BROWN, Thomas III (d.1454), of Abbess Roding, Essex and Westminster, Mdx.

Given this MP’s very common name, doubt must remain about his identity. There is a strong case for believing that the representative for Marlborough in the Parliament of 1449-50 was Thomas Brown II*, who until a few months before the Parliament met had been under treasurer of England and deeply involved in the attempts of the government to extricate itself from its engulfing financial crisis. His expert advice might well have been appreciated in the Commons, and the government could call on his help to guide debate there.

On the other hand, the MP may have been a Thomas Brown whose career had taken a very different path to prominence, namely as a prothonotary in the court of common pleas. By 1449 Brown the lawyer had been employed in various capacities in that court for some 40 years, a period during which he had enjoyed a very close relationship with the royal justices. He must have usually resided in or near the law courts at Westminster, but his life perhaps started, as it was to end, at Abbess Roding in Essex. Although his family background is obscure, it may well be that while he was a young man the manor of ‘Brownes’ in that parish remained in the possession of his mother or stepmother. P. Morant, Essex, i. 137-8 states that Anne Brown held it in 1427. Nevertheless, on occasion he was described as ‘of Essex’, C131/60/20, 227/48, 234/17; C241/225/34. and early in his career (in the closing years of Henry IV’s reign), he was engaged as an attorney for landowners from that part of England and East Anglia, such as Michael de la Pole, earl of Suffolk. CP40/608, att. rot. 2.

Yet for much of Brown’s life the focus of his private interests lay in the south-west, where he established friendly relations with west-country lawyers and became party to many landed transactions in Devon. This focus resulted from his engagement as a clerk in the service of Sir William Hankford, who, initially a justice of the common pleas, was promoted as chief justice of the King’s bench under Henry V. Belonging to Hankford’s inner circle, Brown was to be named in 1423 as an executor of the chief justice’s will, together with the Devon lawyer John Wydeslade*, a colleague who was later to refer to him as his ‘master’ in the exercise of a prothonotary’s duties. Reg. Chichele, ii. 293; Sel. Cases in Exchequer Chamber (Selden Soc. li), 177. Hankford was Brown’s patron and mentor. After recognizing the young man’s potential as a legal practitioner, Sir William became ‘special preferrer and helper to the seide Thomas Broun’, and even arranged for him to marry his grand-daughter Joan Kirkham. Many years after their wedding Brown and his wife were to claim in a Chancery petition of about 1453 that on 10 Apr. 1419 Joan’s brother John Kirkham, about to go overseas in Courtenay service, had enfeoffed their grandfather Hankford and others of four of his manors in Devon, so that in the event of his death the feoffees might pay Joan and her two sisters 20 marks each from the profits, over and above the sums their late father had provided for their marriages. John died four months later, but, so the Browns claimed, the surviving feoffee, John Gambon, had never paid Joan the money due to her following the deaths of her sisters. Gambon, giving his version of events, said that no seisin had passed to feoffees because Kirkham had stayed at home rather than taking ship, and on the death of his widow the Kirkham estates had passed into the King’s hands because of the minority of John’s brother and heir, Robert. The Kirkham estates were committed to farm to Hankford and others, who authorized Gambon to receive the profits on their behalf. Hankford further arranged that Brown, on his marriage to Joan, was to be paid 300 marks of the money raised during Robert’s nonage. Robert came of age, entered his inheritance and made his brother-in-law Brown, along with Gambon and others, his feoffees before he died (in 1444) at Rhodes, while on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. C1/21/42. For the Kirkhams see CIPM, xxi. 482; xxiii. 459-60, 719; xxvi. 165-6; CFR, xix. 127. Brown and Gambon were also Kirkham’s executors, and in July 1444 the two men shared the wardship and marriage of his son, another Robert, for which they paid £90 at the Exchequer. C140/26/49; CPR, 1441-6, p. 267; CP25 (1)/46/83/111; E403/753, m. 10; CP40/746, rot. 280d. Gambon held land in Devon as a feudal tenant of Brown’s wife: C140/81/49. This heir died while still a minor in 1451, but it seems likely that Brown and Gambon retained the wardship of his brother, Nicholas, who came of age in March 1455. C139/156/14. The feoffees named by Robert Kirkham senior apparently continued to hold the lands, the survivors (not including Brown) still doing so in Dec. 1466 when Nicholas lost his wits: C140/26/49.

