MALLORY, Thomas

Mallory’s father, William, was a younger son of Sir Anketin Mallory (d.1393) of Kirkby Mallory in Leicestershire,4 The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 674. whose estates for the most part descended after the death before 1412 of his first son Sir Thomas to the latter’s only child, Elizabeth.5 Leics. Village Notes ed. Farnham, v. 222-3, 351. However, in accordance with an entail made in 1391 and confirmed in 1408 William had been named as heir of the manor of Papworth St. Agnes, straddling the border of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire, by a childless kinsman, Sir William Papworth† (c.1331-1414), and it was decided that he should also inherit the manor of Shelton in Bedfordshire which Papworth had acquired by purchase.6 The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 9-10; C138/12/28; VCH Cambs. ix. 369; VCH Beds. iii. 162. Precisely how the Mallorys and Papworths were related is not known,7 The ped. in Archaeologia, lvi. 179, incorrectly states that the MP’s gdfa. Sir Anketin married Sir William Papworth’s da. Alice. In fact, Sir Anketin’s wife Alice (d.1412) was the da. and h. of John Dryby of Breedon-on-the-Hill, Leics. and wid. of Ralph, Lord Basset of Sapcote and of Robert Tuchet: Reg. Repingdon, ii (Lincoln Rec. Soc. lviii), 275-7. but their close kinship undoubtedly proved beneficial to William and his descendants. Well connected in the Midlands, being brother-in-law of Sir Robert Moton* of Peckleton and of Sir John Bagot† of Blithfield and half-brother to Elizabeth, Lady Grey of Codnor, he was knighted before May 1411, probably took part in Henry V’s invasion of Normandy in 1415, and in April 1418 sailed for France in the service of the duke of Exeter.8 CPR, 1408-13, p. 319; DKR, xliv. 606. Sir William’s marriage shortly before April 1421 to the widow of the Shropshire esquire Robert Corbet† (1383-1420),9 C139/90/4; The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 654. took him to Moreton Corbet, where his wife had kept the manor-house as part of her dower.10 He put his manor of Shelton in the hands of feoffees from Salop on 26 Apr. 1421, perhaps intending to settle it in jointure on his wife: C139/117/10; Feudal Aids, iv. 248, 252. Thus it came about that our MP was born there, while a gale was blowing on 6 Dec. 1425, and he was baptized in the local parish church five days later. Margery, wife of Thomas Thornes* was brought over from Shrewsbury to be his godmother, and one of those present chased and killed a great stag and presented its head as a gift to his mother.11 C139/144/45. Thomas was probably brought up alternately at Moreton Corbet and Papworth with his older half-brothers, Thomas Corbet II* and Roger Corbet II*. His father went to France again in the spring of 1430, this time in the company led by Thomas, Lord Roos, who shortly before their departure granted him for life an annual rent of 20 marks as a reward for good service.12 DKR, xlviii. 275; CIPM, xxiii. 541.

Mallory’s mother died early in January 1439, and his father, who had meanwhile married again, on 20 June 1445. One inquisition post mortem held that he, the heir, had reached his majority the previous December, but the jurors in Cambridgeshire were better informed – he was still only 19.13 C139/117/10; 144/41. Papworth was held of the King in chief, and as soon as three days after Sir William’s death the young man’s wardship and marriage were granted to a gentleman from Sawtry in Huntingdonshire named Leo Louthe, who negotiated with the treasurer to pay 40 marks for the marriage.14 CFR, xvii. 334-5; xviii. 3. Little more is known about Mallory’s guardian (save that Louthe was to be appointed escheator in Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire in 1459), and how long his stepmother, Margery, lived after the assignment of her dower in the autumn of 1445 is not known.15 CCR, 1441-7, p. 330. After Thomas came of age (but before he made proof), an inquiry was held relating to two messuages and 50 acres of land at Sudborough in Northamptonshire, which his father was said to have held. In fact, this estate had been granted in tail by Thomas’s paternal grandfather to the latter’s daughter Ela, wife of Thomas Green of Isham, and the inquiry found that Ela’s daughter-in-law Isabel, widow of John Green, had occupied the property since Sir William Mallory’s death. Nevertheless, despite his weak title to the manor of Sudborough, our MP successfully contrived to dispossess the Greens.16 C139/125/4; VCH Northants. iii. 246; C140/31/16.

