POUND, Thomas (d.1476), of London and Drayton, Hants.

That Pound was a Yorkshireman by birth is confirmed by the description ‘of Yorkshire’ accorded him in a pardon he took out in 1437, and the fact that papal letters for indulgences which he purchased in 1442 called him, ‘of the town of Hull, nobleman, donzel of the diocese of York’, even though by then he had long been resident in the city of London. C67/38, m. 3; CPL, ix. 316, 317. A later pardon, of 1445, also called him ‘of Yorks.’: C67/39, m. 21. It is very likely that he was a younger son of William Pound, the Hull merchant who died in about 1418 leaving as his heir his eldest son, Walter. The latter made William’s widow a grant of ten marks p.a. from property in Hull in 1423, and this may have been the identical rent that was subsequently transferred to Thomas in July 1447. Walter’s brother, Robert Pound, who by then was firmly established as a member of the Grocers’ Company in London, was a party to the latter transaction. He had earlier conveyed his goods and chattels to Thomas, in 1439 and 1441, so their fraternal relationship is all but confirmed. Cal. Hull Deeds ed. Stanewell, D262-3, 360, 427, 457; CCR, 1441-7, p. 40; Cal. P. and M. London, 1437-57, p. 166.

Like Robert, Thomas made his career in London, but primarily as an official at the Exchequer rather than by trade. As ‘of the receit’ he was given free admission to the fraternity founded by the Taylors’ Company, in 1444-5: Guildhall Lib. London, Merchant Taylors’ Co. accts. 34048/1, f. 388v. The post of teller at the receipt of the Exchequer, to which he was appointed in 1433 and occupied for over 35 years, was one of great responsibility. There were four tellers at any one time. On Pound’s arrival in the department they were headed by the more senior Robert Whitgreve* and William Baron*, while Richard Alrede was appointed at the same time as him, and John Poutrell succeeded Alrede in 1437. With all of them he established a close working relationship as their duties involved them in the complexities of royal finance throughout its successive crises of the period. In the 1430s an important concern was the adequate funding of English garrisons overseas. In the winter of 1434-5 the Exchequer was unable to find the instalment of 5,000 marks due to the chancellor of France serving under the Regent, the duke of Bedford, for those manning the fortresses in northern France. In February 1435 the treasurer, Ralph, Lord Cromwell, proposed a way of raising extra revenue. This was to purchase and export on the King’s behalf 222 sarplers of wool on which only half the duty would be paid. The purchase was to be made with 5,000 marks assigned on the revenues of the duchy of Lancaster, and on 30 Mar. Pound and two others including the experienced financier Thomas Brown II* had licence to export and sell the sarplers at the King’s venture. Similarly, in July 1437 Pound, specifically described as a clerk of the receipt, received permission to ship 40 sarplers of wool from Boston to Bishop’s Lynn without payment of duties, and this, too, probably related to public affairs rather than his own private ones. CPR, 1429-36, p. 454; 1436-41, p. 75; G.L. Harriss, Cardinal Beaufort, 243. Meanwhile, the death of Bedford in September 1435, and the perfidy of the duke of Burgundy exacerbated the Exchequer’s recurrant problem of financing the garrisons at Calais, which now faced a new and serious threat. Since 1421 the treasurer of Calais had been Bedford’s retainer Richard Buckland*, whom the duke had named among his executors. Buckland was dismissed in February 1436, but quickly enlisted Pound to assist him in his difficult dealings with the Exchquer. In April Pound stood surety for Buckland, and when the latter made his will four months later he nominated him among his eight executors, each of whom were to receive £10 for their trouble. Pound, one of those responsible for the adminstration of the will, undoubtedly earned the bequest, for the executors had to render a final account at the Exchequer for Buckland’s offices at Calais, and were subjected to ‘various imaginations, procurements and unreasonable and unlawful informations being objected to them in divers courts by certain creditors of the testator to prevent them recovering money due’. In July 1439 they obtained a discharge so far as concerned anything pertaining from the deceased man to the Crown, but Buckland’s estate was still owed £1,130 at the Exchequer six years later. The executors also had to defend themselves in a complicated action in the admiral’s court brought by a Genoese merchant, Benedetto Lombardi. They appealed against a sentence condemning them to restore to Lombardi goods to the value of £188, and in October 1439 fresh commissions were set up to hear an appeal against the reversal of the original judgement given in their favour. Pound was still pursuing Buckland’s debtors as late as 1456. He and his fellows had sued in the mayor’s court in London an original bill of debt for £1,073 16s. against Sir John Fastolf as sole surviving executor of the late duke of Bedford (who had undertaken to satisfy Buckland for the same a year before his death), and also demanded £200 as damages for non-payment. However, all they received was a gold reliquary cross, valued at 510 marks, after Fastolf had defaulted four times. CFR, xvi. 275; Fifty Earliest English Wills (EETS, lxxviii), 107-8; CPR, 1436-41, pp. 290, 293-4, 337, 341; 1441-6, p. 212; Cal. P. and M. London, 1437-57, pp. 155, 181; A.J. Stratford, ‘John, duke of Bedford’ (London Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1991), ii. 611.

