BREWES, Thomas (c.1406-82), of Fressingfield, Suff. and Topcroft, Norf.

Unlike many of his contemporaries among the gentry of East Anglia, Thomas was from an old knightly family that had held property in the region since the thirteenth century. Blomefield, vi. 242; W.A. Copinger, Suff. Manors, iii. 50-51. According to one authority, he was descended from the Brewes lords of Bramber and Gower: CP, ii. 302. Still a few years short of his majority when his father died, it is possible that he became a ward of the Crown during the latter stages of his minority. There is no evidence for any arrangements that Sir Robert Brewes, who had died intestate, had made for his wife, Ela, but her rights of dower make it unlikely that their son came fully into his own before her death in 1456. Sir Robert died possessed of sizeable estates, consisting of seven or more manors and other lands in east Suffolk, Norfolk and Lincolnshire. There is no evidence that Ela had brought any properties to the Brewes family, or that their son gained in landed terms from his first marriage to Elizabeth Calthorpe, whose brother, William, succeeded to the Calthorpe estate. Nor did Thomas gain from his connexion with the Shardelowes, the family of his paternal grandmother. Although an inquisition post mortem held in 1432 after the death of the childless Sir John Shardelowe found that he was the knight’s heir, at least part of the Shardelowe estate (consisting of properties in west Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, Norfolk and Essex) remained in the hands of Sir John’s long-lived mother until her death in 1457. Blomefield, viii. 268; CIPM, xxiv. 13; CPR, 1452-61, pp. 206-7; Procs. Suff. Inst. Archaeology, xxxiv. 112. If any Shardelowe lands did pass to Thomas, they were no longer in his possession when he himself died. C140/85/50.

Brewes must have spent at least some of his early adult life in Norfolk, where he first attested an election to Parliament, although the family’s principal residence was at Fressingfield in Suffolk, the county that he himself represented in a parliamentary career spanning more than three decades. A statute passed in the second of these Parliaments, that of 1445, laid down that MPs who sat as knights of the shire should be ‘notable Knyghtes of the same Shires for the which they shall so be chosen; other ellys such notable Squiers, Gentilmen of birth, of the same Shires as be able to be Knyghtes’. PROME, xi. 499-501. Brewes easily fulfilled these criteria, and usually someone of his rank possessed the means to support the costs of obtaining a seat in the Commons. Such costs could be considerable. On 20 Apr. 1467, the day of his election to his third Parliament, he and his fellow MP, (Sir) John Howard*, spent over £40 entertaining the electors of Suffolk at Ipswich, where the county’s elections were held. Among their purchases were eight oxen, 24 calves, 24 sheep, 20 lambs, 30 pigs, 32 gallons of milk, 800 eggs, 36 barrels of beer and a large quantity of wine. They also bought or hired numerous pots, cups and other items of tableware and employed four cooks (assisted by 12 adult helpers, six boys and four washers-up) to prepare the feast. Howard Household Bks. ed. Crawford, i. 398-400.

Brewes had already begun his public career when first elected an MP, since he was then already escheator in Norfolk and Suffolk. While escheator he discovered that one of his own tenants, John Baker of Harleston, Norfolk, was a ‘hill-digger’ or treasure hunter, who had found a hoard of treasure worth £100 and concealed it from the King. (Some 40 years later Baker’s executors accused him in Chancery of having extorted a bond from their testator, a security he had later used against them at common law.) C1/66/305. Before the end of the 1430s Brewes served the first of his two terms as sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk, immediately after which he was the subject of several suits in the Exchequer alleging malpractice on his part (mainly in the handling of writs directed to him). E13/141, rots. 20d, 24, 32, 42d, 57, 63d, 64d. Assuming they were justified, these complaints were insufficient to prevent his reappointment to the shrievalty in November 1442, three months after he had joined the commission of the peace in Suffolk for the first time. It is unclear if he stepped down from the bench while serving his term as sheriff: the govt. did not automatically omit sheriffs from comms. of the peace until the early 16th cent.: C. Arnold, ‘Comm. of the Peace for W. Riding’, in Property and Politics ed. Pollard, 117. Although never appointed to the bench in Norfolk, he helped early in the following year to hunt down those who had participated in a serious rising at Norwich and received a letter of thanks from the King’s council for his efforts. PPC, v. 235; R.L. Storey, End of House of Lancaster, 217, 222.

