GILLE, Thomas II

Gille was the son of a prominent royal servant from south-western England. The date of his birth has not been discovered, but there can be little doubt that at the time of his first return to the Commons in 1442 he was still relatively young and inexperienced, and that he owed his election for the borough of Totnes entirely to the influence of his father (who having begun his rather more impressive parliamentary career in that constituency, was returned to the same Parliament for the port of Dartmouth). The younger Thomas may at this period have been mostly resident in London, perhaps acquiring some legal training, but the family possessed ties with Totnes at least in so far as to be suitors of the manor court by virtue of their holdings in the locality.11 CP40/751, rot. 105; Watkin, Totnes Priory and Town, ii. 473.

Gille’s relative youth may account for the further hiatus before he was appointed to public office in the late spring of 1448, and the circumstances of that appointment (as controller of customs in the district of Exeter and Dartmouth) are in themselves uncertain: once again, his father’s patronage may have had a part to play, for the elder Thomas Gille had just a few months earlier taken up an important post as surveyor of all royal officials in the ports of Devon, Cornwall, Somerset and Dorset.12 CPR, 1446-52, pp. 81-82; E403/769, m. 6. That autumn, Gille also succeeded his father in the office of escheator of Devon and Cornwall, and it was perhaps in the course of his official duties that in mid September 1449 he fell victim to a group of men from Saltash, who, so he claimed, robbed and imprisoned him for two days.13 CP40/765, rot. 402d; KB27/810, rot. 50.

Gille’s father worked to promote his son’s interests in other ways as well. The sudden death in late 1449 or early 1450 of the former water-bailiff of Dartmouth, Henry Baret, widowed his young wife, Anne, daughter of the wealthy Dorset landowner Robert Cammell. The elder Thomas lost little time in entering into negotiations with her father and uncle, John Wyke II* (a fellow customs official at Exeter and Dartmouth) for her marriage to his own son, and before long an agreement was reached, and guaranteed by prominent witnesses, including Walter Reynell* and John Pralle*. While Anne brought her new husband the Dorset manor of Lillington, and a possible future claim to the Northamptonshire manor of Burton Plecy,14 CPR, 1446-52, p. 278. Gille’s father undertook to grant a rent of ten marks out of the manor of Woodhouse to the couple within three months of the wedding, and he also promised to seal a deed to ensure the descent of his manor of Hatch Arundell (in Loddiswell), Devon, to the couple after his and his wife’s deaths. Yet ten years later the elder Gille had still to fulfil his part of the bargain, or so his son and daughter-in-law, Cammell and Wyke complained to the chancellor.15 C1/29/74-77. Equally fraught, at least initially, was Gille’s attempt to purchase the lands of one Joan Peneles in Bowden near Totnes and other villages in the area. Although a bargain was struck, Joan’s feoffees, who included Lord Fitzwaryn, (Sir) John Fortescue* and Richard Fortescue* failed to release the property. Eventually, the affair reached a satisfactory conclusion and by the end of his life Thomas had taken possession.16 C1/33/131; 53/34.

The elder Thomas Gille had dedicated more than two decades of his life to the service of the house of Lancaster, both in the south-west and overseas. The younger Gille’s spell of official activity, by contrast, was in the immediate term destined to be a short one. Following the end of his escheatorship, he continued as customs controller at Exeter for just over two more years, until 1452. The family’s shipping business now became the focus of his career. To judge by its name, it was probably he who owned Le Yonge Gilles, a barge detained at Dartmouth for the transport of troops to France in June 1451, while his father owned Le Antony Gylle which was likewise commandeered at that time.17 CPR, 1446-52, p. 448. Eventually, the Antony also came into the younger Thomas’s possession, and it was he who was charged with the capture of a cargo of 26 tuns of white wine of La Rochelle worth £120 belonging to Lambert Smyth, a Hanseatic merchant and servant of the duke of Guelders, off the coast of Normandy, and selling it to the London mercer John Sturgeon*.18 Although the German merchant’s petition does not specify an addressee by which it could be dated, the accused is described as ‘of Kingsbridge’: C1/73/161; W. Country Shipping (Devon and Cornw. Rec. Soc. xxi), 39.

