CUMBERWORTH, Sir Thomas

More can be added to the earlier biography. The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 713-15.

Cumberworth was married by 19 Feb. 1400, when the family’s manor of Scremby was settled on him and his wife, Katherine, and their issue. Hatton’s Bk. of Seals ed. Loyd and Stenton, no. 489. Her identity poses a puzzle. In the 1390s our MP’s sister, Katherine, married Marmaduke, son and heir-apparent of Sir Robert Constable of Flamborough; and it has been assumed that she was the Katherine ‘Comberworth’, described in the 1432 will of Marmaduke’s sister, Joan, widow of Sir Robert Hilton*, as her ‘sister’, a term used interchangeably with the newly-coined ‘sister-in-law’ in fifteenth–century England. Test. Ebor. ii (Surtees Soc. xxx), 24; The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 380. It is, however, equally possible that Joan is describing her blood sister rather than her sister-in-law, and that a triple marriage had taken place in the 1390s, her own to Hilton, her sister Katherine’s to our MP, and her brother Marmaduke to our MP’s sister Katherine. To these matches is to be added a fourth, that of Marmaduke’s younger brother, John (d.1407), to Sir Robert Hilton’s sister, Maud: The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 379.

At about the time that Cumberworth inherited the family estates, he was among those who witnessed the execution at York of Archbishop Scrope in June 1405, and it is probable that he was there in the retinue of the Lincolnshire magnate, William, Lord Willoughby of Eresby (d.1409), one of those before whom Scrope had been tried. He was certainly numbered among the Willoughby retinue a few years later: in 1408 Willoughby presented a petition to the King against the master of the royal horse, Robert Waterton, complaining of a series of crimes and extortions, including the theft of 160 sheep from his servant, Cumberworth, at Theddlethorpe. T. Gascoigne, Loci e Libro Veritatum ed. Rogers, 227; DL41/434. Thereafter, our MP long maintained an association with Willoughby’s more famous son and successor, Robert. In October 1435, for example, he was one of the feoffees for the implementation of the contract made on the important marriage of Robert’s daughter and heiress-presumptive, Joan, to Richard, son and heir-apparent of another Lincolnshire peer, Lionel, Lord Welles. Lincs. AO, Earl of Ancaster mss, 2ANC3/A/19.

Cumberworth’s military experience was less extensive than might have been accepted. He may have served in Lord Willoughby’s retinue during the Agincourt campaign, although the evidence is indirect. In June 1415 he sued out letters of attorney as departing abroad and by the end of the year he was a knight. If he was present at that great battle, it would help to explain why he was later chosen as the custodian of Charles, duke of Orléans, who had been captured there. Later in his career he was again fleetingly involved in military affairs. In 1436 he provided two men-at-arms and nine archers to serve in Humphrey, duke of Gloucester’s expedition for the relief of Calais, and he himself was among those commissioned to take the muster of the relief force at Sandwich. DKR, xliv. 571; E403/723, m. 13; CPR, 1429-36, pp. 611-12.

In the late 1420s, after nearly 30 years of marriage, Cumberworth’s childlessness led to unhealthy speculation among his kin about the future of his substantial inheritance. This, at least, is one explanation for a curious deed of 1428: his sister, Katherine, widow of both Constable and Sir Thomas Hercy† of Grove (Nottinghamshire), and three of her children, Robert Constable, John Constable and Hugh Hercy*, confirmed his estate and that of his wife in the manor of Scremby, saving their rights under the entail of the manor in 1400. In the following year our MP made an unusual settlement of his own. He conveyed a large part of his lands, although not his principal manors of Somerby and Argam, to five relatively insignificant men, headed by the parson of Stain, to hold for the term of his life, with remainder over in fee to a group of high rank, headed by John Kemp, archbishop of York, Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, Robert, Lord Willoughby, and Ralph, Lord Cromwell. His intention may have been to insure the protection of his wife’s rights in the event of his death. Hatton’s Bk. of Seals, no. 489; CP40/679, cart. rot. 2.

Preparations for death were certainly preoccupying him a few years later. In 1443 he brought a rare and interesting action against Robert Sutton of Chellaston (Derbyshire) and two others. He claimed that, for a large (but unspecified) sum of money paid to them at Somerby, they had undertaken to make a ‘tumbam et certas ymagines super et circa eandem tumbam de puro et mundo alabaustro’, but had completed the task unacceptably badly, to his damage of £40. Sutton was an established carver, responsible for the extant tomb of Ralph Green† (d.1417) at Lowick (Northamptonshire), and he was an obvious choice to be fabricator of our MP’s tomb. Whether their dispute was resolved is not known. The occasion for the commission may have been the death of Cumberworth’s wife. She is known to have predeceased him, for in his will of 1451 he provided for his burial in the north isle of Somerby church ‘be my wyfe’. CP40/729, rot. 287d; N. Saul, English Church Mons. 68-70; Lincoln Diocese Docs. (EETS, cxlix), 45.

Although Cumberworth’s tomb is no longer extant (if it was ever completed), he is not without his surviving physical memorials. A bell he gave to the church of Somerby in 1431 is still in situ, and at least one of his books survives. In his will he bequeathed to one of his chantry priests his book of ‘gracedew of the sowde’, that is, Guillaume Deguileville’s Pilgrimage of the Soul. This book – bearing the inscription ‘Liber domini Thome comorworth militis’ – is now in New York Public Library. J. Wylie, Hen. IV, ii. 234n.; New York Public Lib., Spencer mss, 19.

Cumberworth’s famous will, a testament to his personal piety, provides a memorial of another sort, as does the praise bestowed upon him by the chronicler and conservative churchman, Dr. Thomas Gascoigne. The two men were friends, and it was probably our MP who provided the chronicler with details of Archbishop Scrope’s dignified bearing before execution. In return Gascoigne noted for posterity Cumberworth’s generous gifts of lands to impoverished parish churches, ‘ut curati in eisdem jam vivere competenter possent’, a reference, no doubt, to the settlements our MP made in favour of the churches of Somerby, Argam and Stain. Gascoigne, 227; J. Hughes, Pastors and Visionaries, 46.

None the less, a high reputation for piety did not prevent Cumberworth playing his part in the unseemly side of local politics. He was invoved in disputes with Sir Godfrey Hilton† and Sir William Tirwhit* (as described in the earlier biography), and one interesting charge of dishonesty was made against him. In 1431 Sir John Gra* claimed that, as sheriff of Lincolnshire, Cumberworth had fraudulently returned a writ of scire facias, asserting that Lord Cromwell, the richest man in the county, had no property there. E13/139, rot. 20. Such charges, however, are far from representative of his career. Cumberworth was a man of prestige and connexion, as is evident from the willingness of the Crown to entrust him with the custody of the most important French prisoners, Orléans and John, duke of Bourbon. Further, his will shows that he was on close personal terms with some of the greatest men of the realm. Cardinal Kemp had given him, ‘a pare bedys of xij. bedys with the gaudes’, which he bequeathed to Cromwell; and to the cardinal he bequeathed, ‘a pare bedys of gold meynghid with corall, a tabelit of gold enperlid and enameld with emaughe with-in’. He also left two horses worth £4 each to Lord Welles and Lionel’s son, Richard. His admission, in 1433-4, to the London tailors’ prestigious fraternity of St. John the Baptist is another indication of his high standing. Lincoln Diocese Docs. 46, 48; Guildhall Lib. London, Merchant Taylors’ Co. accts. 34048/1, f. 246.