ARBLASTER, Thomas

This MP has generally been identified as the son of another Thomas Arblaster by the coheiress of the manor of Mancetter, but this identification depends on the assumption that the son inherited the family estates in the early 1430s.10 HP Biogs. ed. Wedgwood and Holt, 17; I. Rowney, ‘Staffs. Political Community’ (Keele Univ. Ph. D. thesis, 1981), 67; H.R. Castor, King, Crown and Duchy of Lancaster, 236. Yet there can be no doubt that the father was alive at least as late as 1456, when he was sued for making waste in land demised to him at some date before the autumn of 1400.11 CP40/781, rot. 433. Since there is no evidence that the son had any independent place in local affairs before his father’s death, there can be no doubt that the father was the MP.

The Arblasters had enduring connexions with the bishops of Coventry and Lichfield, who were considerable landowners in the immediate locality of their own estates at Longdon. Our MP’s grandfather, Adam Arblaster†, who sat as knight of the shire for Staffordshire in the first Parliament of 1352, was bailiff of the bishop’s liberty in the 1340s, and he was succeeded in that office by his son, James, who also served the bishops as ranger of their chase of Cannock. James, although by no means a significant figure, also had other associations: as a young man in 1361 he had served in Ireland under Ralph, earl of Stafford; and in 1398 he was described as ‘King’s servant’.12 S. Shaw, Staffs. i. 223; Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. (1925), 1-5; CPR, 1381-5, p. 553; 1396-9, p. 378. Thomas was to build significantly on the foundations laid by his father, becoming both a central figure in the retinue of Earl Ralph’s great-grandson, Humphrey, and a long-standing member of the royal household.

Arblaster’s career was exceptionally long and began in his father’s lifetime. He was probably born in the late 1370s, for he is likely to have been of age when he leased from Sir Baldwin Freville of Tamworth (Staffordshire), who died in 1400, a messuage, a garden and two acres of wood in Middleton (Warwickshire).13 CP40/781, rot. 433. When he gave evidence at the proof of age of William Mytton* in Feb. 1437, he gave his age as ‘65 and more’, which was probably a slight overestimate: CIPM, xxiv. 719. Much more important, it was at about the same time that he was granted a life annuity of £5 by Edmund, earl of Stafford, who came of age in 1399.14 CIPM, xviii. 829. This annuity was still being paid in the 1440s and so provides further evidence that the elder Thomas was the MP: Rawcliffe, 233. Although his service to this earl was brief – Edmund fell in the Lancastrian cause at the battle of Shrewsbury in 1403 – this association with the great family of Stafford was to dominate his career and ensured that he played a far more important role in local affairs than was justified by his modest landholdings. When first retained by Earl Edmund he had not yet inherited even this competence. On his father’s death in about 1409, our MP’s elder brother James succeeded to the patrimony and it was only on the death of the latter, at an unknown date in the reign of Henry V, that our MP inherited. Judging from an inquisition taken after the death of his grandson, Richard, in 1502, this inheritance comprised only a messuage and some 700 acres of farmland and wood, worth 20 marks p.a., in Longdon, a few miles from Lichfield, held of the warden of the chantry of St. Radegund in Lichfield cathedral.15 Shaw, i. 223; CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 807. To this Arblaster added, albeit fairly insignificantly, by marriage. Neither the date nor the circumstances of the match are known, but his wife was an heiress. She brought him a ninth part of the much-divided manor of Mancetter, valued in 1506 at only about £3 p.a., and, from 1449, a share in lands at Peatling Parva and Bruntingthorpe in Leicestershire, which the abbey of Merevale (Warwickshire) gave to the coheirs of that manor in exchange for the advowson of the church of Mancetter.16 CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 211; C. Carpenter, Armburgh Pprs. 34, 178-9. It is significant here that, at no point in his long career, was he distrained to take up the rank of knighthood, implying that his income was less than £40 p.a.

After Earl Edmund’s death, Arblaster moved into the service of the earl’s widow, Anne, and her third husband, Sir William Bourgchier† (d.1420). By 1405, at the generous annual fee of £20, he was constable of Anne’s fine Welsh castle of Caldicot, largely rebuilt by her father, Thomas of Woodstock, duke of Gloucester.17 L.S. Woodger, ‘Hen. Bourgchier’ (Oxf. Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1974), 291; R.R. Davies, Revolt of Owain Glyndwr, 13. Later he had an active military career under Bourgchier. Although he is not known to have fought against the Glendower rebels, he spent most of Henry V’s reign in France. He fought in the campaigns of 1415 and 1417 and then, after the capture of Dieppe in February 1419, he was in the garrison there with Bourgchier as captain. His service won a direct reward from the Crown: on 4 Jan. 1420 he was granted the forfeited lands of Reynold Beleville of Dieppe to the value of 60 francs (to be held by him and his male issue at the nominal annual rent of 4d.) together with Beleville’s goods worth as much as £40. Bourgchier died in the following May and our MP was promoted to the captaincy in January 1421.18 N.H. Nicolas, Agincourt, 360; E101/51/2; R.A. Massey, ‘Lancastrian Land Settlement in Normandy’ (Liverpool Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1987), 190; C64/12, m. 49; DKR, xliv. 632. As with many others, however, the death of Henry V occasioned Arblaster’s disengagement from military service, and in the 1420s the focus of his career became administrative service in England.19 One of his kin, however, Edmund, who may even have been one of his younger sons, went on to have a notable, if ultimately unsuccessful, career in France. Ransomed in the 1430s, he was captured again in 1449, and failure to pay his ransom resulted in him being returned to French captivity five years later: M.K. Jones, ‘Ransom Brokerage’ in Guerre et Société ed. Contamine et al., 228, 231; PPC, vi. 208-9.

