FROWYK, Thomas II

Thomas Frowyk came from a junior cadet branch of an old Middlesex family with parliamentary traditions dating back to the reign of Edward II. His father, Henry, had been the younger son of the landowner Henry Frowyk† (d.1386) who had represented Middlesex in the ‘Bad Parliament’ of 1377 (Jan.), and had made his fortune in the city of London, rising through the ranks of the Mercers’ Company to hold the mayoralty on two separate occasions. Thomas’s mother, Isabel, had already outlived two other London mercers before marrying Henry Frowyk, and added to the family business the shop of a successful silkwoman. Under the circumstances, it was natural for the couple’s eldest son to enter the family firm as his father’s apprentice, but this may have been something of a formality designed to secure for him admission to the livery through the Mercers’ Company, for it seems that in parallel with his apprenticeship Thomas underwent some training in the law.14 Ricardian, x. 89; Med. Acct. Bks. of the Mercers, 525, 643; Mercers’ Co., London, Biog. index cards, ex inf. A.F. Sutton. No details of this training have been discovered, but it seems that Frowyk never actively traded as a mercer, while his legal expertise was evidently sufficient not only to recommend him to several of the most important ecclesiastical landlords of Middlesex as an estate steward or counsel, but also to secure him a place on the quorum of the county bench even in his father’s lifetime. Equally, connexions both among the mercers of London and among members of the legal profession probably played a part in Frowyk’s marriage to Joan Sturgeon, at some point before 1447. Joan was the daughter and sole heir of Richard Sturgeon, for many years principal clerk of the Crown in Chancery, and niece of the mercer John Sturgeon*.15 Richardson, 98; Ricardian, x. 91-92. Joan’s mother was the sister of the prominent Household official, William Cotton*.

Not long after Frowyk’s marriage, his father settled on him property in Soper Lane which had previously belonged to Joan Sturgeon’s grandfather, Walter Cotton,16 London hr 183/4. but it was only after the successive deaths of Thomas’s father and mother in 1460 and 1465 that he came into his full inheritance. Although Henry Frowyk had been a younger son, he had used the wealth he amassed in trade to acquire a substantial estate in London and its hinterland. In the city the family resided in a property known as Ypres Inn at the southern end of Cordwainer Street in the parish of St. Thomas the Apostle.17 Ricardian x. 90. Other holdings in the parish of All Hallows Honey Lane came to Henry from his mother, Alice Cornwall, and it seems that the mercer’s London property was consolidated in a redistribution of the Frowyks’ estates between the two branches of the family in 1438. By this date, Thomas’s father had also acquired additional holdings in the parishes of St. Pancras and St. Benet Sherhog. The family holdings in Middlesex included the manors of Gunnersbury and Palyngswyke, as well as other lands in Ealing, Brentford and East Twyford.18 Cal. P. and M. London, 1458-82, p. 97; London hr 197/4; CCR, 1476-85, no. 736; CP25(1)/152/91/92, 98; 93/131, 136; 95/188; CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 463; VCH Mdx. vii. 126, 130, 213.

The wealth acquired through his professional practice allowed Frowyk to add further property to these estates, including holdings in Harrow, Greenford, Willesden and elsewhere in Middlesex and the neighbouring counties.19 CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 195; CCR, 1485-1500, no. 864. From Edward Chalkhill he purchased lands in Acton, Willesden and Kingsbury, as well as the manor of Flambards in Harrow, while Robert Hayte sold him the reversion after the death of Katherine, his wife, of lands in Standon, Bexgate and Sandon in Berkshire, as well as more in Wiltshire.20 CIPM Hen. VII, i. 58, 159; iii. 195, 463. In 1473 he purchased the manor of Shalbourne from the thrice-widowed Maud Stanhope, Lady Willoughby de Eresby and niece and coheiress of the former treasurer, Ralph, Lord Cromwell.21 CCR, 1468-76, no. 1173; CIPM Hen VII, i. 58. It is possible that the Glos. manor of Quinton, which became the subject of a protracted dispute between Frowyk and the Cromwell heirs had already been intended to be part of the same transaction: E405/62, rot. 2; CCR, 1476-85, no. 468. The financial troubles that beset Frowyk’s first cousin Henry II* from the later 1450s provided him with an opportunity to reunite in his hands some of the family estates that had descended in the senior line from Thomas I to his son. In 1473 the younger Thomas acquired the family’s secondary manor of ‘Derhams’ and other holdings in South Mimms, as well as property in the London parish of St. Giles without Cripplegate.22 CCR, 1468-76, no. 1270; CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 195, 309, 444; Guildhall Lib. London, St. Paul’s mss, 25125/94, m. 1; 99, m. 1. At the time of his death, Frowyk’s real estate in Middlesex and Berkshire alone was thought to be worth some £102, and the total value of his holdings was probably rather greater.23 CIPM Hen. VII, i. 58, 159. In 1506-8, after the death of Frowyk’s sons, the holdings that had descended to them from their father were altogether valued at more than £142: CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 137, 195, 243, 279, 294, 309, 427, 444, 463.

