FROXMERE, Thomas (d.1498), of Droitwich, Worcs.

Thomas came from a prominent family which lived in the prosperous Worcestershire town of Droitwich and profited from the local salt works. E326/5453. The head of the family in the late fourteenth century was John de Froxmere, who witnessed transactions regarding boilers and vats attached to salt-houses in the 1390s, Leics. RO, Rothley Temple mss, 44’28/395-7. and served as a tax collector in the county. However, in 1398 his goods and chattels were forfeited (and granted to the duke of Surrey) as he had been put in exigent for felony by the justices of oyer and terminer in neighbouring Herefordshire. Further serious allegations were made against him six years later, when Richard, earl of Warwick, voiced a complaint that his salt-water well, known as ‘Shirrevespitt’, used for extracting salt at Droitwich, had been subject to attack by John and nine other local men, who were said to have rung the common bell to summon accomplices, broken into the earl’s close and houses, forced open the doors to the well and carried away the leaden vessels needed for boiling the water. CPR, 1396-9, p. 316; 1401-5, p. 423. Earlier on, John’s relations with Earl Richard and his father before him had been much more cordial. Indeed, he had been present at the baptism of the future earl at Salwarpe early in 1382 (and told the escheator at the proof of age in 1403 that he well remembered seeing the abbot of Pershore and the bishop of Worcester at the ceremony). CIPM, xviii. 855. As a feudal tenant of the earls of Warwick, John held part of a knight’s fee in Crowle, Worcestershire, which he (or perhaps a younger namesake), described as ‘of Droitwich, esquire’, occupied in 1431; and the manor there became known as ‘Froxmere Court’. CIPM, xviii. 515; xix. 282; Feudal Aids, v. 330; VCH Worcs. iii. 331-2. In January 1429, he or this namesake had made a conveyance of a garden and appurtenances in Wawenham in Droitwich. Worcs. Archs., Hampton (Pakington) mss, 705:349/12946/475872. As John had given his age as 40 in 1403, it is unlikely that our MP, who must have been born much later, was his son. Much more likely he was, as the heralds’ visitation has it, this John’s grandson, the son of William Froxmere (who attested the Worcestershire elections to the Parliaments of 1422, 1425 and 1435), Vis. Worcs. 39. and brother and heir of the younger John, who died without male issue.

What is certain is that Thomas bore the same arms as the John Froxmere who lived in the early fifteenth century: sable, a griffin segreant between three crosses crosslet fitchee argent, which figured in a window of the north aisle of St. Andrew’s church, Droitwich. S. Grazebrook, Heraldry of Worcs. A-L, 222; T. Habington, Surv. Worcs. (Worcs. Historical Soc. 1895), i. 473. And his kinship to John, and the date by which he had inherited the family holdings is clear, too, from a deed dated 12 Mar. 1449, when as ‘of Droitwich’ he confirmed a lease which John had earlier contracted with a local cordwainer and his wife of a tenement and curtilage in the town, with rights of egress and ingress to the river Salwarpe. Hampton (Packington) mss, 705:349/12946/475871. Although he spent long periods of his life away from Worcestershire, our MP always retained property in his home town, being listed in Edward IV’s reign as the owner of three ‘phates’ there, one of them held ‘of the sheriff’ (the earl of Warwick). Habington, i. 471-3, provided a list dated 4 Edw. I, but as the names clearly belong to the 15th cent., Edw. IV must be meant. Indeed, he was to leave his widow a very large number of properties in Droitwich and its neighbourhood, comprising six messuages, nine cottages, 24 salt-boilers and two brine-pits, as well as 800 acres of land, which her feoffees leased out for an annual return of nearly £24. C142/59/49.

