CHAMBERLAIN, Thomas

Thomas came from a family which had migrated to Southampton from Cornwall in the closing years of the fourteenth century, and was a nephew or grandson of the Thomas Chamberlain alias Lorimer, who had been the first member of the family to acquire property in the town.1 C. Platt, Med. Southampton, 141. The bulk of the family holdings in Cornwall and Southampton passed to that Thomas’s sons, Robert and William, the latter being the sometime recorder of Southampton who represented the borough in ten Parliaments.2 Ibid. 236-7; Queen’s Coll. Oxf., God’s House deeds, 431-3; CCR, 1441-7, pp. 205-6. Our MP’s father, John, was put in charge of the King’s ships, as their clerk or keeper, from 1398 to 1405, served as clerk of the works at Portsmouth under Henry V, and was long in receipt of a pension of 6d. a day, initially granted him for life by Henry IV. He lived in a large house described as having three roofs and two vaults on the west side of English Street, which he occupied from December 1436 on a 24-year lease from Walter Fettiplace, paying the substantial rent of £4 p.a. He may have been still alive in 1454.3 Navy of Lancastrian Kings (Navy Recs. Soc. cxxiii), 30-31, 233; Southampton RO, SC4/2/269, 285; Southampton Terrier 1454 (Soton. Rec. Ser. xv), no. 189. Thomas himself appears to have resided in French Street, in a building rented by his father from God’s House for 21s. 8d. a year: certainly he himself took responsibility for paying the rent in 1430-1 and again from 1435 to 1448, when it was reduced to 20s.4 Cart. God’s House, ii (Soton. Rec. Ser. xx), 305. He also held property outside Southampton at Romsey, for in 1439 he brought an action in the court of common pleas against a gentleman from Winchester and a local carter on the grounds that together with a hosteler they had broken into his house there and stolen goods worth £20.5 CP40/715, rot. 154d.

In April 1440 the pension previously awarded to Thomas’s father alone was granted to him, too, the two men henceforth receiving 6d. a day from the customs of Southampton for term of their lives, in survivorship. It looks as if Thomas had already entered royal service. Initially he was attached to the King’s secretary, Master Thomas Bekynton, as his ‘servant’, and together with Bekynton in July 1441 he received from the King a grant of a tenement and certain lands together with a moiety of a stretch of water called ‘Lambourn’ (presumably the river itself) in the royal lordship of Speen in Berkshire, for which they were to pay 7s. 6d. a year.6 CPR, 1436-41, pp. 395, 561. Chamberlain’s position in Bekynton’s household probably accounts for his election to Parliament for the crown’s borough of Ludgershall early the following year. He had no known connexion with the burgesses or the place. Yet he may well have been known to William Ludlow II*, the yeoman of the King’s cellar, who currently held the manor and lordship of Ludgershall by Henry VI’s gift, for one of Ludlow’s descendants was to lay claim to Chamberlain’s estate many years later.

Parliament assembled at Westminster from 25 Jan. to 27 Mar. 1442. Chamberlain was in attendance on Bekynton when the latter left Windsor on 5 June, at the start of his journey to Bordeaux for negotiations with the count of Armagnac regarding the King’s marriage, and ten days later, after they had spent the night at Taunton, he was sent to Enmore to meet Edward Hull*, the secretary’s fellow envoy, before rejoining Bekynton on the 23rd at the earl of Devon’s castle at Tiverton. On the secretary’s return to England in January 1443 Chamberlain met him at Bedwyn in Wiltshire bearing a letter from the King.7 Corresp. Bekynton ed. Williams, ii. 177-9, 240.

Later in 1443 Chamberlain began to receive fees and robes in the Household as a groom of the chamber, and at Michaelmas 1444 he was promoted to the rank of ‘valet’ or yeoman, which he held for some 13 years.8 E101/409/12, f. 82v; 16, f. 35v; 410/1, 3, 6, 9. Together with John Say II*, also assigned to the chamber, he received in August 1444 a grant of portion of the petty custom collected at Bordeaux.9 C61/132, m. 2; CPR, 1441-6, p. 347. He continued to be associated with Bekynton, now risen to be bishop of Bath and Wells, and in 1446 assisted him in making a donation to his old school, Winchester College, of land and property at Otterborne in Hampshire. Sometime previously Chamberlain had been awarded an annuity of £5 from the farm of the rabbit warrens at ‘Hertyngfordbury’ by letters patent under the seal of the duchy of Lancaster, but had to surrender these letters as invalid following the gift of the warrens to Margaret of Anjou as part of her dower. However, in October 1446 he obtained in recompense a back-dated grant of the same amount levied on the wool customs at Southampton.10 CPR, 1441-6, p. 444; 1446-52, p. 20.

