GILLE, Thomas I

Gille’s background and parentage are obscure, but it is possible that at an early stage in life he received some training in the law. He is first heard of in 1412, when he was in dispute with Walter Bishop and others over property in Kingsbridge, a few miles from Totnes,19 JUST1/199/9. and within three years he had established himself sufficiently to be associated with the wealthy Thomas Archdeacon† of Leigham in a royal grant of custody of the alien priory of Modbury. In the event, the grant came to nothing, as it was successfully disputed by the prior of Tywardreath and the lawyers William Wynard and Robert Treage*, who had secured a similar grant in the autumn of 1413.20 CFR, xiv. 138; CPR, 1416-22, p. 379. Archdeacon, perhaps Gille’s early patron, died in 1421, and before long Gille had found a new master in the leading, if unruly, Devon knight Sir John Dynham (d.1428). He regularly acted for his litigious master is the Westminster courts and was included among the feoffees of his lands,21 CP40/652, rot. 352d; 656, rots. 132, 323d; 658, rot. 415, att. rot. 5; 660, rot. 234d, att. rot. 2; KB27/653, rots. 68d, 69; Cornw. RO, Arundell mss, AR1/561/1-2. but at other times he was probably a resident member of the Dynham household, for he was styled a ‘domicellus’ and was present at Sir John’s deathbed.22 CPR, 1436-41, p. 316; H. Kleineke, ‘Dinham Fam.’ (Univ. of London Ph.D. thesis, 1998), 36, 247; Reg. Lacy ed. Hingeston-Randolph, i. 117, 120. Among the rewards of Gille’s service to the Dynhams was the lease for life of a tenement near the family’s seat at Kingskerswell, but it seems that there may have been some initial disagreement between him and his old master’s son and heir, for in May 1431 a box containing both the lease and a general release of all actions by the younger Dynham to Gille were placed in the hands of the local gentleman John Horeston, Dynham’s receiver, pending a settlement between the two men.23 CP40/691, rots. 102d, 116. This was evidently reached, for Gille continued to serve the Dynhams into the later 1440s, when he held the office of bailiff of the family’s hundred of Haytor, and when Sir John’s widow, Philippa, at last died in 1465, he was the sole survivor of the Dynham feoffees appointed in the 1420s.24 KB9/258/5, 6; KB27/749, rex rot. 4; CCR, 1461-8, p. 289; CPR, 1461-7, p. 459; Arundell mss, AR2/460, mm. 6-7; 546, m. 2; 872; Kleineke, 147.

Gille’s connexion with the Dynhams also produced indirect benefits. Thus it was that John Wroughton (d.1429) of Broad Hinton, a feudal tenant of the family, leased his Devon manor of Woodhouse and borough of West Alvington to Gille for his life at an annual rent of £26.25 CIPM, xxiii. 175. Moreover, in June 1440 he was able to secure custody of lands in Hemyock and Matford once held by Sir William Asthorp (d.1399) in the right of his wife, the heiress of a junior branch of the Dynhams, which had escheated to the Crown on account of Asthorp’s bastardy.26 CFR, xvii. 157-8; Kleineke, 30-33, 41, 174-5. He also enjoyed the active support of members of the Dynham household like James Baucombe when in 1423 he fell victim to a series of violent assaults by Robert Hill of Churchstow, John Prideaux of Orcharton and the former Dartmouth mayor and MP John Foxley† at Bigbury, Dodbrooke and Kingsbridge.27 KB27/649, rot. 19; 650, rot. 53; CP40/658, rot. 340; CPR, 1422-9, p. 137; The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 117. The background to the dispute is unclear, but it was just one of several such attacks to which Gille was subjected in these years, for about the same time the influential Henry Fortescue† was said to have broken into his house at Dodbrook with a following of armed retainers, pursued him into the market with drawn swords and assaulted and wounded him there.28 KB27/649, rot. 19; CP40/660, rot. 401d; Stonor Letters, i (Cam. Soc. ser. 3, xxix), p. xxi; CPR, 1416-22, p. 447. Less dramatically, in the spring of 1430 a group of Kingsbridge men led by the local merchant John Vele were said to have broken into Gille’s property at Alvington and to have carried off a substantial quantity of wax worth £40. The incident was probably connected with an earlier clash between Gille and Vele, and relations between the two men continued to be tense for several years thereafter.29 KB27/662, rot. 57d; 679, rot. 41d; CP40/745, rot. 259; 758, rot. 84d.