The very many payments to Pound recorded in the issue rolls, usually of £10 or sometimes twice that amount, to reward him for carrying out the instructions of the treasurer, taking messages from him to the King or to Cardinal Beaufort, and working during vacations and sittings of the Exchequer court, all attest to his industry. The most important part of his role as a teller involved conveying large amounts of coinage to where it was needed. Accordingly, Pound frequently figured on commissions to hold musters of troops prior to their embarkation at south-coast ports, taking responsibility for making payments in accordance with the indentures between the King and the war-captains. In 1434 he and Alrede were sent with £2,750 in cash to Berhamdown in Kent to muster Lord Talbot’s army and pay the initial instalments of the soldiers’ wages, and they took £1,053 to Canterbury and Dover for other forces, while Pound deployed another £1,000 elsewhere. Early in 1436 he and Alrede rode to Winchelsea with 1,000 marks to pay the company recruited by Edmund Beaufort, count of Mortain, and in August they supplied funds for the duke of Gloucester’s retinue. E403/712, m. 12; 715, mm. 13, 16; 717, m. 8; 721, mm. 5, 6; 723, mm. 2, 14. In July 1437 Pound was paid £26 13s. 4d. to cover his own wages (at the rate of 5s. a day for 23 days) in safeguarding £4,486 dispatched from London to Portsmouth to pay the earl of Warwick’s army together with an additional £501 entrusted to him en route by Cardinal Beaufort at Winchester. Then, on 5 May 1438 he was instructed not only to take the musters at Poole of the forces Edmund Beaufort, now earl of Dorset, was to command in Normandy, but also to cross the Channel with them to supervise further musters on their disembarkation at Cherbourg. The summer of 1439 saw him again at Winchelsea guarding £3,480 for Sir Richard Wydeville’s retinue.

Officials at the Exchequer had a vital role to play in the collection for the Crown of the wool customs and subsidies, and Pound’s successive appointments as a collector – initially at Calais and then in Southampton and London – ensured his active involvement in the supervision of this important source of royal revenue with few interruptions for more than 35 years. Significantly, in 1443-4 the entire process of collection of the customs and subsidies in London was in the hands of three of the four tellers of the receipt: Pound, Poutrell and, as controller, Baron. Pound’s nomination as customer in London on 26 June 1443 was made by Cardinal Beaufort at a time when he was busy with preparations for the expedition of the cardinal’s nephew, John, duke of Somerset; indeed, on the same day the Council sent him and a fellow teller, Robert Whitgreve, a letter instructing them to check carefully when the duke’s army was mustered that he had not been overpaid for men indented for but not present, and to pay any sums saved by their investigation to another force, one going to Guyenne. On 13 July the treasurer was told to hand over to the two tellers the £1,000 borrowed from the cardinal for the supply of ships to transport the army. Two years later, on 20 Apr. 1445, the longest-serving tellers – Whitgreve, Baron and Pound – were each awarded an annuity of £10 for life, in consideration of their good service. Unlike Whitgreve and Baron, however, Pounde was not granted his tellership for life, as they were the following November. E403/727, m. 12; 731, m. 6; 734, m. 11; 749, mm. 12, 20; CPR, 1436-41, pp. 197, 199; 1441-6, pp. 335, 415; CFR, xvii. 237; PPC, v. 292, 307.

