LANOY, Thomas I

The identification of the man who represented Dartmouth in the Parliament of 1425 poses some problems. Both the election indenture and the attached schedule give his name unambiguously as Thomas ‘Lanoy’. However, no man of that name is known to have been active in the Dartmouth region, and Thomas Lanoy II*, who by this date was in the service of the prior of Launceston, is unlikely to have secured election for Dartmouth, whose burgesses throughout the first half of the fifteenth century tended to choose as their representatives men with strong links within their own community.

The parliamentary representation of Dartmouth was dominated from the 1390s to the early 1430s by two successive heads of the prominent Hawley family, and it seems reasonable to speculate that the otherwise obscure ‘Lanoy’ who accompanied John Hawley* to Westminster in 1425 may have been one of his associates, a man called Thomas Loveney (or Loueney).2 H.R. Watkin, Dartmouth, 120; The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 331 Loveney had secured an income by his marriage to the widow of the wealthy lawyer John Jaycock, who as her dower brought him a claim to a share of her first husband’s lands around Kingsbridge.3 The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 491; CP40/697, rot. 174d; 745, rot. 15; 750, rot. 105. Yet, Jaycock also left two married daughters, and, presumably in accordance with his wishes, in 1434 Loveney and his wife agreed to settle the lands on Joan, the elder of them, and her husband William Prideaux of Thurlestone, in return for an annual rent of £10 during his wife’s life and £4 6s. 8d. thereafter, as well as use of a certain ‘high chamber’ in the manor-house at Norden. Yet, Prideaux failed to keep his side of the bargain, and by early 1451 the rent was in arrears.4 CP25(1)/46/84/132; CP40/750, rot. 105; 760, rot. 291d.

Following John Hawley’s death in 1436, Loveney continued his association with his former parliamentary colleague’s son and heir, Nicholas. It was in association with the younger Hawley that Loveney was bound over in 1437 to keep the peace towards Thomas Gille I*, but the penalties threatened were evidently insufficient to deter the two men from interfering shortly afterwards with Gille’s construction of a great ship at Dartmouth.5 C1/11/245; West Country Shipping (Devon and Cornw. Rec. Soc. xxi), 42; KB27/706, rot. 82. In March 1440 Loveney was among the witnesses to Hawley’s acquisition of a tenement in the town from Joan, widow of John More II*, and later that year Nicholas rewarded him for his ‘good service and advice’ with a grant of a tenement and garden to the west of the Kingsway for his life, at a negligible annual rent of 1d.6 Watkin, 119-20.

Loveney’s conflict with Gille was not to remain his only brush with the law. In the summer of 1440 he clashed with the Kingsbridge merchant John Vele who, so he claimed, had infringed his property holdings there.7 KB27/724, rot. 26. Early in the following year one Thomas Danylles accused him assaulting and wounding his servant, William Oliver, while two years later, in 1443, he was implicated in the taking at sea of a Breton ship called Le Marie of Portsall worth £120 and of receiving part of its cargo of wine.8 CP40/720, rot. 260d; 730, rot. 407; CIMisc. viii. 169-70. More seriously, in April 1446 he was said to have been associated with John Brushford*, Nicholas Stebbyng*, Robert Stephen* and Robert Wenyngton alias Cane*, four leading members of the Dartmouth merchant community, in an assault on the lawyer John More at Kingswear, and the theft of his money.9 KB27/743, rot. 46d. By contrast, Loveney’s public career remained limited. He occasionally served on local juries, and in late 1449 secured his only recorded Crown appointment as a tax collector. He may have gone about his task with some discretion, for the burgesses of Totnes subsequently paid him 3s. 4d. for his ‘amicitia’. He was still active in the same capacity in the following year.10 CP40/696, rot. 132; CFR, xviii. 125; H.R. Watkin, Totnes Priory and Town, i. 409, 413.

By this time, so it seems, Loveney had built a bond with one of the greatest lords in the region, the volatile Henry Holand, duke of Exeter. Following the death of William Prideaux in 1451 his widow, Joan Jaycock, apparently took the title to her paternal inheritance to a second husband, William Frye, and in the autumn of 1455 the couple complained before justices of the common bench that even in November 1450 Loveney and an associate had drawn up fraudulent property deeds by which they had granted and quitclaimed the Jaycock estates to the duke, a claim which Thomas (who appeared in court in his own person) denied.11 CP40/779, rot. 447.

An incident in the streets of Exeter on 18 Mar. 1456 provides the final footnote to Loveney’s career. On that day, the officers of the sheriff of Devon, Andrew Hillersdon, sought to arrest him over an outlawry dating back as far as the autumn of 1443. They seized him, but were forced by the intervention of a group of leading citizens, including John Cutler alias Carwithan*, William Bishop* and John Beaufitz* to release him again.12 KB27/781, rex rot. 33d.