CASTELCOMBE, John

A lawyer, Castelcombe was probably a native of Wiltshire, and it is possible that he was the ‘Januarius Dunstanville alias Castelcombe’ who features in an untrustworthy pedigree of the sixteenth century. According to the pedigree, Januarius had a daughter and heir, Barbara, who married the Garter King of arms John Wrythe (d.1504), apparently the son of William Wrythe* of Cricklade. Made for John’s son Thomas Wrythe, who succeeded him as Garter King and adopted the name of Wriothesley, the pedigree has Januarius as one of the Dunstanvilles, anciently lords of Castle Combe, Wiltshire. Furthermore, this family tree – and other sources based upon it – would have it that Januarius was the son of Henry Dunstanville by his wife Millicent Cornewell, and that Henry was the son of Nicholas Dunstanville or Castelcombe by his wife Agnes, daughter and coheir of Sir John Lusthill or Lewsell. Agnes is supposed to have built a house at ‘Colatford’ (near Castle Combe), where Januarius was born and which Thomas Wriothesley later inherited.3 Reg. Order of the Garter, i. 155, 365n, 366 and n, 367 and n, 369, 371, 373 and n; PCC 9 Holgrave (PROB11/14 ff. 71, 71v); Godfrey, 41-42; Greenfield, 77, table between pp. 76 and 77; Materials for Hist. Cricklade, 136.

Tax assessments of 1428 and 1451, the indenture recording the election of Wiltshire’s knights of the shire to the Parliament of 1443 and a lawsuit of the late 1440s provide at least some supporting evidence for the pedigree. The assessment of 1428 records that Agnes Castelcombe and others were then seised of one and a half knights’ fees at Lushill in north Wiltshire that once belonged to John de Lustehull. Among those who attested the election was Henry Castelcombe (perhaps Januarius’s putative father), while a plea roll shows Millicent Castelcombe pursuing a suit for debt in the court of common pleas in 1449, against a chaplain and husbandman from the same county. As for the assessment of 1451, this records that Millicent (of Malmesbury) then held lands worth 40s. p.a.4 Feudal Aids, v. 259; C219/14/4; CP40/795, rot. 93; E179/196/118. Yet, assuming that Januarius Dunstanville was the MP, it is still likely that the pedigree credited him with a grander family background than he actually possessed, given that its purpose was to provide Thomas Wriothesley with a respectable ancestry.

Whatever his antecedents, the schedules recording his election to the Parliaments of 1426 and 1437 provide the earliest definite references to Castelcombe. In these documents, attached to the returns of Wiltshire’s knights of the shire, his name appears in the form given at the head of this biography, with no Christian or surname aliases to prove that he was the Januarius of the Wriothesley pedigree. A dozen years after sitting in his second Parliament, Castelcombe was again involved in a parliamentary election in Wiltshire, as a surety for another lawyer, Thomas Hasard*, upon the latter’s election as an MP for Malmesbury to the Parliament of February 1449. Like Hasard, Castlecombe became an attorney at Westminster, where by the later 1450s until at least early 1460 he acted as such in the court of common pleas, in cases emanating from Wiltshire. His clients included John Cricklade*, the prior of the Augustinian house at Maiden Bradley and Sir Edmund Hungerford*,5 CP40/781, att. rot. 4d; 783, att. rot. 2; 789, rot. 162, att. rot. 2; 796, rot. 64. and during 1456-7 he received writs issued by the same court on behalf of the then sheriff of Wiltshire, Henry Long*, whom he served as a deputy in that office. In 1457, he successfully pursued a case of his own in the common pleas against John Ploute, for unlawfully disseising him of three acres of land at Cricklade worth 6s. 8d. p.a.,6 CP40/786, rot. 318d. but it is not possible to prove that he was a resident of the borough he represented in at least two Parliaments.