BRYDGES, Thomas (c.1427-93), of Coberley, Glos.

It is difficult to identify Brydges with absolute certainty, since he shared a common surname (including variants) with several other men from south-west England alone. Among them were a clerk of the peace for Gloucestershire, who held that office from 1417 to 1450, E. Stephens, Clerks of Counties, 91. and three Thomas Brydges residing in Herefordshire (at Bridge Sollers, Lea and Ivington respectively) in the 1430s. CPR, 1429-36, pp. 376, 377. Presumably Thomas of Ivington was a close relative, if not the father, of the Thomas Brydges junior, ‘late of Ivington’, who received a royal pardon in Jan. 1486: C67/53, m. 4. Also from the latter county was Thomas Brydges of Ross-on-Wye, a distinguished lawyer active in the later fifteenth century who became a serjeant-at-law in 1478. E.W. Ives, Common Lawyers: Thomas Kebell, 454. Thomas of Ross was the man who secured the stewardship of Elmley castle and other lordships in Worcs. and Glos., following the death of George, duke of Clarence, in 1478 (CPR, 1476-85, p. 110) and probably the ‘Brygges’ who owned a still extant ms abridgment of statues: now in private hands (ex inf. Prof. J.H. Baker). On balance, the man who sat for Gloucestershire in 1460 was probably the eldest son of Giles Brydges of Coberley, an MP for the county in 1431 and 1455. Both Giles and his son were annuitants of Richard, duke of York, and the Parliament of 1460 met in the wake of the Yorkist victory at the battle of Northampton. P.A. Johnson, Duke Richard of York, 229 (although Johnson assumes the men were brothers rather than father and son). To complicate matters further, Thomas of Coberley is not always easy to distinguish from Thomas of Ross and other namesakes. These included Thomas Brydges of Dymock, Glos. (from a cadet branch of the Coberley family), Thomas Brydges of Longhope in the same county, and a bastard uncle: C67/43, m. 6; The Commons 1509-58, i. 531; CFR, xxi. no. 275; PCC 16 Marche (PROB11/2A, f. 124). Both T.B. Pugh, Marcher Ldships. S. Wales, 289, and C. Rawcliffe, Staffords, 226, conflate him with one or more of these other Thomases. Thomas of Dymock was also of Fownhope, Herefs., where he came into lands through marriage. Perhaps the man who served as a Glos. coroner in the mid 1470s (C244/119/62B), he was the father of John Brydges†, who sat for London in the Parl. of 1510. It is possible that, like Giles Brydges, Thomas of Longhope was a servant of the Talbot family: CFR, xxi. nos. 275, 314. It is also possible that he and the bastard uncle were one and the same man.

Born in about 1427, the Coberley Thomas is assumed by some authorities to have been the ‘Brigges’ admitted to Lincoln’s Inn at the end of 1450, but it is most unlikely that he was the Thomas Bridge (otherwise Brygges or Brugge) who served as one of the bailiffs of Gloucester in 1450-1. VCH Glos. iv. 374; E368/223, rot. 7d; C219/16/1, 2. At the latter date, he was still a relatively young man with little or no administrative experience, and the office would have been an unusual appointment for the eldest son and heir of a substantial esquire with no particular associations with the town. He was however active by the early 1450s, when he was associated with his father in Giles Brydges’ quarrel with Thomas* and Richard Hasard*, Nicholas Jones*, John Cricklade* and others from Wiltshire. The true circumstances of the dispute are unknown. Ostensibly, it was over the theft of a sheep at Minety, Gloucestershire, but it probably arose from now hidden regional rivalries and may have had a political dimension. KB27/768, rots. 53d, 55d; 769, rots. 7 47, 63; 770, rot. 27d; 771, rot 58; 772, rot. 16; 773, rots. 17, 54; 774, rots. 73, 73d; CPR, 1452-61, p. 62. In early 1453, following their indictment for the supposed theft and while they were in confinement in Gloucester castle, Thomas and Richard Hasard and Jones gained election to the Parliament of that year, as MPs for Malmesbury, Wootton Bassett and Cricklade respectively.

