SANDYS, Thomas

Owing to the loss of Sandwich’s early fifteenth-century records, Sandys is an extremely obscure figure and it is impossible to reconstruct his career or, indeed, to identify him with absolute certainty. It is nevertheless likely that he was the Thomas Sandys who obtained a lease of a plot of land in the town’s fish market in December 1433, and the plaintiff of that name who was involved in pleadings at Westminster in Easter term 1434. If the litigant, he possessed holdings at Woodnesborough, immediately to the west of Sandwich. The suit was over arrears of rent for a messuage, dovecot and lands in that parish which the plaintiff had leased to the defendant for ten years, at four marks p.a., in 1427.1 E. Kent Archs., Sandwich recs., ‘Old Black Bk.’, SA/Ac 1, f. 14v; CP40/693, rot. 343d. The lack of external interference in parlty. elections at Sandwich, and the borough’s record of returning townsmen rather than outsiders to the Commons in this period, makes it unlikely that the MP was the Thomas Sandys ‘esquire’ who witnessed the will that Sir Richard Poynings* made in the town prior to embarking for France in July 1428. This Thomas was perhaps a member of the Hants family of that name: PCC 14 Luffenham (PROB11/3, f. 110v); The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 301-4.