HARYNGTON, Thomas II, of Layton, Lancs.

This Thomas Haryngton was a younger son of a younger son of the great Lancashire family of Haryngton. His career was an obscure one and he owed his elections to Parliament purely to his family connexions. That career is relatively easy to disentangle from that of his much more important first cousin, Thomas Haryngton I*: our MP is generally distinguished with the addition of ‘son of Sir James Haryngton’. In one context, however, the distinction cannot be so easily made. The more important man is known to have fought in France. In a petition to the Crown, he claimed to have been present at the sieges of Calais in 1436 and Le Crotoy in 1437 and to have been part of the expedition that escorted Margaret of Anjou to England, but the lack of any reference to earlier military service raises the possibility that the namesake who appears in the military record between 1429 and 1433 was Thomas II. DL37/19/27. In July 1429 a Thomas Haryngton was serving under Sir John Fastolf at Pontoise; on the following 18 Feb. he indented to serve with three archers on the King’s coronation expedition; in the spring and summer of 1431 he was at the siege of Louviers under Robert, Lord Willoughby of Eresby; and he then served, either intermittently or continuously, in the garrison at Evreux from the autumn of 1431 to early in 1433. Archives Nationales, Paris, K63/7/6; 19/1; Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, Fr. 25769/588, 597, 600, 618; 25770/639, 732, 754; E404/46/201; DKR, xlviii. 272. These references may describe more than one military career, but the strong probability is that at least some of them relate to our MP. His elder brother, Sir Richard, was captain of Evreux in the early 1430s, and it was natural that he should have been in his retinue there. Further, it is unlikely that the more important Thomas served at Evreux. On 7 Apr. 1432 he was elected to represent Lancashire in the Parliament that assembled on 12 May; yet, on 21 Apr., a Thomas Haryngton was present in the garrison. Lancs. Knights of the Shire (Chetham Soc. xcvi), 217; Archives Nationales, K63/19/1. The most likely conclusion is that our MP had an intense military career between 1429 and 1433. One later military reference is also probably to be attributed to him. On 18 Dec. 1436 a Thomas Haryngton was serving in the garrison at Verneuil under William, Lord Fauconberg, younger brother of Richard Neville, earl of Salisbury. Since the more important Thomas entered into a contract for the marriage of his daughter on 14 Dec. and was then elected to represent Lancashire in Parliament on 24 Dec., the probability is that it was Thomas II who was then at Verneuil. Evreux, Archives Départementales de Eure, sous-série II F 4069; Lancs. RO, Parker fam. of Browsholme mss, DD B 12/1; Lancs. Knights of the Shire, 219-20. This, however, seems to have marked the end of his military career.

Little more is known of Haryngton until his election to Parliament in 1447. The most interesting reference to him occurs in the autumn of 1440 when, for some now unknown reason, he was in trouble with the Crown. On Friday 14 Oct. he was required to find sureties in as much as 2,000 marks for his appearance before the King and council on the following Tuesday; and then to find new sureties in £1,000 for two further appearances there on 31 Oct. and 4 Nov. For his sureties he looked to his kinship network: his first cousins, Richard Halsall*, John Tunstall*, John Pennington* and David Pennington, were among those ready to endanger themselves financially. The identity of these sureties also suggests that, like his more important namesake, he had some connexion with the earl of Salisbury. Tunstall was a servant of the earl as was another of the sureties, Geoffrey Middleton, resident at the Neville stronghold of Middleham. Together with the high sums he was called upon to pledge, this implies that Haryngton was not a negligible figure. So too does the royal grant made to him on 5 Mar. 1442 of the keeping of the manor of Layton (near Blackpool) to hold during the minority of his cousin, (Sir) John Boteler*. CCR, 1435-41, pp. 444, 449; DKR, xl. 536.

