The Bolles of Bolle Hall, Swineshead parish
See also
The Bolles of Swineshead
and
The Family Tree of the
Bolles of Swineshead
For the first part of the Bolles of Swineshead story
see The Roots of the Bolles of Swineshead
See
This page will contradict the long accepted claim in
the Bolle of Haugh pedigree that an Alan of Swineshead, father of Thomas
Bole of Bole, was the Lord of Swineshead.
Please see
The Lords of Swineshead
and
The Question of the Bolle as
Lords of Swineshead.
The
Hundred Roll of 1274
documents that a John Bolle was living in Kirton wapentake, the
administrative district which included Swineshead parish, and an Allan Bolle
and a Thomas Bolle were referenced in an inquisition held in Elloe wapentake
just to the south of Kirton.
Although this doesn’t place them at Bolle Hall, this is consistent with the
top two levels in
The Bolles of Haugh
Pedigree that show the earliest known Bolle of Haugh ancestor was
an Allan of Swineshead and his son was Thomas Bolle of Bolle Hall.
So far I can just say that people of that name were in the immediate
area and according to references in the Hundred Roll that John Bolle was of
enough authority in the Swineshead area to have influence over the hanging
of thieves and that Thomas Bolle was accused by some for abusing his office
as a royal sub-bailiff in the area around Moulton, Whaplode etc.
The next levels of the Haugh pedigree can be
confirmed.
William Bolle (1)
The earliest Bolle mentioned in the Bolles of Haugh
Pedigree that I could find an original source reference for is William Bolle
(ca. 1270-1326) of Swineshead.
In this reference from November 1311 he was referred
to as ‘the attorney of John la Warre, Lord of Swineshead’.
This is notable as John la Warre had been Lord of Swineshead for only
1 year at that point. The
Gresley family had been the Lords of the Manor of Swineshead since about
1070 when this land was first awarded to Sir Albert de Gresley by William of
Normandy following his conquest of England in 1066.
Sir Thomas Gresley (1280-1310) was the 8th Lord of
Swineshead but he died with no heir in 1310 and the estate passed to Thomas’
sister Joan’s husband, John la Warre of Ewyas, Wales (now Hereford).
John la Warre already held extensive land in Somerset, Hereford,
Wiltshire, Wales, Northampton, Surrey and Shropshire and through Joan he
acquired her father’s holdings of Wakerle, co. Northampton;
the Manor of Manchester, co. Lancaster and the Manor of Swynesheved
in Lincolnshire in September 1310.
With all that property, la Warre would have been too
busy to see to the day-to-day business end of running Swineshead Manor so he
would need a trusted local representative.
When one of la Warre’s tenants, William de Staunton, fell into debt,
the Sheriff of Lincolnshire was not able to locate him within his bailiwick
and reported back to the chancery court that he had seized all Staunton’s
land and chattels and delivered them to ‘William Bolle, the attorney of John
la Warre’. Attorney did not
mean what it means today, it was just a person appointed to represent
another person on a specific occasion but it did indicate a level of trust
that la Warre must have had in William.
As la Warre had only been Lord of Swineshead for one
year at this point it has to be considered whether his trust in William
could have been based on an earlier association with him.
See
Was There a Previous Connection
Between William Bolle and John La Warre?
In the 1300’s abbeys were run as businesses often
with a son of the founding family or another leading local family as the
Abbot. Faith was a strong
driving force and the church was seen as being able to influence the future
of the soul after death. Gifts
of land and other assets to the church often followed an inheritance for the
sake of prayers for their ancestor’s souls.
Those grants are very helpful to establish the lines and dates of
descent at least in the better-off landholding families.
Well run abbeys were skilled at developing those donated lands,
building manors on donated land to lease and running their own farm
operations with donated labor coming from their parish. In the 1320’s John
the carpenter, son of Thomas Bolle of Algarkirk, gave Crowland Abbey an acre
of sea-marsh lying between the sea-marsh of John Bolle and Foscedyke towards
the east and John the Carpenter’s land toward the west, the south abutting
on the sea-marsh of the Abbot of Crowland and the north on the sea-dyke.
Ref. (Spalding Gentlemen’s Society, Wrest Park Cartulary, f. 132, no.
12)
The list of tenants of Thomas of Multone, Lord of
Fleet (sons Alan and Lambert de Multone and Thomas de Lucy) in 1315 includes
a Simon Bolle.
Ref.
Land between the messuage of Simon son of Gilbert and
the church and between the bank and Westgate:
Richard son of Roger atte Green the plot of Simon
Bolle and returns per year 18d and 3 days of boon work
The land in the Fells south of Swineshead was very
swampy but the landowners and church leaders built dikes and drainage canals
to reclaim the swamps as very valuable meadow land.
Then began a period of competition for these lands as ages old grants
were studied to see just what rights may have been retained when their
families made grants to the abbeys in the past.
Claims and counter-claims were regularly made as the various factions
argued over their rights to these valuable meadows.
As the king rarely ruled on church matters (until Henry VIII’s time)
they sometimes escalated into armed encounters.
The abbot of Crowland Abbey, which had originally
founded Spalding Priory, attempted to supplant the Abbot of Spalding’s use
of church land within the manors for which Crowland still held the charters
but that was met with resistance and an offensive onto his own lands.
In July 1329 he complained to the king that Walter, the prior of
Spalding, with his men of Spalding and Moulton, including Alan of Multon,
Thomas de Fleet of Holbech, John Bolle of Whaplode, William son of John of
the same (so William Bolle?) and an Alan Bolle (of Moulton), had cut down
the beams supporting his dikes protecting his abbey and crop lands had been
flooded, they had also extorted tolls from persons coming to the Crowland
fair and assaulted the officers he had appointed to collect those tolls
within his own manors of Spalding, Holbech, Whaplode and Sutton.
