The village of Kniveton takes its name from a family who owned its land, shaped its church, and dominated local life for over four centuries. Their rise was gradual and determined; their fall was swift and absolute.
Origins
The story begins not with a great lord but with a free peasant. Around 1200, a man named Humfrid son of Haslac held land in Kniveton. His son Matthew expanded these holdings quietly and steadily, and by 1240 the family had become respected tenants and trusted agents for the Bishop of Lichfield. It is unclear exactly how the money and influence accumulated, but when Matthew died in 1240 the foundations of what might be called the Kniveton dynasty had been laid.
His son, also Matthew, built on this foundation acquiring estates at Parwich, Hognaston, Ashbourne and Bradley, with Bradley becoming the principal seat of the elder branch of the family. The Rev. Heather article in The Reliquary (1884) notes that Sir Matthew de Knyveton was living at Bradley Hall as late as 1301.
Matthew’s son Henry of Bradley, who died in 1311, was among the first Derbyshire knights to sit in Parliament, representing the county in the reign of Edward I. In the space of roughly a century, the family had travelled from peasant landholder to parliamentary knight.
Their coat of arms, still visible in the church glass, featured a chevron patterned in silver and black. It is one of the oldest surviving reminders of the family’s presence in the village.
Rise of the Family
As the family grew in wealth and influence, it divided. While the elder branch settled at Bradley, a younger branch established itself at Mercaston in the parish of Mugginton and for a time both branches appear to have flourished.
The last of the elder Bradley branch was William Knyveton, born in 1551. When he died without male heirs, the estates passed to his cousin William Kynveton of Mercaston. The two branches of the family had effectively rejoined.
The Baronets
The family reached the height of its importance in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Sir William Kniveton of Mercaston was appointed a Knight of the Shire and served as Member of Parliament for Derbyshire from 1604–1611. In 1611 Sir William was made one of the first baronets in England by King James I.
His son Sir Gilbert Kniveton, the second Baronet, was knighted in 1605 by James I and served as High Sheriff of Derbyshire in 1623.
Sir Gilbert’s second wife was Lady Frances Dudley, one of the five daughters of Sir Robert Dudley – himself the illegitimate son of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, the celebrated favourite of Queen Elizabeth I. Lady Frances was therefore the granddaughter, by an irregular line, of one of the most powerful men in Elizabethan England.
Lady Frances brought this extraordinary heritage to a small Derbyshire church, and left her mark on it in the most practical way through the magnificent communion plate she donated in 1641, which is still in use at St Michael & All Angels today.
Her monument, a marble effigy, can still be seen at St Giles in the Fields in London.
Sir Gilbert died around the time of Lady Frances’s gift to the church. He was succeeded by his son Sir Andrew and it was with Sir Andrew that everything unravelled.
Civil War and Decline
Sir Andrew Kniveton, the third baronet, was a committed Royalist at a moment when commitment to the King carried enormous personal risk. When the Civil War broke out between Charles I and Parliament, Sir Andrew was appointed Governor of Tutbury Castle one of the Royalist strongholds in the Midlands.
The King visited him there twice in the summer of 1645 in May and August. On the second occasion, Charles stayed at Ashbourne on his way, and his visit was recorded in the in the Ashbourne church register.
Tutbury did not hold. Disease spread through the garrison, and Sir Andrew was forced to surrender on 26th June 1646. The terms of Parliament’s victory were punishing and Sir Andrew was fined so heavily that he had no choice but to sell his estates. Bradley, Osmaston and Sturston went to Francis Meynell, an alderman and goldsmith of London, while Kniveton itself was sold to a Mr Lowe.
Sir Andrew’s brother Thomas was the 4th Baronet but the Kniveton name disappears from the Baronetcy early in the eighteenth century.
What Remains
The family left traces across the county. At Bradley church there was once a carving on the north wall of the arms of Thomas Knyvetone and his wife Jane Leech, though Rev. Heather noted with regret that it had been painted over in gaudy colours by the time he visited. At Mugginton there is an altar tomb bearing a Latin inscription recording Rictius Kynveton of Mercaston and his wife Johannes. In Ashbourne church there is a tomb with a canopy in memory of Robert Knyveton, son of Sir John Knyveton, Knight of Bradley.
In London, at St Giles in the Fields, there is a marble effigy of Lady Frances Kniveton commissioned by her sister after Frances’s death and relocated when the previous church on the site was demolished. The monument bears an inscription recording her connections to the Dudley and Kniveton families, and she lies there still, far from the Derbyshire hills where she made her most lasting mark.
At Kniveton, the coat of arms in the south chancel window, the chalice and paten she gave, and the church that the family helped to build and sustain across five centuries are what remain of the Knivetons in the place that bears their name.