By that date Thomas of Coberley was married, for a deed of 10 Feb. 1453 records that Giles Brydges had undertaken to settle lands worth 100s. p.a. on his son and daughter-in-law, Florence Darell. It is likely that the couple were newly-weds, for in the following May Giles acknowledged having received 200 marks from Florence’s widowed mother, presumably for her dowry. CAD, i. C744; SP46/45, f. 65. Florence was the daughter of a well-connected bureaucrat of northern origin who had settled in Wiltshire, and the match was a respectable rather than a spectacular one. Like the Brydges family, the Darells had links with the duke of York, of whom Thomas’s brother-in-law, George Darell, became a retainer for life in January 1453. C146/6400.

The association of Brydges of Coberley with York was doubtless a longstanding one. Over a decade earlier, the duke’s servant, Richard Dixton (d.1438), had appointed as his executor Giles Brydges, who was also the stepbrother of William Browning I*, an esquire active in York’s service by the mid fifteenth century. Trans. Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc. xi. 155-60. Conceivably Giles’s links with the duke helped him to win his seat in the Parliament of 1455, which convened in the wake of the Yorkist victory at the first battle of St. Albans. Within days of the battle, York granted him an annuity of £10 p.a. from his manor of Bisley in Gloucestershire, and the duke bestowed another annuity of ten marks on Thomas of Coberley in early 1456. Johnson, 160, 229. As already suggested, Thomas may likewise have gained his seat in the Yorkist-dominated Parliament that opened in October 1460 through his connexion with the duke. Possibly, he was an active supporter of York, since he had found it necessary to acquire a pardon for all treasons and other offences in the previous May, CPR, 1452-61, p. 580. when those associated with the royal court still dominated the government. Soon after York’s son seized the throne in 1461, the clerk, William Stourton, obtained licence to found a chantry in the church at Lugwardine, a Herefordshire parish in which the Brydges family possessed a manorial interest. He established the chantry for the good estate of himself, the King, the Yorkist peer, Walter Devereux II*, Lord Ferrers of Chartley, John Welford*, Thomas Brydges and others, for the welfare of their souls after their deaths, and for the good of the souls of the late duke of York and earl of Rutland. CPR, 1461-7, p. 151; C143/453/1.

Save for a term as escheator of Gloucestershire in the mid 1450s, all of Thomas’s administrative career post-dated 1461, possibly because of the longevity of his father rather than any political reasons. The identity of the Thomas Brugge appointed to a commission of inquiry in Carm. in Mar. 1465 (CPR, 1461-7, p. 451) is uncertain, as is that of the Thomas who served Henry Stafford, 2nd duke of Buckingham, as a councillor, and as an itinerant justice in the south Welsh lordship of Newport in 1476. Pugh, 21, 84, assumes that it was Thomas of Coberley but Thomas of Ross seems a more likely candidate. Giles had continued to serve as a j.p. after York’s son had seized the throne, and within months of Edward IV’s accession he was placed on a commission of array intended to meet the threat posed by Lancastrian rebels in Gloucestershire. Ironically, among those implicated in an attempt to raise rebellion in the county against the Crown in early 1464 were Thomas Brydges of Stroud and John Brydges of Coberley. R.H. Hilton, English Peasantry, 71-72; KB9/33/33 (although on the face of this indictment their names, as well as of those of several of their co-accused, have been struck out, suggesting that they were not in fact indicted). It is impossible positively to identify them but it is most unlikely that Thomas of Stroud was the Yorkist Thomas of Coberley, who was probably the Thomas Brydges who stood surety for John Dunne, one of Edward IV’s household esquires, in July 1466. CCR, 1461-8, p. 363.