The explanation for the election to Parliament of this man from Worcestershire for the distant borough of Weymouth, on the Dorset coast, lies with the identity of his maternal uncle, Henry Filongley. The latter, a member of the Warwickshire gentry, had become one of the most trusted retainers of James Butler, the son and heir apparent of the earl of Ormond who was himself created earl of Wiltshire in 1449. Butler’s marriage to the wealthy heiress Avice Stafford of Hooke in Dorset, who through her mother inherited the valuable Bryan estates in the south-west, led him and his henchman Filongley to become closely involved in the affairs of her home county. Filongley’s own election to represent Weymouth (in the first Parliament of 1449), was an aspect of his service to Butler, and he was engaged in activities on his lord’s behalf during the parliamentary sessions. No doubt it was he who, at this very same time, arranged for his kinswoman Alice Froxmere (probably Thomas’s niece) to marry John Russell III*, the eldest son of Henry Russell* alias Gascoigne, who was the most important Weymouth merchant of his day. John Russell was also one of the heirs apparent of his maternal grandfather John Herring esquire, Butler’s tenant on the manor of Sutton Poyntz near Weymouth. The marriage, clearly arranged through the Butler nexus, was contracted by April 1449, when Herring’s feoffees settled this manor in reversion on the betrothed couple and their issue. C139/162/21; G. Scott Thomson, Two Cents. Fam. Hist. 90-92, 102-3, 106, 315. The Froxmere arms appear on the monument to John and Alice Russell in Swyre church, Dorset.

On 19 Feb. 1453 Filongly headed the attestors to the parliamentary election in Dorset, even though he held no property in the county in his own right. His influence was almost certainly material in securing the election of another outsider, his nephew Thomas Froxmere, for Weymouth, C219/16/2. and he was to join Froxmere in the Commons by, two weeks later, securing his own return for his native Warwickshire. In June, during the second session, Filongley was elevated to be keeper of the great wardrobe, presumably owing the appointment to his master the earl of Wiltshire. While there is no indication of Froxmere’s activities while the Parliament was in progress, or evidence that he benefited directly from his uncle’s promotion, before too long he assisted Filongley in furthering the earl’s interests in Dorset. Thus, at Easter 1457 uncle and nephew were party to a fine whereby the manor of Bradpole and the hundreds of Redhove and Beaminster came into Earl James’s possession. Dorset Feet of Fines (Dorset Recs. x), 384; CCR, 1454-61, p. 213. That our MP was at least on occasion resident in his adopted county had been indicated too by his appearance at the Dorset elections to the Parliament of 1455, to act as a surety for Richard Snelling*, one of those returned for Weymouth. C219/16/3. But this was perhaps the full extent of his participation in local affairs, and he is not recorded there after the death of the earl of Wiltshire.

Froxmere’s uncle Filongley may have died fighting on the Lancastrian side at Towton, where the earl himself was captured (and subsequently executed). Whether Froxmere was there too we do not know. Fortunately for him, his uncle was not among those attainted in the first Parliament of Edward IV’s reign, and the Filongley lands were allowed to pass to the dead man’s three sisters and their descendants: the prominent Essex landowner Robert Darcy II*, Froxmere himself, and Thomas Fraunceys, who had served under Earl James as clerk of the estreats at the Exchequer. CP40/913, rot. 113; VCH Warws. iv. 71. The inheritance of part of his uncle’s estates led Froxmere to leave Dorset to settle in East Anglia, a move which took place before March 1468, for he was then described, in a papal indult granting him remission of sins, as resident in the diocese of Norwich. CPL, xii. 615. A pardon issued later that same year called him ‘of Droitwich, esquire, alias late of London, gentleman, alias late of Melford, Suffolk’, C67/46, m. 23. and it was probably in the latter county that he made his home. His wife Katherine Cornwallis belonged to a prominent Suffolk family, being the daughter of a former knight of the shire, and her mother was one of the Tyrells, who like Froxmere’s cousins the Darcys ranked among the wealthiest gentry of Essex. Through his links with the Darcys he made the acquaintance of Robert Crane, who in the following year enfeoffed him of his manors in Suffolk. CIPM Hen. VII, ii. 429. Froxmere also became a feoffee of the estates of Thomas Darcy (d.1485), the son and heir of his cousin Robert, and in 1489 both he and Crane were asked by Darcy’s widow to be executors of her will. CIPM Hen. VII, i. 64, 495; Test. Vetusta ed. Nicolas, ii. 394.

