GASCOIGNE, James

A younger son of a prominent lawyer and servant of the house of Lancaster, Gascoigne is a relatively obscure figure. He is not mentioned in his father’s will of 1419, and features only briefly in that of his mother, who left him a small bequest of six silver cups.3 Test. Ebor. i. 390-5, 410. Linked with south-west England at the beginning of his short career, he owed his connexion with Bedfordshire to his wife Joan Pigot, in whose right he held the manor of Cardington and a ninth part of the barony of Bedford.4 VCH Beds. iii. 15, 235.

Sir William Gascoigne, Gascoigne’s elder brother of the half-blood, was a soldier who died on active service in France in March 1422.5 The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 161-2. He himself also campaigned there, for in the summer of 1428 he crossed the Channel as a member of the retinue of Thomas Montagu, earl of Salisbury. Another member of the expedition was the soon to be knighted Richard Hankford*, who married Salisbury’s sister Anne and under whom Gascoigne served at the siege of Orleans later that year.6 DKR, xlviii. 258; Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, fr. 25678/339. The letters of protection he received before leaving for France with Salisbury Gascoigne described him as ‘of Somerset’, but there is no evidence that the unrelated Gascoignes of Bridgwater included a James. In any case, the MP’s links with the Hankfords suggest strongly he was the James Gascoigne who crossed the Channel with Richard Hankford in 1428. Gascoigne and Hankford had a legal connexion, for the latter was the grandson of Sir William Hankford, who had become a serjeant-at-law on the same day as Gascoigne’s father and succeeded him as c.j.KB.7 Order of Serjts. at Law (Selden Soc. supp. v), 159; Law Offs. (Selden Soc. supp. vii), 8. They were already closely associated before departing for France, since in February 1426 Hankford and his previous wife, Elizabeth Fitzwaryn, conveyed the manor of Edlington, Yorkshire, to Gascoigne to hold for life, and Gascoigne was subsequently a feoffee for the jointure settlement which Hankford made for Anne Montagu.8 CIPM, xxi. 619; xxiii. 567-78; CCR, 1429-35, pp. 86-87, 89-90. The reason for giving Gascoigne an interest in Edlington is unknown, although it is possible that the arrangement was a means of repaying a debt to him.

The two comrades-in-arms did not long survive their return from France, for Hankford died in February 1431 and Gascoigne just over three years later. The latter spent his remaining days in Bedfordshire where, thanks to his wife’s estates, he possessed sufficient status to gain election as one of the county’s knights of the shire to the Parliament of 1433. This Parliament was probably not his first, for it is likely that he was the James Gascoigne who had sat for the Devon borough of Barnstaple in 1431. Barnstaple already had a tradition of returning outsiders to the Commons, and it possessed a connexion with Bedfordshire in that the lord of the borough was Sir John Cornwall, one of the leading magnates in that county and a feoffee for Gascoigne’s father-in-law, Sir Baldwin Pigot.9 The Commons 1386-1421, i. 342, 344; iv. 84. (Barnstaple’s other MP in 1431 was John Wydeslade*, a lawyer who owed his early advancement to the patronage of none other than Sir William Hankford, the grandfather of Gascoigne’s associate, Richard.) The Bedfordshire election indenture of 1433 names Sir Thomas Sackville* and William Whaplode* as the men returned to the Commons, but this is due to a scribal error. Sackville and Whaplode did indeed sit in 1433, but as the knights of the shire for Buckinghamshire, which shared the same sheriff as Bedfordshire. Although the indenture was never amended, a separate schedule listing the representatives of both counties correctly named Gascoigne and John Wenlock*, an associate of the recently ennobled Sir John Cornwall, as the men elected for the latter county. A pressing concern for the Parliament was the problem of lawlessness throughout the kingdom, and both the Lords and the Commons swore an oath to uphold the peace. A month after the Parliament, the Crown ordered Gascoigne, Wenlock and the other knights of the shire to draw up the names of all those in their respective counties whom they thought should likewise swear the oath,10 CCR, 1429-35, p. 271. which they were afterwards commissioned to administer.

During the second session of the Parliament Gascoigne was pricked as sheriff of Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire. In the event, he never accounted at the Exchequer, for he died in office on 28 June 1434.11 CIPM, xxiv. 304. John Glove replaced him as sheriff, taking up office five days later.12 PRO List ‘Sheriffs’, 2. Gascoigne’s widow survived him by less than a year. The couple’s son and heir, another James Gascoigne, was only four years old when she died, and in October 1441 the Crown granted his wardship to the clerk of the signet, William Gedney*.13 CPR, 1441-6, p. 3. Cardington remained in the Gascoigne family, descending in due course to Sir William Gascoigne† (d.1540). Edlington, the manor the MP had held by grant of the Hankfords, reverted to Thomasina, Sir Richard Hankford’s sole surviving daughter and heir by his first marriage.14 CP40/830, rot. 405; The Commons 1509-58, ii. 194-5; CIPM, xxiv. 304.