DREW, Thomas (d.1453), of Seagry, Wilts. and Southcote, Berks.

Thomas was the eldest of the three surviving sons of Laurence Drew, the lawyer who came to national prominence during the last five years of Richard II’s reign as a member of the King’s Council particularly esteemed for his advice on legal matters. Laurence built up an impressive record of service in Parliament, too, both as a parliamentary proxy for the abbot of Malmesbury and as shire knight for Berkshire in at least eight of the Parliaments between 1379 and 1414. Although the generous annuities of 140 marks granted him by King Richard were cancelled following the latter’s deposition, Laurence nevertheless appears to have died a wealthy man, in enjoyment of an annual income from his property in Wiltshire, at Seagry, Littleton Drew and elsewhere, amounting to £56 6s. 8d., and from his wife’s manor of Southcote in Berkshire which provided at least £15 p.a. more. Feudal Aids, vi. 402, 451, 538. Furthermore, in his will, made in 1417, he was able to leave Thomas’s three unmarried sisters as much as £100 each. Thomas, his father’s executor and principal heir, PCC 36 Marche (PROB11/2B, ff. 287-8). inherited besides the properties already mentioned manors at Great Somerford, VCH Wilts. xiv. 189, 198, 200; Feudal Aids, v. 236, 253. and a number of houses in Chippenham. Wilts. Feet of Fines (Wilts. Rec. Soc. xli), 400; Tropenell Cart. ed. Davies, i. 83.

In addition, Thomas acquired more landed interests for himself, for in 1414 in association with John White† of Reading he took possession of holdings in the parishes of Shinfield and Burghfield, in Berkshire, CP25(1)/13/81/1. and he also obtained property in the London parish of St. Anthony, which had an annual value of as much as £15 6s. 8d. C131/62/19. This was an extent for debt made when he failed to fulfil a bond for £20 which he had entered into in partnership with his brother Robert and William Browning I*. However, for reasons which are now obscure, in later years he gave up some of his landed possessions. For instance, in the late 1420s he, his mother and his brother, Robert, relinquished to Richard Wyot* any title they might have had in the manor of Horton, Buckinghamshire, which our MP’s father had once held in wardship, VCH Bucks. iii. 283; CCR, 1422-9, p. 334; CP25(1)/22/119/1. and they also released their rights in the manor of Great Durnford to Walter, Lord Hungerford†. What prompted Thomas to part with yet more of his property is unclear, but towards the end of his career, in 1445, he conveyed to Hungerford and others all the lands, tenements, rents and reversions he had inherited from his father in Chippenham and six other Wiltshire vills. Wilts. Feet of Fines, 433; Hungerford Cart. (Wilts. Rec. Soc. xlix), 354. Similarly, he also disposed of the manor of Horham in Essex, which passed to him following the death of his brother Robert, by transferring it to feoffees apparently to the use of Robert Large* the London mercer. Essex Feet of Fines, iv. 19; CCR, 1435-41, pp. 187-8; C1/15/150. Whether he gained financially from these transactions is not on record.

