CHILD, Thomas

Given his election to two particularly ‘royalist’ Parliaments, it seems safe to assume that Thomas Child was the minor royal servant of that name whom the King made ‘yoman fewtrer of oure bukkehondys’ at the end of 1447. Evidently, this office was his to treat as a sinecure, since the grant, for life, permitted him to exercise it through a deputy rather than in person.2 Ibid. It is unclear whether the yeoman of the buckhounds was the Thomas Child of London, ‘gentleman’, who stood surety in the ct. of c.p. for a spicer from Saffron Walden earlier in the same year: CP40/744, rot. 114.

Child’s parliamentary career provides his only known association with Wiltshire. It is impossible to prove that he was related to the namesake elected MP for Salisbury in 1407, or that he was the man who stood surety for Robert Roude* upon the latter’s election as a burgess for Calne two decades later.3 C219/13/5. HP Biogs. ed. Wedgwood and Holt, 184, raises the possibility that he was the son of the Salisbury MP but no such link is suggested in that Thomas’s biography in The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 565. In the autumn of 1460 Thomas Child of Rosley, Gloucestershire (‘late of London, gentleman’) was suspected of having committed felonies in Hampshire but, again, there is no evidence that he was the MP.4 CPR, 1452-61, p. 656. HP Biogs. 184, assumes that the MP was the Rosley man. The same holds true for a gentleman of the same name from Northwick in Worcestershire. Active by the reign of Henry V, Thomas of Northwick was escheator in Worcestershire in 1426-7. He and his wife Joan joined the important municipal guild of the Holy Cross at Stratford-upon-Avon some two decades later.5 C241/217/37; 222/47; CPR, 1422-9, p. 369; C219/13/5; 14/2; CAD, ii. C2130; Shakespeare Centre Archs., Guild of Holy Cross, Stratford-upon-Avon mss, BRT1/3/52.