POPE, Thomas (d.1460), of Rye and Little Horsted, Suss.

Although nothing is known about Thomas Pope’s background, it may be noted that in many respects his career was remarkably similar to that of his contemporary, William Pope*, another royal servant who represented one of the Cinque Ports in Parliament in our period. Both men received annuities from Henry V charged on the principality of Chester, both held offices at Windsor castle, and both were appointed King’s bailiff of one of the Ports. Yet while it is not unlikely that they were related, they have not been found recorded together. Like William, Thomas entered the service of the Lancastrian kings, doing so by October 1418, when he shared with William Menston a grant for life of an annuity of £10, levied from the profits of the royal mills on the Dee. DKR, xxxvii(2), 533. A pardon he took out later in life referred to him as once a ‘garcon’ of Henry V’s chamber, C67/38, m. 3. and at an unknown date he joined the royal entourage in Normandy. While at Rouen with the King in 1420 Pope was awarded the office of bailiff of Rye, and both annuity and office were confirmed after the accession of the infant Henry VI in 1422. The council of the new King also saw fit to grant him the post of a porter at Windsor castle, which he held for four years. CPR, 1422-9, pp. 46, 93, 96, 410; 1436-41, p. 126; E159/205, brevia Mich. rot. 4.

Pope’s appointment as bailiff of Rye brought him to the place he was to represent in five Parliaments. He made his home there, and by marriage to a kinswoman of the late John Salerne he acquired by 1433 some 160 acres of land in Iden, Peasmarsh, Ewerst and Westham in the neighbourhood of Rye, as well as the manor of ‘Salernescourt’ and six acres of land just across the county boundary at Stone in Kent. The couple took up residence in Salerne’s principal tenement in Rye. CP25(1)/292/67/147; Cat. Rye Recs. deed 137/11. There, Pope also held property near the market place, and in 1444 he leased from William Broughton* 18 acres of marshland together with a vacant building with a cellar, which appears to have belonged to the Onewyn family. Cat. Rye Recs. deeds 122/10, 130/1. As a Portsman, he claimed exemption from parliamentary taxation on his chattels outside the liberty, at Hope and Wivelridge, and in the hundred of Colspore. E179/227/94; 228/118; 229/138. He also seems to have dabbled in the trade of the Port, for he sometimes paid maltolts on the sale of wine. Rye mss, 60/2, ff. 15-16.

None of Pope’s predecessors as King’s bailiff in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries had ever been chosen to represent Rye in the Commons, so his five elections to Parliament are an indication of his acceptance by the Portsmen as one of their number. His first Parliament, assembled at Leicester in 1426, famously witnessed confrontations between the chancellor Bishop Beaufort and the King’s uncle Humphrey, duke of Gloucester. The duke was constable of Dover castle and warden of the Ports, but it did not necessarily follow that the barons of the Ports sitting in the Commons lent him their support in his quarrel. Pope himself was the subject of a commission directed to the duke in March the following year, requiring that he and William Forde of Winchelsea be arrested and brought for questioning before the Council in connexion with the disputed ownership of a balinger called La Mecon, which was also to be seized. CPR, 1422-9, p. 403. Yet nothing appears to have been discovered to Pope’s detriment, for he kept his post as bailiff of Rye, and two years later he was granted the office of a royal serjeant-at-arms, with the standard fee of 12d. a day. As an esquire of the King’s household he was naturally expected to accompany Henry VI to France on his coronation expedition in 1430, duly receiving wages for himself and the three archers he recruited for the expeditionary force. CPR, 1429-36, p. 1; DKR, xlviii. 268-9; E403/693, m. 15, 695, m. 6. It looks as if he remained overseas with the King until the latter and his entourage sailed home in 1432. He took the musters of troops there in the summer of 1431: E403/698, m. 7. Wages of war were still owing to him in 1445: E404/62/9.

In the following year Pope was again returned to Parliament, and shortly after the close of the first session he was appointed collector of customs and subsidies along the Sussex coast. The appointment marked the beginning of an involvement in the collection of such revenues in Chichester and Sandwich that lasted more than 14 years, and the start of a close association with Godard Pulham* of Winchelsea, who was similarly engaged. Besides acting together in a public capacity, the two men were partners in other more private affairs. In 1436 they provided guarantees in 100 marks that John Cook of Colchester would ship a consignment of wool he had bought in Sandwich to his home port and not to foreign parts, and on another occasion they together brought a suit in the common pleas against two seamen from Dartmouth. CPR, 1429-36, p. 493; CP40/715, rot. 488d. They were kept busy with all manner of tasks for the Crown, including providing valuations of confiscated goods, organizing shipping for Sir John Cressy* and Walter Cressoner and their retinues to cross the Channel, supplying the fortress of Le Crotoy with victuals and arms, paying mariners and crews conscripted for vessels assigned to naval defence, and transferring money for the arming and victualling of the balingers Jacquet and Jhesu. The passage to France of the forces of the duke of York and the earls of Warwick and Huntingdon, and to Calais of the dukes of Gloucester and Norfolk also came under Pope’s remit. E159/210, recorda Hil. rot. 7; E403/719, m. 9; 721, m. 8; 723, m. 13; 725, mm. 2, 3; 725, mm. 3, 4, 18; 727, m. 13; 729, mm. 10, 14; 734, mm. 16-17, 21; E404/51/360. Although a collector of customs at Sandwich in 1439, his duties clearly continued to extend round the coast to Sussex, for he was called ‘customer of Winchelsea’ in the issue rolls of the Exchequer, E403/734, mm. 17, 21. and as such he was responsible for making payments for the voyages of Cardinal Beaufort and other lords sailing to and from Calais to treat with the King’s French adversaries. E403/736, mm. 8, 12.

