WINSLOW, Thomas II

The family background of this Thomas Winslow is obscure. After he had established himself as a prosperous draper in London he made his home in Essex, so it is tempting to speculate that the choice of this county reflects a wish to return to his roots. He may, therefore, have been related to William Winslow (1388-1415),7 William was the s. of John Winslow, probably the London pepperer (fl.1399) and Mary (d.1406), da. and h. of William Croucheman. Besides land in Hempstead, his mother (whose 2nd husband was Thomas Holgill), had inherited land in Finchingfield and Great Sampford, Essex. William died at Harfleur in 1415, leaving an only da. Joan (b.1414), who herself died still a minor in 1426. Joan’s heir was a kinsman on her grandmother’s side, Walter Huntingdon: CIPM, xix. 673, 898, 742; xxi. 238; xxii. 40, 41, 688; CPR, 1416-22, p. 419; CFR, xv. 147. who acquired through his mother lands in Hempstead in Essex, and also held the manors of Triplowe and Assheton in Cambridgeshire.8 Miscellanea Genealogica et Heraldica, ser. 5, vi. 118, 120-1, 138-9; C1/7/48, 49. Yet no evidence has been found to connect the two men, and the fact that the MP’s brother, Richard, became both a citizen of Lincoln and an ‘esquire’ with landed holdings in Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire, may point to stronger family links with that part of the country.9 CCR, 1454-61, p. 178.

Thomas followed the lead of another putative kinsman, John Winslow (d.c.1426), by learning the drapers’ craft.10 Although he was not mentioned in the will John made in 1423: Miscellanea Genealogica et Heraldica, ser. 5, vi. 118-19; P. Boyd, Roll of Drapers’ Co. 204. His apprenticeship ended before May 1438; within three years he had begun to train apprentices himself, and like other members of the Drapers’ Company he took up residence in the parish of St. Martin Orgar, in Candlewick Street ward, an important centre for their trade.11 CCR, 1435-41, p. 180; Johnson, i. 346. Unusually, at the same time as he was building up his commercial interests, Winslow did business at the Exchequer on behalf of creditors of the Crown. From 1441 he regularly collected fresh assignments there for Sir John Sutton, Sir Henry Percy, Sir John Melton and the duke of York, after they had been unable to realize the value of tallies previously allotted to them.12 E403/757, m. 10; 762, m. 9; 765, mm. 3, 11. In turn, this led to employment by Robert Rolleston, the under treasurer to Lord Sudeley, who engaged him to help prepare Exchequer documents for the information of the King and Lords during the sessions of the Parliament held at Westminster from February 1445 to April 1446. He received a reward of 20s. for his labour in the following July.13 E403/762, m. 9. Although there is no sign that Winslow continued to work at the Exchequer after the end of that year, the experience he had gained of royal administration led to his appointment as a customs official in London in March 1450.14 E403/781, m. 6; 786, m. 8; 796, m. 1. While so employed, in January 1451 he made the Crown a loan of £20.15 E403/786, mm. 9, 10. The post brought with it serious aggravations: he and his fellow collector Richard Joynour* were sued in the court of the Exchequer by Roger, Lord Camoys, for an alleged debt of 200 marks.16 CCR, 1447-54, p. 324. It was probably to secure financial indemnity in this and other respects that he took out a royal pardon on 20 June 1452, shortly after his term of office ended.17 C67/40, m. 27.

