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Lund Manor, John Remington, Boon Services, and Neville's French-Embassy Sales, 1596-1601

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Topic: Lund Manor, John Remington, Boon Services, and Neville's French-Embassy Sales, 1596-1601

Source-Control Summary

Four image-controlled Royal Berkshire Archives documents and one independent Yorkshire deed catalogue now establish a coherent Lund transaction sequence. The sequence is important to Neville's biography because it connects his maternal inheritance, northern estate management, the financing or timing of his first French embassy, and the later financial consequences of his 1601 conviction.

The key documents are:

  1. Neville's copy letter of 25 July 1596 to the tenants of Lund, offering to

    2. sell the tenements and cottages, excluding the mill and one occupied property, for sixteene hundred pounds under staged payment and security terms.

  2. A Yorkshire Archaeological Society catalogue entry for a 20 April 1598

    3. lease by John Remington of Lund. It places Remington in the Lund manor house and records his lease of White Flat to William Elwood.

  3. Remington's undated letter to m^r Henry Nevill Esquire at Sir Henry

    4. Killigrew's house in Lothbury. Probably written between late 1598 and early April 1599, it asks Neville to resolve a covenant dispute over Boone dayes and Boone hennes and to acknowledge a Chancery release before going to France in connection with receipt of £500.

  4. Neville's own estate statement, dated 20 July 1601, saying that Lund

    5. descended from his mother, that a first sale made upon his first going to France yielded £2,400, and that he sold the remainder after returning for £1,000 to help friends who had become sureties for his debts.

  5. Richard Beaumont's letter of 9 March 1608 Old Style (9 March 1609 modern),

    6. reporting that Lundwood had been stripped of valuable timber, that its value depended on release from Lord Eure, and that he had sent Neville a stone or mineral sample obtained at Lund.

The independent deed catalogue also supplies a transaction earlier than all four: Neville's 20 November 1595 fifteen-year lease of the named woods Lundwoode to Francis Clifford at 100 marks a year. The surviving term was assigned in trust for Griselda Countess of Cumberland on 4 May 1608. Together these records establish that the wood had a legal and economic history distinct from the manor and tenant sales, continuing into 1609.

Archival Placement

The physical Remington letter is D/EN/F6/2/5. Its modern pencil shelfmark is visible on IMG_8263.jpeg. The Royal Berkshire Archives public catalogue exposes the parent D/EN/F6/2 as nine miscellaneous undated documents, approximately c.1600, rather than publishing a separate item-level page for /5.

The archive separately catalogues D/EN/F6/5 as seven papers concerning the estate at Lund in the East Riding of Yorkshire, held for a short time by the Nevilles. Neville's 25 July 1596 copy letter is physically marked D/EN/F6/5/6. Thus the Remington letter remains correctly filed in the miscellaneous correspondence bundle, although its subject belongs to the Lund estate history represented by D/EN/F6/5.

There is also a catalogue-range problem worth preserving. The public description dates D/EN/F6/5 to 1598-1606, but /5/6 is explicitly dated 25 July 1596 in its contemporary docket. The written date governs the item; the discrepancy should be reported to or at least recorded against the parent catalogue range.

Quoted Source Passages and Documentary Analysis

I. Neville's Proposed Sale to the Lund Tenants, 25 July 1596

Neville's docket identifies the first document without inference:

“A Coppie of my l[ett]re / to the tenants of Lund / touching the sale of the

tenements there / 25 July 1596”

The opening describes the property offered:

“all my tenements & cottaiges at Lund besides the mill”

and records the tenants' collective offer:

“sixteene hundred pounds”

The offer was not a simple cash sale. Neville accepted the proposed price in principle but restructured the timing because he expected to put the proceeds into another purchase. The controlled text says:

“you must make shift to pay one quarter of the / mony namely 400^li in London

two dayes after / Martlemas day next.”

He allowed the balance to remain until the morrow after Midsummer or another day in the next Trinity term, provided it fell at least five days before term ended. The first payment would trigger conveyancing:

“When you / make your first payment, I will make you assurance / of the land,

as your councell shall devise, at your / charge, by fine or recovery & with

warranty against / me & mine heires.”

The draft then protects the unpaid balance by a defeasance condition:

“yf the mony be not paid at the time appointed / the land to be mine againe &

the conveyance / voide.”

