INTRODUCTION Much Has Been Made of the Fluctuating Fortunes Of

INTRODUCTION Much has been made of the fluctuating fortunes of gentry families in the sixteenth century.1 Some would say too much, since the gentry as a class is recognisable but not clearly definable. Amid the flurry of speculation about the factors which might be responsible, geographi- cal location was by all accounts important, so that the Barringtons, who were undoubted gentry, were lucky to find themselves firmly rooted in south-east England. But that was an ancient piece of luck; when Robert, Lord Rich supported Sir Francis Barrington in the parliamentary election of 1604 he wrote of 'the aunciente name of Barrington ... whose auncestors I canne averre to be knightes before Englishe was in England, or anie name of knightes that I knowe were in the countrye, that nowe make greate shew and are newe comers in amonge us .. .'2 The Barrington ancestry can indeed be traced back before the conquest. Then, from at least the time of Henry I, they held the hereditary office of woodward or forester of Hatfield Forest and lived at Barrington Hall, on the edge of the forest in the north of the parish of Hatfield Broad Oak in north west Essex.3 A later stroke of fortune—and though few details are known, 'luck' can hardly be the right term this time—was the marriage between Thomas Barrington and Winifred Hastings in 1559.4 By this one alliance wealth and status were secured to nourish the ancient gentry of the Barringtons. Winifred, the widow of Sir Thomas Hastings, was born Winifred Pole, one of the two daughters and co-heiresses of Henry Pole, Lord Montagu; therefore, as well as the niece of Cardinal Pole, she was the granddaughter of Margaret Plantagenet, Countess of Salisbury, and the great-granddaughter of George, Duke of Clar- ence, brother of Edward IV. Through her the Barringtons were able to elaborate the quarterings of their arms to include the royal arms of England.5 Her elder sister Katharine had married Francis, second 1 I his introduction is a shortened version of that which appears in the present writer's 'Letters of the Barrington Family, 1628 32' (M.Phil, thesis, University of Leeds, 1982). A more detailed and more fully annotated account, in particular of the growth and value of the family estate, will be found there. 2 Eg. 2644, f. 151. 3 T.E.A.S., n.s., i. 252, 253. 4 T.E.A.S., n.s., ii. 8. 6 E.R.O., D/DQs 45. Francis Quarles, who was godson to Sir Francis Barrington, con- sidered descent from the Barringtons to be enough to fill even 'Th'insatiate vastnesse of an Heraults tongue'. Quarles, Hosanna and Threnodes, ed. J. Horden, (Liverpool, 1960), 27. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.226, on 27 Sep 2021 at 19:58:47, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0068690500003895 2 BARRINGTON LETTERS Earl of Huntingdon, so Winifred brought to her marriage not only the Pole tradition of loyalty to the old faith, which was hardly in accord with the religious temper of the Barringtons, but also a connection with the active puritanism of the second and third earls of Huntingdon. More important by far, her first marriage had been childless, so that she also brought to the Barringtons her share of her grandmother's estates, granted to the two sisters when first Mary and then Elizabeth effectively reversed the attainder on the Countess. How the Barringtons rationalised their vastly increased landholdings is explained below; essentially, however, they remained an Essex family. They gave up the medieval office of forester and in its place gradually assumed the various duties of county government which formed the new route to power in the land: sheriff, justice of the peace, deputy lieutenant, member of parliament. Sir Thomas achieved all of these positions except deputy lieutenant. The eldest of his and Win- ifred's sons, Francis, occupied this position as well, and was able to miss out the more onerous first stage of sheriff. Francis was knighted by James I in 1603 and created baronet in the second patent of 1611. It was also Sir Francis and his children who, by their marriages, built up the Barrington 'connection', that alliance of puritan and politically like-minded families which has been held typical of the parliamentary gentry of England on the eve of the civil war.1 It is largely the domestic affections of this group of kin which are illuminated by the section of the Barrington correspondence presented here. Lady Joan Barrington, the recipient of most of these letters, entered the family in 1579, when, as Joan Cromwell, she married Francis Barrington.2 She was one of the eleven children of Sir Henry Cromwell of Hinchinbrook, so that in time she had among her nephews Oliver Cromwell, John Hampden, Oliver St. John and the regicide Edward Whalley. The children of Francis and Joan and the ramifications of the alliances they made are set out in Table 3. Besides their political significance, almost without exception they reflect and reinforce the general religious puritanism which Francis and Joan, prompted no doubt by upbringing as well as inclination, erected into an unshake- able family principle. 