GYNNOUR, Thomas, of West Firle, Suss.

Thomas was the son of a namesake who served the archbishop of Canterbury as bailiff of the liberty of South Malling in Sussex in the mid 1420s, and was described as a ‘franklin’ in 1431, when sued in the court of common pleas by John Parker I* of Hastings. KB27/656, rot. 17; 661, rot. 85; CP40/680, rot. 233. By then the Gynnors were established at West Firle, situated to the south-east of Lewes, and the MP also farmed the fishery of Southerham, to the north of the town. His landed holdings in this part of the county were largely inherited through his paternal grandmother Alice Osberne, but in the 1430s and 1440s he relinquished his title to various properties in West Firle and Compton, sometimes exchanging them for others in the possession of his near neighbour, the prominent Lincoln’s Inn lawyer Bartholomew Bolney*. E. Suss. RO, Gage of Firle mss, SAS/G8/38-41; Bolney Bk. 26, 27, 39, 45-48. Although Gynnour himself joined the Middle Temple, it may be that Bolney helped him to forward his career as an attorney in the King’s bench (where he took briefs at least from 1439), and in Trinity term 1442 they were named together (both called ‘of Firle, gentleman’), in a plea they brought against a husbandman from Seaford. Able lawyers were often employed by sheriffs to carry out administrative tasks on their behalf, and Gynnour himself found regular employment as under sheriff of Surrey and Sussex to at least four of the sheriffs of the period, starting in 1443 with nomination by Archbishop Stafford’s retainer, John Basket*. He was also known to William Belknap, appointed sheriff in November 1446, for he appeared as his attorney in the King’s bench towards the end of that same Michaelmas term. KB27/715, rot. 3; 719, rot. 50; 725, fines rot.; 742, att. rot. 1d. It is, therefore, of interest that Belknap was the person responsible for making the electoral returns for Sussex to the Parliament summoned to Bury St. Edmunds on the following 10 Feb., to which Gynnour was elected as a representative for the borough of Midhurst. Indeed, a personal connexion with the sheriff may well have been significant in this election, for Gynnour is not known to have held any property in west Sussex, where Midhurst is situated, or to have had any dealings with its burgesses.

It is a measure of Gynnour’s standing in Sussex, or else of his position on the sheriff’s staff, that on 9 Oct. 1449 he attested the shire election held at Chichester. C219/15/7. Nine months later he was among those who sued out pardons in the aftermath of Cade’s revolt, but this was almost certainly a precautionary measure on his part, and one that was taken by a number of the lesser gentry of the shire, including his associate Bolney. In Gynnour’s case the pardon may have served a specific purpose, for in the previous year he had been attached in the King’s bench to answer one Robert Sawyer for the theft of 220 head of livestock at Wootton, and judgement in this suit had yet to be delivered. Furthermore, in Michaelmas term 1450 the King’s attorney-general brought an action against him in the common pleas for breaking into crown property at Guildford. Unfortunately, the date of the alleged illegal entry is not given in the record, so it is not known whether it coincided with the serious disturbances of the summer months. CPR, 1446-52, p.340; KB27/752, rot. 64d; CP40/759, rot. 425.

That same autumn Gynnour was once again chosen as an MP, this time for the borough of New Shoreham, which was somewhat closer to his home. On this occasion the sheriff making the return was John Penycoke*, one of the esquires for the King’s body, and he too made use of Gynnour’s services. In February 1453 Penycoke was to authorize our MP to receive custody on his behalf of John Lye†, a royal ward, and in the following Michaelmas term he brought a plea in King’s bench against one William Edward for assaulting and wounding his ‘servant’ Gynnour in the London parish of St. Mary Le Strand so that the injured man was unable to do his business, collecting debts, for more than four months. CCR, 1447-54, p.416; CAD, vi. C5960; KB27/770, rot. 70d. Meanwhile, Gynnour himself had again been attached in the King’s bench, this time to answer pleas brought by the abbot of Hyde abbey in Winchester that in the early months of 1449 he and a servant had broken into the abbey’s close at ‘Tetlescombe’, Sussex, assaulted the tenants and taken 20 cattle. As before, the defendant used his experience of the court’s procedures to gain repeated adjournments. KB27/763, rot. 9; 768, rot. 63. Gynnour served as under sheriff for at least three more terms. He clearly valued the position: promising in an obsequious letter he sent to Thomas Basset*, the sheriff of 1457-8, to be ‘your man in eternam et ultra’. SC1/64/39. Yet the way he carried out his duties might lead to difficulties in the law courts. In late 1457 when John Bekwith* (who had sat with him in the Commons of 1450) failed to pay the sum he owed one Stephen Reigate, a London shipwright, under a statute staple, a writ was sent to Gynnour as under sheriff of Sussex to pursue him. Gynnour duly gave the plaintiff a warrant for Bekwith’s arrest in that county, only for Reigate to alter it on the ‘bak syde’ to validate Bekwith’s seizure in Surrey, whereas that county had not been specified on the writ. Gynnour, attempting to arbitrate between the parties, made an award which secured Bekwith’s release, but by virtue of the alterations made to the writ found himself subject to processes in the Exchequer court which awarded Reigate £28 against him. He appealed to the chancellor for redress. C1/29/478. In 1457-8 he apparently shared his duties with Thomas Cager*, who acted for the sheriff in Surr.: KB9/998/43d.