The few of Mallory’s activities documented over the next few years associate him with the Exchequer and its officials, although he himself is not recorded as directly receiving any remuneration as a member of staff. On 14 Jan. 1449, styled ‘esquire’, he shared with Brian Roucliffe (later one of the barons) the wardship and marriage of the heir of Thomas Swynnerton of Staffordshire.17 CFR, xviii. 101-2. One of their mainpernors was Thomas Cross* of Ramsey, an assistant to the treasurer’s remembrancer, the influential Thomas Thorpe*. Like Cross and several other men linked with the Exchequer in an official or unofficial capacity, Mallory was elected to the Parliament which assembled on 6 Nov. that year. An unlikely candidate – still a young man, aged 23, and with no known connexion with the Wiltshire borough he represented (Great Bedwyn) – his contacts at the Exchequer offer a plausible explanation for his return, especially as the financial crisis exacerbated by the fall of Normandy meant that the government had urgent need of supporters in the Commons. Alternatively, a link with the duke of Buckingham, the lord of Great Bedwyn, might provide the answer, for Mallory was Buckingham’s feudal tenant in property at Papworth. Yet no direct link between them has been discovered. During the second session of the Parliament, in February 1450, Mallory appeared in the Exchequer to stand surety for two senior figures in the royal administration, Ralph, Lord Cromwell, and John, Lord Dudley, who were granted custody of estates formerly held by Henry, Lord Grey of Codnor, Mallory’s kinsman.18 CFR, xviii. 149. Later that same year he was elected to Parliament again, this time for the Dorset borough of Wareham, which belonged to the duke of York. Again, while a link with York is possible – albeit undiscovered – it seems likely that it was Mallory’s connexions with Exchequer officials which facilitated his successful candidature. In April 1451, shortly before the Parliament reassembled for its final session, he joined another serving MP, Thomas Umfray*, in providing mainprise for Sir John Burcester, Cross, and Roger Thorpe* (son of the remembrancer), who were given keeping of estates late of the earl of Pembroke, including the castle and honour of Huntingdon near Mallory’s home.19 CFR, xviii. 197-8.

It was while this Parliament was still in session at Westminster that on 17 May 1451 Mallory finally made proof of age before the escheator of Shropshire, having long delayed doing so. By then he was 25. Accordingly, he was given formal seisin of his patrimony, by order of 31 May.20 C139/144/45; CCR, 1447-54, p. 225. On the very same day he proved his age, he sealed a bond to pay Elizabeth, the widow of John Palmer of Carlton, and her late husband’s half-brother Thomas Palmer* of Holt the sum of £300 before the following Whit Sunday (13 June).21 Add. Ch. 41416. Palmer, an astute lawyer, was then sitting with Mallory in the Commons, and it looks likely that he had seized the opportunity to broker an advantageous match for his niece, Elizabeth’s daughter, with his fellow MP, and to make sure that legal requirements were satisfied to secure Mallory’s inheritance from the Crown. Mallory’s bond was almost certainly made to cement the marriage contract. Although the first name of Mallory’s wife is not recorded, his subsequent close association with her brothers, the esquires William and Robert Palmer, whom he was to name as his executors, as well as the trust he placed in her uncle Thomas Palmer, is indicative of the ties which bound them together. The marriage proved fruitful, producing at least ten children.22 PCC 28 Godyn.

Part of Mallory’s inheritance caused him trouble in the late 1450s. Although he held the advowson of Papworth St. Agnes, his patronage of the church was challenged, and he took exception to the man presented to the living in 1457, Master Richard Tydde. At some point before 1460 Tydde complained to Bishop Waynflete the chancellor about the ‘grete grevous extorsion and oppression’ inflicted on him by Mallory. Allegedly, the latter, with four other ‘riotous and mysgoverned’ persons of his affinity, all arrayed ‘as hit had been in londe of werre’, had lain in wait to beat or slay him at nine o’clock one November night, and had taken him from Papworth through the shires of Huntingdon, Bedford and Northampton and on to Leicester. There, Mallory physically threatened Tydde until he made an obligation in £100, which would be forfeited if he failed to resign from his living, and demanded that if he proved unable to secure the next presentation, Tydde should give him £20. Tydde, having refused to resign, was in constant dread that he would be sued under the bond.23 C1/26/620. For Tydde, who remained rector of Papworth until his death in about 1466, see Biog. Reg. Univ. Cambridge to 1500 ed. Emden, 600-1.

