The Proposed £9,800 Wadley Leasehold Purchase: Neville, Unton, Knightley, Wentworth, and Southbye, 1598-1599

The Proposed £9,800 Wadley Leasehold Purchase, 1598-1599

Verified Sourced Facts

The sections below distinguish the directly controlled manuscript clauses, the independent Unton/Oriel controls, and the conclusions that remain open.

Why This Memorandum Matters

Royal Berkshire Archives D/EN/F6/1/4 is a densely revised working paper headed:

remembrances for covenantes touching wadley

It records the terms on which a first-person purchaser proposed to enter the house and leasehold estate at Wadley near Faringdon. The document is preserved among Sir Henry Neville's correspondence and memoranda, and the I is probably Neville. The leaf itself, however, does not name the purchaser or carry a signature. The hand should not be called Neville's autograph until it is independently authenticated.

The scale is remarkable. The memorandum ends:

The sume to be 9800^li

That was not the price of Oriel College's freehold manor. Oriel College Archives states that the college had owned the manor of Wadley since 1440 and preserves records of its estate leases. The negotiation therefore concerned the valuable Unton leasehold interest and its associated house, demesnes, rents, woods, copyholds, and subleases.

A Document Fixed to Hallowtide 1598

The proposed purchaser was to enter at Hallowtide, the feast of All Saints on 1 November:

M^r Knightley to receave the halfe yeares rent & profitts of

the demesnes att hollontide, & I then to enter & to

receave the rents & profitts from thence forth

The payment schedule begins on the same day and continues quarterly:

The apparently backward February 1598 is not an error. Under the English legal year, the year changed on 25 March, so February 1598 came after November 1598 and before May 1599. The memorandum must have been prepared before the first entry and payment date, 1 November 1598.

The Unton Succession Explains the Negotiating Parties

Sir Henry Unton, soldier and former ambassador to France, died in March 1596. John Gough Nichols's *Unton Inventories*, checked against the scanned pages lxv-lxvi, says that Unton left no will and that administration was granted on 6 April 1596 to his sister Cecily Wentworth and her husband John Wentworth.

Nichols next reports an inquisition at Faringdon on 9 June 1598. It identified Unton's co-heiresses as the three daughters of his deceased sister Anne, wife of Valentine Knightley, and his surviving sister Cecily, wife of John Wentworth. The manuscript's repeated pairing of M^r Knightley and M^r Wentworth is therefore not incidental. They represented the two family lines through which the Unton interest was being administered and inherited.

This places the proposed bargain directly inside the unsettled post-Unton estate. It is a record of an attempt to consolidate a complicated inherited leasehold, not an ordinary purchase from a single owner.

Averills Lease and the Southbye Litigation

The opening clause reads:

To discharge Averills lease from Southbye otherwise upon abatement

for the rent of C^li by the yeare for vij yeares & not above

The reading is independently controlled by Nichols's notice of a Chancery case. He names John and Richard Southbye as plaintiffs and John Wentworth and Valentine Knightley as defendants. The disputed premises included:

pasture ground called Averylls Leaze

and a close of meadow called Great Weseye in Faringdon. According to that printed calendar notice, the lease had been made to the Southbyes in consideration of debts owed by Sir Henry Unton.

The manuscript clause therefore addresses a real encumbrance created by Unton's debts. It proposes either discharge of the Southbye lease or an abatement valued at no more than seven years of £100 annual rent. This makes the maximum stated adjustment £700. The clause is financial due diligence: the buyer would not accept the full £9,800 valuation while a debt-backed sublease remained outstanding.

Vacant Possession and Protection Against Last-Minute Waste

The prospective purchaser required the estate to remain unchanged before entry:

That there shalbe no woodfalls made nor no estates

of any copyhold graunted before I enter

This protects two distinct sources of value. A new woodfall would remove saleable timber. A new copyhold grant would create or enlarge a tenant's customary estate and reduce the incoming leaseholder's control. The clause shows that Neville's estate papers should be read not merely as descriptions of land but as instruments for preserving capital value during negotiation.

The same logic governs already felled timber:

That such wood as is felled may not be sold but

brought home for the use of the howse

The wood was to remain an estate resource. It could be consumed for the house, but it was not to be turned into cash by the outgoing interest before entry.