Meanwhile, with Chief Justice Hankford’s help Brown had risen quickly in the legal profession. From early in Henry V’s reign he was made an associate of the justices of assize, assisting them to carry out commissions in the localities. His appointment as second prothonotary in the common pleas dated from 1418. The three prothonotaries were at the top of the hierarchy of officers who carried on the administrative work of the court, being the chief clerks in charge of entering the records of cases in the plea roll and of making out judicial writs of process. Persons of considerable dignity and importance in the court, they were frequently called upon by the justices for expert knowledge or opinions concerning technical matters, but as well as being expert lawyers they were busy clerks, M. Hastings, Ct. of Common Pleas, 113-14, 116, 118. employed in countless tasks of administration of justice in the localities. Brown’s diligence, exemplified by the assistance he gave the King’s uncle the duke of Bedford in carrying out a commission of oyer and terminer in Derbyshire in 1434, found its reward in a grant of exemption from employment in any royal office or commission in future. Nevertheless, this grant, dated 15 Feb. 1435 and mentioning that Brown was ‘growing old’, heralded no diminution in his work-load. CPR, 1429-36, p. 462. Outside the court of common pleas he continued to take on a variety of tasks, including a second term as under sheriff of Middlesex, and the role of attorney for the civic authorities of London by appointment of 15 Oct. 1438. Corp. London RO, jnl. 3, f. 24v. Well into his old age the sheriffs of London and Middlesex often employed him to receive their writs. CP40/761, rots. 147, 195; 765, rots. 102d, 133d; 769, rots. 1d, 2. Contact with the citizens of London led in 1443-4 to Brown’s admission with his colleague Wydeslade (by then chief prothonotary) to the Merchant Tailors’ fraternity. Guildhall Lib. London, Merchant Taylors’ Co. accts. 34048/1, f. 373. Intermittently, he also continued to take on private lawsuits, acting for example as an attorney for Thomas Montagu, earl of Salisbury, and his countess, CP40/675, att. rots. and he was a popular choice as an executor, being named as such not only by Chief Justice Hankford and other of his wife’s relations, but also for the Devon landowner Edmund Chymbeham, with whose family he was closely linked. Reg. Chichele, ii. 377.

Brown probably enjoyed a substantial income from the fees of his office. Yet some payments which came his way roused suspicion of corrupt practice. In the early 1440s Stephen Marcey, the abbot of Dureford abbey in Sussex, granted an annuity of £20 to Brown, Wydeslade and a number of their associates. However, in about 1444 Marcey was deposed, having been accused of squandering the abbey’s resources and incurring unsustainable debts, whereupon his successors sought to revoke the grant and in 1445 successfully foiled the attempts of the deprived grantees to make distraint on the abbey estates for payment. The matter was to come up again in the 1460s, after Brown’s death. C1/15/27-28, 27/178; CCR, 1441-7, pp. 306-7; VCH Suss. ii. 90; C253/38/303. Rewards for Brown’s services were occasionally forthcoming from the Crown. Besides the Kirkham wardship he also received on 18 Mar. 1443 keeping of the estates of the recently-deceased Essex landowner Thomas Torell* during the minority of John* his son and heir, at the same time agreeing to pay £200 for the ward’s marriage. Yet Torell’s minority only had 18 months to run, and there is no evidence that Brown made a profitable sale of the marriage. CFR, xvii. 260; CPR, 1441-6, pp. 166, 169. The surname of Torell’s wife, Elizabeth, is not known, and the possibility that she was Brown’s own da. cannot be excluded. Even so, she was not expressly mentioned in Brown’s will, which stated that Torell owed the testator £60: commissary ct. will, 9171/5, f. 124v. Brown was associated with his ward as a feoffee in 1448, E159/225, commissiones Easter. and it may be that he accompanied Torell to the Commons in the Parliament of November 1449, when the young man was returned for the Dorset borough of Bridport, and he himself perhaps represented Marlborough. Yet a few months before the Parliament met, on 22 Mar. 1449, Brown had obtained a royal licence permitting him to hold his office as prothonotary by deputy, in view of his good service to three successive Lancastrian Kings and in consideration of his age and infirmities. CPR, 1446-52, p. 263; Hastings, 118. In several respects this echoed the grant of exemption made to him 14 years earlier, which had not been followed by any noticeable signs of dwindling energies, but doubts must still remain that this elderly lawyer would have sought election to Parliament for the first time at this late stage in his life.

By the mid 1430s Brown had come into his inheritance in Essex, and as ‘of Roding’ had been assessed for taxation on lands in the county worth £50 a year. H.L. Gray, ‘Incomes from land in Eng. in 1436’, EHR, xlix. 633. Such an income qualified him for promotion to knighthood, but he was exonerated from payment of a fine for refusing the honour in 1439 by virtue of his letters patent of exemption dated four years earlier. E159/216, recorda Mich. rot. 11; CPR, 1429-36, p. 462. William Cumberford* became second prothonotary in Brown’s place in the Easter term of 1454, CP40/773. probably at the time of his final illness. Brown’s last will was dated 20 June that year. In it he left his wife Joan the sum of £100 together with a life interest in his manors in Abbess Roding and White Roding and a tenement called ‘Clerkes’ in Matching, which were to pass on her death to his eldest son Baldwin, while his feoffees were to convey two other manors and other properties to a younger son, John. Commissary ct. will, 9171/5, f. 124v. In the event, Baldwin died without issue, leaving the estate initially to John, who himself died childless in 1467. Although the next oldest brother and new heir was Thomas, John had insisted that his feoffees should transfer possession not only of the Essex lands but also their late father’s properties in Cambridgeshire to another brother, Robert. The latter died in 1488, possessed of ‘Brownes’ and other estates worth in excess of £50, which had been inherited or otherwise acquired by the prothonotary. C140/28/31; CIPM Hen. VII, i. 409. In VCH Essex, iv. 192 Robert is wrongly called Thomas. The manor of ‘Brownes’ or Rookwood Hall in Abbess Roding descended in the fam. through Robert’s son Wistan until the late 16th cent.