Ingram de Boynton married Joan, and in 1231 she inherited her family's land in Acklam and Roxby. The Boynton family lived in Boynton, Acklam and Roxby for the next 400+ years. Roxby was the last of the three manors sold, but only after Matthew lived there and buried his wives in the church in the seventeenth century. All that is left of the family manors is one corner of a wall. Half a century later it stands, marking 400 years of Boyntons living in Yorkshire.

No plumbing; no running water. No refrigeration. No heating systems other than fireplaces. No electricity. No motors. Medical care of questionable value. My favorite reminder of how different their life was is a story about the Percys [Percys]. The Percys were the richest family in north England most of this period. They had castles and manor houses spread across several counties. In the sixteenth century they had glass windows -- a great luxury -- which they carried from one lodging to the next as they moved from one to another. The Percys had 83 rooms in one of their castles, but they could not afford glass for all of their windows. Few of us have 83 room houses, but we do have panes in all of our windows. We need to re-think many of our assumptions about living to understand life as it was lived from 1066 to 1650.

Most of the information we have about the Boyntons is in the form of public documents: documents of the government, the church, and land transactions. There are no diaries, no letters, and no family record books. It would be much easier to think ourselves back into their lives if we had more personal information. Instead we have to rely on making as much as we can from a few hints.

Knighthood

Walter is the first Boynton about whom there is substantial information. Walter was a knight; the first in a long line of knights that ended only when Matthew made the family baronets in the seventeenth century. Knighthood defines a population in which the Boyntons participated.

That leads to three questions: 1) How do we know the Boyntons were knights? 2) What did it take to be a knight? 3) How many were there? What was the size of the population?

About Walter, the answer to how we know he was a knight is twofold. First, he served the King in court in ways that were limited to knights [A Boynton Story: Justiciar Duty]. There are no documents that label him a knight, but Hugh Thomas writes, "the practice of using knight as a title in documents and witness lists, which became standard later, is extremely rare in the Angevin period" [Thomas (1993), p. 8] And that leads to the second way we know that Walter was a knight. Hugh Thomas did extensive research on the knightly families -- though he prefers the term 'gentry families' -- of Yorkshire during this period, and he included Walter among the families he studied. Later, in the fourteenth century, there are many documents that give the title of knight to members of the Boynton family.

By this point becoming a knight was considerably less heroic than we might imagine. If you had land that yielded the appropriate amount of income you were supposed to become a knight. Some families with the requisite wealth eschewed knighthood, but knighthood was their responsibility -- based on their wealth [Notes on Knighthood].

How many knights were there? Hugh Thomas again gives the most concrete answer to this question. He found 225 families that met his criteria for being included among the gentry families in Yorkshire [Thomas (1993), p. 12]. "This may not have been the entire Yorkshire gentry in this period, but it is a sufficiently large portion to give a good picture of the gentry and their role in Angevin Yorkshire." That number is for the turn of the thirteenth century. Most of the historical research has found that the number of knights -- or gentry families -- declined from that point on. So the Boyntons were members of a very small population: a few hundred in Yorkshire and a few thousand in England. Scale matters! If you live in a community of a few hundred, or even a few thousand, you live in a community in which everyone knows everyone else. For knights, life was organized to facilitate everyone knowing everyone.

Heraldry and Armor

Two of the romances of knighthood are heraldry and armor. If "or" and "fess" read like from a foreign tongue, which they are, you may want to check out Notes on Heraldry. It is a quick introduction to the most visible manifestations of heraldry -- family coats of arms and family crests.

North Riding Boyntons	Sedbury Boyntons	Boyntons of Boynton

What is a knight without his armor? Apparently, not much. You can trace the development of armor from the twelfth century for as long as armor was worth wearing. We do not get many glimpses of the armor of the Boyntons. But there are pictures of the armor for the periods that the Boyntons were warring. And there are two pictures of Boyntons in armor [A Boynton Story: The Warriors' Finest].

 

Warring

The treacherous part of being a knight was warring; knights were responsible for the defense of the realm. When the king sent out a call, knights were expected to show up with a platoon. It was a quick, easy way to raise an army; each knight supplied his own infantry and war equipment. That, at least, is how it started in the 11th and 12th centuries. As the technology of war changed kings had to rely on knights more for war administration and less for supplying equipment of war. But when Henry V sailed for France he took almost all of the lords and knights in England with him to recover his lost lands [Ramsay, 1892]. As late as the beginning of the 15th century all the king's men were the war machine.

The first warring by Boyntons, that we know about, was Ingram's participation in the insurrection against king John [A Boynton Story: Magna Carta -- Father and Sons]. It produced the Magna Carta, but it was not exactly John's conception of the defense of the realm.

Ingram, the grandson of the first Ingram, was called up by Edward I to battle the Scots [A Boynton Story: Recalibrating Wealth]. At about the same time Alice de Boynton's ancestor was fighting the Scots and being rewarded with Castle Leavington.

This is the inquisition post mortem taken when Alice died. It tells that Castle Leavington was held from the king, and that it was won "by the service of providing a man with an unbarded horse, armed with 'aketon', 'palet', lance and gauntlets of 'plate', for 40 days when there is war in Scotland." In the thirteenth century knights -- Alice's great grandfather, for example -- were still expected to show up with men and war equipment. And there were rewards for warring.