The full extent of Gille’s landholdings is obscure. Woodhouse and West Alvington and his tenement in Kingskerswell aside, he held the manor of Hatch Arundell, worth £20 p.a., and other lands in Culverhill and Cogworthy (in Yarnscombe) and Kingsbridge.30 C1/29/74-77; 53/34; JUST1/199/9; CP40/703, rot. 314d. Many of these holdings were located in southern Devon, in the region between Dartmouth and Totnes, and it is probable that Gille’s local credentials played their part in securing his early returns for these two constituencies. It is not clear whether it was Gille’s first spell in the Commons in 1429-30 that brought him to the government’s attention, but within a year of the dissolution he was appointed to ad hoc commissions in his locality, and he soon became a leading Crown servant in the south-west.

By the early 1430s Gille had established a prosperous and growing shipping business. In early 1431 he claimed that a crayer of his had been taken from ‘Bateston’ with anchors, cables and other equipment.31 KB27/679, rot. 28d. Six years later, he was building a ‘grand nief’ at Dartmouth, the construction of which was, however, impeded by Nicholas Hawley (himself a scion of a prominent family of Dartmouth shipmen), and Thomas Lanoy I*, probably on account of a pre-existing dispute, the details of which are uncertain.32 C1/11/245; KB27/703, rot. 30d; 706, rot. 82. It is likely that the ‘grand nief’ can be identified with the Christofer of Dartmouth, a ship of 320 tons later owned by Gille. His business activities were varied and ranged from the export of fish from the port of Plymouth, and the trade with Brittany (for which Gille was granted a special licence in 1437), to the transport of pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela.33 E122/113/55, f. 2; DKR, xlviii. 317; Foedera ed. Rymer (orig. edn.), xi. 78. Few late medieval ship masters were above opportunistic attacks on other vessels, and Gille was no exception to this rule. Moreover, he was also astute enough to avail himself of the opportunities for profit that the ill-gotten gains of others could offer. Thus, in July 1433 he was authorized to sell on the King’s behalf a cargo of wine and other merchandise belonging to some Spanish merchants and captured in a ship of Sluys, while about the same time he and Sir Nicholas Carew were said to have seized a ship from Dunkirk on the pretext that its cargo was French property.34 CCR, 1429-35, p. 259; CPR, 1429-36, p. 301; C1/10/37.

In that same summer of 1433, Gille was returned to the Commons for a second time, on this occasion by the townsmen of Dartmouth, two miles south of his principal residence at Nethway. He had probably already attracted the government’s attention, for four days after the end of the first session he was appointed one of the customs collectors in the south-Devon district, beginning a career of Crown service that would span more than two decades. By contrast, no details of Gille’s part in the Parliament’s deliberations are explicitly recorded, but it is highly likely that he took a personal interest in a petition placed before the Commons in the final days of the autumn session by the Lisbon merchant John de Port. The Portuguese trader claimed that on 8 Aug. he had lawfully brought a cargo of salt, oil, hides and other merchandise worth some £400 to Dartmouth and had paid the customs to Gille (who had presumably absented himself early from the first session of Parliament, which continued for five further days). On 12 Aug., so de Port’s petition continued, a group of Exeter merchants, including William Attwyll*, the searcher of ships in the port, and the deputy butler, John More II*, as well as the wealthy John Hull*, had boarded his ship with an armed following of some 60 men, and had cut the vessel’s sail from the yardarm, before raiding the cellars where de Port’s property was stored and carrying off his property. In October de Port had ridden to London to seek redress, but had been intercepted at Honiton, dragged off to Exeter, and clapped in strong irons. De Port had succeeded in regaining his liberty by a royal writ of corpus cum causa, but the writs of sub poena summoning de Port’s assailants into Chancery had never been served, as the Exeter men had curtly informed the messengers bearing them that any attempt to deliver them would prove fatal. The Commons and Lords passed the petition and it had received the royal assent by 12 Dec. when the sheriff of Devon was ordered to act upon it. In January de Port’s assailants appeared in the court of King’s bench and claimed that two of their number had struck a bargain to buy part of the cargo, and had made partial payment, but that the Portuguese merchant had subsequently refused to honour the agreement, and had consequently been arrested by the officials of the Exeter staple court. He had been bailed, but had sought to make for London, and had thus been intercepted and returned to Exeter by Hull, one of his sureties. The claims and counter-claims evidently baffled the justices, and in September a commission of four Dartmouth men, including Gille and his fellow customer Nicholas Stebbing*, was appointed to investigate the matter further.35 SC8/135/6718; C1/9/177; KB27/691, rot. 73; CPR, 1429-36, p. 469. Internal evidence demonstrates that the petition to the Commons was drafted on or after 18 Nov. 1433.