In his youth Winslow had become known to William Cromer† (d.1434), the wealthy London draper, and formed a friendship with his son and heir, another William Cromer*, who sat as a knight of the shire for Kent in 1447 and 1449. Like his powerful father-in-law James Fiennes*, Lord Saye and Sele, the treasurer of England, Cromer was put to death by the followers of the rebel Jack Cade early in July 1450. The ecclesiastical authorities appointed Winslow along with William Fiennes, the new Lord Saye, as administrators of his estate, and as a consequence Winslow became engaged in prolonged lawsuits with Cromer’s stepbrother Robert Poynings*. In the summer of 1451 Poynings accused Winslow of the theft of household goods worth £40 from Tunstall in Kent, but Winslow contended that these were Cromer’s goods, which he had in his keeping by the archbishop of Canterbury’s commission,18 CP40/762, rot. 334. and going on the offensive he joined Lord Saye in bringing their own suit against Poynings in Trinity term 1452. They alleged that on 30 June 1450 (that is, before Cromer’s death), one of Poynings’s servants had broken into a house in the parish of St. Martin Orgar and stolen silver bowls, candlesticks, spoons and other property, all belonging to Cromer and valued at 100 marks. The servant maintained that these valuables had been bequeathed to Poynings by his late father, Robert, Lord Poynings, and that Cromer had stolen them from him; but Winslow and Saye contended that Lord Poynings had presented them to his wife, with the intention that her son Cromer should inherit them after her death.19 KB27/765, rots. 78d, 83; R.M. Jeffs, ‘The Poynings-Percy Dispute’, Bull. IHR, xxxiv. 152-3. Another version of the story was given in the ct. of c.p.: that Winslow had purchased the goods from Cromer on 6 May, but Poynings had stolen them from his house on 28 June: CP40/767, rot. 426. A further plea prosecuted by Winslow in Easter term 1454 provided different details. In these proceedings it was claimed that Poynings himself had broken into Winslow’s house in St. Martin Orgar on 5 July 1450 (that is, after Cromer’s death), and taken these same items, now valued at £100, which Winslow held as administrator of Cromer’s estate.20 CP40/773, rot. 124. At the time of this last suit Poynings was in desperate straits and facing many charges of felony and treason; in attacking him, Winslow joined forces with many other plaintiffs. Nor were the legal battles against Poynings the only ones facing Winslow and Saye in their attempts to recover Cromer’s possessions and livestock seized from his property in Kent in the troubled summer of 1450.21 KB146/6/31/1, 2; 32/2. Winslow also had to deal with the expectations of Cromer’s nephew, William Thomas, and the latter’s da. Elizabeth: C1/19/246; 31/388; C4/5/3, 7.

Winslow was asked to take on positions of trust for others besides the late William Cromer. In May 1451 his brother Richard enfeoffed him of his lands in Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire, naming him in the distinguished company of Lords Cromwell and Abergavenny,22 CCR, 1454-61, p. 178. and on other occasions his fellow members of the Drapers Company entrusted him with their goods and chattels.23 CCR, 1447-54, pp. 404, 440. A full picture of his increasing participation in overseas trade cannot now be pieced together, although it is known that he and William, Lord Saye, were among the owners of a caravel, which, after being requisitioned by the Crown, allegedly seized two ships from Dordrecht in 1454, in breach of treaties with foreign powers.24 C1/17/102. Winslow is not recorded as using ports along the Channel for commercial purposes, and it is unlikely that in this way he came to be known to the burgesses of Lyme Regis, the impoverished borough which returned him to the Parliament of 1455. He was never resident there or elsewhere in Dorset, and must have been largely ignorant of local concerns. How his return was arranged cannot now be discovered, but the key may lie in the politics of the capital. London always remained the focus of his interests, and in the year before his election he had assumed a more active role in the affairs of the City. In September 1454 he had been elected as one of the civic auditors, and thus was occupying the post not only when the Parliament opened in July 1455 but also (as he was re-elected auditor that September), when Parliament met for its second and third sessions.25 Cal. P. and M. London, 1437-57, p. 145; London Letter Bk. K, 370. It may not be going too far to suggest that Winslow was seen as a fifth representative for London in the Commons.