In the event, Gille’s withdrawal into private life may have stood him in good stead as towards the end of the 1450s Lancastrian fortunes began to wane. Neither he nor his father held office under Queen Margaret’s increasingly partisan regime after the abortive love-day of March 1458, and it is indeed possible that Thomas in some way fell foul of the younger Thomas Courtenay, the queen’s partisan who had succeeded to the earldom of Devon on his father’s death in February that year, for in the following December he was attacked by an armed gang at Newton Abbot, dragged off to the comital seat at Tiverton, and held captive there for a period of two weeks.19 KB27/810, rot. 74d.

Following the assumption of power by the Yorkist victors of the battle of Northampton, the younger Thomas quickly became a leading supporter of the new administration in his native south-west. He was included in a number of local commissions and in November 1460 was appointed escheator of Somerset and Dorset. The term was destined to be a turbulent one, for while the major battles of the dynastic conflict between Lancaster and York were fought elsewhere, there was also unrest in the West Country. In the early months of 1461 Gille had just collected the farms of Fordington and Cory Malet, when he was set upon by a group of lesser Somerset men who robbed him of £32 from the farms, as well as £10 of his own money. A commission to bring the offenders to justice was issued after Edward IV’s accession, in July, and in September 1462 Gille was pardoned the moneys of which he had been robbed.20 CPR, 1461-7, pp. 134-5, 198. Gille also received fresh appointments from the new rulers: in April 1461 he was once more made controller of customs at Exeter and Dartmouth, in July he added to this the post of deputy at Exeter to the chief butler John Wenlock*, Lord Wenlock, and a week later he also became water-bailiff at Dartmouth, an office pertaining to the duchy of Cornwall, now in King Edward’s hands. In addition to these multiple offices, in 1463 Gille was once again appointed escheator in Devon and Cornwall. Before long the strain of the varied duties of these diverse posts began to tell. Perhaps detained by other duties, on expiry of his term of office as escheator Gille failed to appear at the Exchequer on the set day to present his account, and proceedings were initiated against him. In February 1465, Thomas successfully petitioned the King, blaming the need to account in person, rather than being able to send an attorney, for his default.21 E28/89/46. In the interim, however, he was also failing in his duties as customs controller: during the year from Michaelmas 1463 to 1464, and again for more than a year from Michaelmas 1466, the collectors at Exeter and Dartmouth (Thomas Gale* and William Duke†) accounted for their revenues explicitly without formal controlment.22 E356/21, rots. 49-50.

It may be that these offices for the first time provided Gille with an income of substance, as well as a sense of his own standing, for he seems to have developed a penchant for building, that found encouragement in his acquisition in September 1462 of a royal licence to crenellate his manor-house at Hatch, to build walls and towers with battlements and impark 100 acres of woodland.23 CChR, vi. 188. It may have been as part of these building works that in April 1467 he commissioned a mason from Churchstow to construct a new lime kiln (calcicoquinum), only to find it so negligently constructed that it was entirely unsuitable for its purpose.24 KB27/831, rot. 63. Similarly, having commissioned and paid a Stoke Canon carpenter to build him a house in St. Sidwell’s fee outside Exeter, Gille was forced to seek redress in the royal courts, as the craftsman had failed to fulfil the agreement within the set time.25 CP40/829, rot. 477.

The death of Gille’s father in late 1466 or the early days of 1467 finally gave him access to the family lands, albeit diminished by the dower of his stepmother, Joan. The inheritance did, however, create new problems, for in defence of his property he now became embroiled in the petty litigation common to the landowning class of the period.26 CP40/822, rot. 111; 830, rot. 44. Moreover, some of the elder Thomas’s muniments remained in the hands of feoffees, and it took further litigation in Chancery to secure their return.27 C1/31/6.