Evidently a lawyer of some skill, Frowyk was much in demand in his native county. He was retained as steward by successive heads of the two great houses of Syon and Westminster, and drew an annual fee of 20s. for his counsel to Bishop Thomas Kemp of London.24 Ricardian, x. 92; KB9/286/12; 313/63; KB27/880, rex rot. 20; SC6/140/25-27; CFR, xx. 257. Among the laymen to call upon his services as a feoffee, trustee of goods, surety or arbiter, or simply as a witness to property transactions, were his and his wife’s kinsmen by blood and marriage, the Frowyks, Charltons, Sturgeons and Bledlowes.25 London hr 187/46; Westminster abbey muns. 439, 462, 490. Alongside the mercer John Sturgeon (who in November 1459 made him a trustee of his portable property), Frowyk would later serve as an executor of the will of his wife’s other uncle, the composer Nicholas Sturgeon (a significant pluralist who acquired canonries at Exeter, St. Stephen’s, Westminster, St. Paul’s and St. George’s, Windsor), a protracted process that continued into the 1460s.26 Biog. Reg. Univ. Oxf. ed. Emden, iii. 1810; Fifty Earliest English Wills (EETS lxxviii ), 134; CP40/802, rot. 384; CCR, 1454-61, pp. 306-7, 427; CPR, 1461-7, p. 4. Apparently rather less distinguished was the part Frowyk played in the establishment of a chantry chapel in the cemetery of St. Bartholomew’s hospital by his father-in-law. Richard Sturgeon had originally taken on the task of setting up this foundation on behalf of one Robert Scarborough, and had to this intent accepted an enfeoffment of lands in Tottenham and Harringay. Following Sturgeon’s death, his executor, Nicholas Bailly, had been ‘sore laboured and entreted by dyvers meanes by Thomas Frowyk and his frendes’, and with promises of an alternative endowment had been persuaded to let Frowyk have the property for himself. Nevertheless, it seems that in the event the lands did pass to the priory, where a chantry for the benefit of the souls of Sturgeon, Frowyk and their wives was eventually established.27 C1/1/86-87, 99; Cart. St. Bartholomew’s Hosp. ed. Kerling, no. 1123; Ricardian, x. 92. Frowyk did, however, apparently succeed in retaining the lands in Tottenham and Harringay, which passed to his yr. s.: CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 195. Further kinsfolk with whom Frowyk was associated included his brother-in-law, John Martin, son of the royal justice of the same name,28 PCC 10 Stokton (PROB11/4, ff. 75v-76v); Ricardian, x. 93. his son-in-law, Thomas Bledlowe,29 CCR, 1476-85, no. 98; C1/85/12; London hr 196/11; 204/4, 6. and Richard Danvers*, whose niece and ward, Joan, daughter and coheiress of (Sir) Robert Danvers* j.c.p., was to marry Frowyk’s son and heir, Henry.30 CCR, 1476-85, no. 142. Among his other clients were Londoners of a variety of trades and occupations, like the mercer Thomas Staunton, the tallow-chandler John Weryng, the vintner John Lyon, the brewer Robert Newton, the grocer Robert Pecoke, the draper Walter Chertsey, the salter Thomas Beaumond, and the fishmonger William Eston,31 CCR, 1447-54, pp. 120, 122; 1454-61, p. 48; 1461-8, pp. 76, 194, 211, 400; CAD, iii. C3500; v. A13416; vi. C4610; C131/77/27; London hr 183/32; 196/38, 39; 199/25; Add. Chs. 26080, 40583-5. There may have been some distant tie of kinship between Frowyk and Eston who by his will assigned to him the remainder of some of his lands in Hendon and left him a standing silver vessel and cover: Guildhall Lib. London, commissary ct. wills, 9171/6, f. 56; CCR, 1454-61, p. 362; 1461-8, pp. 187-8; CP25(1)/152/95/188; London hr 187/46. but also a range of south-eastern gentry, including the sons of William Wroth*, John Ebmede of Staines, Miles Windsor of Stanwell and the lawyer and under sheriff Walter Brigger.32 KB27/751, fines rot. 1; C237/43/192; C67/41, m. 9; CP25(1)/152/95/190; CPR, 1446-52, p. 325; 1452-61, p. 280; CCR, 1454-61, p. 50; 1461-8, pp. 98, 187-8; 1468-76, nos. 42, 281, 1086; 1476-85, nos. 702, 820, 897; PCC 14 Mills (PROB11/8, ff. 113v-114); London hr 184/8; 191/18; CAD, i. B1517-19.