Arblaster’s emergence as an important figure in his native county coincided with the coming of age of Earl Edmund’s son, Humphrey, who had livery of his estates in 1423. He quickly made himself one of the young man’s most valued retainers. He was elected to represent Staffordshire in Parliament on 14 Feb. 1426, and on 3 Apr. 1427 he witnessed the young earl’s confirmation, dated at Newport castle, of the charter granted to the borough of Newport by the Staffords in 1385.20 C219/13/4; Archaeologia, xlviii (2), 450-1. More importantly, he may already by this date have been in office as sheriff of the earl’s lordship of Newport. He was certainly serving as such before Michaelmas 1428, when he joined the steward of the earl’s household, William Munden, and Thomas Whitgreve in awarding a series of leases within that lordship. The appointment brought a welcome augmentation to his resources for it carried an annual fee of 20 marks.21 Pugh, 165, 185, 226. Most of the references to Arblaster over the next few years show him as the earl’s agent, and his election to four of the five Parliaments between 1432 and 1439 is to be seen in this context. On 20 July 1433, while an MP, he joined William Waweton*, then sitting for Huntingdonshire, as surety that the earl would pay the Crown 400 marks for the marriage of James, son of Sir John Luttrell of Dunster (Somerset). In the summer of 1435 the earl employed him and John Harper* to settle the manor of Bletchingley (Surrey) in jointure on his wife, Anne Neville.22 CPR, 1429-36, pp. 284, 466; CP25/1/232/71/72.

Aside from his service to the earl of Stafford, Arblaster was also, like his father and grandfather before him, a servant of the bishops of Coventry and Lichfield. By 1426 he was acting as Bishop Heyworth’s parker at Beaudesert, very near his home, an office which was to become, if it was not already, hereditary in his family. None the less, there is no evidence that his connexion with successive bishops had much impact on the pattern of his career.23 Rowney, 438. Very much more important was his entry into the royal household, presumably mediated through his principal patron, Earl Humphrey. It is not known when he took this place, but he had done so by the autumn of 1435. On 1 Oct. of that year, when a small expeditionary force was recruited from Household ranks for the defence of Calais, he contracted to serve with a retinue of four archers for two months. 24 H.L. Ratcliffe, ‘Military Expenditure of the English Crown’ (Oxf. Univ. M.Litt. thesis, 1979), 103-4; E101/71/3/883; E404/52/11. He was paid wages of £8 8s. on 12 Dec. 1435: E403/721, m. 9. This force mustered at Dover six days later, and it must therefore be supposed that Arblaster, elected once more for Staffordshire on the previous 15 Sept., did not take his seat in the Parliament which met on 10 Oct.25 C219/14/5.

However this may be, membership of the royal household brought about an expansion in his role in local administration. From the mid 1430s he was routinely appointed to ad hoc commissions in Staffordshire, and early in 1439 he was added to the bench there. It also brought him some solid material benefits. On 21 Mar. 1439 he was named as surveyor of the duchy of Lancaster chase of Needwood, where his lord the earl of Stafford was master forester.26 There was some confusion about this grant for it was made in disregard of the interest of Thomas Whittington, who had been appointed in 1405, and the office was re-granted to our MP on 22 June 1439 to hold from Whittington’s death: R. Somerville, Duchy, i. 546. A few months later, on 12 July, described as King’s esquire, he was granted an exemption from office. This was rather an ironic reward in view of his newly-acquired place on the local bench, but it may later have protected him from appointment as sheriff. In both November 1441 and November 1448 he was on the pricked list, but on neither occasion was he appointed.27 CPR, 1436-41, p. 277; C47/34/3, 5. This exemption from office was followed, less than three weeks later, by a grant of the keeping of the pannage in six hays in the royal forest of Cannock for ten years at an annual farm of one mark.28 CFR, xvii. 95.

