MOIGNE, Thomas

Moigne’s career poses problems of identification. The surviving references appear to describe a single coherent career, and this assumption has been followed here. Another difficulty relates to the MP’s parentage. He was certainly not, as the standard pedigrees have it, the younger son of Laurence Moigne of Theddlethorpe. His father was probably Thomas Moigne of Clee near Grimsby, a Lindsey tax collector in 1410 and 1417. This Thomas was, in turn, probably the son of another Thomas who was one of the chief constables of the wapentake of Bradley, in which Clee lies, at the end of Edward III’s reign and a frequent juror before the Lindsey j.p.s in the 1380s.3 CP40/836, rot. 139; CFR, xiii. 180; xiv. 222; Lincoln Rec. Soc. xxx. 105; lvi. 36, 54, 68.

By the time our MP first appears in the records he was already established as a lawyer. He was educated at Gray’s Inn and his first reading was probably given in the autumn of 1436.4 Readings and Moots, i (Selden Soc. lxxi), p.xxxii; J.H. Baker, Men of Ct. (Selden Soc. supp. ser. xviii), i. 1136. In the same year he failed to appear before the Lincolnshire subsidy commissioners to state his income. Process was initiated against him in the Exchequer, and he appeared to declare an annual income of £10.5 E179/240/269, m. 5d; E159/212, recorda Hil. rot. 14 (i). If this income was derived from land, it represented a reasonable inheritance, and it may have been this inheritance that prompted him to make his career as a local lawyer in his native county rather than seeking promotion to the higher reaches of the legal profession. He next appears as one of the attestors to the Lincolnshire election to the Parliament of 1442, to which he was returned to represent Grimsby. As a lawyer resident on the outskirts of the borough he was a natural candidate if the burgesses wished to look beyond their own ranks. Soon after he was appointed to his first office: in July 1443 he was appointed feodary of the duchy of Lancaster lands in Lincolnshire, probably as the nominee of the steward of the duchy in the county, John, Viscount Beaumont, with whom he was later to be closely associated.6 C219/15/2; R. Somerville, Duchy, i. 581.

Moigne’s administrative services were soon to be in demand in a more urgent capacity. The Lincolnshire shrievalty was a financially burdensome office which the Crown was finding increasingly difficult to fill. In November 1443 (Sir) John Pygot* was nominated but secured the cancellation of his appointment; and in the following March Robert Fauconberg refused to serve even on pain of imprisonment. The royal council thus turned to Moigne who, although from below the ranks of the leading gentry from which the office was generally filled, had a legal training to recommend him. The Crown’s acute need to fill the office enabled him to secure very favourable terms of appointment: not only was he to take a fee of £20 for holding a post which carried no wages, but he was to be charged at the Exchequer with only that part of the county farm which he could successfully collect. This was the first occurrence of an accounting device, the ‘declared account’ which was later to become common. The same problems presented themselves when Moigne’s successor was due to be appointed in the following November. Richard Waterton* and John Newport II* refused to act and Moigne had to be reappointed on 10 May 1445.7 R.M. Jeffs, ‘The Later Med. Sheriff’ (Oxf. Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1960), 61, 64-65, 265-6; E28/75, 10 May 1445.

Soon after his prolonged shrievalty ended in the following November, Moigne was appointed to the first of his many ad hoc commissions of local government, and in November 1448 he was added to the Lindsey quorum of the peace. Clearly he was becoming an important local figure. In April 1447, for example, he was one of the feoffees for the settlement made by Lionel, Lord Welles, on his marriage to Margaret, dowager-duchess of Somerset. But it is still surprising that he should have been named at the head of the electors at the county parliamentary election held on the following 19 Jan. 1449, an election from which the leading shire gentry were absent.8 CPR, 1441-6, p.465; C66/467, m. 32d; C140/3/32; C219/15/6. Despite his high level of involvement in county administration he remained associated with Grimsby. In 1450 he contributed 26d. to the expenses of the town’s MPs; in February 1452 he was one of two arbiters appointed to resolve a dispute between the burgesses and the local abbey of Wellow; and in June 1455 he was fined 4d. in the borough court for obstructing a sewer.9 N.E. Lincs. Archs. Grimsby bor. recs., assessments for parlty. expenses 1/612/1; ct. rolls 1/101, 33 Hen. VI; CCR, 1447-54, p. 328. This interest in the port may have been related to his own trading interests. In 1456 and 1459 he sued pleas of account against two merchants of Kingston-upon-Hull, who had been acting as his receivers of money, and he also brought several pleas of debt against merchants of Boston and Lincoln.10 CP40/753, rot. 210d; 765, rot. 185d; 777, rot. 96d; 780, rot. 170; 795, rot. 65d.