Together with Richard Alrede, his fellow teller, Pound had provided mainprise for the Household official John Norris* in 1436, and he later acted as a feoffee on Alrede’s behalf of the manor of Newhall in Essex. A more unexpected connexion was one formed with John Tailboys*, the Lincolnshire esquire, for whom he stood surety in 1441 when he was granted the marriage of a royal ward. CFR, xvi. 303; CAD, iv. A6165, 1996, 7909; v. A13118; CPR, 1441-6, p. 2. Yet it was neither in Essex nor Lincolnshire that Pound chose to invest in land – rather, he decided to focus on Hampshire. He became known in the county through his post as customer in Southampton, which frequently required his presence in the port, his duties as a commissioner to take musters there and at Portsmouth, and his official, perhaps even personal, links with Cardinal Beaufort (from whom he took custody at Winchester of the loans of £6,000 and £1,000 Beaufort made to the Crown in the spring of 1443 and summer of 1445, respectively). E403/734, m. 4; 736, m. 11; 740, m. 15; 741, m. 7; 745, m. 3; 747, m. 15; 757, m. 7. Pound had also made the acquaintance of the local lawyer Richard Holt*, for whom he acted as a feoffee. Add. Ch. 17434. He continued to be mainly resident in London, certainly until the late 1440s, but after the death of Philip Pagan in 1442 he acquired (probably by purchase) Pagan’s manor of Drayton in Farlington, in the hundred of Portsdown, and in January 1447 this was settled on him and his wife Mercy in jointure, along with lands in Cosham and Bere by Southwick. VCH Hants, iii. 150; CPR, 1446-52, p. 31. The feoffees who assisted him in these transactions included the treasurer Cromwell and Richard Quatermayns*, Pound’s co-executor for Buckland. It seems very likely that Mercy was a kinswoman, perhaps even the natural daughter, of Richard Dallingridge, by whom Pound had been enfeoffed of estates in Sussex, for soon afterwards Dallingridge settled on the couple the reversion of his manors of Wilting and Hollington in the event of his death without legitimate issue, and he also made a more immediate transfer to them of the manor of Lymbourne in Havant, worth 45 marks a year, apparently to pay off a debt to Pound of 200 marks. CCR, 1441-7, p. 462; C140/33/48; Suss. Feet of Fines (Suss. Rec. Soc. xxiii), 3087; C1/66/44.

Significantly, it was Dallingridge who as sheriff of Hampshire conducted the election at Winchester on 12 Oct. 1450 which resulted in Pound’s return as a knight of the shire, while members of the prominent gentry family of Uvedale, with whom he had become acquainted, attested the electoral indenture. C219/16/1. Yet there can be little doubt that he was elected principally because of his office at the Exchequer, and perhaps at the prompting of a government in grave crisis, contending with popular rebellion in southern England (which had led in the past few months to the violent deaths of a number of Henry VI’s ministers), and the calamitous loss of Normandy. Pound’s presence in the Commons may well have been useful in the passing of an ‘act of preferment’, which arranged that the King should have exclusive right to the first £20,000 from the customs and subsidies levied at Southampton in order to make provision for the defence of the realm. Indeed, on 3 Apr. 1451, during the recess, he was sent by the King and lords to Southampton with instructions for the customers to implement the act. PROME, xii. 180; E403/781, m. 9.