Gille would continue to serve as one of the customers at Dartmouth for some seven years until 1440, when he took up a similar post in the port of Southampton for a further period of two years. It is probable that these appointments were at least in part intended to give him preferential access to the Crown’s revenues in order to be able to commandeer the shipping that was desperately needed to transport ever fresh expeditionary forces and garrisons to and from France. Dartmouth shipmen had long played an important role both in assembling the necessary flotillas, and in keeping the seas by harassing enemy (as well as all too frequently neutral) vessels by their privateering activities, and it seems that Gille eventually inherited the mantle of the distinguished John Hawley*, for many years the Crown’s principal servant in the south-Devon ports. He was first charged with the provision of shipping in 1434 and was tasked to do so on frequent subsequent occasions throughout the 1430s and 1440s, drawing substantial sums from the Exchequer for the wages of masters and mariners.36 E403/723, mm. 11, 13; 731, m. 15; 734, mm. 1, 4, 16, 17; 745, m. 15; 747, m. 4; 749, m. 16. Not infrequently, he put his own vessels at the Crown’s service, as in 1439, when he was in receipt of a reward for the efforts of the master and 30 mariners of one of his ships serving the King, and in 1440 when he manned and victualed his own Christofer for 16 weeks to transport Edward Hull* and his retinue to Guyenne.37 E101/53/27; E159/216, brevia Trin. rot. 24d; E403/734, m. 17; 740, m. 5; E404/56/295; H. Kleineke, ‘English Shipping’, Mariner’s Mirror, lxxxv. 472-6.

In February 1436 Gille was granted letters of marque licensing him to arm two ships, the Antony and the Katerine, as well as two balingers or barges to fight the French at sea for a period of four months, taking any goods and vessels captured as his reward,38 CPR, 1429-36, p. 509. but his activities as a privateer (or at least those of the masters and sailors in his employ) did not come to an end when these letters expired. Thus, on 21 Jan. 1440 Gille’s Christofer was returning to Dartmouth when some four miles out of port its master, one Richard Walter, spotted a ship behind him called the George of Welles, also heading for the port. He immediately brought his vessel around, positioned some 60 armed members of the crew in the top-castle and other strategic places on board and headed under full sail for the George. A strong wind was blowing from land, and Walter perhaps lost control of his ship, ramming the George so that the whole fore-ship split off and it sank quickly, sending its cargo to the bottom of the Channel. Only when some of the drowning crew of the George managed to shout out that they were Englishmen and by a singular act of fortune be heard above the gale, did the crew of the Christofer eventually fish their victims out of the sea and convey them to safety. It is likely that the sinking of the George and the loss of its cargo (the property of some Irish merchants from Drogheda) were a genuine accident, even if the attack had been deliberate, and after a series of proceedings in Chancery and the failure of a first attempt at a settlement on 1 Dec. Gille and the Irishmen agreed under penalties of £2,000 to submit the matter to the adjudication of arbiters who included on Gille’s part the civil lawyer Master Richard Cordoun and the London merchant Stephen Forster*, as well as William Soper*, Gille’s fellow customs collector at Southampton.39 C1/43/33; 44/278; 45/141; CPR, 1436-41, p. 451; CCR, 1435-41, p. 445.

