 They were also major landholders in the Midlands, with estates in Greasley, Ilkeston, and Withcall.The family had traditionally played an important role in both local society and central government with a history of loyal and diligent service to the crown.Not only were they lords of the realm—"one of the richest and most influential families in fourteenth-century England", suggests the scholar Frederick Pedersen—but the family possessed Saint Thomas de Cantilupe in its ancestry, and considered themselves to be under his special protection.