AGARD, Thomas

Agard was from a long-established family of minor gentry resident at Foston on the border between Derbyshire and Staffordshire and tenants of the honour of Tutbury. This tenure and the proximity of their home to Tutbury explains their tradition of service in the administration of that honour. Indeed, during the early fourteenth century they became established as hereditary bailiffs of the honour court in Derbyshire.1 R. Somerville, Duchy, i. 352, 382, 547. Unfortunately, before the family rose to a position of greater prominence in the late fifteenth century, their pedigree is extremely confused. It is, however, a reasonable speculation that our MP was the son and heir of his namesake, feodary of the honour of Tutbury as early as 1402 and confirmed in the office in 1423.2 Ibid. 547; J.C. Cox, Notes on Churches Derbys. iii. 263; Vis. Derbys. (Harl. Soc. n.s. viii), 59-60.

The date of death of the older Thomas is unknown, but in the late 1430s there was a hiatus in the family’s tenure of the office and it is likely that when a Thomas Agard was once more appointed to it in 1440 the appointee was our MP. Not improbably, it was also he who was assessed on an annual income of £8 in the subsidy returns of 1435-6,3 E179/240/266. Our MP was does not appear in the Derbys. subsidy returns of 1450-1, perhaps because he was absent in Parl. when the assessments were made: E179/91/73. and who soon after was sued by Sir John Gresley* and Margaret, Gresley’s wife, to render account to the latter. Presumably Agard had served in the wealthy Margaret’s estate administration before her marriage in about 1430 to Sir John. His failure to appear led to his outlawry, but he was only briefly inconvenienced for, in November 1440, he successfully sued a pardon.4 Wm. Salt. Arch. Soc. n.s. iii. 140; CCR, 1436-41, p. 457. It was, however, not long before he was again in the same sort of trouble. On 2 Jan. 1447 he was outlawed in the Bedfordshire county court for failure to answer a plea of debt sued against him by one Thomas Tappe of Crawley. Suing in a county in which the defendant was a stranger was a common ruse to secure an outlawry and we must assume that this was the case here. Agard in turn resorted to another common ruse to defend himself: on the following 3 Feb. he appeared personally at Westminster to plead that he was a mere yeoman and not, as he had been described in Tappe’s plea, a gentleman.5 CP40/744, rot. 119d. In other pleas he appears as both ‘gentleman’ and ‘yeoman’: CP40/738, rots. 176, 398d.

Not until October 1449, when Agard attested the borough parliamentary election, is there any evidence of his connexion with Derby, and a year later he was himself returned to represent the borough.6 C219/15/7, 16/1. There can only be one explanation of this sudden and short-lived interest in the town, namely, that he was acting as a servant of Walter Blount*. The election of Walter’s younger brother, Thomas*, in 1453 is the clearest indication of the readiness of the Blounts to take a part in the borough’s affairs, and, while there is no direct evidence to connect Agard with the family, there is little doubt that this interest also explains his return to a Parliament in which Walter sat for the county. The indirect evidence is compelling: Agard’s home at Foston lay near the Blounts’ manor of Barton Blount; his fellow Derby MP in 1450, Thomas Bradshaw*, seems also to have been a servant of Blount; and a later indictment shows that his son and heir John numbered among those prepared to commit crimes in Walter’s service.7 KB9/280/27; S.M. Wright, Derbys. Gentry (Derbys. Rec. Soc. viii), 137; Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. n.s. iii. 224.

Agard was alive on 22 Feb. 1456, when he witnessed a deed in respect of property in Foston, but he died later in the same year, when his son and heir was the defendant in an action in the court of common pleas.8 Derbys. Chs. ed. Jeayes, no. 1316; CP40/785, rot. 369. John enjoyed a career of far greater prominence than his father, being successively a servant of Walter Blount, George, duke of Clarence, William, Lord Hastings, and Richard III.9 Wright, 79, 90-1; R. Horrox, Ric. III, 231.