ROKES, Thomas II

While it was as a bureaucrat in the service of the Crown that Rokes primarily achieved advancement, his career was sufficiently wide-ranging to make him sometimes difficult to identify. Of unknown parentage, he appears originally to have come from the West Riding of Yorkshire. His will provides the clue as to his origins, for he directed his executors to erect a stained-glass window in his memory in the parish church of Halifax, indicating that he was from the Rokes family of Hipperholme, a township in that parish. He was therefore probably of relatively humble background, since in the later Middle Ages members of that family were tenants of the manor of Wakefield where they served as constables and jurors.10 Halifax Antiq. Soc. Pprs. (1910), 243, 248; J. Horsfall Turner, Hist. Brighouse, Rastrick and Hipperholme, 40, 108-17, 115, 117, 120, 123, 124; Yorks. Arch. Soc. Rec. Ser. xxxix. 89; l. 75; Halifax Wills, i. ed. Caley, 12; W. Yorks. Archive Service, Calderdale, Coley Hall recs., CH:1/3. In spite of pursuing a career in southern England, Rokes is likely to have maintained more than a passing connexion with Yorkshire. In the later 1430s he received obligations from three gentlemen from the West Riding,11 E159/214, commissiones Mich. pursued a suit for debt in the court of common pleas against Richard Aldeburgh, an esquire from the North Riding,12 CPR, 1436-41, p. 326. and received a conveyance of three parts of the manor of Hipperholme and a nearby mill from William Skargill esquire. The purpose of this latter transaction, dated 1438, is unclear. Presumably it followed a sale to Rokes, who later reconveyed the same manorial moiety and lands in neighbouring Rishworth to (Sir) Thomas Haryngton I*, his son John and others, in return for 120 marks.13 Halifax Antiq. Soc. Rec. Ser. i. 56; W. Yorks. Archive Service, Calderdale, Armytage fam. mss, KM/25; C66/458, m. 14d.

The manor of Wakefield of which the Rokeses of Hipperholme were tenants was part of the duchy of York, and following the death of the then duke, Edmund Langley, in 1402, it was held for life by his widowed duchess Joan until her own death in 1434. Early in his career, Rokes was a servant of Sir Thomas Brounflete, whose son and heir Henry (later Lord Vessy) was Joan’s fourth husband.14 Oxf. DNB, ‘Edmund of Langley’; ‘Willoughby fam.’; ‘Holland, Thomas’; ‘Scrope, Henry’; CP, xii (2), 285n; CIPM, xxiv. 245-62. Sir Thomas, the lord of extensive estates in the East Riding as well as a manor and lands in Bedfordshire, was a member of the households of both Richard II and Henry IV and keeper of the wardrobe from mid 1409 to the end of Henry’s reign.15 CIPM, xxiii. 550-1; CP, xii (2), 285n. Through his master, Rokes had become clerk of the wardrobe by mid 1411, and he remained in Brounflete’s service after the latter relinquished the office of keeper of that department. Brounflete was sheriff of Yorkshire in 1414-15, and when he was called to account for his shrievalty in January 1416 Rokes appeared in the Exchequer as his attorney.16 Handbk. British Chronology ed. Fryde etc. (3rd edn.), 81; Issues of the Exchequer, 317; E13/131, rot. 10.

In the following month the Crown appointed Rokes a collector of customs at Bristol during pleasure, an office he held again in the late 1430s and earlier 1440s. Although it was far from his native Yorkshire, he would form far more than a passing connexion with this major town. In due course he came to act as a feoffee on behalf of others at Bristol, where he himself appears to have acquired property interests and where he traded as a merchant. Among the commodities in which he dealt was cloth, and on 20 June 1449 he suffered the seizure of ten dozen white woollen cloths, for non-payment of customs. He had been preparing to export the cloths, then aboard a ship berthed at Bristol called the Margaret Talbot, when John Wych*, claiming to be the searcher of ships in the port of Bristol, impounded them for the Crown. As it happened, Wych had no authority to take such action, having lost his position of searcher less than three weeks earlier. Yet, in an attempt to cling on to that lucrative office, he refused to accept his dismissal and continued to exercise his duties. It was his seizure of Rokes’s cloth, which he carried off to his house for safekeeping, that sparked off an acrimonious quarrel with his successor, John Maryot.17 C1/13/115; CP40/826, cart. rot.; E159/225, recorda Trin. rot. 2d; E207/16/2, nos. 1, 22; 3, nos. 44, 50. It is also possible that Rokes held office in other ports, since a ‘King’s servant’ of that name was made gauger at Kingston-upon-Hull for life in 1418, and a Thomas Rokes was subsequently a controller of customs and gauger in the port of Southampton.