Mallory’s whereabouts and affiliations during the civil war years are obscure, although his link by marriage with Thomas Palmer may have predisposed him to support the house of York, and it was only after Edward IV came to the throne that he was appointed to royal commissions, these being to deliver the gaol at Huntingdon, and to assess the unpopular tax of 1463. In the following year he became a feoffee of the manor of Hill in Middleton, Northamptonshire, on behalf of his brother-in-law William Palmer.24 CCR, 1468-76, no. 543. Mallory’s last public appearance was as an attestor of the Huntingdonshire elections of 1467, when one of his kinsmen, John Wake†, was returned. In his will, made at Papworth on 16 Sept. 1469, he was to name Wake as an overseer along with John Styuecle*, who like him had sat in the Parliament of 1450 and whose wife, Margaret, was his relative. Mallory asked to be buried in St. Mary’s chapel at Huntingdon priory, where a chaplain was to offer prayers every day for a year for his soul, and those of his late wife and parents. The priory was bequeathed a small wooded grove called ‘Trappes’. Mallory’s wife can have died only recently, and perhaps in childbirth, for their youngest child, John the younger, had not yet been weaned; the infant was to be put out to nurse with an ‘honest woman’. On his deathbed Mallory’s thoughts focused on the care and education of his children, all of whom were still minors. His daughters, Alice, Elene and Elizabeth, were each to receive £20. He left instructions that his eldest son and heir, John, should be educated in the law; the next, Robert, was to be placed under the governance of the abbot of Sawtry, whether or not he wished to be a priest; another, William, was to be apprenticed as a draper in London, and schooled in accordance with the advice of Thomas Palmer; Anthony was to stay in the guardianship of the testator’s ‘mother’ (probably his mother-in-law), and his Palmer relations; and Christopher and Edward were to receive such an education as would enable them to be priests or chaplains should they so wish. If the baby, little John, survived, he was to be treated in a similar way. Small bequests were made to the fraternity of Corpus Christi and the high altar of St. Peter’s church at Papworth, while the church at Stukeley (whose vicar witnessed the will) was to have half a mark. The wives of John Styuecle and John Wake were both left belts adorned with gold and silver, while Mallory’s sister Anne was to have his late wife’s best green gown. Mallory’s executors included two Cambridge graduates who held livings in the locality, Masters Edmund Sheriff and Richard Ward, as well as his brothers-in-law William and Robert Palmer. The will came for probate on the following 27 Oct.25 PCC 28 Godyn, printed in Archaeologia, lvi. 166-72. For Sheriff and Ward: Biog. Reg. Univ. Cambridge, 523, 616.

The jurors at the inquisition post mortem held in Cambridgeshire two weeks later wrongly gave Mallory’s date of death as 1 Sept. (before he made his will).26 CFR, xx. 246, 247, 288; C140/31/16. An inquiry regarding the disputed manor of Sudborough was not held until Jan. 1471, in response to a fresh writ. The wardship and marriage of his eldest son, John, then aged 17, were promptly sold to William Essex*, the prominent Exchequer official (who had sat with Mallory in the Parliament of 1449-50), and his associate William Stokker, who paid 50 marks for the heir’s marriage. The farm of the Mallory lands, as valued by the escheator, was fixed at just £8 p.a.27 CFR, xx. 258, 261; E405/51, rot. 1; 57, rot. 2d. John did not long survive his father: he died on 20 July 1471, whereupon the estate passed to his brother Robert (b.1457).28 CFR, xxi. no. 5; C140/36/11. During Robert’s minority, the Crown presented to the church at Shelton,29 CPR, 1467-77, p. 274. but William Essex may have retained the wardship until Robert made proof of age in December 1478.30 C140/68/57; CCR, 1476-85, no. 349. He made a release to the wid. of his uncle William Palmer in 1490-1: Assoc. Archit. Socs. Reps. and Pprs. xxxvi. 170. Robert too was to die childless, on 10 Jan. 1492, so it was left to the next surviving brother, Anthony (d.1539) to inherit the Mallory lands and carry on the line.31 CIPM Hen. VII, i. 687, 736; CFR, xxii. no. 429; VCH Cambs. ix. 369. One of our MP’s daughters, Alice Carlell alias Norre, was to be buried in the Greyfriars in London in 1507: Collectanea Topographica et Geneaologica ed. Nichols, v. 282.