BAGOT, Thomas

Very little can now be said with certainty about Thomas Bagot. It may be that he belonged to the Bristol family of this name, which held the manor of ‘Hall’ in Biddestone, Wiltshire, but even if so the location of the manor in the north-west of the county and at some distance from Old Sarum can hardly have been a factor in his election.2 Wilts. Feet of Fines (Wilts. Rec. Soc. xli), no. 54. The family had links with Chippenham: PCC 15 Holgrave (PROB11/14, f. 116). The key to Bagot’s return to Parliament may lie in his link with John Stourton II*, Lord Stourton, which is revealed in a transaction of June 1459. In this transaction Bagot and Stourton received from one John Uphill a grant of lands and tenements known as ‘Ruddokkes’ in Plaitford, on the border of Wiltshire and Hampshire, a few miles from Salisbury.3 Salisbury Domesday bk. 3, G23/1/215, f. 3. The fact that these two were the only recipients and that this does not seem to have been an enfeoffment, suggests that Bagot was one of Lord Stourton’s servants and the intended beneficiary of the grant.

If that was the case, then Bagot’s appointment in the summer of 1454 to help requisition ships for the naval force established to defend the Channel also perhaps points to his service to Stourton, who was one of the keepers of the seas specifically named in the Parliament dissolved a few weeks earlier. A year later, in July 1455, at the close of the first session of the Parliament in which Bagot represented Old Sarum, Stourton and his fellow keepers were discharged from office at their own request. Although speculative, it must remain a possibility that Bagot had been returned to the Commons in Stourton’s interest. There is nothing to point to him holding property in the place he represented or in the city of Salisbury nearby, although his subsequent election as a serjeant of the mace in Salisbury indicates that he was well known there. In the late 1450s or early 1460s a suit he pursued against a weaver from Devizes for a debt of £3 resulted in the weaver’s outlawry.4 CPR, 1461-7, p. 317. There is no evidence to show that he was the Thomas Bagot who was serving William, Lord Berkeley, as bailiff of his liberty in Glos. in 1474: E13/160, m. 50d.