During the 1450s officials at the Exchequer were among the Crown’s principal creditors, who advanced substantial loans from their private resources or as members of syndicates to meet the demands of financing naval defence and such English garrisons as remained in France. Between May 1449 and October 1460 Pound advanced as much as £955 in his name alone, E403/775, m. 9; E401/813, m. 17; 815, m. 13; 827, m. 21; 831, mm. 2, 46; 843, m. 41; 844, m. 12; 853, m. 6; 864, m. 8; 868, m. 12; 873, m. 5. and with syndicates a further £1,180. Notable among the sydicated loans was one of £600 he made in January 1453 in association with John Poutrell, William Beaufitz* and John Wood III*, among others, and another of £500 in March 1458 in partnership with Robert Tanfeld* and the London mercer Hugh Wyche*. They were accorded preferential treatment for repayment from the customs. E401/830, m. 25; 858, m. 47; E403/807, m. 9; E159/235, brevia Trin. rot. 13. Meanwhile, in June 1451 he had been appointed to receive certain jewels and gold and silver vessels from the treasurer and to pledge the same to Sir Richard Wydeville, now Lord Rivers, for his wages as seneschal of Aquitaine. When, in May 1454, the soldiers at Calais mutinied in defiance of the authority of their newly-made captain, the duke of York, now Protector of England, the Council sent him over to Calais with Henry, Viscount Bourgchier, to guard the 6,000 marks in cash which Bourgchier was authorized to use to negotiate terms. Pound was given £20 on 29 May for his labour, and was later paid wages for the 71 days in which he was occupied on this business. CPR, 1446-52, pp. 446, 476; G.L. Harriss, ‘The Struggle for Calais’, EHR, lxxv. 35-37; E404/70/1/71; E403/798, m. 11. Pound was already associated with Bourgchier as his co-feoffee of the late Richard Alrede’s manor in Essex, and their shared experience in Calais may well have proved to his advantage when Bourgchier was made treasurer of England a year later. Later, in May 1457, he stood surety at the Exchequer for Bourgchier’s son, John, when he was granted the subsidy on cloth in Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex, and during the viscount’s second term as treasurer, in November 1460, he secured with John and the other mainpernors pardons touching the farm and all debts to the Crown arising from it. A few months earlier, on 18 May 1460, the Council had ordered that all wools, tin, lead and other merchandise sent to the staple of Calais from London, Southampton and Sandwich before the following Michaelmas should be shipped in the King’s name or by such persons as the treasurer (Bourgchier’s predecessor) deemed expedient; Pound was one of eight factors appointed to carry out the treasurer’s instructions on 21 June. CFR, xix. 174; CPR, 1452-61, pp. 600, 631.

Pound’s connexions with the Bourgchiers enabled him to keep his tellership throughout the political changes of the late 1450s and the accession of Edward IV. He continued to be engaged in the collection of customs and subsidies, and the change of regime presaged his appointment as a j.p. in Hampshire. In June 1461 he was linked with Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, and his brother George, the bishop of Exeter and then chancellor, as a feoffee of property in Alton and elsewhere. The 1460s were a period when the Crown still needed to raise large loans, to which Pound continued to be a party. In 1467, along with Earl Rivers, the then treasurer, John Roger III*, the under treasurer, and William Kerver, the London mercer, he ‘lent’ £6,500 to the King, to the latter’s ‘greet hertes ease and pleasur’, the four men being granted in repayment on 24 Aug. all the revenues from the customs and subsidies including tunnage and poundage collected in London, Southampton (where Pound was again customer) and seven other ports, together with those arising from feudal incidents and temporalities, until they were satisfied; and in May 1468 in return for £500 lent by Sir Henry Waver, he, Roger and Kerver were permitted to ship wool from England and import other goods from Italy free of duties until the sum had been repaid. CCR, 1461-8, pp. 90-91; CPR, 1467-77, pp. 33-34, 59, 85; E404/73/3/72; A. Steel, Receipt of the Exchequer, 334, 346. For his association with Henry Bourgchier, now earl of Essex, in property transactions in London, see Corp. London RO, hr 196/35. Pound took out a general pardon as one of the customers at Southampton on 3 Oct. following, but this was just one of several pardons he secured in the course of his career, and a necessary precaution for a man handling such enormous sums of money. CPR, 1467-77, p. 122; C67/46, m. 2. He, Roger and Kerver also made payments at the King’s express command: thus, in 1469 they handed over £150 to a London armourer, no doubt when Edward was equipping an army to suppress Warwick’s rebellion. At an unknown date Pound alone was bound in £200 for ale delivered by certain London brewers to the royal household, but a petition was later, in June 1471, sent to Chancery by six of the brewers, claiming £60 was still owed them, and alleging a conspiracy between him and one of their number to defraud them. E404/74/2/60; C1/12/10; C253/44/456.

