GIBTHORPE, John

Gibthorpe hailed from a long-established family of duchy of Lancaster tenants in south Lincolnshire, but his place in their poorly-documented pedigree is not clear. The most likely speculation is that he was the younger brother of Simon Gibthorpe of Thorpe St. Peter, who attested the Lincolnshire elections of 1429 and 1433, and the son of Sir William Gibthorpe, who seems to have owed his knighthood late in his short career to service in Henry V’s campaigns.3 Scrope v. Grosvenor Controversy ed. Nicolas, ii. 225-6; Lincs. Archit. and Arch. Soc. iii. 65. William, escheator of Lincs. in 1406, was knighted between May 1415 and Apr. 1418: CPR, 1413-16, p. 408; 1416-22, p. 199. His very short will, made on 6 July 1420 and proved a month later, says nothing about his family: PCC 48 Marche (PROB11/2B, f. 157). Such an identification is chronologically consistent with our MP’s first appearance in the records: in March 1437 he offered mainprise in the Exchequer on the appointment of his neighbour, Thomes Meres*, to the Lincolnshire shrievalty.4 CFR, xvi. 326. It is not known what, if any, landed provision was made for him, but it cannot have been significant, for the family’s standing in the 1430s was compromised by the survival of Sir William’s widow, Alice. In the subsidy returns of 1435-6 she was assessed on an annual income of £40, compared with Simon’s £19.5 E179/136/198. Alice was alive in 1437: CIPM, xxiv. 545.

Gibthorpe clearly had to make his own way in the world, and he was to do so in the service of his clerical neighbour, William Waynflete, who became bishop of Winchester in 1447. This service explains his entry soon afterwards into the royal household – at Pentecost 1448 he first received robes as a yeoman of the chamber – and his election to represent Taunton, a borough in the bishop’s patronage, in the Parliament of February 1449. He continued to receive livery in the King’s chamber,6 E101/410/1, f. 31; 3, f. 32; 6, f. 41; 9, f. 44 (covering 1447-52). He was not named among the yeomen of the chamber or the Crown retained in the attenuated Household under the ordinances of Nov. 1454, but was again called a ‘yeoman of the chamber’ in 1457: PPC, vi. 220-33; CPR, 1452-61, pp. 356-7. and some small marks of royal favour followed a few years later. On 17 Apr. 1452 he was granted for life the keeping of the royal park at Odiham at the daily wages of 4d., and on the following 16 Dec. he was granted a further 6d. a day (assigned on the issues of Wiltshire) when he was promoted to be a yeoman of the Crown.7 CPR, 1446-52, p. 528; 1452-61, p. 28.

According to a petition presented to Chancellor Kemp by his fellow Household servant, William Warbleton*, Gibthorpe secured the grant of the parkership of Odiham by fraud. Two months before it was made, Warbleton had been granted the constableship of Odiham castle with the attendant parkership for life as compensation for the surrender of certain of his lands to the royal foundation at Eton. He had then, or so he claimed, delivered the letters patent of grant to our MP, trusting him to sue, in his name, the relevant writs of liberate and allocate out of Chancery and then return the letters patent to him on our MP’s next coming to his manor of Sherfield in Hampshire. But Gibthorpe ‘of gret subtilite and vntrouthe’ had informed the King and chancellor that the grantee wanted him to have the parkership and secured letters patent to that effect.8 CPR, 1446-52, p. 513; 1452-61, p. 40; C1/232/23. If this was true then Warbleton was hard done by, for the petition did not result in our MP’s immediate loss of the office. Indeed, on 22 Nov. 1452 he secured further letters patent of grant on the grounds that the earlier ones were invalid, and it is likely that these second letters were issued as a result of the petition and mark the resolution of the dispute in Gibthorpe’s favour. Warbleton had to wait several years for even partial satisfaction: on 7 Mar. 1457 he was granted reversion of the office expectant on his rival’s death. So the matter might have rested but for the intervention of Hugh Pakenham, the husband of a kinswoman of Warbleton and a servant of Waynflete. On the following 22 Apr. our MP surrendered his estate in the parkership to Pakenham, and five weeks later Warbleton did the same in respect of both constableship and parkership.9 CPR, 1452-61, pp. 356-7, 363-4; CCR, 1454-61, pp. 215, 217-18.

Towards the end of Gibthorpe’s life his service to the Crown shifted from the Household to his native county. On 7 Nov. 1457, while his master Waynflete was chancellor, he was named as escheator of Lincolnshire, and, while in office, he was nominated to his first and only ad hoc commission of local government. If he played any part in the civil war of 1459-61, it has escaped notice in the surviving records, but it is possible that he met his death on the Lancastrian side in one of the battles of these years. He was, in any event, dead by 6 Feb. 1462 when his neighbour and another of Waynflete’s servants, Hugh Tilney of Boston (younger brother of Robert Tilney*), sued out a pardon as his executor. Six days later his putative elder brother, Simon, did the same. A Chancery petition of about the same date names the other executors as Alice Gibthorpe, who was probably his widow (although it is possible she was his mother).10 CPR, 1452-61, p. 435; E159/238, brevia Hil. rot. 29d; C67/45, m. 40; C1/29/145.