This is a compact but unusually informative account of negotiated land-sale machinery: collective tenant purchase, staged consideration, a London payment, fine or recovery, warranty against encumbrances, and a condition returning the land to Neville if the buyers defaulted.

The draft also shows the seller negotiating with sitting tenants rather than disposing of the whole manor as an undifferentiated unit. Robert Lutman was to have his tenement for £150 if he would buy and pay on the proposed terms. The mill and the property occupied by Christopher Gibson were excluded from the tenants' offer.

The fully controlled postscript corrects an important inherited mistranscription. It does not say that other buyers would give £230 for Philip Wittie's land. Neville writes:

“I do thinke that Philip / witties offer of 210^li for his / land is much to

little & there / fore unles he will give 230^li / for yt I will abate so much /

of the 1600^li as valueth his / tenement to be w^th the mannor.”

The £230 is therefore Neville's minimum demand to Wittie, not a rival bid. If Wittie refused, Neville would remove that tenement's value from the tenants' £1,600 package and keep the tenement with the manor. This makes the collective offer adjustable parcel by parcel.

The Named Tenants in the Yorkshire Deed Landscape

The University of Leeds catalogue adds a useful control for Robert Lutman. MD239/84, a survey dated 4 September 1611, lists “Robert Lutman’s farm” among two messuages and six cottages in Middleton, part of the possessions of William Lord Roos. It gives Lutman's farm a total of 170a. 2r. 35p. A 1620 deed in the same catalogue also locates a messuage occupied by Robert Lutman in Middleton. These entries establish a substantial landholder or occupier of the right name in the immediately connected Middleton-on-the-Wolds documentary landscape. They do not, by themselves, prove that the 1611 occupier was Neville's 1596 tenant; the fifteen-year gap and different superior title still require a connecting deed.

The same catalogue contains a continuing Wittie family in Middleton. A 1614 gift names Stephen Wittie as a son of “Phillip Wittie of Middleton yeoman,” and 1619 conveyances again name Phillip Witty and his son Stephen. This supplies local chronological support for reading the manuscript surname as Wittie and for treating the postscript as part of the Lund–Middleton land market. It does not yet identify that Phillip with Neville's 1596 tenant. No Christopher Gibson was found in the MD239 catalogue during this pass, so his excluded holding remains an especially useful target for parish, probate, subsidy, and manorial searches.

The letter is therefore evidence for a parcelled disposal process already under way in 1596, nearly three years before Neville's departure for France. It also supplies the background for the later conflict: the proposed purchasers were offered freedom from rents issuing from the manor, while Remington's leases continued to reserve customary services.

II. John Remington at the Lund Manor House, 20 April 1598

The University of Leeds catalogue of Yorkshire Archaeological Society deeds gives an independent, non-AI identification of Neville's correspondent. MD239/73 describes:

“John Remington of Lunde upon the Would co.York gent.”

On 20 April 1598, Remington leased to William Elwood of Middleton a sheep rake or sheep pasture called White Flat or White Field in Lund. The catalogue says that it belonged to:

“the manor house of Lund now in occupation of”

Remington. The initial term was ten years at £9 annually. Remington promised to extend it to twenty-one years after renewing his own whole lease of:

“the manor house of Lund where he now lives.”

This is decisive contextual control. It gives Remington a concrete Lund tenancy, places him in the manor house, and shows him making subordinate leases while awaiting renewal of his own. The catalogue's next Lund entries trace White Flat afterwards: a November 1599 mortgage calls it formerly in John Rimington's tenure, and a December 1599 assignment recites Remington's April 1598 lease.

III. Remington's Letter Before Neville Went to France

Date and Address

The letter is undated. It addresses Neville as an esquire and asks him to complete an act before going to France. Cecil was discussing the proposed French envoy by 6 November 1598; the instructions and pass followed in January-February 1599; Neville was knighted on 9 April 1599 before departure. The strongest responsible range is therefore late 1598 to early April 1599, without pretending that the month can yet be fixed.

The address leaf reads:

“m^r Henry Nevill Esquire at S^r Henry Killigrewes howse in Lothberie London”

This is a direct household-network witness. Remington sent northern estate business to Neville at his father-in-law Sir Henry Killigrew's London house. Remington's opening remembrance to Neville and my very good Landladie most naturally addresses Anne Killigrew Neville as the lady with an interest in the landlord household, though the letter does not write her personal name.