It seems that about this time Gille fell seriously ill, for he had to write to the treasurer, Lord Cromwell, ‘with all lowelynesse’ to apologise for his shortcomings in the execution of his official duties, which he blamed on his unspecified ailment, and to thank him for his patience.40 E163/7/37. By the end of 1441 he had evidently recovered sufficiently to secure renewed election to Parliament by the burgesses of Dartmouth, and on the first day of the assembly he was able to surrender his onerous Southampton appointment. He was, however, to be dogged by the fallout from this unhappy period of his life for some time: even in the early 1450s he was still being sued by Soper over a bond for £100 he had sealed at Southampton more than two years after relinquishing office,41 CP40/756, rot. 177; 761, rot. 108. and it is probable that a later dispute with the Southampton merchant Richard Sexcy also had its origins in Gille’s time in the Hampshire port.42 CP40/788, rot. 132d; 852, rot. 613. Gille’s illness aside, it seems that he in fell foul of the authorities about this time. At some point in the second half 1443 he was subject to a summons into Chancery, which he ignored, and the following January the sheriff of Devon was instructed to place him under arrest. Moreover, after July 1443 he was entrusted with no further official assignments for a period of three years, until he had procured a general pardon for the misdemeanours he had been charged with.43 C244/40/105; C67/39, m. 12. Certainly, Gille’s disgrace seems to have reverberated in Dartmouth, where he failed to secure re-election to the Commons in 1445. He was, however, evidently anxious to attend Parliament, and thus agreed instead to represent the men of Totnes, and to do so for an at best nominal payment of 6s. 8d. in lieu of his wages. It is likely that he had not anticipated the unusual length of the assembly, which continued for an unprecedented four sessions lasting for more than 27 weeks, and following the dissolution he procured a writ de expensis, attempting to claim wages at the customary rate of 2s. per day.44 KB145/6/26.

Gille’s rehabilitation, when it came, was more than complete: in February 1447 the men of Dartmouth once more elected him one of the representatives in Parliament (although perhaps motivated at least in part by a difficulty to find other men willing to travel to a provincial backwater like Cambridge or Bury St. Edmunds), on 27 May he was reappointed as a customer at Exeter and Dartmouth, and on the same day he was granted sweeping and unprecedented powers to inspect the records of all royal officials in the ports to the west of Poole.45 E403/769, m. 6; 771, m. 9. He surrendered his collectorship at Michaelmas, but within little over a month instead took up the post of escheator of Devon and Cornwall, which he had first held ten years earlier. The background to these dramatic changes of fortune is uncertain, but it is possible that they were in some way connected with changes in the upper ranks of the administration. On 7 July 1443 Gille’s patron, the long-serving treasurer Ralph, Lord Cromwell, was replaced by the King’s chamberlain, Ralph Butler, Lord Sudeley. Sudeley for his part was dismissed in December 1446 in favour of the energetic bishop of Carlisle, Marmaduke Lumley, and it was to this reforming prelate that Gille owed his renewed appointments.

While Gille’s service to the Crown was central to his career, he also maintained other connexions along with those to the Dynhams: in the summer of 1440 he found sureties before the justices of common pleas for the influential Sir William Palton*;46 KB27/717, fines rot. 2. and on frequent occasions he acted as a witness to local deeds or as a feoffee for his neighbours both in London and the West Country, or provided them with legal advice. In recognition of his services, the civic authorities of Exeter admitted him to the freedom of the city in January 1449, waiving the usual entry fine.47 CCR, 1435-41, pp. 35, 131, 133; 1447-54, pp. 434-6; Exeter Freemen ed. Rowe and Jackson, 51; C1/73/33; CP25(1)/46/83/107; 86/192; 90/299.