By now elderly, Giles Brydges died on 13 Apr. 1467. C140/23/15. His will is no longer extant but a royal pardon issued to his eldest son in October 1472 shows that he appointed the latter his executor. C67/49, m. 16. Thomas inherited the manors of Coberley and Haresfield and a moiety of that of Stoke Orchard in Gloucestershire, the manor of Eldersfield and a tenement at Staunton in Worcestershire and the manors of Lugwardine and Lymbury in Herefordshire, although the dower of Katherine Bromwich, who lived until 1504, encumbered the Herefordshire estates. The surviving inquisitions post mortem for Giles and his son record that Thomas succeeded to estates worth just under £50 p.a. in Gloucestershire and Worcestershire alone; in reality, they were probably worth considerably more since such inquisitions often significantly undervalued property. VCH Glos. viii. 12; x. 193; VCH Worcs. iv. 78; CP, iii. 150; CIPM Hen. VII, i. 857-8 ; ii. 753; CPR, 1494-1509, p. 470. Katherine Bromwich was formerly the wife of Robert Mattesdon (d.1458), a cousin of Giles Brydges. Mattesdon and Giles had each succeeded to a share of the former Chandos estates (of which Lugwardine and Lymbury were part) once held by their common forebear, Sir John Chandos† (d.1428) of Herefs.: CCR, 1429-35, p. 1; CIPM, xxiv. 460.

Some 40 years of age when he succeeded his father, Thomas is not in the latter stages of his career always readily distinguishable from his namesake of Ross, who survived until the late spring or summer of 1483. Order of Serjts. at Law (Selden Soc. supp. ser. v), 501. Some of the commissions listed at the head of this biography may well relate to Thomas of Ross, who was probably the man who served as a commr. of oyer of terminer in N. Wales (Aug. 1467), S. Wales (Aug., Nov. 1471) and Herefs. (Mar. 1483), and on other ad hoc commissions in Herefs. from the late 1460s until 1483. Thomas of Ross was also a j.p. in Herefs. from 1461 until his death, and in all likelihood it was he who served on the quorum of the peace commissions for Cornw., Devon, Dorset, Hants, Som. and Worcs. in the later years of Edw. IV’s reign. In all probability, he was the Thomas Brydges† who sat in the Parl. of 1472 as a knight of the shire for Herefs. Such problems of identification render parts of the cursus honorum at the head of this biography uncertain. It is likewise not always easy to trace his private activities. Probably the man who witnessed settlements on behalf of Thomas Buckland* of Gloucester in 1473 and the Guise family of Elmore, Gloucestershire, in 1481, Gloucester Corporation Recs. ed. Stevenson, 410; Trans. Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc. lx. 285. he was certainly the Thomas Brydges whom the abbot of Gloucester sued in the mid 1470s and whom Thomas Lymryk† appointed as overseer of his will of 1486. Logge Reg. of PCC Wills ed. Boatwright, Habberjam and Hammond, ii. no. 306. It is worth noting that Thomas of Coberley had a connexion with the Guises: his mother had once been the wife of Reynold Guise, after whose death she married Giles Brydges. The abbot’s suit, heard in the common pleas at Westminster, related to a bond for the very large sum of 1,000 marks that he had received from Thomas of Coberley in the late 1450s, but it does not explain why Brydges had entered into that security. CP40/859, rot. 155d.

Thomas of Coberley died on 30 Jan. 1493. He left at least two surviving sons, his heir Giles and Henry. CIPM Hen. VII, i. 857-8; The Commons 1509-58, i. 531. It seems that he also had another younger son, for in her will of 1464 his mother-in-law, Elizabeth Darell, set aside 20 marks for the schooling of John, son of Thomas Brydges: PCC 4 Godyn (PROB11/5, ff. 31v-32). It is not known if this John was still alive in 1493. About 30 years of age when he came into his own, Giles had likewise served as a j.p. and ad hoc commissioner in the reign of Richard III, from whom he had secured a valuable grant for life of the office of constable of St. Briavels castle in the Forest of Dean and a substantial annuity of £66 13s. 4d. in March 1484. CPR, 1476-85, pp. 384, 393, 398. He had lost his place on the commission of the peace in 1485 but afterwards became a household knight of Henry VII and was restored as a j.p. in mid 1501. His heir at his death in 1511 was his son John, created Baron Chandos of Sudeley in 1554. VCH Glos. vii. 176-7. Obliged to make his own way in the world, Giles’s younger brother Henry initially advanced himself through trade, almost certainly as a clothier. He settled in Berkshire, marrying a widow from Newbury and establishing himself as one of the gentry of that county. Like his father, he entered the Commons where he represented the Wiltshire borough of Ludgershall, perhaps in as many as three of Henry VIII’s Parliaments. The Commons 1509-58, i. 531-3.