Together with Thomas Darcy’s young son and heir and Richard Fraunceys (the son of Froxmere’s cousin Thomas), in 1490 our MP commenced a lawsuit concerning the Leicestershire manor of Barkby and some 20 messuages and 600 acres of land elsewhere in that county. His uncle Filongley had acquired the manor, not without difficulty, in the 1450s; now the coheirs accused a local gentleman, Thomas Pochon, of illegally entering their inheritance in November 1485. CP40/913, rot. 113. A few years later Froxmere was also trying to secure possession of the Cambridgeshire manor of ‘Dunmowe’ in Fulbourn, which Filongley had left to another of his nephews, John Fraunceys, in tail with remainder to our MP. As Fraunceys had died childless, Froxmere claimed title to the manor, but had been barred from entering it by his kinsman’s widow. C1/201/11. Despite these contentious matters, by the time of his death in 1498 Froxmere had successfully taken possession of other Filongley estates. In Warwickshire he held the manors of Old Filongley and ‘Marbrokys’ with more than 1,300 acres of land there and in Alspade and Corley, worth at least £48 p.a., all of which he instructed his feoffees to hold to the use of his widow until she died, and to pay an annuity of ten marks to her and one of her brothers, Robert Cornwallis. The profits from his lands elsewhere were to be paid to his executors for nine years after his death to provide for the education of his three young children, Francis (then aged 14), Elizabeth and Anne, although if the children refused marriages arranged by the executors they were to receive nothing. If his widow died within that nine-year period the feoffees were to hold Froxmere’s estates to the use of his cousin Anne Montgomery (sister of Robert Darcy II and widow of John Montgomery*, who had been executed as long before as 1462). Only after the nine years had elapsed and his widow had died was the property to be entailed on Francis and his issue. The Warwickshire jury at his inquisition post mortem believed that Froxmere had died on 14 Aug. 1498, CIPM Hen. VII, ii. 136. yet the brief will he had made on the previous 21 July had been proved on 10 Aug. and the writ de diem issued on the 12th. Froxmere had requested burial in the church of Stanwey in Essex, before the image of the Virgin Mary, in the empty space next to the wall, and provided 6s. 8d. to repair the damage caused by preparing his tomb. He had no sins on his conscience: his executors were to pay any debts that could be proved, and recompense anyone he had wronged, although, he proudly declared, ‘I knowe ther is none suche’. His widow Katherine and cousin Anne Montgomery were to act as executors. The latter, Robert Crane, and Robert Cornwallis were all present to witness the document. PCC 23 Horne (PROB11/11, f. 190d).

Francis did not long survive his father and died childless at some point after May 1506, leaving his inheritance to be claimed by his two sisters. The elder, Elizabeth, married Edward White, and together with her unmarried sister Anne she petitioned the chancellor seeking possession of the manor of ‘Dunmowe’ and of other property. C1/370/23, 454/7. Elizabeth and Anne, while still single, had been left £10 and 66s. 8d. respectively in the will of their uncle John Cornwallis in Aug. 1506: W.A. Copinger, Suff. Manors, iii. 239-40; PCC 12 Adean (PROB11/15, f. 96v). Our MP had left his substantial holdings in Worcestershire in the hands of his wife’s four brothers, to hold to her use for life; they let them to farm in 1506. The widowed Katherine, evidently much younger than her husband, lived on nearly 40 years after his death, eventually dying at ‘Freneshall’ in Suffolk in 1536. Her heirs were her grandson George White, and her surviving daughter Anne, who had married Edward Cokett of Appleton, Norfolk. C142/59/49; E150/1191/1; VCH Warws. iv. 71. Anne Cokett’s son Anthony Cokett† emulated his gdfa. by sitting in Parl. for a Dorset borough (in 1545): The Commons 1509-58, i. 669.