STEVENS, Thomas

More may be added to the earlier biography.2 The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 475-6.

Unless Stevens began his public career in his latter decades, the Thomas Stevens active at Gloucester in Richard II’s reign must have been an older namesake. Perhaps a relative of the MP, this other Thomas entered into a bond in statute staple in November 1384, to guarantee he would pay for merchandise he had bought from the Gloucester merchant, Walter Messager. Likewise identified as a merchant in the statute staple, he failed to pay the £10 he owed at a given time, prompting Messager to begin legal action against him in 1390. Three years later, the same Thomas entered another such security to John Folyet, son and heir of Thomas Folyet of Worcestershire, again as a security for a purchase of merchandise. Like Messager, Folyet subsequently took legal action against Stevens for not paying the debt.3 C241/178/46; 184/15. As for the Thomas Stevens who ran into difficulties in Henry IV’s reign over a sum of 100 marks he owed the London mercer John More, it is unclear whether he was the MP or his putative elder namesake. Having entered a statute staple in April 1406, this Thomas failed to settle the debt on the day given to him. After More took action against him he was for a time imprisoned by the sheriffs of the City.4 C131/221/19; C241/198/68.

Whatever the identity of More’s debtor, the MP was certainly at the receiving end of suits for debt that a couple of London mercers, Richard Lovelace and Thomas Middlemore, brought against him at Westminster in the late 1420s. Both suits reached pleadings in Easter term 1428, immediately after Stevens’s fourth Parliament. In his suit, Lovelace claimed that Stevens had entered into a bond for £17 with him and William Preston, now no longer alive, at London in December 1422, only to fail to pay them that sum by the given day of Christmas Eve 1423. Stevens riposted that in fact he had entered into the security under duress, while a prisoner of Lovelace, Preston and their ‘coven’ at Ruarden in Gloucestershire. Yet when the case came before the Gloucester assizes of February 1429, a jury found for Lovelace, to whom Stevens was ordered to pay the debt, along with damages and costs of 20s. Middlemore’s suit, still pending at the beginning of 1429, concerned a debt of £24 2s. arising from two bonds, each for £10, that he had received from Stevens at London on 20 Dec. 1423, as well as a loan for a further £4 2s. that he had made to the MP on the same day. In response, Stevens denied the existence of any such loan, while claiming that Middlemore and his ‘coven’ had extorted the bonds from him while he was their prisoner, again at Ruardean.5 CP40/669, rot. 304. Presumably both of these disputes with other members of his trade had come about through his business dealings with them.

In Stevens’s fifth Parliament the Commons complained to the Crown about those ‘Welshmen’ and others who were impeding the free transport of goods to Gloucester, Bristol, Worcester and other towns situated by the Severn. Quite possibly he and his fellow burgess, John Hamlin*, played some part in preparing or promoting the petition in question, to which the King responded by ordering that his lieges should enjoy the right of free passage on the river for their rafts or barges.6 PROME, x. 470-1.

While customs controller at Bristol, Stevens carried out an appraisal of the fee farm and other sums the town customarily paid the Crown, a task allotted to him following the death in mid 1437 of Henry IV’s widow, Queen Joan, to whom these revenues had been assigned. The issue rolls show that Stevens had relinquished his office at Bristol by the summer of 1440, since they record that he was paid a reward on 17 July that year for his time as controller and that he no longer held that office at that date.7 E403/739, m. 15; 747, m. 8.

It is possible that Stevens lived to a ripe old age, since Thomas Stevens and Joan his wife sued two husbandmen from Wiltshire in the court of King’s bench in 1462. Emanating from Gloucestershire, the case concerned the alleged taking of livestock and goods belonging to Joan at Minety, a parish on that county’s boundary with north Wiltshire.8 KB27/804, rot. 4; 805, rot. 4; 806, rot. 5d. While the plea rolls do not record the plaintiffs’ address, it is conceivable that they were the MP and his wife, unless they simply happened to share the same – far from uncommon – names with that couple.