Ref. (Patent Rolls of Edward III)
In another land dispute, in 1332, Thomas Wake of
Liddell and his men of East and West Deeping and Barholm prevented
Crowland’s bailiffs from collecting tolls and other dues from the fair there
and hindered merchants from attending and also broke into the abbey’s close
at Baston and seized livestock from several of the abbey’s manors and held
them at West Deeping until a fine of £500 was paid.
However, the abbot had other plans.
Accompanied by his monks and several other men he raided Wake’s manor
assaulted Wake’s servants and carried away his animals.
Later Wake raised a dike to manage the water on his
own land which caused it to flow onto Crowland’s land and in June 1342 Wake
complained to the king that ‘the Abbot of Crowland with several monks and
many others (the list of men is stated this time and included a Richard
Bole) broke a dike in his marsh at Depyng (Deeping) causing his land to be
flooded so that he lost the profits of the marsh for a great while and
carried away his fish’.
(Patent Rolls of Edward III)
One last reference in the south of Lincolnshire.
In 1349, a William Bolle, chaplain to the church of St George
Stamford (west of Deeping) was appointed to the ministry of that church.
The appointment came from King Edward III as the church was normally
under the abbot of St Fromond (of France) but was temporarily in the king’s
hands due to the present war with France. (Patent Rolls of Edward III)
John Bolle (1)
William Bolle (2)
In 1348 William, son of John Bolle of Swineshead,
settled 1 messuage (property) of 45 acres of land, 29 acres of meadow and 97
acres of pasture which were in the parishes of Swineshead, Wigtoft and
Bicker on himself and his wife Alice.
The land description fits as the family home and land of
Bolle Hall near Hoffleet which was
right at the meeting point of those three parishes.
The Bolle land had been divided into 3 parcels due to the dower
rights of the surviving two widows of the previous two generations but by
temporarily granting all 3 parcels to two feofees (Robert de Spaigne and
Robert Daniel), who in the same document then granted their rights to the
land back to William and Alice, the property would be combined back into one
again on the death of the two widows.
His own portion had been 2/3 of that land with 1/6 held by dower
right by Joan the widow of John Bolle (so William’s mother) and 1/6 by dower
rights of another widow, Joan now the wife of
John de Meres
(so almost certainly William (1)’s widow and William (2)’s great-aunt
now remarried). This charter,
along with William Bolle (1)’s IPM of 1326, is an excellent confirmation of the descent of Bolle
Hall in the Bolle line of inheritance as stated in the
Bolle of Haugh Pedigree.
William specified that he and Alice would hold the
land for their lives but, as they had no male heir, after their decease the
land would pass to John Bolle and wife Katherine and their heirs.
Their relationship to William is not explicitly stated but that would
be William’s brother John and wife Katherine Goddard.
After that, if John and Katherine should predecease him and they
should have no surviving heirs, the land was to go to the other children of
John Bolle (Senior, their father).
Their brother Godfrey had predeceased then by 1333 but there may have
been other younger brothers.
Lacking such a surviving heir only then was the land to go to William’s heir
as would be decided in an Inquisition Post Mortem.
On that same day (January 27, 1348) another agreement
was signed in which John and Katherine paid William and Alice 20 marks of
silver and 1 rose yearly for another messuage, 3 salt works, 13 ½ acres of
land, 2 ½ acres of meadow, 5 acres of marsh and 7s 4d of rent in Swineshead,
Wigtoft, Bicker and Donnington and for William’s rights to the 1 ½ acres of
that land held by John de Meres
and his wife Joan as her dower rights of William’s inheritance for the term
of John and Katherine and their heir’s lives with the same defaults as the
above. Ref 3a
The statement that John paid 20 marks for the
property is not necessarily true.
The Medieval Genealogy’s page explaining the Feet of Fines states
that they were often a neat way to legally assign property within the family
and that the fee paid in those cases was just a round sum stated to ensure
the legality of the document as a land sale although no payment may actually
have changed hands. Ref:
http://www.medievalgenealogy.org.uk/fines/format.shtml
Joan’s dower rights were for a 1/3 share in three
specific parcels of land (see William Bolle’s
Inquisitions Post Mortem): a plot in Coningesby, the Bolle home
and land near Hoffleet and a parcel of land in Swineshead, Wigtoft and
Donnington held under John de Holand.
The plot in Coningesby is not mentioned so we don’t
know so far whether that land had been seized by the king after Cecily’s
death or if it was still in the family and William was still keeping that
for himself. The parcel
containing their home was passed to his brother John in the first document
and the third parcel then must be for the land they held under John de
Holland. The parish names given
are correct with the addition of Bicker but there are some properties listed
in Joan’s dower rights IPM (ex. Holdefrith, the marsh of Estevening, a
meadow called Crakestevene) which I cannot place
John Bolle (2)
Randulph Bolle
The National Library of Wales
Lease for 5
years of a piece of meadow called le Ouxpastr', , and if 2 ...,
Author(s):
Material
type: Text
Language:
Latin
Year:
1383
Level:
File.
Summary:
1 Lord John la Warre, kt, lord of Swynesheued. 2 Ralph Bolle of
Swynesheued. Lease for 5 years of a piece of meadow called le Ouxpastr', [ ?
p. Swineshead, Lincolnshire], and if 2 dies within the aforesaid term there
will be no constraint upon his heirs to rent the aforesaid meadow beyond the
first day of March following his death. Annual rent: 100s. Dated at
Swynesheued. Latin. Armorial seal of 2 (damaged). Deed repaired prior to
purchase by NLW.
