If we disregard the opprobrium heaped upon the ‘new men’ who – at least in the opinion of Richard Neville, earl of Warwick – came to dominate Edward IV's first reign, the young king's friends and associates in this early period remain somewhat shadowy figures. While modern biographies outlining the public careers of many leading members of the Yorkist court have been, or are about to be, published, detail beyond births, marriages and deaths, and lists of official appointments, is available only for a few of the greatest men of the age, such as the ‘Kingmaker’ earl of Warwick, or the monarch's younger brother, George, duke of Clarence. Testamentary materials have been used with some success to gain a measure of individual members of the Yorkist court, but the limited snapshot provided by an individual's will offers, at best, a selective picture. By virtue of the survival of two sets of his household accounts, John Howard, later Lord Howard and duke of Norfolk, is perhaps the Yorkist peer of whose daily life most is known; the library of John Tiptoft, earl of Worcester, lends a cultural varnish to the image of the ‘Butcher of England’; while the wider retinue of Edward IV's chamberlain, William, Lord Hastings, was studied in detail by William Dunham more than half a century ago. That aside, little can be said of the composition or size of the establishments of the greater men of Yorkist England, or of where and how the members of these households were recruited. The information (however limited) on the household of Humphrey Stafford, Lord Stafford of Southwick and briefly earl of Devon, that may be gleaned from the will of Roger Bekensawe (d.1468), a cleric closely associated with him in the 1460s, is thus of some interest.

I

Humphrey was a descendant of a cadet branch of the Stafford family, earls of Stafford and dukes of Buckingham, that had become established in Dorset in the second half of the fourteenth century. His father, William, an esquire of Henry VI's household, had been murdered during the rebellion of 1450, and he had subsequently been taken into the household of his guardian, William, Lord Bonville.