ASTYLLE, Thomas

Perhaps a member of the Astley family of Norfolk, Warwickshire and Hertfordshire,3 C. Carpenter, Locality and Polity, 230n, 646, 647. Thomas is not easy to distinguish from a namesake and putative relative from Melton Constable in the former county who also had a wife named Isabel.4 F. Blomefield, Norf. ix. 419. The Ipswich chamberlains’ acct. of 1446-7 (Suff. RO (Ipswich), Ipswich recs., C/3/3/1/1) shows two burgesses riding to Norf. that year to discuss borough business with Isabel Astylle, supporting the theory that the MP was a kinsman of the Norf. family. One possibility is that his marriage brought him to Ipswich, where he became a burgess on 3 June 1417. Just over a year later his wife was associated with him in making a release of a messuage in the town’s parish of St. Nicholas to Alexander Fernham*, suggesting that she had an interest in the property and may have been a burgess’s daughter.5 Add. 30158, f. 2. In the deed of release, Astylle is styled ‘esquire’, as he was when he attested the Suffolk parliamentary election of 1422. Although the relevant return is now lost, he probably attested his own election in the same year as an MP for Ipswich, since he was already one of the borough’s bailiffs by that date. It was as bailiff that he also took part in the Ipswich elections to the Parliaments of 1423 and 1425. Furthermore, while nearly all of the surviving Ipswich returns of the first half of Henry VI’s reign do not list the attestors by name, Astylle is likely to have attended the last two parliamentary elections of the 1420s, since he was a mainpernor for the newly-elected John Deken* and Robert Wood I* in 1427 and 1429 respectively. He had also acted as a mainpernor for Augustine and William Dunton of Hadleigh when the Exchequer had farmed out the subsidy and alnage of cloths in Norfolk, Suffolk and other eastern counties to them in 1425.6 CFR, xv. 113. In the later 1420s William Walworth* and his wife sued Astylle, his wife and John Pieresson for unjustly dispossessing them of property at Ipswich, and the matter came before the royal justices of assize for the eastern counties during the spring circuit of 1428. At this point, the bailiffs of Ipswich intervened. Citing the privileges of their borough, they asserted that they should try the case. The assize court referred their claim to Westminster for consideration, although there is no record of how it ended.7 JUST1/1539, rots. 8, 8d.

There is no definite evidence for Astylle dating after the 1430s.8 It is not possible to prove that he was the man who served as a commr. of inquiry in Norf. and Suff. in 1437. Presumably, his successor was his eldest son and namesake,9 Add. 30158, f. 2. while William ‘Style’, probably one of his younger sons, was buried in St. Nicholas’s, Ipswich, in 1475.10 Suff. RO, Archdeaconry of Suff. wills, IC/AA2/2/291; N. Pevsner, Buildings of Eng.: Suff. 295. The Isabel Style, who in her will of 1487 requested burial beside her husband in the same church, was doubtless the widow of William rather than of the MP.11 PCC 40 Milles (PROB11/8, f. 312).