The House, Movables, Crops, and Phased Entry

The memorandum sought the house with its movables and distinguished among parts of the agricultural cycle. The buyer could enter the house immediately, take arable after the corn had been harvested, and take fallow immediately:

That I may enter upon the howse presently & upon

the arable as soone as the corne is off, & upon the

fallow presently

This is unusually concrete evidence about how an elite estate transfer was made operational. Entry was not a single abstract legal moment. House, movables, standing crop, fallow land, rents, demesnes, woods, and copyholds could pass on different practical timetables.

The surviving Wadley building contains sixteenth- and seventeenth-century fabric, although its principal south front was rebuilt in 1768. Historic England's list entry for Wadley House records its Unton association and Queen Elizabeth's 1574 visit. The memorandum therefore concerns a major house with established courtly history, not a minor farm.

Five Instalments and a Diminishing Collateral Package

The purchaser did not propose to pay £9,800 outright. Each fifth was £1,960, and the first payment was to be secured personally:

for the first payment my self to be bound in a statute of 3000^li

The following clauses progressively narrow the property standing as security. The whole lease initially remained bound; later stages excepted or retained specified portions; the last stage still named Averills Lease and the grounds under the hill. Some revised exceptions remain too compressed to print, but the financial architecture is clear: as instalments were paid, the collateral package diminished.

The ratio is also informative. A £3,000 statutory obligation secured a £1,960 instalment, a face-value coverage ratio of about 1.53 to 1. The larger bond created pressure to pay on time and gave the sellers a remedy stronger than the bare unpaid instalment.

This is one of the best surviving Neville-estate documents for reconstructing how a very large acquisition might be financed: periodic cash, personal statutory security, and property security operated together.

What the Document Does Not Prove

No located source yet shows that the bargain was completed. Nichols's later account says Valentine Knightley became resident at Wadley and died there in 1618, while Oriel retained the manor. That later history makes it especially important to search for a failed negotiation, revised bargain, assignment, licence to alienate, or reconveyance rather than silently adding Wadley to Neville's completed landholdings.

The first-person purchaser is probably Neville because the leaf survives in his RBA correspondence-and-memoranda file and the paper describes the buyer's payments and entry. That remains a content-and-provenance attribution. The leaf has no signature, no address, and no explicit Henry Neville in its text.

New Research Programme

1. Oriel College estate archive. Search the EST series and college

accounts for 1598-1599 for a licence to assign Wadley, a fine, entry money, rent arrears, or the names Neville, Knightley, Wentworth, Southbye, and Unton.

2. Chancery pleadings. Identify the full record behind the printed

Southbye v Wentworth and Knightley calendar notice. The bill and answers may transcribe the Averills lease, its consideration, term, rent, and debt.

3. Statutes and recognizances. Search for a £3,000 statute naming the buyer

and sellers. Such a record could independently identify the manuscript's I and show whether the first instalment was actually secured.

4. Conveyance and assignment records. Search RBA, Oriel, TNA, and feet of

fines for the £9,800 total or five £1,960 payments between summer 1598 and the end of 1599.

5. Estate mapping. Align Averills Lease, Great Weseye, Wickenham, and the

grounds under the hill with the 1596 Unton inventory, Oriel maps, and later Wadley rentals.

6. Hand control. Compare the text hand only with independently

authenticated Neville autographs. Similarity to another attributed draft is not enough.

Sources

• Royal Berkshire Archives, [D/EN/F6/1, Miscellaneous correspondence of Sir

Henry Neville](https://ww2.berkshirenclosure.org.uk/calmview/Record.aspx?src=CalmView.Catalog&id=DEN%2fF%2f6%2f1).

• John Gough Nichols, [*The Unton Inventories, Relating to Wadley and

Faringdon* (1841)](https://archive.org/details/untoninventorie00nichgoog), especially pp. lxv-lxviii.

• Oriel College Archives,

including the statement that Wadley was a college manor from 1440 and that estate-leasing records survive.

• Historic England, [Wadley House, National Heritage List entry

1199959](https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1199959).

Quoted Source Passages

All displayed quotations from D/EN/F6/1/4 were checked line by line against IMG_8327.jpeg at original resolution. The short Averylls Leaze quotation was checked against the scanned 1841 page, not accepted from OCR.

Notes on Access

RBA's public catalogue describes the nineteen-document parent file D/EN/F6/1, but not item /4 separately. The two manuscript photographs are held in the project's controlled BRO corpus. Nichols's complete scan is public through Internet Archive; Oriel College's site gives archive contact and access conditions for the estate-leasing records proposed for the next pass.