 29 April 1483.
From Stony Stratford, the young King Edward was taken by the two dukes to the Tower of London, and it is there, it is believed, he and his younger brother, ten-year-old Prince Richard, Duke of York, were murdered. Their disappearance has given rise to many of the stories and legends about the ‘Princes in the Tower.’
In 1487, John Comberford bought out Thomas Stokley’s interest in the lands, tenements and rents in Newport Pagnell and Tickford that had been acquired by Stokley and John Comberford’s father in 1470-1471. In 1504, after his wife had died, John Comberford, along with his son Thomas and daughter-in-law Dorothy (Beaumont), sold the former Parles estates in Stoke Bruerne, Shutlanger, Alderton (about 10 miles north of Milton Keynes), and Wappenham to Richard Empson of Easton Neston. The estate then consisted of 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.
John Comberford died in 1508, but the Comberford family’s interest in lands in the Watford area continued for some decades later, as told by Murray Johnson in his book, Give a Manor, Take a Manor: the rise and decline of a medieval manor.
The Priory of Tickford owned some property in Aston, outside Birmingham that seems to have constituted a rectorial manor. It seems more than coincidental that at the same time John Comberford’s sister Margaret was married to William Holte (ca 1430-post 1498) of Aston Hall. The tomb of their son, William Holte (ca 1460-1514), in Saint Peter and Saint Paul Church, Aston, displays one of the earliest known heraldic depictions of the Comberford use of the Parles family’s arms, with its cross and five roses, as their own coat of arms.
After the suppression of the priory in 1525, its possessions were said to have included ‘the manor of Tickford in the parish of Aston’, and this manor in Asston was granted to Christ Church, Oxford, in 1532. The estate included the advowson of the vicarage and a pension of 40 shillings from Aston church. The rectorial estate seems to have passed into the possession of the Holte family between 1535 and 1552, and was united with the manor of Aston.
Humphrey Comberford (1496 -1555) of Comberford owned significant estates, including Watford Manor. He left most of his manors to Thomas Comberford (1530-1597), and he specified in his will that his Manor in Watford was to be held by his second son, Humphrey Comberford, from the elder son, Thomas, at an annual rent of one red rose for 60 years. In the event, Humphrey had died unmarried in 1545, before his father’s death. Thomas Comberford the probably sold the manor and lands of Watford shortly after 1555.
The name of Tykford or Tickford, which was part of the Comberford property interests in the Newport Pagnell area in the 15th century, is found in Tickford Priory, a mediaeval monastic house in Newport Pagnell.
Tickford Priory was established in 1140 by Fulconius Paganel, the lord of the Manor of Newport Pagnell. The priory belonged to the Cluniac Order, with their French headquarters at Marmoutier Abbey in Tours.
Cardinal Wolsey annexed ‘the superfluous house of Tickford’ and its wealth to Christ Church College, Oxford, in 1524. Later, King James I sold the abbey to his physician, Dr Henry Atkins, in 1621.
Some of the former buildings of Tickford Priory were still standing in the early 18th century, but they were in poor condition. Tickford Abbey was built on the site of the prory ca 1757 for John Hooton, a lace merchant, and much of its fabric is believed to have come from Tickford Priory. It is said members of the Hooton family are buried in a a private vault with the grounds of Tickford Abbey.
The house was altered and added to in the early-mid 19th century and again in 1881-1889 by the Stony Stratford rchitect Edward Swinfen Harris for Philip Butler, JP. Futher internal alterations were made in the late 20th for its use as residential home. Tickford Abbey is now a residential and dementia care home and a Grade II listed building.
As I walked through the grounds of Tickford Abbey that late sunny afternoon, I found myself on Castle Meadow, looking across the River Great Ouse and the Ouzel or Lovat River towards the tower and pinnacles of the parish church, Saint Peter and Saint Paul.
Despite the name of Castle Meadow, historians today debate whether there the evidence for a castle at Newport Pagnell is meagre. Although there are references to Castle Meadow dating back to the 12th century, there is no specific documentary reference to a castle, and there was no castle in Tickford or Newport Pagnell by 1272.
The main house, with whatever remains of Tickford Priory, it is the nearest I can find to any remains of the Comberford properties in late mediaeval Newport Pagnell and Tickford. My great-grandfather, James Comerford (1817-1902), continued to use the Comberford coat-of-arms quartered with the arms of the Parles family on his bookplate.
From Tickford Abbey, I returned along Priory Street to Tickford Street, close to the home of Aston Martin and by the Bull Inn, and continued my afternoon stroll along to Tickford Bridge. It was built over the River Ouzel in 1810, is one of the last 21 cast iron bridges in Britain that continue to carry modern road traffic, and it is the oldest bridge in Milton Keynes. A plaque near the bridge recalls its history and construction, and it is Grade I listed by Historic England.
From there, I continued to walk on into the centre of Newport Pagnell, where I wanted to photograph another building by Edward Swinfen Harris and where we had dinner in Apollonia, the Greek restaurant on High Street.
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