Drew, who took up his father’s profession, finished his training in the law at some point before July 1402, when he first appeared as a mainpernor for litigants from Berkshire. CCR, 1399-1402, p. 585; 1409-13, pp. 89, 90. Not surprisingly, his earliest clients were drawn from the circle of kinsmen and landowners who had employed his father. Thus, the latter had been the executor of the will of Sir William Langford†, to whom the Drews appear to have been related, and in the spring of 1417 Thomas undertook business transactions on behalf of Sir William’s son and heir, Robert, who was about to go overseas. He arranged leases of Langford’s properties in London, of which he had been made sole feoffee, and following Langford’s death two years later he assisted his widow Elizabeth by offering sureties in Chancery to enable her to obtain the wardship and marriage of her son Edward*. Subsequently, he was party to the settlements made in 1424 to protect Elizabeth’s interest in the Langford estates after her marriage to John Boyville*, the Leicestershire esquire. The elaborate provisions then made included two in Drew’s own favour. These stated that, if Elizabeth’s issue by her former husband Langford should fail, seven messuages, some 520 acres of land and rents in Ashden and Compton would pass to the heirs of Laurence Drew, and that other holdings, including 320 acres and rents of £6 14s. 5d. p.a. in Binfield, would remain specifically to Thomas and his children. Cal. P. and M. London, 1413-37, pp. 60-61; CPR, 1416-22, p. 253; CP(1)/292/67/126; Corp. London RO, hr 170/62. Drew’s involvement in the affairs of the Langfords led in turn to his being named in 1420 as executor of the will of their kinsman Sir Walter Dauntsey, a member of an ancient Wiltshire family. Reg. Hallum (Canterbury and York Soc. lxxii), 1148. His father had been a trustee of the manor of Arborfield which belonged to the Bullocks, and in 1421 after the completion of financial arrangements between them he released his interest in it to their heir. C241/214/24; CP25(1)/13/81/35; VCH Berks. iii. 201.

Drew’s participation in local administration had begun in 1416, with his appointment to a commission of sewers, but, curiously, no further appointments came his way until 22 years later. He attested the Wiltshire elections to Parliament held at Wilton on 20 Oct. 1422, C219/13/1. but it was not as a shire knight that he entered the Commons himself four years later, at Leicester in 1426; rather, it was as one of the representatives for the borough of Malmesbury. Although his relations with the local burgesses are poorly documented, he did own lands and rents in the town and its vicinity, which he mentioned in his will, so it is unlikely that he was a stranger there. Although the Parl. was held at Leicester, Drew appeared in person in the ct. of c.p. at Westminster that term to sue a fletcher from Abingdon for a debt of five marks: CP40/661, rot. 363d. At the close of the Parliament he was owed £8 2s. for his wages for 81 days’ attendance, but five years later he had still not been paid. The bailiff of Malmesbury certified in 1431 that he had never received a writ de expensiis, and although he had levied from the community eight oxen worth nine marks, woollen cloth of the value of 30s. and spices worth 12s. which were all to be sold to pay Drew, he was unable to find purchasers. KB145/6/9, printed in Parliamentarians at Law ed. Kleineke, 246-7.

Despite representing a borough, Drew was no townsman, since his landed interests clearly placed him among the gentry. Indeed, as a wealthy esquire he was distrained in Berkshire in 1430 and in Wiltshire nine years later for failing to take up knighthood, while in the meantime, in 1434, he had been required to take the oath against maintenance in both these counties where he had residences. CPR, 1429-36, pp. 370, 402. Drew was subsequently appointed to the Berkshire bench as a member of the quorum, and served for ten years in this capacity. While so doing he was elected to represent the county in the Parliament of 1442. During the session, on 6 Mar., he witnessed the conveyance of the lordship of the manor of Yattenden by Edward Langford to one of the shire knights for Oxfordshire, John Norris*, an esquire for the King’s body. Evidently, he later made Norris’s closer acquaintance, for he willingly provided sureties for his attendance in the Lower House following his election for Berkshire to the Parliament of February 1449. Furthermore, Drew was named among those party to the electoral indentures for the same county in 1450, when Norris and Langford were returned together. CCR, 1441-7, p. 59; C219/15/6, 16/1.

