| Administrative History | The Agard family held various offices of the Honor of Tutbury in the Duchy of Lancaster, including those of feodary, coroner, bailiff and escheator. It is not known exactly when the family acquired this franchise, known as Prima Pars Agard. However, when Henry Agard petitioned the Duchy of Lancaster in 1635, the court issued a decree ruling that the family had held it ''time out of mind'' (i.e. since before the accession of Richard I in 1189). The family continued to hold the franchise until 1731, when it passed to Charles Stanhope, as representative of his mother Dorothy Stanhope (nee Agard).
Arthur Agard (1540-1615) was born at Foston and was chamberlain of the exchequer and a member of the society of antiquities. The Agards were also the Lords of the Manor of Scropton, a title purchased from Charles I in 1629. In 1675, the John Agard sold the subordinate lordship of Foston and Scropton to Richard Bate, the son of Colonel William Bate, a royalist who had fled to Barbados during the civil war and become wealthy as a planter of sugar cane. In 1679, Richard Bate purchased the seignory of Scropton itself. Brownlow Bate sold both titles to John Broadhurst in 1784. Foston Hall was destroyed by fire in 1836. |
| Custodial History | This collection was purchased by Derbyshire Record Office in 1971. Most of the documents are in good condition, despite having been through changes in their physical arrangement. At some stage in their history, possibly when they were owned by the antiquarian Sir Thomas Phillipps, many of the documents were evidently sewn into volumes, before being cut out again and re-arranged later. This has left some of the documents with parts of the edges missing. The few items that have remained sewn together bear little relation to one another. For instance, Folder 3, item 6 consists of a list of pains in the manor of Scropton in 1626, sewn on to one half of a draft document from the Chancery Court dating from the 1540s. The other half of this document was discovered in Folder 21, before the two pieces were reunited. With this one exception, the arrangement of the items in folders has been retained, as there is no information from which to resurrect their original archival order. Instead, indexes by place, name and subject have been added at the back of the catalogue. These refer the researcher to pages in this catalogue, on which the relevant item number/s can be found. |