These trading interests explain Moigne’s appointment, in February 1459, as customs collector in Hull, but it may also have had other contexts. Hull’s corporation had retained him as legal counsel from about 1450, and, if he owed the nomination to a patron, there was an obvious candidate in Beaumont, then a powerful figure in the Lancastrian establishment. Earlier, in January 1453, he had shared with Beaumont and others a royal grant of the keeping of the impoverished Lincolnshire priory of Newstead-on-Ancholme, and on 5 Mar. 1453 he attested the county election at which the viscount’s servant, John Truthall*, most ill-qualified to represent the county, was returned.11 CPR, 1452-61, pp. 45-46, 459; Baker, i. 1136; C219/16/2. This association with Beaumont probably assured his loyalty to the cause of Henry VI during the civil war of 1459-61. This is implied by his appointed to the Lancastrian commission of array of December 1459 and his replacement as customs collector in the following July, shortly after the Yorkist victory at the battle of Northampton (where Beaumont was killed), by the Yorkist Thomas Blount*. It is not surprising that he should have been omitted from the first peace commission of the new reign.12 CPR, 1452-61, pp. 560, 590; 1461-7, 567.

Nevertheless, although initially distrusted by the new regime, as an experienced administrator Moigne quickly recovered his place in local affairs, being restored to the quorum of the peace in February 1463.13 C66/499, m. 26d. His private practice also seems to have expanded, at least so far as it is reflected in the surviving records During the financial year, Michaelmas 1463-4, for example, he was employed as a lawyer by the corporation of Nottingham, being paid 8s. 11d. for his expenses in spending two days in the town and a further two marks ‘for his rewarde’.14 Nottingham Recs. ed. Stevenson, ii. 375-6. More importantly he may also have found a place among the legal counsel of the Lincolnshire knight, Sir Thomas Burgh†, master of the horse to the new King. In August 1466 Burgh nominated him to arbitrate a minor Grimsby dispute, and on the following 26 Apr. he appears third on the list of attestors to the county election at which Burgh was returned. His removal from the Lindsey bench during the Readeption is also consistent with an association with Burgh, and it is clear that he had left his Lancastrian connexions behind.15 HMC 14th Rep. VIII, 267; C219/17/1; CPR, 1467-77, pp. 620-1.

On Edward IV’s restoration Moigne’s career resumed its established course. The last 15 years of his life were uneventful. He attested the county election of 21 Sept. 1472, but this was the last occasion he appeared in that role, and although he continued to be appointed to administrative commissions it was with diminished frequency. His last such appointment, in December 1484, probably occurred only shortly before his death. In January 1486 his son John took his placed on the Lindsey bench, almost certainly because the MP was no longer alive.16 C219/17/2; CPR, 1476-85, p. 491; 1485-94, p. 493.

Not surprisingly, Moigne, as a successful lawyer, was active in the purchase of land. For example, in 1460 he sued a widow from whom he had purchased a Lindsey manor called `Dawemperemaner’ in North Kelsey, some miles inland from Grimsby, for failing to convey seisin to him His most important acquisition was also from a widow: at an unknown date Joan Somercotes settled a manor at North Willingham near Market Rasen, valued at £10 p.a., upon him and his second wife, Joan Sheffeld, in tail-male with remainder to his right heirs. Interestingly, this manor was held of the dean and chapter of Lincoln cathedral, by whom, from the late 1440s, he had been retained as legal counsel, and it may be that the purchase was made through this connexion. He further extended his estates by lease: by Hilary Term 1466 he had taken a 12-year lease of a small property in Snarford from the prior of Elsham.17 CP40/796, rot. 234; 814, rot. 199d; N.L. Ramsay, ‘The English Legal Profession’ (Cambridge Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1985), app. 9, p. xcv;

Moigne’s career, although by no means remarkable, was successful enough to advance significantly the fortunes of his family. At least two of his sons followed him into the legal profession. His eldest son, Henry (d.1503), was of the Inner Temple, and his son, John, MP for Grimsby in 1489, was of Thavies Inn. Less happily, his grandson or great-grandson, another Thomas†, who was also a lawyer and rose to be recorder of Lincoln, was executed and attainted for his role in the Lincolnshire rising of 1536.18 Baker, i. 1136; The Commons 1509-58, ii. 610.