Winslow took out another pardon on 1 Feb. 1458, specifically as a draper of London, administrator of the goods of William Cromer, and former customs’ collector.26 C67/42, m. 11. This was designed to protect himself from prosecution for irregularities in his commercial dealings. In Michaelmas term 1459 he was attached to answer at the Exchequer for the sum of £252 8s., the value of 61 lengths of cloth he had allegedly sold to foreign merchants 14 years earlier in breach of the statutes. When he came before the barons to make answer in the following term he pleaded his pardon, which applied to all offences committed before 7 Dec. 1457, and obtained a writ to Exchequer officials not to trouble him further. Even so, it was not until Easter 1461, and with a different King on the throne, that the slate was finally wiped clean.27 E159/236, recorda Mich. rot. 19. Winslow encountered other difficulties in the civil war years. In a suit he brought in Chancery he claimed that on 22 June 1459 he had sold the Florentine merchant Gherardo Caniziani 72 woollen cloths of diverse colours in return for two gold brooches set with a ruby and diamonds, worth £100 each, a bishop’s mitre garnished with precious stones worth another £100, 100 rings set with rubies worth a further £100, and £130 6s. 8d. in ready money. The sale had been arranged in Lombardy, with Winslow putting his trust in a broker, Jacopo Falleron, that the values of the items of jewelry were as agreed. When the contract was translated into English, however, he could discover no mention of the value of either of the brooches. Caniziani, taking advantage of this, had handed over to him a brooch of ‘symple value’ without a ruby, in the knowledge that Winslow had no redress at common law.28 C1/29/467-8.

Meanwhile, Winslow had become an important member of the corporation of London. In June 1460 he was among the group of citizens sent by the mayor and aldermen to persuade the Yorkist earls marching through Kent to keep their army out of the city, and in the following October he served on the committee appointed by the common council to decide how best to promote the interests of the City in the Parliament summoned after the earls’ victory at Northampton.29 Corp. London RO, jnl. 6, ff. 238, 272. Although he himself was not returned on that occasion, he was elected as one of London’s four representatives in the second Parliament of Edward IV’s reign, summoned to meet at Westminster on 29 Apr. 1463.30 London Letter Bk. L, 21. On 2 July, shortly after the end of the first session, he received from Thomas Gille II* a recognizance for £20, promising that he would pay him the sum of £16 on appointed days. The background to this transaction lay in a bond in £28 Gille had entered at the staple at Westminster in June 1460, but had failed to honour; it probably had nothing to do with the business of the Parliament, which did not reassemble until January 1465.31 CCR, 1461-7, p. 191; C241/246/69. Shortly before the Commons met again Winslow was called upon to attest deeds of John Middleton*, acting as a feoffee for the late (Sir) William Estfield*, the City’s benefactor, and at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in the following May Winslow waited on the mayor as chief butler of England.32 CCR, 1401-7, p. 257; jnl. 7, f. 98.

During the 1450s and 1460s the prosperous Winslow sought to establish himself as a landowner beyond the city walls, looking not only to the nearby counties of Essex, Middlesex and Hertfordshire, but also further away to Sussex. In 1458 he began the process of purchasing the manor of Brundish in Moreton, Essex, with 1,000 acres of marshland in Fobbing and Vaunge, and having successfully defeated the claim of Thomas Brocket* (d.1477) to hold it in right of his wife, he died in possession of the manor.33 CP40/789, rot. 486; C1/51/12-15; 54/379. Together with the fishmonger William Chattok, in May 1465 he conveyed a newly-built house and another messuage adjacent to it in Chelsea to Master Robert Kirkham, the keeper of the rolls, and with Sir Henry Waver, shortly to be master of the Drapers’ Company, he confirmed Kirkham in a lease for 20 years of land nearby.34 CCR, 1461-7, pp. 310, 329. Winslow’s attempts to gain for his daughter Agnes the manor of Sonwell in Ashwell, Hertfordshire, proved more problematic. In 1456 he had made an agreement with Alexander Marshall, the son and heir of the deceased London grocer Robert Marshall, for Agnes to marry Alexander’s son. This led to a vitriolic dispute with Robert Marshall’s feoffees, the alderman John Lambard and another grocer, John Bassenthwait, which came before the court of Chancery ten years later. The feoffees held that Robert had instructed them to pass the property on to Alexander only if he was of good governance, but as he ‘yeveth him to riot and to vices’, he had forfeited his right to inherit or freedom to make any arrangements with Winslow; furthermore, the latter had removed the contents of the manor-house, worth £40, and taken the profits of £20 p.a., which by then amounted to over £190. Winslow replied that he had paid £80 to Alexander and £18 to the abbot of Westminster (to whom Alexander owed rent), as well as making other payments of £4, but before the marriage had been formalized Agnes and her sister Katherine had both died, and the contract had been cancelled. Alexander had agreed that Winslow should hold the property until he had been recompensed for the sums he had expended, but even so, owing to the costs of repairs to the manor-house and Lambard’s hindrance he had only received a small part of his money back. Far from yielding £20 p.a. the most the manor might raise was £4 a year, and its contents consisted of such items as ‘ragges of old arras’, an ‘olde cawdren’ and two empty chests, which were worth no more than £3. In November 1466 Lambard entered recognizances to him in £100 conditional that he would abide the award of a group of distinguished lawyers.35 CCR, 1461-7, p. 401; C1/33/92-94; C4/3/52. Winslow eventually relinquished possession of the property to Lambard, but the alderman was later forced by the civic authorities to give up the Marshall holdings to Alexander’s daughter.36 Cal. P. and M. London, 1458-82, pp. 57-64.

