SAGE, Thomas I

Sage’s parentage has not been established, but it is probable that he was a kinsman of Edward Sage, who served as portreeve of the duchy of Cornwall borough of Grampound in 1425-6.4 Edward was probably the son of an older Thomas Sage and his wife Joan, together with whom he was granted licence to hear divine service in the chapel of St. Mary at Grampound: SC6/820/12, rot. 4d; Reg. Lacy, i (Canterbury and York Soc. lx), 35. The MP must be distinguished from the lawless contemporary yeoman Thomas Philip Sage alias Savage of St. Austell, a servant of Henry Bodrugan in the mid 1450s: KB9/276/29; 277/1-5, 25-26; KB27/778, rex rot. 28; CP40/784, rot. 6; C67/41, m. 18; Cornw. RO, Edgcombe mss, ME1836. He evidently trained as a lawyer, and from the mid 1440s acted as a feoffee, arbiter and executor both in his native county and in the city of London, and served men from Cornwall in the Westminster law courts. In the late 1450s he was appointed to the quorum of the Cornish bench.5 Corp. London RO, hr 181/4, 5; 188/6; CFR, xix. 27; C140/29/38; CP40/750, rot. 103d; 774, rot. 208d. Professional activities aside, little is known of Sage’s relations with his immediate neighbours. In the spring of 1449 he was embroiled in a dispute over a trespass with the local gentleman Otto Treaghen, but he does not otherwise appear to have been a litigious man.6 KB27/751, rot. 8d.

The exact extent of Sage’s landed holdings, which in 1451 were thought to be worth at least £5 p.a., has not been established, but they included property in Grampound held from the Trevelyans, in ‘Tregenseth’, ‘Tregensowyn’ and Sancreed, held from Richard Tredinney†, and probably also in St. Austell.7 E179/87/92; Trevelyan Pprs. i (Cam. Soc. lxvii), 92; Cornw. RO, Croft Andrew mss, CA/B46/5; Coode and French mss, CF2/215/62/1-2. The precise date at which he succeeded to these holdings is uncertain, but it was probably not long before 1443, when he is first known to have entered public life. It was about that time that Sage forged a bond with the greatest of the Cornish gentry, the young John Arundell of Lanherne, who had recently come into his inheritance. In the autumn of 1443, when Arundell assumed the Cornish shrievalty, he appointed Sage his under sheriff. The term appears to have been largely uneventful, punctuated by the accusations of corruption customarily levelled at the holders of the office.8 CP40/732, rot. 114. Before long, Sage was among the most trusted members of Arundell’s circle, serving him as a feoffee of his estates, standing surety for him at the Exchequer, regularly attesting his deeds, and in 1456 acting for him as an arbiter in a dispute with Henry Bodrugan† over lands in Truro Vean.9 CFR, xix. 27; C140/29/38; CP40/786, rots. 118, 119, 145; Cornw. RO, Arundell mss, AR1/176, 177, 266, 924, AR3/315, AR4/1259, AR17/78, AR19/4-6, 17/1, AR20/21-26. Furthermore, the connexion with Arundell acquired wider significance as Arundell was drawn into the circle of the King’s leading minister, William de la Pole, earl of Suffolk. Increasingly, members of the Arundell affinity were selected to hold office under the duchy of Cornwall, which was pivotal to local administration in the far south-west.10 Arundell mss, AR19/4-6, 17/1. While Sage did not immediately receive such preferment, his return to Parliament for the duchy borough of Helston in February 1449 may indicate the degree to which he was trusted by the ruling faction, among whose ranks he had further links through his tenure of property from the royal household esquire John Trevelyan*, who that year presided over the Cornish parliamentary elections in his capacity as sheriff of the county.11 Trevelyan Pprs. i. 92.

The pattern of Sage’s subsequent public career suggests how closely he was identified with the court party: even after Suffolk’s disgrace and murder in 1450 he continued to receive periodic appointments to ad hoc commissions in his locality, but he was excluded from such tasks during the periods of the duke of York’s two protectorates. Naturally enough, he came to the fore in the months of the court’s ascendancy after the Yorkist rout at Ludford Bridge in the autumn of 1459. In December of that year he was appointed a commissioner of array in his county, and the following March he was ordered to identify and seize the goods of the duke of York and his south-western supporters who had been attainted by the Coventry Parliament. Simultaneously, he was also given judicial responsibilities to try and punish any who persisted in their allegiance to the Yorkist cause or who had received and harboured such insurgents. The administration set up by the victorious Yorkist lords after the battle of Northampton naturally excluded Sage from similar appointments, but it is a mark of his standing as a professional that he was permitted to remain on the county bench for a few more months. It is possible that when his name was omitted from the first commission of the peace of Edward IV’s reign, he was in fact dead: certainly, he had died by the autumn of 1466, by which time his affairs were being attended to by his executors.12 CP40/821, rot. 492d; 833, rot. 278d. It was a yr. namesake who attested the Cornish elections to the Parl. of 1478: C219/17/3.