COSTANTYN, Thomas

The Parliament of 1447, summoned initially to Cambridge but relocated at short notice to Bury St. Edmunds, posed a problem for many of the poorer and more far-flung boroughs of England. Whereas men from within their own communities might be prepared to undertake the journey to Westminster, where the opportunity to transact private legal or commercial business tempered the inconvenience of a long and possibly dangerous journey, no such considerations came into play when the Parliament sat somewhere else. Liskeard was one of the Cornish boroughs reduced to recruiting outsiders as their MPs in 1447, since neither of its representatives had a previous connexion with it. The election of Costantyn and his fellow MP, Robert Chalers*, must have met with the general approval of the borough since their sureties were men from established local families.3 C219/15/4.

The journey to Bury St. Edmunds was a relatively easy one for Costantyn and Chalers to make, because both were from East Anglia. Costantyn came from Bishop’s Lynn but very little else is known about him. Not long after leaving the Commons, he briefly held the position of searcher in the port of Lynn and he served on an ad hoc commission in Norfolk in the late 1450s. He held a tenement in the Saturday Market at Bishop’s Lynn, for which he paid a rent of 4d. p.a. to the local guild of the Holy Trinity, as well as a messuage somewhere else in the town. He was no longer alive in the 1490s when this latter property was the subject of litigation in the Chancery. The plaintiff, Robert Some, brought his action against Costantyn’s widow and executrix, Elizabeth, and one of his feoffees, Simond Baxster. According to Some, Elizabeth and Baxster had refused to make a release of the messuage to him after he had purchased it from her and the MP’s other executor, John Taillour.4 Norf. RO, King’s Lynn bor. recs., acct. scabins of Trinity guild, 1467-8, KL/C38/21; C1/223/55.