'J. H. Hexter, The Reign of King Pym (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), 78. 2E.R.O., D/DHt T126/23. This is the marriage settlement. Only a single fragment of the early parish register of Hatfield Broad Oak survives, so that precise dates of marriage, baptism and burial of members of the family are often in doubt. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.226, on 27 Sep 2021 at 19:58:47, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0068690500003895 INTRODUCTION 6 The Barringtons in the seventeenth century (a) Estates Because of the lack of a surviving coherent series of estate surveys and accounts, details of the Barrington family's landholdings have to be pieced together from an incomplete set of deeds and from fragments of steward's rough papers. Even so, the main pattern for the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries is clear: a loosely-knit estate accumu- lated over a long period of local marriage alliances in south-east England was transformed by the addition of the Countess of Salis- bury's estates, brought into the family by the marriage of Thomas Barrington with Lady Winifred Hastings. In the middle of the fifteenth century the family held their ancient seat of Barrington Hall together with three other manors in Essex, two in Hertfordshire and one each in Cambridgeshire and Suffolk.1 Lady Winifred was able to add all of the estates granted to her in 1554 at the reversal of the attainder on her grandmother: four manors (and two advowsons) in Yorkshire, two manors in the Isle of Wight, two in Buckinghamshire, the manor and half-hundred jurisdiction of Clav- ering in Essex, and one manor each in Hertfordshire, Lincolnshire and Monmouthshire.2 Sir Thomas Hastings died in 1558. Thomas Barrington and Lady Winifred were married the following year. Soon afterwards the con- solidation of the estate began. Distant isolated (and unprofitable) property was sold off; in 1566 Thomas Barrington purchased the site and manor of the priory of Hatfield Broad Oak.3 This moved the family's interests from the periphery to the centre of their large home parish. With the priory came the lease, from Trinity College, Cam- bridge, of the major part of the tithes of Hatfield Broad Oak; the importance of the lease to the family shows up in the protracted negotiations for its renewal in 1606.4 The purchase of the priory together with the ownership of Clavering (very close to Hatfield) made a valuable group of holdings. From this fact stems the seventeenth-century pattern of a consolidated holding in Essex—the half-hundred being a real basis for political power in addition to the influence by patronage that ordinary landownership could give—with the other estates derived from the Countess of Salisbury pared away to the two main elements in Yorkshire and the Isle of Wight. Nonetheless, the principal properties in Hatfield, the manor and the forest, still belonged to Lord Rich, the chief beneficiary in Essex 1 E.R.O., D/DBa F7. 2 Calendar ofPatent Rolls, 1553 4,147 8 3B.L., Add. Ch. 28634, 28635. 4 Eg. 2644, ff. 157 165. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.226, on 27 Sep 2021 at 19:58:47, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0068690500003895 4 BARRINGTON LETTERS from the post-Reformation changes in landownership. The forest in particular was a constant source of dispute—between Rich, Barring- ton, lesser landowners and the commoners—especially after an arbitration of 1576 gave the Barringtons the right to make enclosures in the forest in return for the surrender of their office of forester. The presence of Lady Winifred, an aristocratic outsider, did not help, and the new social and economic pretensions of the Barringtons were attributed directly to her.1 Those pretensions suffered a blow in 1592 when Rich sold the forest to Lord Morley, whose manor of Great Hallingbury lay close by. Tensions with the Morley family were only eased by a further arbitration of 1615 which enabled the Barringtons to lease the soil of their enclosures within the forest, an arrangement which suited the major landowners although it prejudiced the commoners by effectively reducing their legal rights.2 But by this time good relations between Rich and Barrington had been established.

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