These modest marks of royal favour were followed by a much more important one. On 9 Dec. 1439, when Arblaster was again sitting as an MP, the Crown committed to him the keeping of the lands once of Thomas Leigh of Shelley (Essex) during the minority of the infant heir together with the heir’s marriage. He was to have this wardship and marriage without payment, and it is clear that this grant was made in the acknowledgement of his prior interest in the Leigh properties. Only five weeks earlier, Thomas Thorpe*, an Exchequer official, and Thomas Skargill*, a yeoman of the royal chamber, had undertaken to pay the Crown 40 marks for the marriage and over £13 p.a. for the land. Their right, however, was challenged. On 26 Nov. our MP joined the infant ward’s maternal grandfather, Thomas Boteler of Pitstone (Buckinghamshire), in undertaking, on pain of £100, to deliver the ward to Thorpe and Skargill. Clearly they had detained the boy, and even though our MP delivered him to Thorpe at St. Albans on 6 Dec., he had influence enough to secure a grant of his own only three days later. Since Arblaster’s son and heir, another Thomas, is known to have married the boy’s mother, Alice Boteler, it is a fair speculation that this marriage explains his interest in the matter.29 CFR, xvii. 110-11, 121; CIPM, xxv. 164-6; E159/216, recogniciones Mich. When precisely that marriage took place is not known, but it was presumably in agitation when Arblaster joined Boteler in asserting a claim to the wardship.30 The marriage had been made by Mich. term 1441, when the couple were co-plaintiffs with Thomas Leigh’s executors: CP40/723, rot. 500d. The bride did not fall heiress to her father until the mid 1450s. Indeed, by the time of her father’s death she already had three sons: VCH Bucks. iii. 409; C1/26/247a.

Arblaster maintained his place in the royal household into the 1450s. He appears among the esquires of the hall and chamber in the surviving Household accounts for the period 1441 to 1452.31 E101/409/9; 409/11, f. 38; 410/1, f. 30; 410/3; 410/6, f. 40; 410/9, f. 42v. Yet he was not again to be as favoured as he had been in 1439, and it is clear that most of his time was spent locally in the service of Earl Humphrey, who was elevated to the dukedom of Buckingham in 1444. Indeed, although he was already an old man in the 1440s, his responsibilities in the Stafford service mounted. On four occasions in the 1440s he was named as an itinerant justice in the family’s Welsh lordships, and on at least one occasion he travelled to Newport to preside over sessions; from 1438 he was the earl’s steward in his major Warwickshire properties at Atherstone and the newly-acquired Maxstoke; and he continued to hold the shrievalty of Newport (although here, in the 1440s at least, he acted through deputies). Nor were these offices in Stafford service the extent of the demands on his time. On 27 Apr. 1443, for example, he was at Maxstoke castle for a meeting of the lord’s council, and no doubt better records would reveal his presence at many other similar gatherings. In 1446 he and the duke’s Staffordshire receiver, Humphrey Cotes, led a retinue of 24 to the inquisition post mortem held at Lichfield in respect of the lands of Henry Beauchamp, duke of Warwick, no doubt to prompt findings acceptable to their lord (probably in connexion with the disputed former Basset of Drayton lands).32 Rawcliffe, 49; Peniarth mss, 280, p. 33; Pugh, 287; I. Rowney, ‘Govt. and Patronage’, Midland Hist. viii. 62. He was also active in more routine ways as one of the duke’s representatives in the government of Staffordshire. On 27 Mar. 1448, for example, he sat at Lichfield on a royal commission of inquiry into concealments, and in the same year and the next he sat as a j.p. at both Stafford and Lichfield. He appears to have been one of the busiest of the county’s j.p.s in these years, even active out of the sessions. On 8 Jan. 1451, acting as a j.p. at his home at Longdon, he took surety of the peace from one of the leading Staffordshire gentry, John Stanley II*.33 CPR, 1446-52, p. 140; CIMisc. viii. 209; KB9/260/18, 81, 83; 261/8; KB29/93, rot. 10.

None the less, although he remained active into the 1450s, Arblaster was then in his seventies and that activity could not be long sustained. His date of death is unknown. He was certainly alive as late as the mid 1450s. In November 1454 he was still one of the ‘squiers of attendaunce’ on the King; in Michaelmas term 1455, described as ‘senior’, he was joint plaintiff in an action of debt against Walter Blount*, executor of the will of Sir John Gresley*; and in the following Easter term a verdict was awarded against him in an action of waste in respect of a small property at Middleton that he had taken at farm more than 50 years before.34 PPC, vi. 224; CP40/779, rot. 126; 781, rot. 433. No certain later reference has been found to him, yet it is probable, given his continuous presence on the Staffordshire bench since 1439, that he is to be identified with the namesake who was named to the county’s peace commission of 10 Mar. 1460.35 CPR, 1452-61, p. 677. If so, he is also to be identified with the man commissioned in the previous April to govern the temporalities of the bishopric of Coventry and Lichfield during the vacancy occasioned by the death of Bishop Boulers; and he must therefore have been alive as late as Trinity term 1463 when, appearing personally in the Exchequer, he was exonerated from rendering account on the basis of a pardon granted to him on 5 May 1462.36 C67/45, m. 26; E159/239, recorda Easter rot. 13. His death, however, probably followed very soon afterwards. It was, in any event, Arblaster’s son and namesake, who, in the mid 1460s, was involved in litigation over his wife’s Boteler inheritance.37 CP40/818, rot. 340; KB27/820, rot. 54; C1/44/31-36. For the family’s later hist., long but unspectacular: Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. (1925), 6-16.