The sheer volume of this professional activity meant that there were occasional conflicts. Thus, in 1457 the Warwickshire esquire Thomas Hotoft complained to the chancellor of Frowyk’s refusal to release to him his title in certain property in Drayton and Ealing in which he stood enfeoffed;33 C1/26/368; C253/35/216. in 1463 Amy, widow of the London goldsmith John Drayton, sued Frowyk and his fellow feoffees of her late husband’s property for seisin of a tenement in the city parish of St. Denis Backchurch;34 C1/28/419; C253/38/102; London hr 183/19. and similarly, at some point in the reign of Richard III, Joan, widow of Roger Frende of Acton, asserted that Frowyk was refusing to let her have seisin of her late husband’s estates, as he was bound to do under the terms of Frende’s will, while Frowyk for his part claimed to be unable to do so, since Roger’s son and heir, John, insisted on the existence of another will which gave him title to the disputed lands.35 C1/65/126-7.

Perhaps the Frowyks’ closest associates among the Middlesex gentry were their near kinsmen, the Charltons. Members of the two families regularly attested each other’s property deeds and served as each other’s feoffees and executors. Particularly close were Thomas Frowyk’s ties with his first cousin of the half blood, (Sir) Thomas Charlton*, who had been his parliamentary colleague on the occasion of his first return in 1447, and who would again sit alongside him in 1460. Frowyk was among Charlton’s feoffees, his wife was godmother to Charlton’s son and heir, and when Charlton came to make his will in 1465 he appointed Frowyk overseer, and bequeathed to him a silver gilt cup.36 London hr 180/24; 192/3; CCR, 1461-8, p. 132; C140/17/31, 35/64; PCC 10 Godyn (PROB11/5, f. 60v). This proved a modest reward for the extensive work that the settlement of Charlton’s affairs entailed. For a payment of 1,000 marks Frowyk and the executors secured custody of the Charlton estates and heir from the Crown,37 CFR, xx. 151; E405/43, rot. 2d; E13/151, rot. 44d; Westminster abbey muns. 9207A, m. 5. whereupon the heir, Richard Charlton, and his siblings were taken into the Frowyk household, and it fell to Thomas to see to their needs. Before long, Richard was married to Thomasina Turnaunt, the step-grand-daughter of the draper John Gedney*, but remained in Frowyk’s care until 1468, when he entered the service and household of his distant kinsman, George Neville, archbishop of York.38 E13/151, rot. 44d; C1/66/286; Westminster abbey muns. 5471, f. 9; 9207A, mm. 5, 8; M. Erler, ‘Three 15th-cent. Vowesses’, in Med. London Widows ed. Barron and Sutton, 176. Richard’s younger brother William and their sister Elizabeth both died while still in Frowyk’s care, while the two remaining sisters, Agnes and Mary, divided their time between the Frowyk residence and periodic sojourns at Haliwell priory. In 1470 Agnes married the London grocer Thomas Bledlowe, newly widowed after the death of his first wife, Frowyk’s own daughter Isabel, and Mary eventually became the wife of the Essex landowner Thomas Brown.39 Westminster abbey muns. 5471, ff. 5v, 16v, 18v, 21v, 22v; 6625, mm. 1, 3; CPL, xii. 763; C1/85/12. The investment of time and money which the care for the Charlton children entailed was hardly offset by the items that Frowyk was able to acquire from his cousin’s estate: ‘an engelische booke calde Giles de regimine principum’ valued at 2s. and ‘a coller of goolde wt sonnys & rosys, the rosis ynamelid white & wt a white lyon’, weighing eight ounces and valued at £8, but sold to Frowyk for £11, and a share in 6 ‘flechys of bakon’ divided among the executors.40 Westminster abbey muns. 6625, mm. 2, 3; 6646, mm. 2d, 5.

