COMER, Thomas

The identity of the MP who represented Calne in the Bury St. Edmunds Parliament of 1447 cannot be established with any degree of certainty, but he was probably not a local man. Nevertheless, the return of two outsiders may have met with the approval of the burgesses, since Comer (whose parliamentary colleague, Thomas Freeman*, was a citizen of Salisbury) was able to name among his sureties the local lawyer John Justice*.1 C219/15/4. Justice’s biography in The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 506 erroneously calls him ‘Cromer’. It is possible that the Calne MP may be identified with the royal servant Thomas Combe* who is first heard of at the time of the 1447 Parliament, then described as a gentleman of Somerset.2 CFR, xviii. 64. Alternatively, he may have been an otherwise obscure kinsman of John Combe* of Amesbury, who represented the Wiltshire boroughs of Marlborough and Ludgershall in four Parliaments between 1433 and 1450, and was returned for the former constituency in 1447.3 No connexion has been established between Calne and another Thomas Comber, who was living in Southwark by the 1450s, and was periodically named among the trustees of his neighbours’ moveable possessions. Styled a ‘gentleman’, he was perhaps a minor lawyer, and in 1459 could claim among his associates John Audley alias Tuchet*, the son and heir of Lord Audley, who was to inherit the title and assume an influential position when the Yorkists came to power in the following year. When they did so, Comber attested the Surrey elections to the Parliament which met in October 1460, in company with two of the nephews of Archbishop Bourgchier, whose service he entered at an unknown date. In 1461 he witnessed a conveyance to new feoffees by Thomas Slyfield* of some of the property in Southwark formerly held by William Redstone*. Having served as Archbishop Bourgchier’s bailiff in Southwark for a number of years, Comber died before 1480. He named as his executors his widow Isabel and two local men, Thomas Sayer and John Holgrave†: CCR, 1454-61, pp. 112, 436; 1461-8, p. 201; CP40/821, rot. 521; 871, rot. 87; E13/156, rot. 12d; London Metropolitan Archs., Mark mss, O/206/001.