Throughout the 1460s, Gille had maintained close ties in the port of Dartmouth, where his offices as customs controller and water-bailiff in any event required his regular presence. He was evidently well regarded among the townsmen, and in 1464 was named among the feoffees of the endowment of the Bowyer chantry in the parish church.28 Watkin, Dartmouth, 141. It is thus probable that he was a candidate for election to the Parliament of 1467 agreeable both to the burgesses and the Crown. A week into what was to be the final session of the Parliament, Gille was removed from the Exeter controllership after an exceptionally lengthy term of eight years, and was instead appointed customs collector at Poole. He now sued out a general pardon, perhaps to put an end to his earlier troubles, which was granted on 20 July.29 C67/46, m. 25.

In the aftermath of the dissolution of Parliament, tensions between the King, his brother the duke of Clarence, and the earl of Warwick continued to grow. In the summer of 1469 popular unrest in the north, orchestrated by Warwick, erupted into an open rebellion, of which the earl availed himself to arrange for the semi-judicial murders of several members of the King’s inner circle, including the treasurer, Richard Wydeville, Earl Rivers. On 29 July, the archbishop of York, George Neville, took the King himself into custody, and throughout the summer the Nevilles attempted to rule in the name of the captive monarch. Faced with continued unrest in the north, this endeavour was doomed to failure, and by the second week of September Edward IV had regained his freedom. Throughout these months of turmoil Gille served in a succession of customs offices at Exeter and Dartmouth, irrespective of the changes of treasurer that accompanied the unrest, and he remained in post until the middle of August 1470. Unquestionably, it was a connexion with the Nevilles, perhaps dating from George Neville’s time as bishop of Exeter, or perhaps established during the time of the earl of Warwick’s command of the Channel fleet, that allowed him to weather the storm. Once back at liberty, Edward IV in the first instance put on a show of cordial relations with his would-be supplanters, but in the summer of 1470 a fresh crisis erupted. In July Warwick, who had fled for Calais in April, came to terms with Margaret of Anjou, and about the same time the King’s mother-in-law, Jacquetta, dowager duchess of Bedford and widow of the recently executed Earl Rivers, began legal proceedings against her husband’s murderers, headed by Warwick, but also including a long list of lesser men, among them Gille, who was dismissed as a customs collector at Exeter.30 KB27/836, rot. 61d.

Before these proceedings could go to any lengths, however, Warwick invaded England and at the end of September 1470 restored Henry VI to the throne, while King Edward was forced to seek refuge in the Low Countries. Gille took the precaution of procuring a general pardon from King Henry,31 C67/44, m. 4. but his ties with the new regime were such that he was allowed to keep his remaining offices of deputy butler and water-bailiff. In November, a Parliament assembled at Westminster. Gille, not himself a Member of the Commons, was nevertheless present in the entourage of the chancellor, Archbishop Neville, in which capacity he was able to claim the protection of parliamentary privilege in a claim for a sum of money owing from his Exeter customership brought by a Westminster butcher.32 E159/247, brevia Hil. rot. 1.

In the spring of 1471, Edward IV’s return home saw Warwick’s regime swept away for good. Gille was now stripped of the post of deputy butler, but was apparently allowed to retain that of water-bailiff at Dartmouth. In the event, he was not to enjoy it for long, since his health was failing. He was dead by the following April, when a writ of diem clausit extremum was sent to the escheator of Devon.33 CFR, xxi. no. 97. He was survived by his wife, whom he had entrusted with the execution of his will. Within two years of Gille’s death, she married the Devon landowner Henry Pomeray.34 C1/53/34; CP40/850, rot. 364; 854, rot. 38. Gille’s lands passed to his widow for her lifetime, but whereas at her death they should have reverted to his heirs, the children of his sister Joan, Pomeray refused to relinquish them. Friends of the parties intervened and succeeded in brokering a settlement by which Pomeray would surrender the manor of Hatch to its rightful owners, but keep the revenues, amounting to some £60, which he had been receiving for three years after his wife’s death. Yet, in the event he refused to honour this agreement and litigation between the two parties’ heirs continued well into the sixteenth century.35 C1/13/226-27; 53/34; 111/38-40; 112/32-39.