Gynnour must have often been resident close to the royal courts at Westminster, and in January 1457 he had been the recipient of a gift of goods and chattels made by a London goldsmith. This was in association with John Faukes, the master in Chancery and clerk of the Parliaments, but there is no evidence of a close relationship between them. CCR, 1454-61, p.196. By then he had come to the attention of Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, and his countess Eleanor, the Poynings heiress, who in 1457 named him and Bolney the feoffees of Eleanor’s substantial inheritance in Sussex and elsewhere. In their capacity as feoffees Gynnour and his fellows were subject to litigation; in October 1458 they thought it wise to sue for royal pardons. Suff. RO (Bury St. Edmunds), Hengrave mss, 449/2/651; C67/42, m. 4. Gynnour’s return to the Coventry Parliament of November 1459 for the Surrey borough of Bletchingley was sealed by Thomas Tresham*, the sheriff whom he had been assisting as under sheriff for the past official year. C219/16/5. When the Commons met, Tresham, himself elected for Northamptonshire, was chosen as their Speaker, and thus guided those assembled through the process of the attainder of the duke of York and his followers, recently put to flight at Ludford Bridge. Gynnour’s part in these momentous events is not recorded. It is possible that his skills as a lawyer had brought him to the attention of Humphrey, duke of Buckingham, the lord of the borough he represented, or to that of the duke’s estate staff, but seems more likely that his employment by Tresham, and, as a feoffee, by the earl of Northumberland, were more decisive factors in securing his election. Even so, there is little to indicate where Gynnour stood in the civil conflicts of 1459-61, save that when the Yorkists were in power in the autumn of 1460 (after their victory at Northampton) he would appear to have been in financial difficulties, to judge by the number of obligations he entered at that time. Following the earl of Northumberland’s death at Towton in March 1461 he continued to serve Eleanor, the widowed countess, as a trustee of the estates which she had inherited from her grandfather Lord Poynings, but effectively relinquished this role in April 1463 so that a new body might assist Thomas Hoo II* to pay off the enormous debts left by the dowager’s late husband. Collectanea Topographia et Genealogica ed. Nichols, iii. 266-70; Hengrave mss, 449/2/656. Meanwhile, he was again under sheriff in 1461-2, and by 1463 he had been engaged as steward of the manor of Heighton-St.-Clere, held by the Gage family. Suss. N. and Q. i. 253; Suss. IPM (Suss. Rec. Soc. xiv), 97.

Yet all was not well for Gynnour, as a spate of lawsuits in the early years of Edward IV’s reign makes clear. CP40/808, rot. 413; 809, rot. 391; 815, rots. 118d, 410. William Brocas, the former master of buckhounds to Henry VI, alleged in the common pleas early in 1463 that Gynnour had entered a bond in £14 to him at Beaurepaire in Hampshire on 28 Nov. 1460, but had failed to pay; CP40/807, rot. 349d. and his old dispute with Stephen Reigate now revived. In the summer of 1462 Reigate and an associate, John Beckingham, stated in the common pleas that Gynnour had failed to honour a bond for £40 made with them on 21 Oct. 1460. Gynnour successfully defended himself by producing records to show that Beckingham was an outlaw. But this was not the end of the matter. In Michaelmas term 1463 Reigate and Beckingham took their suit (now for £41) to the court of the Exchequer, using Reigate’s privileged position as a ‘servant’ of the treasurer, Edmund, Lord Grey of Ruthin. The defendant concealed himself in the palace of Westminster, but the official keeper of the palace, Elizabeth Venour, brought him to the Exchequer on 4 Nov. before conducting him to the Fleet prison. Five days later he was released on bail, and on 11 Nov. he acknowledged that the action was valid. The barons awarded for the plaintiffs, with damages of £2. Yet even then Gynnour failed to pay up. In Easter term 1465 Reigate and Beckingham sued the sheriffs of London for their failure to act on warrants for his arrest; the coroner was told to summon a jury from the parish of St. Bride’s in Fleet Street, presumable where Gynnour was dwelling. CP40/805, rot. 395; E13/149, rots. 24d, 34d; 151, rot. 17. A third bond which Gynnour had entered in November 1460, this time for £3 and payable to Henry Marbyll, had a better outcome for the plaintiff, who sued him in the Exchequer court in November 1463 (when he was in the Fleet), successfully gaining judgement in February following, and declaring his satisfaction in May 1465. E13/149, rot. 38.

Emerging from these set-backs, in the mid 1460s Gynnour was engaged by the Sussex landowner Nicholas Morley*of Glynde to conduct his business in Hertfordshire and with the dean and canons of St. George’s chapel, Windsor, E. Suss. RO, Glynde Place archs. GLY/965. and was appointed to a commission of inquiry in August 1473 and as coroner in his home county some eight years later. He was still a member of the Middle Temple in 1479-80. J.H. Baker, Men of Ct. (Selden Soc. supp. ser. xviii), i. 119. The date of the MP’s death is not known. He may have left a daughter as his heiress, for a later visitation has it that Thomas Seeles alias Gynnour, who was said to have been granted arms by Clarenceux herald in Henry VI’s reign, was succeeded by an only child, the wife of John Howell, Vis. Kent (Harl. Soc. xlii), 124. yet Gynnours or Joynours continued to live in Sussex until well into the sixteenth century. Suss. Wills (Suss. Rec. Soc. xlii), 54.