Winslow also ran into trouble through his dealings with the prominent lawyer Thomas Hoo II*, whose complex and devious machinations caused frustration and financial loss to many. In Winslow’s case his dispute with Hoo arose over the sale of the Sussex manor of Moorhall in Ninfield, which had come into his possession by grant of William, Lord Saye. To purchase the manor from Winslow, in 1459 Hoo and his friend Nicholas Hussey sealed bonds for the payment of £400, the lawyer alone following this in December 1464 with two more obligations, each in £100. Yet even by the time of the Readeption Parliament of 1470-1, Hoo had still failed to honour his commitment; he was then bound over to pay Winslow £100 within six months of the dissolution. Winslow brought a bill in Chancery in the following autumn, claiming that Hoo had inveigled his way out of paying anything at all for the manor. He said that ‘ymagenyng and entendyng fraudelently to disceyve him’, the lawyer had persuaded him to show his evidences, and having done a valuation of the manor sued an assize against him at which Hoo obtained judgement to recover Moorhall with damages of £37. Hoo responded that, on the contrary, Winslow knew full well that he had ‘come bot lightly and by a faynt title’ to the manor, that the estate he had in it was ‘of non effect in the lawe’, and that he had intended to defraud Hoo by selling him a manor to which his title was not sound. Whatever the truth of the matter, Winslow gave up his vain pursuit of Hoo in the King’s bench in 1472, and Hoo contrived to retain the property.37 CCR, 1454-61, p. 376; 1468-76, nos. 650, 781; SC11/658; C1/40/20; C4/6/51; C253/44/344; VCH Suss. ix. 248; C241/249/52, 58; KB27/844, rot. 90. Winslow’s suits in 1463 against Hoo’s cousin Thomas Etchingham and half-brother John Lewknor*, for £180 still owing on two bonds totalling £800 16s. 4d. they had entered six years earlier, were intricately linked to this quarrel: CP40/810, rots. 158-9. Yet another dispute concerned the manor of Astlyns or Ashlyns in Essex, which Winslow purchased from Sir Richard de Vere, for this was seized by Thomas Bodulgate*, in a quarrel arising after Bodulgate’s marriage to de Vere’s stepdaughter.38 C1/38/113; R. Coll. of Physicians, London, LEGAC/Ashlyns deeds 7, 10-13, 16, 17.

Winslow died on 17 May 1481. His heirs were his two surviving daughters, Margaret, wife of William Nynge, and Elizabeth, wife of William Haukyns, aged 32 and 31 respectively.39 C140/79/16. He was probably buried in the small church of St. Martin Orgar, the place of burial of his wife, Alice.40 Stow, i. 223.