PETY, Thomas

More may be added to the earlier biography. The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 64.

Pety is certainly to be identified with the ‘Petyt’ of Lincoln’s Inn. The combined Westmorland and Appleby indenture notes that it was delivered to the clerk of Parliament by ‘Thomas Pety of Lincoln’s Inn in Holborn’, who had been elected for Appleby. C219/12/3. In the late 1420s this lawyer was the most active of the attorneys of Cumberland and Westmorland: in Michaelmas term 1428, for example, he numbered among his clients Thomas, Lord Dacre, William Thornburgh*, William Bewley† and at least six others. CP40/671, rots. 38, 130d, 355, 388. He was also a frequent litigant on his own account, generally in pursuit of small debts (presumably representing unpaid legal fees), but sometimes in defence of what can only have been modest property interests. In 1426 he secured a writ of outlawry against a husbandman for depasturing his grass at Warcop, a few miles outside Appleby, and two years later he was awarded the same writs against others for a similar offence. CP40/661, rots. 79, 410d. These lands were his principal holding; at least if one may draw an inference from his description as ‘of Warcop, gentleman’, when, in 1432, he offered pledge for the payment of a fine before the justices of gaol delivery at Appleby. JUST3/70/7.

On 29 Sept. 1435 Pety sat at Appleby on an influential jury, headed by Sir Richard Musgrave*, charged with inquiring into the estates of Elizabeth (d.1424), widow of Thomas, Lord Clifford, but there is no evidence that he had any particular connexion with the Cliffords. His date of death is unknown, but it is possible that he was alive as late as the 1450s. In 1450 either he or a namesake, described as a gentleman of Sandford, near Warcop, was sued for a debt of £8 by George Neville, Lord Latimer; and in the autumn of 1454 a Thomas Pety served on a jury before the Westmorland justices of gaol delivery. CIPM, xxiv. 393; JUST3/70/24. If, however, the MP was alive so late, his legal practice had greatly diminished after the late 1420s.