As a yeoman of the chamber Chamberlain was expected on occasion to act as the King’s messenger, and in March 1447 he was given a reward of £10 for excessive labour and charges in riding by day and night over a period of five weeks at Henry’s command, on a journey which cost ‘greet money’ for the hire of horses and guides. Perhaps this was related to the business of the Parliament at Bury St. Edmunds. He was promised ten marks for going on a similar errand in May 1450, when Parliament was assembled at Leicester.11 E404/63/29, 66/170. He did not receive his ten marks until Aug. 1451: E403/785, m. 15. There were other signs of favour too. In June 1449 a commission headed by one of the squires for the body, John Norris*, was set up to investigate a complaint made by Bishop Bekynton and Chamberlain that the prior of Poughley had built a mill across the river at Lambourn and diverted the watercourse, thus affecting their rights there.12 CPR, 1446-52, p. 271. Furthermore, Chamberlain’s fees as a yeoman of the chamber, amounting to £9 2s. 6d. a year, were exempted from the Act of Resumption of 1450, and although he lost his £5 annuity when, at the same time, the lordship of the Isle of Wight was resumed from Richard, duke of York, he was given the office of receiver of the lordship, presumably as compensation. Since the island stood in great jeopardy and peril of invasion from France, and was insufficiently equipped with ordnance, artillery and armour, he immediately became involved in arranging for guns to be delivered to the constable of Carisbrooke castle. His receivership was granted him for life on 11 May 1452, but in fact he only accounted at the Exchequer for the issues of the lordship for a few weeks longer, for the island was then alienated to Edmund, duke of Somerset, in fee tail-male.13 E163/8/14; PROME, xii. 128; CPR, 1446-52, pp. 329, 546; E364/87 rot. F; E404/66/216. Whether Duke Edmund kept him on as receiver is not recorded, but this seems quite likely, for he acquired property on the island, and in October 1456 he stood surety for John Jaye when he was leased the farm of the manor of Freshwater there, during the minority of the duke’s son and heir, Henry. Chamberlain apparently left the Household at some point within the next 16 months, for it was as ‘former’ yeoman of the Chamber that he took out a royal pardon in February 1458.14 CFR, xix. 137; C67/42, m. 33.

The fact that Chamberlain was a member of the Household with personal access to the King had no doubt been a significant factor in his return to Parliament for Southampton in 1453, for this Parliament contained an unusually large number of royal servants. Yet the choice was not imposed on the burgesses, for he did not lack for influential contacts among them. His father had long been a close friend of William Soper*, the prominent merchant and current keeper of the King’s ships, and Thomas continued the association, especially after Soper took as his second wife our MP’s kinswoman (perhaps sister) Joan Chamberlain. He is known to have ridden on one occasion from London to Somerset on Soper’s business, and in 1454 he became the sole feoffee of his friend’s property in Eling, Dibden and Fawley, which he reconveyed a year later to Soper and his wife for term of their lives, undertaking that after their deaths he would pay the mayor of Southampton £2 a year from the income of the property to ensure that their obits would be kept in perpetuity. Soper made him an executor of his will dated 8 Nov. 1458, and he and the testator’s widow took on joint administration of it.15 C1/16/301; Black Bk. Southampton, ii (Soton. Rec. Soc. 1912), 113-15, 123-5.

Little is recorded about Chamberlain after the accession of Edward IV. His service in Henry VI’s household clearly marked him out as a potential rebel, and he was arrested at Southampton in the summer of 1466 on charges of treasonous behaviour.16 KB9/314/70, 73. Others indicted before commissioners of oyer and terminer at the same time were accused of having plotted to kill the King and of having sent messages to Margaret of Anjou in France encouraging her to send a force to invade England. The abbot of Quarr abbey on the Isle of Wight was among those charged with misprision, and the government’s sensitivity to threats to the stratigically vital island, where the conspiracy was said to have been hatched, lay behind the clamp-down. Two of those brought to trial were executed.17 M. Hicks, ‘An Intermittent Abbot of Quarr’, Procs. Hants Field Club, n.s. vi. 5-6. Perhaps Chamberlain’s earlier role as receiver on the island laid him open to suspicion, and it is significant that others arrested with him (Giles Palmer, an apothecary of Southampton, and Thomas Cauntewell of Stapulhurst in Arreton), were men he trusted enough to make them feoffees of his lands. However, in the event Chamberlain and his friends were acquitted.18 C1/32/40; KB9/314/70, 73.

The date of Chamberlain’s death is not known. According to a petition sent to the archbishop of York as chancellor (perhaps in 1470-1), Chamberlain had put his manor of Watchingwell and lands in the parishes of Shalfleet and Calbourne on the Isle of Wight in the hands of feoffees to the use of himself and his heirs, and in his will ‘by writyng of his owne hande’ declared that after his death these properties were to be sold and the money raised (up to 100 marks) spent on the salary of a priest to sing masses for the souls of himself and his friends for ten years. He left no surviving children, and after his death John Wallop† and Joan his wife (said to be Chamberlain’s kinswoman) asserted that they had been promised this property for payment of 120 marks. Among Chamberlain’s executors, headed by his widow, was Walter Fletcher,19 C1/32/40. evidently a relation, too, for in the late 1470s he also petitoned the chancellor, claiming that Chamberlain had been sole seised of two messuages and some 350 acres of land in Fawley, Dipden and elsewhere, and had entrusted Wallop and others to perform his last will regarding the same, which was that after his death they would make an enfeoffment to Fletcher’s use. Wallop had refused to do so. Disputes over the inheritance long continued: in 1500 Fletcher alleged that the property of which Chamberlain had been enfeoffed by the Sopers also included the manor of South Langley, and that this too should have fallen to him after the deaths of Chamberlain and Soper’s widow. Nevertheless, another claimant, John Ludlow of Hill Deverill, Wiltshire, refused to relinquish the title deeds. Litigation continued into the reign of Henry VIII.20 C1/54/205, 202/24-29; Navy of Lancastrian Kings, 26.