The Covenant Dispute

Remington says Neville's covenants with him in his leases included:

“Boone dayes and Boone hennes”

The purchasers had separately covenanted to save Neville harmless against the obligations in Remington's leases. After returning home, however, they consulted counsel and claimed that their covenant was ineffective because they had purchased Neville's remainder and their purchase freed them from services and rents. Remington feared he would lose the benefit and asked Neville to protect the least and smallest particular granted to him.

The letter captures a real collision between layers of title. Remington claimed customary incidents under his leases; the purchasers claimed that their new freehold position and Neville's release from services and rents extinguished those incidents. The point is not merely picturesque vocabulary. It concerns whether a seller's lease covenants survived or were protected after the sale of the reversion.

The £500 and Chancery Acknowledgment

Remington then asks Neville:

“yow woulde acknowledge yow^r release before sume of the maisters of the

Chancerie before yow goe into Fraunce”

and associates that act with:

“the receipt of fyue hundred pounds”

He says enrolment could be deferred until payment, which, God willing, would be truly made. This is unusually precise evidence that Neville's departure required estate business to be completed through Chancery procedure. It is safe to connect the payment with the Lund disposal, but not yet safe to call it a particular instalment of the later £2,400 total. The release, purchasers, and enrolment must be identified before the accounting can be made exact.

Remington closes by asking God to bless Neville's honorable designs and send him:

“a thrise happie returne into yow^r natiue country”

That wording confirms anticipated foreign service, while the esquire address keeps the letter before Neville's April 1599 knighthood.

IV. The “Boone” Manorial Vocabulary

The manuscript letter reads Boone dayes and Boone hennes.

The University of York's Yorkshire Historical Dictionary defines a boon in the manorial system as a service owed by a tenant to the lord. Such obligations could consist of unpaid labor, carriage, or gifts in kind. Its Yorkshire examples are exceptionally close to Remington's wording:

The dictionary also explains why these obligations could generate conflict when land changed hands: they belonged to the conditions of tenure and could be treated as part of the manor. Remington's pairing of labor days and poultry dues is thus locally and chronologically normal Yorkshire manorial language.

V. Neville's Retrospective Account, 20 July 1601

The heading of D/EN/F6/1/6 reads:

“A note of all S^r Henry Nevill's land, as well in possession as reversion.

made 20 July 1601.”

The heading, the references to her ma^tie, Neville's fine, and the need to sell property after his French employment fit the post-rebellion financial negotiations of 1601.

Neville explicitly identifies Lund as maternal property:

“I had also in Yorkshire, w^ch descended to me from my mother the Manno^r

of Lund”

He then distinguishes two sales. Of Lund he sold:

“so much upon my first going ouer into Fraunce as yielded me 2400^li”

After his return, he says:

“I haue been forced to make sale of the rest for 1000^li to helpe frendes

of myne w^ch were engaged sureties for my debts.”

This statement changes the interpretation of the Lund evidence. The estate was not simply inherited and retained. It was converted into cash in at least two stages: a substantial sale timed to the first French mission, followed by sale of the remainder amid the debt and surety crisis after his return. Lund alone therefore produced £3,400 according to Neville's account.

The document later says that lands sold since his first French employment amounted to £4,030. That broader figure combines Lund with subsequent Berkshire sales and should not be mistaken for the value of Lund itself.

The completed figure collation now shows exactly how that £4,030 is constructed: £2,400 from the first Lund sale, £1,000 from the remainder, £330 from Wargrave land sold in Anno 38, and £300 from marginally identified Woolfines and other Waltham parcels. The £4,030 itemization is the precise counterpart of Neville's rounded August 1601 statement to Cecil that his late service forced sales worth £4,000. A later Woolfines paragraph says post-return sales “came to 630^li,” which equals £330 + £300, though its compressed grammar does not allocate the sum cleanly across Wargrave, Woolfines, and Waltham. The full arithmetic and fine context are in henry neville estate statement fine yorkshire tithes reversion 1601 1609.

VI. Maternal Descent and the Gresham-Thwaites Line

Neville's phrase descended to me from my mother is the strongest direct evidence for how he understood the Lund title. His mother was Elizabeth Gresham, daughter of Sir John Gresham and Frances Thwaites. Frances belonged to the Thwaites family of Lund, whose fifteenth- and sixteenth-century wills connect the family with the manor and church there.