Of far greater significance for Rokes’s career than his office at Bristol was his appointment as receiver-general and attorney-general of Henry V’s widow Queen Katherine. These were important positions, for he managed her financial affairs and supervised her extensive estates in England and northern France. It fell to him to collect from the Exchequer the annuity that she received after Henry V’s death, and he became one of her most constant advisers.18 R.A. Griffiths, Hen. VI, 56; E403/660, 663-725; SC6/1291/1; E213/412; Issues of the Exchequer, 386; CCR, 1429-35, p. 184. Sometimes he was referred to as Katherine’s ‘treasurer’: E213/412. He may have used the influence he gained in her service on behalf of his relative, John Rokes*, who secured the position of her receiver on her lordship of Wallingford and was subsequently employed in a similar capacity on her duchy of Lancaster estates in several southern English counties.19 R. Somerville, Duchy, i. 622. John also settled in the south of England and he served as gauger of Southampton, an office to which he was appointed at the beginning of 1450, apparently in direct succession to the MP, assuming that the latter was the Thomas Rokes in question.20 CPR, 1446-52, p. 309.

It is impossible to ascertain how Rokes formed a connexion with Buckinghamshire, although it was perhaps through his service to Queen Katherine who held several manors there, either in jointure or dower.21 PROME, x. 43-55; VCH Bucks. iii. 129; iv. 41; Somerville, 339. In February 1430 he received a recognizance for just over £40 from William Fowler* of Weston Turville,22 E159/206, recogniciones Hil. but the earliest certain evidence of a link between him and the county is his appointment as escheator of Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire in the following November. It was as escheator that he attested the election of Buckinghamshire’s knights of the shire to the Parliament of 1431 and presided over Sir Thomas Brounflete’s inquisition post mortem in Bedfordshire.23 CIPM, xxiii. 550. Later, in 1433, Rokes was described as ‘of Buckinghamshire, esquire’, when he and Thomas Bateman of Leicestershire entered a recognizance to acknowledge that each of them owed £20 to the King’s physician, John Somerset*.24 E159/206, recogniciones Mich. Having settled in the county, he came to act as a trustee and witness on behalf of other gentry with interests there, among them John Barton I*, Sir William Lucy* and the Ruffords of Edlesborough, a family with which he formed a close connexion.25 C1/9/207; CPR, 1429-36, p. 284; 1436-41, pp. 31, 51; Salop Archs., Corbet of Acton Reynald mss, 322/2/256; CP25(1)/293/72/351; CCR, 1435-41, p. 319. Rokes must have begun to acquire property in Buckinghamshire by the early 1430s, although he acquired his most important interest in the county through his marriage to Margery Sackville of Fawley. The match cannot have occurred much before the summer of 1435 when Margery’s parents settled the manor of Ascott in Wing upon the couple and their issue, since she was not born until after the accession of Henry VI.26 CP25(1)/22/120/19. Her parents married in about 1423: CPR, 1422-9, p. 103. Given the considerable disparity in age between Rokes and Margery, it is possible that she was not his first wife; yet she was certainly the mother of his eldest son and namesake, who was to inherit the Sackville manor at Wing. There is no other evidence for Rokes’s landholdings in Buckinghamshire, save that in the mid 1450s he acquired further lands in Wing, by gift of John Emburton and his wife Isabel, who had inherited them from her father John Knyght.27 CCR, 1454-61, pp. 134-5.