Like many gentry in East Anglia, Brewes was associated with William de la Pole, earl (later duke) of Suffolk. He acted as a feoffee for de la Pole, who became the King’s chief minister and led the ‘Lancastrian connexion’ in the region, a role once filled by Thomas Beaufort, earl of Dorset, under whom Sir Robert Brewes had served on the Agincourt campaign. CPR, 1429-36, p. 197; 1441-6, p. 427; 1452-6, p. 149; CCR, 1435-41, p. 62; CP25(1)/170/190/210, 191/266, 224/118/24; C1/16/166; H.R. Castor, ‘Duchy of Lancaster’ (Cambridge Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1994), 76-77, 99, 105, 113; E101/69/495. In 1450, shortly after Suffolk’s career ended in impeachment, exile and death, Brewes and others were commissioned to help the de la Pole receiver-general, Andrew Grygges*, levy a loan of 3,500 marks from his widowed duchess, Alice de la Pole. She had promised this sum to the King to enable him to fund the passage of an army to France, probably under duress given that she was tried for treason not long afterwards. Letters and Pprs. Illust. Wars of English ed. Stevenson, ii (2), 770. Brewes’s links with the duchess (subsequently acquitted) make it unlikely that he welcomed such a commission. During the mid 1450s ‘young Brewes’ (his eldest son, William) was riding out with her retainer, (Sir) Philip Wentworth*, and in August 1454 he himself was among the gentry who gathered at Eye to advise her in her dispute with Thomas Cornwallis*. Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 103-4, 167; Egerton Roll 8779. Nearly 26 years later, he was a feoffee for her son, John de la Pole, duke of Suffolk. CAD, ii. A3355. HP Biogs. 109, claims that Brewes was one of John de la Pole’s counsellors.

Quickly following William de la Pole’s fall from power in 1450 was Cade’s rebellion. Although concentrated in south-eastern England, Norfolk was in a sufficiently restless state in its aftermath to worry the local authorities, and Brewes was among the gentry whom one East Anglian magnate, John de Vere, earl of Oxford, consulted about the ‘indisposicion’ of its people. Paston Letters, ii. 42-44. The rebellion and Suffolk’s removal from government marked the beginning of a decade of increasing political instability and conflict. There is no evidence that Brewes participated in any of the civil war battles of the later 1450s or Edward IV’s reign. He was placed on several anti-Yorkist commissions during the winter of 1459-60, but his career as an ad hoc commissioner and j.p. was not interrupted by the accession of Edward, who knighted him in May 1465, a few days before the coronation of the queen, Elizabeth Wydeville. He lost his place on the bench following the Readeption of Henry VI, but it is impossible to tell whether there were political reasons for his dismissal.

On at least one occasion in the late 1460s Brewes was called upon (perhaps in his capacity as a j.p.) to help resolve a dispute which had gone to arbitration, but he became caught up in a secondary quarrel over the arbitration process and was sued in Chancery as a result. The original dispute had involved Edmund Wynter II* of Ipswich and the Norwich merchant, Thomas Ellis†. Owing to its complexity, the arbiters, John Sulyard*, Richard Yaxley and Roger Aylmer, struggled to make an award. The parties therefore agreed to postpone the date of the award to 2 Feb. 1469, to accept James Hobart† as an additional arbiter and to replace Brewes, who had acted as an umpire, with William Harleston. According to a bill which Wynter had subsequently filed in Chancery, his opponent had failed to observe this agreement and Brewes had taken it upon himself to make an award, in which he ordered Wynter to pay Ellis some 50 marks and costs of 100s. An indenture drawn up at Topcroft on 29 Jan. 1469 shows that the MP had indeed made such an award, but how far this Chancery suit progressed or whether Wynter’s claims were justified is unknown. C1/44/241-2. Brewes was himself a defendant in Chancery a year or two later, when Henry Wode and his wife Anne sued him for breach of trust, in his capacity as a feoffee for the East Anglian esquire, John Lancaster (d.1469-70), son and successor of John Lancaster* (d.1424). C1/40/291.

The evidence of Brewes’s ad hoc commissions suggests that his active public career ended in the mid 1470s. Family affairs certainly came to the fore in his later years. For much of 1477 he negotiated with the Paston family about a possible match between Margery, one of his daughters by his second wife, Elizabeth Debenham, and John Paston†. The Paston correspondence shows that Margery loved John and was keen to marry him (he was less ardent, being at one stage ready to consider ‘Mestresse Barly’ as an alternative bride), but matters were delayed by some hard bargaining over her dowry and jointure. By the summer of 1477, the Pastons were prepared to settle the manor of Sparham on the couple, but were disappointed that Brewes had determined on giving away no more than £100 for his daughter’s marriage portion. The parties had nevertheless come to an agreement by the autumn (seemingly with the help of James Hobart), when the marriage took place, but the details of the settlement reached are unknown. Margery was pregnant before the end of the year and, at the beginning of 1478, her husband took her to stay with her elderly father. Paston Letters, i. 378, 499, 500-1, 606, 608-10, 612, 628, 662-3; ii. 413, 436. Brewes also found a husband for Margery’s sister Muriel before he died, marrying her to John Audley, the eldest son of the late Sir Humphrey Audley, a Lancastrian whom the victorious Yorkists executed immediately after the battle of Tewksbury in 1471. Presumably Brewes contracted the match with Audley’s half-brother, John Audley*, Lord Audley, who had petitioned the Crown in 1475 in order to recover six manors Sir Humphrey had forfeited in Suffolk and to obtain a grant of his nephew’s wardship. Crisp, viii. 59; SC8/29/1450; PROME, xiv. 264-5; CPR, 1467-77, pp. 483-4. In part, the match marked the resolution of a quarrel between Brewes and the late Sir Humphrey. During the later 1460s, they had engaged in a dispute over their respective manorial interests at Clopton, Suffolk, in the course which they had sued each other at Westminster, and in his will Brewes was to assign the reversion of his manor there to Muriel’s husband, then still a minor. CP40/827 rot. 403; 828, rots. 348, 354, 354d, 368, 368d; institutions bk. DN/REG7 bk. 12, ff. 242-3.