For the most part Pope was fully preoccupied with such tasks on the south coast, so it is surprising to find him named on a body appointed in March 1437 to take over the rule of Alcester abbey in Warwickshire for the next ten years. The abbey had long been in dire financial straits owing to the maladministration of the previous two abbots, and this body of custodians took over from another appointed in 1431. Both were headed by the duke of Gloucester, to whom it seems likely that Pope owed his appointment. Even so, there are no clear signs that, like his putative kinsman William Pope, he was one of the duke’s retainers. CPR, 1429-36, p. 186; 1436-41, p. 20. In the same month Pope’s continued role as a serjeant-at-arms was confirmed, although henceforth his wages were to be paid from the issues of Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire instead of directly by the Exchequer, and in December the King, who having attained his majority was now able to make grants on a more permanent basis, assigned him the post for life. Shortly afterwards Pope’s bailiffship at Rye was also confirmed, with the addition of a grant of the ‘ankerage’ and ‘bulgage’ there. He was to continue receiving fees and livery as an esquire of the Household well into the 1450s. CPR, 1436-41, pp. 19, 126, 136; E101/409/9, 11, 16; 410/1, 3, 6, 9.

In the years before his next election to Parliament (in 1445), Pope was active in the affairs of Rye itself. As one of the town’s delegates to seven meetings of the Brodhull at New Romney, while there he was assigned tasks on behalf of the Cinque Ports generally. Thus, in July 1437 he was charged with suing to the Crown for a general pardon for the Ports, and in December 1438 he was sent with Richard Clitheroe* and Godard Pulham to seek Gloucester’s good lordship regarding the ‘recontinuance and observance’ of their liberties. The autumn of 1440 saw him serving as one of the four bailiffs of the Ports officiating at the herring fair at Great Yarmouth. In August 1444 he was elected mayor of Rye for the first of three consecutive terms, and thus, very unusually, served concurrently as both mayor and King’s bailiff. In his capacity as mayor he attended seven more Brodhulls. White and Black Bks. 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 17-23. When returned to the Parliaments of 1445 and 1447, Pope was not only holding both these local offices, he was also controller of customs at Chichester, and a royal serjeant-at-arms with access to those in high places. The death of the duke of Gloucester while being held a prisoner during the Parliament at Bury St. Edmunds in 1447 may have triggered the changes in Pope’s career which occurred subsequently, as power in the south-east and the Cinque Ports shifted decisively to James Fiennes*, elevated as Lord Saye and Sele and granted the late duke’s principal offices. Pope ceased to be employed in the customs service, and his post as serjeant-at-arms was granted in reversion to a yeoman of the pitcher-house. Nevertheless, he successfully petitioned for exemption from the Acts of Resumption of 1450 and 1455 with respect to royal grants made to him for life. CPR, 1446-52, p. 62; PROME, xii. 143, 427.

After the Parliament of 1447 Pope continued to represent Rye at Brodhulls, attending six more between then and July 1458, and he served as a jurat in his home town for three years. White and Black Bks. 32, 36-39. On one occasion he rode to East Grinstead with the mayor, Robert Onewyn I*, and a fellow jurat, ‘on the matter of Michelham’, the three men taking 10s. each for their expenses, and on another he and Onewyn went to Winchelsea for talks with the lieutenant warden and to engross bonds between Rye and its member-port of Tenterden. Rye mss, 60/2, ff. 32, 36v. In the 1450s he was also dealing with personal matters. By some unexplained means he and his wife acquired an interest in the manor of Leasam near Rye (which had been held by Adam Levelord* from 1447 until his death some seven years later), but in 1455 they transferred it to feoffees for settlement on an earlier owner, John Chitecroft*. CP25(1)/241/91/1; VCH Suss. ix. 56. The same year Pope received from Laurence Dobylle of Rye a ‘gift’ of all his goods and chattels. Other local men, such as Onewyn and the lawyer Thomas Pitlesden of Tenterden asked him to be a feoffee of their property, but in April 1459 he relinquished possession of some marshland in Rye of which Onewyn had enfeoffed him many years before. Cat. Rye Recs. deeds, 122/13; 136/195; CCR, 1454-61, p. 388.

By then Pope may have moved away from Rye, for he was described in a pardon of 3 Feb. 1458 as ‘of Little Horsted, Sussex, senior, esquire, formerly of Rye’. C67/42, m. 38; E159/234, brevia Hil. rot. 9d. He seems also to have delegated his duties as bailiff to others, for Babylon Grantford* was acting as bailiff in April 1459, even though no new letters patent regarding the office were to be enrolled before the summer of 1461, after Edward IV had taken the throne. By the latter date Pope had died. The returns for the Cinque Ports had named him as a baron for Rye at the Parliament summoned to meet at Westminster on 7 Oct. 1460, but ten days after the Commons assembled John Convers* was granted the post of serjeant-at-arms left vacant on account of his death. CPR, 1452-61, p. 626. There is no indication in the financial accounts of Rye that the Port sent anyone to take his place in the Commons. Pope left a son, his namesake, who, possibly before the MP’s death, married Joan, one of the daughters of the Sussex landowner John Weston II* of Hindhall in Buxted. The couple’s son, John Pope, was to become the coheir of the Weston estates in 1485, on the childless death of his uncle William Weston, and was later to make a successful recovery of the manor of Leasam, once held by his grandparents. C67/53, m. 8; CIPM Hen. VII, i. 162; VCH Suss. ix. 56, 155.