Pound was discharged as a customer in Southampton and from his long-held office as a teller of the Exchequer in February and July 1470, respectively, but he was kept on as a j.p. by the government of the Readeption in all probability because of his links with the Lancastrian Bishop Waynflete of Winchester, whom he was then serving as his principal financial officer, the treasurer of Wolvesey palace, for which his financial expertise made him an exceptional candidate. In November 1470, on Waynflete’s behalf, he was a feoffee of seven manors in East Anglia, once belonging to Sir John Fastolf, which John, duke of Norfolk, had bought two years earlier, but now relinquished on being told by the bishop that this was contrary to Fastolf’s will. CCR, 1468-76, nos. 622-3. One of the manors was conveyed to Sir William Brandon† and his wife: CIPM Hen. VII, ii. 36. Pound was also a feoffee for Bp. Waynflete in property in Southwark in 1471: CP25(1)/232/75/20. There is no reason to suppose that Pound had forfeited Edward IV’s favour once and for all, for he was reinstated as a customer at Southampton after Edward’s victory at Tewkesbury, and in November 1471 he was associated with Lord Hastings and others in holding various manors in Hertfordshire, Lincolnshire and Leicestershire to the use of the King, until he should be satisfied of a fine of 1,000 marks due from the Hampshire landowner, Richard, Lord de la Warre, for opposing him at that battle. Having retired from the Exchequer, Pound devoted more of his time to local affairs. He set his seal to the parliamentary election indentures at Winchester in 1472 in company with his son, John, who was himself returned for Portsmouth; and he was active at judicial sessions held in the same city. CCR, 1468-76, no. 807; C219/17/2; KB9/110; B.H. Putnam, Procs. J.P.s, 238, 263, 274.

Also during this period of his life, Pound assisted (Sir) Thomas Uvedale* to make a jointure settlement of his principal manor of Wickham on his third wife, Elizabeth, and together with her he took on the executorship of Uvedale’s will in 1474. CPR, 1476-85, p. 523; PCC 16 Wattys (PROB11/6, f. 115). His final years were troubled by lawsuits brought against him in his capacity as feoffee and executor for his benefactor Richard Dallingridge, who had died in 1471. These arose from the claims of Dallingridge’s nephew (and Pound’s co-executor), (Sir) Roger Lewknor*. Lewknor stood to inherit a substantial part of his late uncle’s estate, but not content with that he was determined to take possession of Dallingridge had assigned to others. In a petition to the chancellor he asserted that after Pound had received back from the issues of the manor of Lymbourne the 200 marks he had lent to Dallingridge the manor should have reverted to the latter and his heirs. He also alleged that Pound retained jewels, goods and chattels worth 500 marks as well as 200 marks in cash belonging to the deceased which ought to have been handed over to him. When examined in the Hilary and Trinity terms of 1476 Pound denied the charges, by asserting that Lymbourne had been settled in tail on him and his wife Mercy and her heirs, and indeed the jurors at Dallingridge’s inquisition post mortem had stated that the manor and some 300 acres of land at Warblington and elsewhere near Havant had been conveyed by Dallingridge to the bishops of Winchester and Chichester, the Bourgchier brothers Henry (now earl of Essex), and John, Lord Berners, and others including Pound, and that Pound had released his right to the rest, who had then settled the property on Dallingridge for life with remainder to him and Mercy. He was absolved and acquitted of the charge. Add. 39376, f. 179; C1/66/44; C140/33/48.

Pound died shortly afterwards, on 23 Nov. 1476, and was survived by his wife, C140/64/72. who took as her second husband Edward Tauk. After Mercy’s death Tauk once more raised the question in Chancery as to whether the provisions in Dallingridge’s will had been properly carried out. He said that the testator had asked that the revenues of his manor of Iford in Sussex be used to endow a chantry where two priests would sing masses for his soul and that of his wife. Thomas and Mercy Pound, as Dallingridge’s executors, had duly paid the priests their salaries for four or more years after Dallingridge died, but after their deaths Lewknor had unlawfully entered the manor and taken the profits, so that Tauk was unable to carry out Mercy’s final requests. C1/168/37, 38. John Pound, the MP’s son and heir, had set up in business as a citizen and grocer of London in the late 1460s, CCR, 1468-76, no. 131. but after his father’s death he assumed the role of a member of the gentry, served as sheriff of Hampshire for three terms, and as executor for Thomas Langton, bishop of Winchester (d.1501). Knighted by Henry VII in 1501 he died in 1511.