The will is dated 10 July 1479 although Brewes did not die until 17 June 1482, at the age of about 76. He was buried in Woodbridge priory, the religious house of which he was patron, ‘wher many and diverse of myn Auncestres ben sepultured’. At his death he was the lord of some 16 manors in Suffolk, Norfolk and Lincolnshire. These included four at Topcroft and Denton in south-east Norfolk, the reversion to which he had acquired, probably by purchase, from Robert Clifton (a cousin of Sir Robert Clifton*) and his wife in 1464. In the will Brewes awarded his own wife, Elizabeth, a life interest in the greater part of his estate, namely his manors at Akenham, Witnesham, Woodbridge, Hasketon and Clopton in Suffolk, and Redenhall, Topcroft, Denton and Salle in Norfolk. Such generosity ensured that his heir, William, his eldest son by his first marriage, faced the prospect of initially receiving possession of no more than two manors at Fressingfield and another at Waltham, Lincolnshire. Furthermore, under the terms of the will William was obliged to provide annuities for life from the income of the Fressingfield lands to three of his relatives: £10 and 20s. p.a. respectively to his brother, Giles, and sister, Alice (a nun at Redlingfield), the MP’s other children by his first wife, and ten marks to his uncle, Robert Brewes. Sir Thomas also provided for Ela and Margaret, his yet unmarried daughters, by awarding each 100 marks for her dowry. Institutions bk. DN/REG7 bk. 12, ff. 242-3; C140/85/50; CP25(1)/170/192/12.

The MP’s second marriage had bridged factional differences in that her father, Gilbert Debenham, was associated with the Mowbray dukes of Norfolk, regional rivals of the de la Poles with whom he himself had links, but it also caused a bitter family dispute after his death. Upon marrying Elizabeth he had settled the Suffolk manors of Akenham, Witnesham and Hasketon on themselves and their heirs in tail-male and had given her a life interest in Stinton Hall, Norfolk. In doing so, he had acted considerably to the detriment of William, since these manors had formed a valuable part of the Brewes estate for several generations. Perhaps influencing his generosity towards her was the large marriage portion she had received from her father (in her widowhood she claimed that it had amounted to at least £1,000 in money, plate and goods), and an interest for life that she held in a manor at Redenhall, Norfolk. C1/27/14; CCR, 1476-85, no. 1202. He had reinforced this arrangement in 1455 by having Hemmingstone, another Suffolk manor, settled on him and Elizabeth and their male heirs. Shortly afterwards, however, William had married a daughter of the Suffolk esquire, John Hopton, and Brewes had awarded the couple and their heirs a future interest in Akenham, Witnesham and Haskerton, to vest after the deaths of both himself and Elizabeth. He had then apparently resorted to using his daughter-in-law’s substantial marriage portion to buy property of equal value, Probably the reversion of the manors in s.-e. Norf. which he had acquired from the Cliftons. William’s wife, Elizabeth Hopton, had a dowry of either 500 or 700 marks: CIPM Hen. VII, i. 648, 654. with which to compensate his own wife. Even though Elizabeth was still well provided for, he had sown the seeds for future conflict since she resented the overturning of her marriage settlement. The unfortunate William never came fully into his own, for his stepmother outlived him. Following his death in 1489, she entered into a prolonged dispute with his two daughters and heirs, and their husbands, Sir Thomas Hansard and Roger Townshend†. Eventually, an out of court settlement achieved by arbitration brought both this and a separate quarrel between the Hansards and Townshends over the Brewes manors at Fressingfield to a resolution in June 1502, shortly before her death. Essentially, the arbitration award allowed her a life estate in most of her late husband’s lands, while ruling that the bulk of them should afterwards pass out of the family to his Hansard and Townshend grand-daughters. The Brewes name and line survived in the person and descendants of Robert, the MP’s eldest son by his second marriage, who succeeded to his manors at Topcroft and Denton. Robert’s landholdings were significantly augmented when the Parliament of 1504 recognized him as the heir of his formerly disgraced uncle, (Sir) Gilbert Debenham II*, whose attainder it reversed. Moreton, 95-99 (although this mistakenly states that William Brewes died in 1490); CIPM Hen. VII, i. 648; ii. 199; PROME, xvi. 400-3.