The years from 1447 were busy ones for Gille. As treasurer Lumley sought to balance the books, he placed considerable trust in Gille, who alongside his responsibilities for the maximization of the customs revenues was charged with a range of miscellaneous tasks, such as the sale of the marriages of the heir of Sir John Speke* and other wards, and investigations into the landholdings of tenants-in-chief.48 E403/773, mm. 5, 7; 775, m. 7. Gille was all too familiar with the value of such royal perquisites, and about this time arranged a marriage between his own son and heir and Amy, the daughter of the Dorset landowner Robert Cammell and the widow of the recently deceased water-bailiff of Dartmouth, Henry Baret*.49 C1/29/74-77. Perhaps on account of his preoccupation with such matters, he was not returned to the Parliament of February 1449, but in November he once again secured election at Dartmouth. Parliament met as news arrived of the military disaster in Normandy where the capital Rouen had surrendered in the final days of October. In a last desperate effort, the government threw what scant resources were at its disposal into shoring up the remaining coastal strongholds of Cherbourg and Harfleur, but to little avail: Harfleur capitulated on 1 Jan., and while Cherbourg held out until the second week of August 1450, it, too, was lost to Charles VII. Gille had been heavily involved in the last-ditch attempt to supply the Norman ports, gathering money from willing creditors and even advancing sums of it himself,50 E403/777, mm. 5, 14; 786, m. 14; E404/67/115, 201. and should have seemed a natural candidate for election to the Parliament summoned to meet at Westminster in November that year. Yet, whether he was too closely associated with the discredited administration that had presided over the loss of Normandy, or whether he had made enemies locally in the course of his official duties, he once again failed to secure a Dartmouth seat. The circumstances in which he eventually gained election in the north Devon port of Barnstaple are obscure, but his name, as well as that of his parliamentary colleague Henry Redwyn* (a man with impeccable local credentials who had previously represented the town in February 1449), was entered onto the sheriff’s indenture over an erasure, perhaps pointing to some irregularity in the electoral process.51 C219/16/1. There is, however, little doubt over the identity of the Barnstaple MP, as he was styled ‘senior’ on the election return, a soubriquet not used by either Thomas II or their contemporary namesake Thomas Gille of Warkleigh.

With Normandy lost, attention now turned to the defence of what remained of the Lancastrian possessions in Gascony. In October 1450, even before Parliament had assembled in England, Bergerac had fallen to the French, leaving the Gascon capital of Bordeaux itself open to attack, while the preparations for the dispatch of an expeditionary force under Richard Wydevile, Lord Rivers, dragged on. The Crown was desperate not only for men, mariners and money, but also for reliable intelligence, and so Gille was ordered to sail for Gascony with Rivers’s force, and ‘to retourne ayen in all goodely hast after þe landing of þe said lord Rivers to lete us have knowlach of þe manor of þe disposicion of þe contrey þer’. He would never carry out this commission, for on 29 June 1451 Bordeaux fell, before Rivers had even embarked.52 E403/785, m. 5; E28/85/84; M.G.A. Vale, English Gascony, 139; R.A. Griffiths, Hen. VI, 529-30. All was not lost yet, and efforts to support the earl of Shrewsbury’s attempts to recover some of what had been lost continued throughout the summer and autumn of 1451. Gille and his fellow customer Stebbing scraped together what revenues they could lay their hands on, and on several occasions advanced their anticipated receipts from their own funds.53 E401/813, m. 30; 820, m. 11; 821, m. 12; 824, m. 9; E403/777, m. 14; 781, m. 6; 785, m. 6; 786, m. 4; E404/67/115, 201. In addition, both Gille and his son, the latter by now a successful shipman in his own right, once again put their own ships at the Crown’s disposal and in June 1451 payment of the wages of the master and mariners of both Le Yonge Gilles and Le Antony Gylle, amounting in total to some £72, was ordered by letters patent.54 CPR, 1446-52, p. 448.

Once again, Gille’s duties in the King’s service may have prevented his election to the Parliament of 1453 – alongside his other offices, he was at the time serving a third spell as escheator of Devon and Cornwall – but it seems that he was nevertheless present at Reading at the time of its opening on 6 Mar., for the following day he was assigned his expenses for carrying a message from the King from Reading to London,55 E403/791, m. 16. and it is probable that he went on from there to undertake the further task of assembling yet another fleet to carry fresh troops to Gascony. When he was elected to the Commons for a ninth and last time in 1455, Gascony was long lost, and the political landscape was temporarily dominated by the King’s cousin, Richard, duke of York, whose army Gille had mustered 14 years earlier in the wake of the duke’s appointment as lieutenant of France.

