ASHBURY, Hugh (d.1441), of Merrow and Guildford, Surr.

Although Ashbury’s origins are unknown, a bequest in his will to the parish church of All Saints in Oxford may suggest that he came from that town or was educated there. The way he entered the service of John Mowbray, third duke of Norfolk, remains similarly obscure. It was to this duke or his father as Earl Marshal that Ashbury owed his place as clerk-marshal of the marshalsea of the royal household, an office ascribed to him in a petition to the chancellor. In that petition he was accused of wrongful vexation in an action for debt, as well as detinue of a bond for £40, and on another occasion he was alleged to have unjustly imprisoned a baker from Guildford. C1/68/138; 1510/22. Employment by Mowbray accounts for Ashbury’s returns to two Parliaments for Reigate, where the duke had inherited property.

The allegations expressed in the chancery petitions, if true, are an indication of defects in Ashbury’s character. More telling is the evidence of his attempts to better himself by forgery and theft. At the time of his first Parliament in 1433 he was embroiled in a dispute over the estate of his wife’s mother, Alice, the widow of the former shire-knight, John Clipsham. Alice had recently died, and Ashbury had seized her possessions. On 31 Dec., ten days after the dissolution of the Parliament, he was required to enter bonds in Chancery in £100 that the following month he would bring to the court all the charters, evidences and muniments he had in his keeping concerning lands in Guildford and elsewhere in Surrey once belonging to Clipsham (his wife’s stepfather), which ought now to fall to the latter’s daughter and heiress Agnes, the wife of John Founteyns*; and also in £500 that he would keep safe certain goods, jewels and household utensils which Clipsham had bequeathed to his widow for her lifetime. He was enjoined not to sell or conceal these until it had been ascertained whether they rightly pertained to him or to Clipsham’s executors. CCR, 1429-35, pp. 299, 302. The heiress Agnes Founteyns herself died a few months later, but her father’s executors continued to pursue the matter of Clipsham’s property, and in their petition to Chancery the nature of Ashbury’s alleged deception is revealed. It transpired that he had used his knowledge of his wife’s family to pose as Clipsham in order to forge a will ‘be sotell ymagynacion’, by which he had been able to take possession of the lands and goods. C1/9/67.

No evidence has been found to show that Ashbury held property in either of the boroughs he represented. When, in May 1434, he was listed as one of the gentry of Surrey required to take the generally-administered oath against law-breakers, he was resident at Merrow, near Guildford; CPR, 1429-36, p. 381. and early in the following year he was associated with John Janyn* (a fellow Member of the Commons of 1433 and 1435) in transactions regarding a messuage and land in Guildford itself. Later, in 1439, he and his wife, Joan, quitclaimed other holdings there to one Stephen Mugge. CP25(1)/232/71/28, 29; 72/20. Despite the relative paucity of information about him, he would seem to have become a ‘gentleman’ of some standing in the county. Personal contacts may have helped him secure his third election to Parliament. The Surrey returns to the Parliament of 1437, in which Ashbury was to represent Bletchingley, were made by the sheriff John Feriby*, who (as a shire-knight) had sat with him in the Commons of 1433, but also probably knew him through their offices in the King’s household, although Feriby, as controller of the Household, held a much more exalted position.

The devious side to Ashbury’s character suggested by the earlier bills against him may perhaps be glimpsed again in December 1439 when he, William Redstone* and William Bridges II* were required to appear in Chancery, each of them after undertaking under pain of £100 not to harm Thomas Boston and his wife. CCR, 1435-41, p. 351. The details of this particular dispute are not known, but it is very likely that Ashbury’s propensity for trouble-making was a factor in the events of the evening of Monday 21 Aug. 1441 in the Hertfordshire town of St. Albans, when John Hervy, a servant of John Ash I*, deputy in the royal household to the steward, William de la Pole, earl of Suffolk, stabbed him with a dagger. Ashbury died in the early hours of the following Saturday morning, whereupon Hervy fled the country. The identity of the assailant supports the conjecture that the intense rivalry between Ashbury’s lord the duke of Norfolk and the earl of Suffolk had led to the MP’s death at the hands of one of Suffolk’s men. CPR, 1441-6, p. 273.

As he lay dying Ashbury made a will, in which he left ‘uno doctori vocato Gaskyn’ a bequest of 6s. 8d., perhaps for attempting to save his life. He requested burial in the conventual church of St. Albans abbey, leaving each of the monks 4d. and the custodian of the chapel of St. Andrew 3s. 4d. His executors were instructed to pay 20 marks to a chaplain to pray for him over a period of five years in St. Nicholas’ chapel in All Saints’ church in the university of Oxford. After his debts had been settled the residue of his goods was left along with his lands and tenements to his widow, Joan, following whose death the lands were to be sold by William Thorneholme and his wife Isabel for the benefit of the testator’s soul. The Thorneholmes and John Ashbury, Hugh’s brother, were named as executors. Herts. Archs., archdeaconry ct. St. Albans, reg. 1415-70, 1 AR 35 (probate 23 Sept.). Perhaps Isabel was the MP’s sister. Her husband Thorneholme was a close colleague of Ashbury’s in the marshalsea of the Household, for he was in receipt of an annuity of £20 from the duke of Norfolk’s estate at Bosham in Suffolk, which he was destined to share with Henry Langton*, as their fee as joint holders of the offices of clerk-marshal and serjeant-marshal. Langton’s appointment was made shortly before March 1442, so it looks as if he was Ashbury’s successor at the marshalsea, sharing the perquisites of office with Thorneholme. L.E. Moye, ‘Estates and finances of the Mowbray Fam.’ (Duke Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1985), 438 (as ‘Thornham’); CCR, 1441-7, p. 64; C1/45/206. Thornholme died bef. July 1447: CPR, 1446-52, p. 62.