Haryngton’s own landholdings are poorly documented. He is, however, known to have acquired a small estate in the same locality as Layton. On 24 Aug. 1446, by a deed dated at nearby Poulton-le-Fylde, he conveyed to Richard Broune, the vicar there, and a chaplain, another Broune, several small parcels of land in Poulton, Bretherton and Much Hoole which he had by the feoffment of Nicholas Boteler*, Richard Hole and Lawrence Caterall; five days later these feoffees settled the property on him and his wife Emma. The probability is that he was the purchaser. Lancs. RO, Fitzherbert-Brokholes of Claughton mss, DDFz 15, 16. The lands in Poulton had been quitclaimed to him by Boteler in Mar. 1440: DDFz 14. He may also have had his own purchased holdings at Layton. In about 1429, when he sat on a local jury at Lancaster, he had been described as resident there. Yet, for all this there can be no doubt that he was a man of very modest means. In 1451 he was assessed on an income of only £6 p.a., and although this was no doubt a conservative assessment there can be little doubt that he was the poorest man to represent Lancashire in Henry VI’s reign. Add. Ch. 53085; PL14/155/7/119.

Haryngton’s poverty makes very surprising his election to represent the county in two successive Parliaments in the late 1440s. Indeed, it is so surprising that it has been assumed that this MP was his more important namesake, who had already sat for the county in three assemblies. Lancs. Knights of the Shire, 179, 181; HP Biogs. ed. Wedgwood and Holt, 426-7. This assumption is undoubtedly wrong. In the Lancashire returns to the Parliaments of both 1447 and 1449 (Feb.) Haryngton is described as ‘notabilis armiger’; his namesake had been knighted in May 1445. The compiler of the return can hardly have been unaware of the knighting of one of the county’s most important men, and it is likely that he took the trouble to describe the MP as an esquire with the deliberate intention of distinguishing him from the knight. The first of these elections took place at Lancaster on 6 Feb. 1447, only four days before Parliament was due to assemble at distant Bury St. Edmunds, and a reluctance to travel at such short notice to an assembly with a controversial agenda may have deterred the knight from a candidature that would undoubtedly have been successful. Haryngton’s second election on 20 Jan. 1449 came about in more routine circumstances, but again it is likely that he was returned less in his own right than as a representative of his family. C219/15/4, 6.

In between these two assemblies Haryngton appears more regularly in the records that he had previously done. On 16 Aug. 1447 he attended the assize session at Lancaster to pursue several writs of debt, including one for as much as 100 marks, against Nicholas Boteler’s son, John, perhaps in connexion with his earlier property purchase. At the next assizes on 4 Mar. 1448 he joined Sir Thomas Haryngton in offering surety that Sir Nicholas Longford would keep the peace to Sir Edmund Trafford, and gave mainprise in company with Longford for William Bradshagh, a kinsman of his sister-in-law. PL15/10, rots. 6, 8, 9, 14, 29d; 11, rot. 33. This did not, however, prove to be the beginning of a period of prominence. His elder brother’s return home, after the loss of Normandy in 1450, probably diminished his standing. Only three further references have been found to him: he attested the Lancashire elections of 23 Nov. 1450, when Sir Richard was elected, and 30 June 1455; and on 4 June 1458 he sued out a general pardon. Lancs. Knights of the Shire, 224-5; C67/42, m. 20. By this date he can no longer have been a young man, for as early as 1415 he had been admitted, along with his father and elder brother, to the merchant guild of Preston, near the family home at Fishwick. It may be that he died in the late 1450s. Rolls of Burgesses of Preston (Lancs. and Cheshire Rec. Soc. ix), 10-11.

There is no evidence to identify Haryngton’s wife beyond her Christian name. He did, however, leave issue by her. The property he purchased in Poulton and its neighbourhood was alienated in the mid 1520s by another Thomas Haryngton, then resident at Newington in Kent. Fitzherbert-Brokholes of Claughton mss, DDFz 23, 25-29, 31-33.