MUNDY, Thomas

Few facts about Thomas Mundy beyond his two successive returns for the Somerset cathedral city of Wells have been discovered. He was admitted to the freedom of Wells in March 1448, with Henry Bailly and John Sadeler alias Davy* standing surety.1 Som. Archs., Wells recs., convocation act bk. 1378-1450, p. 322. The background to his admission is obscure, as he never came to play any part in city life. Equally, it was not for another ten months that he was chosen to represent Wells in the Commons, but it may nevertheless have been in preparation for his election that he was enfranchised, for he was returned alongside another relative newcomer, Peter Shetford*. The impression that Mundy had personal reasons for wishing to sit in the Commons (and that the citizens were short of willing candidates) is supported by his immediate re-election in October 1449, on that occasion being accompanied to Westminster by the bishop of Bath and Wells’s bailiff, William Edmund*.2 Ibid. 324, 325.

While Mundy was clearly an outsider to Wells, who played no further part in city life, his origins are more difficult to establish. It is possible that he came from Wiltshire and was a son or other kinsman of John Mundy* who represented Wilton in the Commons in 1437, but no evidence to substantiate such an identification has been found. Alternatively, he may have originated from Uxbridge in Middlesex and was the ‘gentleman’ of that name who attested the Middlesex elections to the Parliaments of 1423, 1425, 1429 and 1435, served as a tax collector in that county in 1442, and six years later obtained royal licence for the foundation of a fraternity dedicated to Our Lady and St. Margaret the virgins in the chapel of St. Margaret at Uxbridge.3 C219/13/2, 3; 14/1, 5; CFR, xvii. 221; CPR, 1446-52, p. 186. A third Thomas Mondy attested the Glos. elections of 1472: C219/17/2.