It is uncertain how highly Frowyk prized his new educational tract, but certainly his was a literate family. The mid fifteenth-century ‘Libelle of English Policy’ had perhaps been commissioned by his father, and a modest London chronicle was kept and continued in Thomas’s own household.41 Ricardian, x. 86-103; Sutton, Mercery, 168-9. It is, nevertheless, difficult to fathom Frowyk’s attitude to the political changes of his age. It seems probable that he owed his returns to Parliament as much to his family’s standing in Middlesex as to any particular allegiance to one faction or another. In the crisis of 1459-61 he (like several of his kinsmen) seems to have maintained a careful neutrality. Thus, he could be included in the commissions of array issued in late 1459 and early 1460 for the defence of England against the expected invasion of the Yorkist lords from Calais, but could nevertheless secure return to the partisan Parliament of October 1460 alongside his friend and cousin (Sir) Thomas Charlton, whom the Yorkists, fresh from their victory at Northampton, made controller of Henry VI’s household. In the summer of 1468 when rumours of conspiracies against Edward IV were rife and a number of prominent Londoners, including the former mayor (Sir) Thomas Cook II*, were arrested, Frowyk took the precaution of suing out a general pardon.42 C67/46, m. 32. It is possible that the blood ties of his near kinsmen, the Charltons, to Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, inclined him towards the Neville faction, and any such inclination may have been strengthened by the despoiling of Cook’s property by the queen’s Wydeville relatives. Frowyk’s former ward, Richard Charlton, accompanied Archbishop Neville to York for Warwick’s abortive parliament of 1469, and a year later, when King Edward had been driven into exile and Henry VI restored to the throne, Frowyk and his cousin Henry II were appointed to try offences in their native Middlesex. Although neither played any more prominent part in the politics of the Readeption, both Frowyks were evidently regarded with some suspicion by the restored Edward IV, and were removed from the Middlesex bench on his return. In May 1472 Thomas was able to secure a fresh pardon from the King, but it took until the end of 1473 before he was allowed to serve as a j.p. once more.43 C67/49, m. 33.

Over the following years, Frowyk was allowed a gradual rehabilitation. He was included in the south-eastern commissions of sewers and of weirs and kiddles which were charged with the surveillance of the watercourse of the river Thames, and his good behaviour along with his wealth and standing found recognition when the degree of knighthood was bestowed upon him in January 1478 on the occasion of the marriage of the young Prince Richard, duke of York and Norfolk, to the Mowbray heiress.44 Shaw, i. 138. Equally, under Richard III he was appointed to ad hoc commissions in Middlesex, including that of array, and he continued to sit on the county bench. The outcome of the battle of Bosworth thus spelled potential trouble for him, especially as his former charge and near kinsman, Sir Richard Charlton, was killed fighting for King Richard, and was posthumously attainted by the Parliament of 1485.45 CIPM Hen. VII, i. 51; PROME, xv. 107-9. Charlton’s estates were taken into Henry VII’s hands, and parcelled out among his supporters.46 E199/28/5; VCH Mdx. iv. 73, 103; v. 149; VCH Cambs. viii. 256; VCH Beds. ii. 231; CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 732, 917; CPR, 1485-94, pp. 63, 96, 210, 365.