The nineteenth-century editor of Testamenta Eboracensia, volume 5, printed page 115, states in a footnote that Lund went from the Greshams to Sir Henry Neville and then to the Remingtons. That property sequence is consistent with the newly assembled documents. Neville's own 1601 statement supplies the direct inheritance claim; the printed footnote is used only as supporting property-history testimony. The independently controlled genealogy identifies Frances Thwaites as the wife of Sir John Gresham.

VII. Biographical Significance

The Lund sequence deepens several central Neville topics at once:

None of this by itself establishes how the £2,400 was spent or whether embassy service required that exact sum. The documents do establish that the sale was temporally and procedurally bound to his departure, and that Neville himself later described it in those terms.

V. Lundwood Was Separately Leased and Still Active in 1609

The Leeds/YAS deed catalogue adds an essential qualification to Neville's account of selling Lund. Item MD239/M206 recites that on 20 November 1595 Henry Nevill late of Pillingbeare co. Berk. Esq. leased to Francis Clifford:

“woods etc. called Lundwoode in the Lordship of Lund for a term of 15 years

and a rent of 100 marks p.a.”

On 4 May 1608 Francis Earl of Cumberland assigned the remainder of that term to Sir Ralph Coningsby and Sir John Boteler in trust for Griselda Countess of Cumberland. The wood term therefore survived the 1596 tenant offer and could remain an encumbrance after the 1601 sale of the rest of the estate.

Richard Beaumont's image-controlled letter from Whitley, written on 9 March 1608 Old Style (9 March 1609 modern), reports the later condition of the property:

“there is not a tree worth a shillinge left / in itt, and the ground nothing

worth for pasture”

Its remaining woodland income depended on:

“kids or fagotts of the underwood”

and the underwood needed to be spared for three years. Beaumont reported offers of only £400 or £500 if the property could be freed from Lord Eure, while local annual offers did not exceed £30. He also sent Neville:

“a stone or rather a mynerall gotten att / Lund”

and thought more occurred:

“in the / ground in Lundwod”

The direct image connects the specimen to the named wood. A superseded location is preserved only in the private verification ledger. Beaumont invited Neville, if skilled in allayinge, to judge it. The mineral is not identified and Lord Eure's legal interest is still unresolved.

This 1595–1609 woodland sequence is developed fully in lundwood lease woodland economy mineral sample 1595 1609. It shows why the Lund history cannot be reconstructed only from the three aggregate sale prices: woods, tenant holdings, manor rights, leases, customary services, and later releases moved through overlapping transactions.

Research Programme

  1. Obtain and line-collate the remaining items in D/EN/F6/5; D/EN/F6/5/6 is

    2. now fully collated. Construct a deed-by-deed concordance of sellers, purchasers, parcels, prices, rents, and dates.

  2. Search Chancery acknowledgement and enrolment records for a Neville release

    3. involving John Remington, Lund, £500, and late 1598-1599.

  3. Search Yorkshire feet of fines, probate records, subsidies, parish registers,

    4. and deed catalogues for Lutman, Witty/Wittie, Gibson, Remington/Rimington, Elwood/Elwald, White Flat, and the manor of Lund. Start from MD239/84's 1611 Robert Lutman survey and MD239/87-88's 1614-1619 Phillip Wittie family.

  4. Reconcile the 1596 £1,600 tenants' offer, the pre-departure £500, the first-sale

    5. £2,400, and the post-return £1,000 without assuming that every number belongs to one conveyance.

  5. Identify the purchasers and any under-tenants in the compressed middle lines

    6. of Remington's letter through deeds rather than speculative paleography.

  6. Compare the later transfer from ... Neville ... to the Remingtons asserted

    7. in Testamenta Eboracensia with primary title documents.

  7. Locate the original 1595 Lundwood lease and identify Lord Eure's 1609

    8. interest through Clifford/Cumberland, Eure, Coningsby, Boteler, Chancery and Yorkshire deed collections.

  8. Investigate the Lund mineral sample through local geology, early mining and

    9. metallurgical records, and Neville's technical contacts, without assigning a mineral species before a source identifies it.

Citations

Notes on Access

The RBA public catalogue exposes parent files rather than separate pages for the three individual items used here; the physical item numbers were checked on the photographed shelfmarks. The Leeds catalogue PDF is openly accessible and its Remington entries were checked at PDF pp. 21-22. The Yorkshire Historical Dictionary is public. The Testamenta Eboracensia footnote was checked against the public page image, not accepted from OCR alone.