In spite of the substantial sums that Gille periodically advanced for the conduct of the war, his personal wealth was clearly substantial, and he displayed no more scruples about the methods by which he refilled his coffers in the early 1450s than he had done earlier in his career. By early 1453 he had sold a ship called Le George (probably the repaired wreck of the vessel he himself had rammed a decade earlier and presumably towed to safety at Dartmouth), to a London merchant, John Adam, and his Portugese associate Pedro Fernandes.56 CPR, 1452-61, p. 61. A year later, so it was claimed, he colluded with a Scottish knight, Sir William Kennedy, who claimed to be the brother of Bishop Kennedy of St. Andrews, to gain possession of a ship of the bishop’s called the Marie of St. Andrews. This ship had been taken at sea by pirates led by one William Kydde, and had been brought to Devon. On Kennedy’s complaint, on 3 July 1454 commissioners, including Gille, were appointed to inquire into the matter and to restore the ship to its rightful owner. The commissioners, finding the vessel still in Kydde’s hands at Exmouth, seized it, and delivered it to Sir William. He, however, had no intention of returning the Marie to the bishop and had, it was claimed, already made arrangements to sell her to Gille at a bargain price. Bishop Kennedy, for his part, disinclined to give up his property, caused a ship belonging to William Mayhew, a London fishmonger, to be impounded in Scotland, leaving the Londoner to seek redress against Gille in Chancery. Protracted litigation ensued, but by 1456 the Marie had been sold to one Philip Alare and renamed Le Antony.57 CPR, 1452-61, pp. 178, 303; C1/24/3-5B; C4/94/97; C253/34/55; C. L. Kingsford, Prejudice and Promise, 89-90, 179-82. Nevertheless, this time Gille had apparently overplayed his hand. The loss of Lancastrian France had perhaps made his services less indispensable to the government, and in March 1455 (a few weeks after Mayhew’s petition to the chancellor) he was removed from his office as customs collector. Around the same time he appears to have become guilty of renewed acts of piracy and in July 1456 a commission was issued for his arrest.58 CPR, 1452-61, p. 310. He had to call upon the support of powerful patrons such as William, Lord Bonville*, to find security amounting to 1,000 marks for his appearance in Chancery, and although he appeared before the chancellor on the appointed day to plead the pardon he had been granted in the interim, this was not the end of his troubles, which were to dog him for the rest of the decade, as his renewed pardon of January 1458 illustrates. In February 1459 a fresh commission was issued for the arrest of Gille and his associates of 1456.59 CCR, 1454-61, pp. 171, 202; C67/41, m. 9; 42, m. 34; CPR, 1452-61, p. 493. To make matters worse, at least one of these same associates, the Dartmouth merchant John Wychehals, now refused to repay Gille a debt of £25 3s. and secured a pardon of outlawry for his failure to answer for it in court,60 CPR, 1452-61, p. 521; CP40/797, rot. 133d; 852, rot. 613. while it was also about this time that Gille was physically attacked at Dartmouth by John Lange, a tailor from Alvington, and a gathering of supporters in an apparent attempt to kill him.61 CP40/780, rot. 435d.

After Edward IV’s accession, Gille retired from the service of the Crown. It is probable that his advancing years were as much to blame for this as the change of dynasty, for his son Thomas developed close ties with the new rulers, and Gille himself remained active in his locality. He held a final office as bailiff of Dartmouth in 1463-4, and periodically still acted as a witness or feoffee for landowners of the region. There also continued to be occasional clashes with his neighbours: he perhaps availed himself of the turmoil of the early months of Edward IV’s reign when in the final days of June 1461 at Brixham he helped himself to 40 cartloads of bricks belonging to Joan, the newly widowed wife of Sir Robert de Vere*, as she complained before the justices of common pleas (a charge which Gille denied).62 CP40/808, rot. 331; 810, rot. 127d.

The exact date of Gille’s death remains obscure, but he died around the end of 1466, for a writ of diem clausit extremum was sent to the escheator of Devon on 18 Jan. 1467. He died intestate, and on 24 Jan. the administration of his goods was initially committed to his son and heir, but it was apparently eventually undertaken by his widow, Joan, who went on to marry the customs official William Fokeray†.63 CFR, xx. 177; H.R. Watkin, Totnes Priory and Town, ii. 438, 442; CP40/824, rot. 184; 825, rot. 421; 852, rot. 613; Reg. Bourgchier (Canterbury and York Soc. liv), 213.