John, son of Robert de Boynton, was a very busy warrior: 1301, 1311, and 1313. The records we have are not war records. They are pardons from various felonies; pardons that he received by participating in the war effort. In 1301 he was pardoned for murder, rape and robberies "by reason of his service on the coast of Scotland." In 1311 the accounting of felonies was less graphic -- "for divers felonies." And the 1313 pardon was for his participation in the insurrection against the king in the Gaveston affair [Boynton Stories: Caught in the Middle; Forgiven].

Robert de Boynton, the father of John, was an administrator of war. [Boynton Stories: Department of Defense 14th Century Style] As knight of the shire he passed a tax bill to fund war with Scotland. He was then commissioned to collect the taxes in the East Riding of Yorkshire. Once the taxes were collected he was commissioned to recruit infantry. And once the infantry was recruited he was commissioned to punish deserters. He probably brought a platoon with him to the war, as had Ingram, but his better recorded exploits were adminisrative [Boynton Stories: Surviving Bannockburn]. Robert also received a pardon for his participation in the Lancaster led insurrection to oust Gaveston [Boynton Stories: Caught in the Middle; Forgiven]. That was a bit of warring which was less friendly to the king.

Robert de Boynton, the grandson of the above Robert, was constable of the castle at Berwick upon Tweed in 1378 [Boynton Stories: Henry Percy Makes His Move]. This was your quintessential high danger assignment; the castle changed hands 13 time in the course of English-Scot conflict. Robert suffered one of those changes of hands, and paid for it with his head. A band of Scotsmen clambered over the walls at night and killed everyone inside.

In 1405 Henry de Boynton joined an insurrection led by Archbishop of York Scrope, Thomas Mowbray and and Henry de Percy. The insurrection failed. Percy, the earl of Northumberland, escaped to Scotland. Scrope, Mowbray, and Henry de Boynton lost their heads. Henry was captured holed up in the castle at Berwick upon Tweed in the king's first use of a canon to take a castle.

When Henry V went off to France to recover his property there, Christopher was commissioned to keep the home fires burning. Civil defense was surely a more comfortable warring than trotting off to the rain and mud that Shakespeare tells us characterized Henry V's warring in France.

Agnes was Christopher's wife; the Christopher who was son of the above Christopher. Christopher died an early death leaving Agnes a prosperous widow. She re-married the up and coming Richard Ratcliffe. Richard was the great good friend of Richard who would become Richard III, and the family went off to court when Richard III took the throne. The reign did not last long. Richard III came to a bloody end at Bosworth field -- and Richard Ratcliffe with him.

The next warring we know about was Matthew Boynton in the Civil War -- 17th century. Matthew was a commander of parliament forces in the north several times over.

Family and Economy

Knighthood was the result of wealth. Wealth was land [A Boynton Story: Recalibrating Wealth]. And wealth/land was intimately connected to family.

The Boynton family fortune began with Walter. His heirs inherited and inherited and inherited -- seventeen generations from Walter to Matthew in the seventeenth century or sixteen male heirs in a row. While they surely prospered by good management of their lands and through service to the crown the major changes in the family fortune came as a result of marrying well [A Boynton Story: Marrying Well]. Joan of Acklam, Margaret del See, and Frances Griffith contributed much to the family fortune.

Life expectancy was different. There was more variation in age at death than we have today; some adults died at a young age and others lived as long as we live today. The result was many persons whose marriage partners died. And most often that was followed by a second marriage. Many Boyntons were married two or three times as the result of husbands or wives dying. Re-marrying was the convention, but there were a few who did not. Agnes and Margaret became widows, and they had had all of the men they needed in their lives. [A Boynton Story: Women's Liberation in the Late Fifteenth Century]

The inter-generational transfer of wealth was transfer of land. That seems easy enough except parents did not die as their children matured. There was overlap of generations. And, usually, there were more children than parents. The distribution of the family fortune among children was both potential conundrum and became standard practice [A Boynton Story: The Next Generation]. It was conundrum if the family wealth devolved into poverty. It was conundrum if distribution led to conflict. The standard practice was a single heir who would inherit the family fortune plus support for establishing other children with the surplus from the family wealth.

Inheritance seems easy. The oldest male child is the heir. If there is no oldest male child then the oldest female child is heir. That is simple. However, life in the 12th through the 17th centuries belied this simplicity. What we would think of as premature deaths -- among both males and females -- and consequent re-marriages served to make the simple rather complex. The story of Alice de Meynell, Bolton, Boynton, Percy exemplifies these complications [A Boynton Story: The Tangled Web of Castle Leavington].

What is missing from this discussion of marriage and family is love/feeling. We think about them as if they were automatons going about their living without feeling. That seems most unlikely, but love stories are not easy to find. We can find only three [A Boynton Story: It was not Only Economy; Three Love Stories].

ownership -- misappropriately reading our conception of ownership back onto english feudalism: the king's real estate agent for specifying holding land from king; witnessing for communal character of ownership.

Daily Living

Home is a major stumbling block for us in imagining their daily life. Notwithstanding the primitive transportation facilities, they were peripathetic people. Everyone who was anyone held multiple chunks of land, and they were scattered all over the countryside. They moved from one to the next, to the next, to the next to take care of their finances. [A Boynton Story: Home is an Entourage]

A Boynton Story: Let's Eat

Before time