A few months after the settlement of Ascott was made, Rokes was appointed to a second term as escheator,28 It is unlikely that he was the Thomas Rokes who served as escheator of Glos. in 1440, given the apparent lack of any connexion between the MP and that county. and in February 1436 he and his father-in-law were placed on an ad hoc commission in Buckinghamshire. The commissioners were instructed to seek loans towards the costs of equipping an army for France. Rokes himself was asked to contribute such a loan, in his case £40, although by means of a letter which the King’s Council sent directly to him.29 PPC, iv. 234. The war in France and the consequent need to raise money was a major concern for his only known Parliament, which sat for just over two months in early 1437. Queen Katherine was still alive when he was returned to the Commons but by then she was in a poor state of health and had retired to Bermondsey Abbey, making it unlikely that she took an active interest in his election. She died on 3 Jan. that year, 18 days before the Parliament opened, and her funeral was held in London on 9 Feb. while it was in session. Nineteen days after her funeral, which he is likely to have attended, Rokes took time off from his duties in the Commons and went in person to the Exchequer, to account for his second term as an escheator. When he appeared there, three shopkeepers from Newport Pagnel took the opportunity to bring a bill against him, alleging that in November 1435 he had entered their shop and seized a rent of 6s. 8d. He responded by obtaining licence to negotiate with his opponents outside the Exchequer, and it would appear that the matter was settled out of court.30 E13/140, rot. 28. On its penultimate day the Parliament turned its attention to the matter of the late queen’s will, approving the appointment of Cardinal Beaufort, Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, and William Alnwick, bishop of Lincoln, as its supervisors. She had named her son, the young King, as her sole executor, but because he was unable to attend to this matter in person, the Parliament authorized Robert Rolleston, keeper of the wardrobe, John Merston, keeper of the king’s jewels, and Richard Alred, soon to become receiver-general of the duchy of Lancaster, to act in his stead.31 Griffiths, 61; PROME, xi. 222-5. Presumably Rokes took a particular interest in these proceedings, not least because he would have expected to account to these men for his time as one of her leading officials.

It was perhaps in connexion with the affairs of his former patroness that Rokes took legal action at Westminster against John and William Turnour, two gentlemen from Northamptonshire in the early 1440s, because he was described as an esquire of the late queen in his suit. He alleged that each of them owed him £4 10s., in both cases for a debt that had arisen in Middlesex.32 CPR, 1441-6, pp. 11, 121. Following the queen’s death, Rokes appears to have retained a position in the royal establishment, for he was probably the Thomas Rokes who features in the extant Household accounts of the period as an esquire of the hall and chamber between 1441 and 1448 and, from the late 1440s, as a clerk of account.33 E101/409/9, 11, 16; 410/1, 3, 6, 9; PPC, vi. 226. He received an annual fee of 33s. 4d. as clerk, and he was frequently employed to receive money or assignments of money from the Exchequer on behalf of successive keepers of the wardrobe. During 1450-1 he spent over a month riding through south-eastern England collecting money to cover the expenses of the Household.34 E403/785, mm. 4, 13; 786, mm. 1, 2; 788, m. 5; 791, mm. 4, 8, 11, 14; 793, mm. 7, 9, 13; 812, m. 1.

Later that decade, Rokes (by now relatively advanced in age) turned his attention to personal affairs. In the spring of 1457, having concluded negotiations for the marriage of his eldest son and namesake to Joan, the daughter of Thomas Palmer*, a prominent lawyer from the east Midlands, he was party to a settlement by which the couple and their issue were to succeed to the manor of Ascott after his death.35 VCH Bucks. iii. 453; CP25(1)/22/124/18; 293/73/416. It would appear that his own wife, Margery, not named in the settlement, was already dead by this date. Rokes himself died early in the following year. In his will, dated 7 Jan. 1458 and proved on the following 9 Mar., he asked to be buried in the parish church of All Saints, Wing, to which he bequeathed £20. He requested that a chaplain should sing for the souls of himself and his wife Margery in the Lady chapel there for a term of three years and sought the intercessions of the parishioners for himself, Margery and one Isabel Russe. As already noted, he also provided for the making of a stained glass window in the parish church at Halifax. He set aside 66s. 8d. for the window and directed that it should depict the Crucifixion at its centre with images of Saints Christopher and George on either side. In testimony to his service to the Crown and his own social advancement, the window was to display the King’s arms above the Crucifixion scene and his own below it. Rokes provided for his goddaughter Isabel Rufford, to whom he left 20s., his ‘cousin’, John Rokes, to whom he gave 66s. 8d., and his nephew, another Thomas Rokes, to whom he bequeathed 40s. He also left each of the friaries at Bristol 6s. 8d. and chose William Rokes of that town, presumably a relative who had followed him to Bristol, as one of his executors. Rokes named three other executors, Master William Norland, Robert Rufford* (probably his son-in-law) and his younger son, John Rokes. The three men were still engaged with their duties in the mid 1460s.36 PCC 12 Stokton; CP40/817, rot. 492d. Thomas, Rokes’s eldest son and heir, inherited a claim to the estates of the Sackvilles of Fawley, following the death of the childless Thomas Sackville (either his uncle or great-uncle) in 1466.37 Stonor Letters ed. Carpenter, 181-2; C47/37/9/38, 39; VCH Oxon. viii. 93; CP40/842, rot. 575; 857, rot. 344; 863, rot. 343; CFR, xxii. no. 186.