Edward Loftus

Edward Loftus, of Swineshead, County York, England, whose sons settled in Ireland in the sixteenth century, where they obtained extensive grants of forfeited land from Queen Elizabeth and King James.

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Edward Loftus, who was bailiff of Swineside for Coverham Abbey, was father of Adam, Archbishop of Armagh and Dublin, and of Robert (the eldest son), who died seised of a messuage called Wool House and other abbey lands in 1606, leaving a son and heir Adam, Lord Chancellor of Ireland, and created in 1622 Viscount Loftus. Adam had a further grant of Coverham lands, the Loftus lands here being estimated at £60 to £100 rent.

http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=64745

The Invention of Memory by Simon Loftus pub 2013
p. 8 Adam’s father, ‘Edwardo Lofthouse de Swyneside’, was bailiff of the Premonstratensian Abbey of Coverham. The abbey was well endowed but the community had gradually dwindled to fewer than a dozen monks, who left the management of their lands to their bailiff.⁴ Occupying a fine complex of stone buildings in the sheltered valley of the Cover, they were forbidden meat - except under special circumstances - but were well provided with fish, from their own fishponds, and with vegetables and fruit from their gardens and orchards. The stream that fed the ponds also powered the monastic watermill, which ground the monastic flour from grain grown on the sheltered slopes of Coverdale. All in all, there is evidence of peaceful prosperity.
p.11 On the eve of the Dissolution of the Monasteries there were more than 800 religious houses in England, containing about 10,000 monks, nuns, canons and friars - owning a sixth of the nation’s land. Four years later there were none. It was one of the greatest social upheavals ever undertaken in this country, and change so radical shook the ancient certainties. It was a moment of opportunity, and the ‘new men’ of Tudor England seized the new day. One such was Edward Loftus, former monastic bailiff.

In some ways it seemed that little had altered, that he simply swapped landlords, from Abbot to King. But the King was far distant and the opportunities endless. There were no monks to feed and keep in comfort, no one but himself to account to. Within less than five years - before his death in 1541 - Edward was able to ensure that his young sons were well provided for, and in the decades that followed his relatives accumulated more and more of the old monastic lands. They moved from the windswept ridge of Swineside to the gentle valley of Coverham.⁸

Edward LOFTUS was born 1500 in Yorkshire, and died 1541 in Yorkshire. He married Anne HARTPOLE on Abt. 1530, daughter of Georgi HARTPOLE De SHRULA.

http://familytreemaker.genealogy.com/users/s/m/i/Don-an-deborah-Smi...

• Reference: Ancestry Genealogy - SmartCopy: Oct 5 2016, 3:09:31 UTC

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Sutton,_2nd_Baron_Dudley