Throughout his career Drew’s services as a legal adviser and trustee were much in demand. For example, Stephen Haytfeld* and his wife, the wealthy widow of Sir John Drayton†, employed him in 1425 for the completion of a settlement of the manor of Nuneham in Oxfordshire to the advantage of Thomas Chaucer* the former Speaker. CPR, 1422-9, p. 280; CFR, xvi. 346. He was closely associated with the Berkshire landowner Thomas Rothwell†, for whom he took on the trusteeship of the manors of Tidmarsh and South Moreton, in part to provide a jointure for his third wife, Isabel Changton (probably Drew’s kinswoman). Winchester Coll. muns. 10247-50; CAD, ii. C2888; iii. C3624. On occasion such commitments took Drew beyond his usual sphere of activity, as when in 1442 he received a share in a yearly rent of 40 marks from the manor of Nether Burgate and the hundred of Fordingbridge, in Hampshire, then subject to litigation. It may well be the case that he was acting as an arbiter between the two parties in dispute, Thomas Lekhull alias Rivers and William Bulkeley of Eyton, Cheshire. CCR, 1441-7, pp. 114, 160. Likewise, he mediated between the litigious William Warbleton* and William Fauconer regarding their quarrel over land in Kingsclere, also in Hampshire, in 1447. Winchester Coll. muns. 12417. Drew was a feoffee of property in London for the Exchequer official William Baron* in 1445, and the two men were associated later on in transactions regarding buildings in Baron’s native town of Reading. CAD, ii. B2014-16, 2221, 2223; CP25(1)/13/85/11. In 1449 Miles Windsor esquire (once ward to Drew’s father) enfeoffed him by royal licence of certain manors in Middlesex and Berkshire and also entrusted him with his estates elsewhere. CPR, 1446-52, p.325; CCR, 1447-54, pp. 301-4. The last of his many commitments fell in November 1452, when the widow of William Danvers* made him one of a group of feoffees headed by William Waynflete, bishop of Winchester, for the transfer of her manor of Stainswick to Winchester College as an endowment for her obit. Winchester Coll. muns. 17a.

In his last years Drew’s closest associates were his son-in-law Walter Sambourn, who had married his daughter Margaret, and a kinsman named John Changton or Jangeton. CP25(1)/13/85/15; Wilts. Feet of Fines, 581. In 1451 he and his wife enfeoffed Jangeton and Thomas Rothwell of the manor of Seagry and lands in Somerford, Stanton St. Quintin and Brinkworth, Wilts. Feet of Fines, 598. and Jangeton was also a feoffee in the following year, when the Drews and the Sambourns conveyed to him and others the manors of Buckhurst (in Wokingham), Littleton Drew and Southcote, probably to effect a settlement on Margaret Sambourn. CP25(1)/293/72/371; VCH Berks. iii. 230. Drew named him as an executor of the will he made on 28 Aug. 1453. In this document our MP made provision for his wife and three daughters by dividing his remaining lands between them, and requested them to honour a bequest of ten marks to one Joan Jangeton. More specifically, he asked his wife to think ‘as godely as sche may’ towards an unnamed daughter of his kinsman William Jangeton (perhaps the same girl). He died at an unknown date after 13 Dec., when he was appointed a j.p. for the last time, and before 20 Feb. 1454. Lambeth Palace Lib., Reg. Kempe, ff. 315-17. The location of Drew’s grave, which he had left to his wife to decide, is not known, although it may have been in Great Somerford church, where stained glass once placed in the chancel bore the inscription ‘Orate pro anima Thome Drew et pro bono statu Agnitis uxoris ejus’. Wilts. Arch. Mag. xxxi. 316.

In May 1455 Drew’s widow, in association with his former colleague, Richard Chokke, serjeant-at-law, received from Thomas Raynham, gentleman, and others a recognizance for £400 guaranteeing that within a month of recovering four messuages in the London parish of St. Anthony in the Guildhall court, they would make her a legal estate of the same for her lifetime. Whether they ever did so is unclear, for the recognizance under the same condition was repeated in November 1456. CCR, 1454-61, pp. 59, 168. Our MP’s daughter Margaret Sambourn, probably the eldest of the three, inherited the bulk of his property, including Southcote, which was valued at £20 p.a. at her death in 1495. Another daughter, Isabel, married another lawyer, John Mompeson*, who had represented Wilton in the Parliament of 1453, but whether this marriage took place before our MP died remains uncertain. CIPM Hen. VII, i. 1120; Ancestor, xi. 61; Genealogist, n.s. xiii. 149. Both these daughters honoured their father by calling their first-born sons Drew.