By contrast, political problems were not to prove Frowyk’s undoing. Instead, having weathered the factional storms of the age, he fell victim to the epidemic disease that the new King’s mercenaries brought to London. In the early autumn of 1485 the sweating sickness carried off two successive mayors of London within five days of each other, along with six aldermen and ‘many a worchyppull man moo’. By 22 Sept., Frowyk had fallen ill and took the precaution of drafting a will. Less than a week later, he was dead.47 CIPM Hen. VII, i. 58, 159; CFR, xxii. 1; Harl. 541, f. 218; C.M. Barron, London in the Middle Ages, 346-7. In accordance with his instructions, he was buried in the chapel of St. Anne in the parish church of Ealing. The sum of five marks was assigned to ‘sume poure maiden of good disposition’ for her marriage, so that she might pray for the souls of the testator and his son-in-law, Thomas Bledlowe. Also remembered were his wife, Joan, his sons, Henry and Thomas, and his unmarried daughter Isabel, as well as his servants who were to be rewarded ‘according to ther merytes’ at the discretion of Frowyk’s executors (his widow, John Ward, his successor as steward of Syon abbey, and Master William Turner). He left detailed instructions for the settlement of his lands by his feoffees. The Berkshire manor of Shalbourne, the Middlesex lands in Acton, Willesden and Kingsbury, and the manor of ‘Derhams’ in South Mimms that he had acquired by purchase, 12 acres of ground called ‘Boterwikes mede’ in Tottenham, and the reversion of the Hayte property in Berkshire and Wiltshire after the death of Katharine Hayte were settled on his widow for her life, with remainder to his younger son, Thomas and his heirs. Joan was also to have for her lifetime the Suffolk manor of Little Cornerd, which was subsequently to fall to Frowyk’s elder son, Henry, and his descendants. Finally, Joan was to retain outright Ypres Inn, the former brewhouse called the White Lyon, with its newly constructed outbuildings, and a tenement in Willesden, and permitted to dispose of them as she saw fit. In his mother’s lifetime, the younger Thomas was to have his father’s holdings in Ickenham, Brabasons in Great Greenford, and other holdings in Little Greenford, Harrow and Ealing (which were to pass to his heirs, or, in default, to his brother Henry), as well as a tenement in West Brentford called the Horsho.48 PCC 18 Logge (PROB11/7, ff. 137v-138v). The remainder of Frowyk’s property fell to his 38-year-old son and heir, Henry, who in 1471 had been endowed with the property in Soper Lane which his father had been given in the early years of his married life. Henry survived until 1505, but it was his younger brother, Thomas (d.1506) who rose to greater prominence, making his way in the legal profession to become chief justice of the court of common pleas.49 CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 427, 463; London hr 201/13. Their mother Joan died in 1500. By her will she asked to be buried next to her husband at Ealing, and left to the parish church there a substantial bequest of 100 marks to provide for a priest to sing daily masses for her soul and those of her husband and their parents for a period of ten years. Other masses were to be sung in the London church of St. Thomas the Apostle and the hospital of St. Thomas of Acre. She made charitable bequests to the poor householders of the parish of St. Benet Sherhog, the poorer priests studying in the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, the prisoners in Newgate, Ludgate, the King’s bench prison and the Marshalsea, the inmates of the hospital of St. Mary Bethlehem without Bishopsgate and five leprosaria in London and Middlesex. Individual legacies to her relatives and friends included a silver basin, a ewer and the standing cup that her late husband had received from (Sir) Thomas Charlton, all of which were assigned to her eldest son Henry, and a primer bound in blue velvet and decorated with the Frowyk arms, which the younger Thomas was to receive. The White Lyon and Ypres Inn were assigned to the latter, on condition that he would settle her debts.50 PCC 2 Moone (PROB11/12, ff. 12v-14); W.G. Davies, Ancestry of Mary Isaac, 644; CFR, xxii. 649; Bodl. Mdx. roll 22.