Family and Education

b. May/June 1510, 1st s. of Robert Roos of Ingmanthorpe by 1st w. Mary, da. of Sir James Strangways (d.1521) of West Harlsey. m. Elizabeth, da. of Sir Nicholas Fairfax of Gilling Castle and Walton, 1da. suc. fa. May 1530.1

Offices Held

Biography

The Roos family of Ingmanthorpe was a cadet branch of the baronial family. In 1512 the Roos barony passed to the Manners, earls of Rutland, who were chief lords of the manor of Ingmanthorpe, and about 1532 the 1st Earl presented to the benefice of Kirk Deighton upon wrong information that Robert Roos was still under age. Roos was an executor of his father’s will of 25 Oct. 1529.2

To his patrimony Roos added the claim derived through his mother to a share in the Strangways inheritance, which included property formerly belonging to the Scropes of Masham. Following the death of Sir James Strangways the younger in 1541 an award of June 1543, confirmed by an Act of 1544 (35 Hen. VIII, c.24), gave Roos as one of the claimants, and in consideration of his costs in the litigation involved, Upsall and other manors in Northumberland, and Yorkshire, the reversion of further manors in those counties, and two advowsons in Leicestershire. He received livery of these lands in January 1545 but disputes continued: thus in October 1549 the 3rd Lord Dacre, another of the claimants, informed the 5th Earl of Shrewsbury that Roos had at length been ejected from Leonard Dacre’s house at Upsall. By then Roos had begun to part with his lands: in 1541 he sold North Deighton to William and Elizabeth Scrymgeour, in 1545 he mortgaged a fifth part of five manors to Robert Curzon and (Sir) Thomas Pope (a transaction which led to a chancery suit which was reported by Edmund Plowden), in 1547 he sold Potto to William Tancred, and in 1557 and 1558 other manors went to Christopher Lascelles and Christopher Wray.3

What significance should be attached to Roos’s election to the Parliament of 1555 is a matter for speculation. Already on the road to ruin, he may have had an interest in visiting London under the protection of privilege or merely have wished to enjoy an experience befitting his station. His property at Upsall gave him a local standing at Thirsk, but he probably owed his adoption there to his connexions, notably his marriage to Elizabeth Fairfax; his fellow-Member Christopher Lascelles, who had a lien on one of the seats for Thirsk, may also have had a hand in his nomination. Neither Roos nor Lascelles appears on the list of Members of this Parliament who opposed one of the government’s bills, and if Roos shared the Catholicism which was later to bring trouble to James Roos of Ingmanthorpe, who was presumably his brother, it was not disaffection which kept him out of other Marian Parliaments.4

Early in Elizabeth’s reign Roos sought financial salvation by surrendering his remaining lands to the 2nd Earl of Rutland to the end his debts should be paid and he have some exhibition during life, which seemeth was not much, for he had a chamber wherein he lay in South Deighton and had his diet sent every mealtime from Mr. Manners’s table, who then lived at the parsonage house there.The transaction took place during Rutland’s presidency of the north, and it may account for the second licence to enter on the Strangways inheritance which was granted to Roos in March 1562. The remainder of his life was passed in obscurity. On his death in 1583 he left a daughter Bridget who was to sink even lower: married to a kinsman, Peter Roos of Laxton, Nottinghamshire, she was reduced to such poverty that, so tradition has it, she was one of those who gleaned corn in the field there.5

Ref Volumes: 1509-1558

Author: Alan Davidson

Notes

• 1. Date of birth estimated from age at fa.’s i.p.m., C142/81/302. CP, iv. 68; Vis. Yorks. (Harl. Soc. xvi), 300; Yorks. Arch. Soc. rec. ser. xxxiv. 32; VCH Yorks (N. Riding), i. 336.
• 2. CP, xi. 117-19; LP Hen. VIII, xii; Test Ebor. v (Surtees Soc. lxxix), 276-8.
• 3. LP Hen. VIII, xix, xx; Yorks. Arch. Jnl. vii. 492; HMC Shrewsbury and Talbot, ii. 344-5; NRA 11614 (Ingilby recs., Ripley Castle, Harrogate, Yorks. nos. 359, 843-4, 846); VCH Yorks. (N. Riding), i. 346, 408; ii. 28, 291, 313-14; Yorks. Arch. Soc. rec. ser. ii. 117, 131, 207, 211; L. W. Abbott, Law Reporting in Eng. 339-40.
• 4. Leeds Phil. and Lit. Soc. Procs. x, 277; Biog. Studies (now Recusant History ), iii. 83-84.
• 5. Yorks. Arch. Soc. rec. ser. xxxiv. 32; CPR, 1560-3, p. 362; Vis. Notts. (Harl. Soc. iv), 111-12; VCH Yorks. (N. Riding), i. 336; Thoroton, Notts. ed. Throsby, iii. 209.