BREINTON, Thomas

Thomas Breinton was from the leading family of Hereford, and, almost certainly, the son of another of the city’s MPs, George Breinton. This is implied by his first appearance in the records: on 15 July 1447 an attorney was named to give him seisin of property in Hereford put in feoffment by George’s father, William.8 C146/6603. During our MP’s long stewardship of the family estates and that of his even more successful son, John, the family became established among the county gentry. This social promotion is another example of the advantages of a legal training, for both Thomas and his son were lawyers. Nothing is known of their legal education, but both are marked out as lawyers by the pattern of their careers. Thomas was regularly appointed to commissions to deliver the gaols of both the city and castle of Hereford between 1455 and 1492, and served on the quorum of the peace intermittently from 1459 and then continuously from 1475 to his death. He is also found discharging the lawyer’s role as an arbiter. In the spring of 1455, for example, as the nominee of Richard Hawley, prior of Hereford, he returned an award in the prior’s dispute with Thomas Walwyn of Lugwardine, just outside Hereford, over a disputed rent.9 Herefs. RO, Walwyn mss, GL37/II/257.

In a pattern typical of lawyers, Breinton’s single recorded election to Parliament came early in his career, perhaps when he was attending one of the Inns of Court. On 16 May 1450, during this Parliament’s last session, he joined another Herefordshire lawyer, William Wykes*, in offering surety for a third, Thomas Fitzharry*, MP for the county, in a royal grant; three days later, he and Fitzharry offered surety in a grant to Wykes.10 C219/15/7; CFR, xviii. 155-6. This early connexion with Fitzharry helps to explain why Breinton identified himself with the Lancastrian cause in Herefordshire in the late 1450s. The county was deeply divided, for a Yorkist faction headed by Sir William Herbert* and (Sir) Walter Devereux I* was opposed by a Lancastrian one, of which Fitzharry was among the principals. This association with Fitzharry aside, Breinton may have been alienated from the Yorkists by an alleged incident in March 1456, when Herbert and Devereux’s son, Walter II*, came to Hereford, and, after a sham trial, hanged a citizen, whom they blamed for the murder of one of Herbert’s kinsmen. As a lawyer and citizen of Hereford, he is unlikely to have been impressed by such conduct, and he was one of several citizens whose sympathies lay with Lancaster. In Hilary term 1459 the younger Devereux brought an action in King’s bench claiming that Fitzharry and others, Breinton among them, had conspired to falsely indict him before the royal commissioners who had visited the county in 1457.11 KB9/35/61; KB27/791, rot. 19d. According to royal letters of privy seal of 10 Feb. 1459, for the issue of an order to the plaintiffs to cease the action, the ‘conspiracy’ consisted of no more than attendance at the sessions at which the indictments were made: PSO1/20/167. Unfortunately, the action never came to pleading, although it persisted into the early 1460s: KB27/810, rot. 50d.

Further evidence of Breinton’s Lancastrian sympathies is provided by attendance at the Hereford election to the Coventry Parliament of 1459; his appointment to the Lancastrian commission of array at the end of this assembly; and, more significantly, by the issue in August 1460, when the Yorkists were in control of government, of a commission for his arrest, along with those of Fitzharry and the mayor of Hereford, John Chippenham, to answer for spreading false news.12 C219/16/5; CPR, 1452-61, pp. 559, 612. None the less, Breinton, unlike the more important Fitzharry, succeeded in adapting to the new regime. Given his earlier connexions, it surprising to find him acting alongside John Welford*, a Hereford lawyer associated with York, as a feoffee in the foundation of a chantry in the church of Lugwardine to pray for the souls of Richard, duke of York, and Edmund, earl of Rutland, and for the good estate of, among others, Edward IV, Walter Devereux II and Welford himself.13 CPR, 1461-7, p. 151; 1467-77, p. 459; C143/453/1. And, although he was not appointed to the county bench in the 1460s (after a brief period of service in 1459-60), his appointments to commissions of gaol delivery from 1464 show that he was not excluded from local government. Further, on 28 Nov. 1467 he was appointed by the King to supervise, in combination with one of the local justices of assize, Sir Richard Chokke, the expenditure of murage by the mayor and bailiffs of Hereford.14 CPR, 1467-77, pp. 54-55.

Breinton’s reappointment to the bench during the Readeption demonstrates that the Lancastrians had not forgotten his earlier allegiance; yet with Edward IV’s restoration his administrative appointments multiplied. He was named to several ad hoc commissions, including one of oyer and terminer within a few months of Edward IV resuming the throne; in 1472 he was on the pricked list for appointment as sheriff, a rare distinction for a citizen of Hereford; after a brief exclusion, he was routinely appointed to the county bench from 1473; and he was named as escheator in 1479.15 CPR, 1467-77, p. 289; C47/34/2/6. The enrolled comms. of the peace for Herefs. are incomplete. No comm. is enrolled between Dec. 1470 and Feb. 1473: CPR, 1467-77, p. 615. Moreover, according to the enrolled comms. Breinton was excluded from the bench between Dec. 1473 and Aug. 1475, and yet he sat as a j.p. at Hereford on 25 July 1474: KB27/876, rex rot. 13. He also had influence enough to secure for his younger son, George, appointment as clerk of the peace in 1482.16 George was in office by 1482 until after 1486: E. Stephens, Clerks of Counties, 99. More significantly still, it was probably during this period that he was appointed as feodary of the King’s earldom of March in Herefordshire and the march of Wales. The only evidence for his tenure of this office is a pardon he sued out in 1484 – as, inter alia, Edward IV’s feodary there – but, given what else is known of his career, the second reign is a more likely period of service than the first.17 C67/51, m. 28.

Breinton’s prominence in local administration encouraged others to employ him. From early in his career he had acted as steward and clerk of the local courts of Hereford cathedral, and on 20 Sept. 1475 Thomas Myllyng, the new bishop of Hereford, nominated him as under steward of the episcopal lands in Herefordshire and Gloucestershire. Better records would no doubt reveal other similar appointments. With service came reward. On 28 Dec. 1482 the bishop gave him the wardship and marriage of his tenant, Robert, son and heir of Hugh Amondesham, and soon after Breinton married this ward to his daughter, Joan. The Amondeshams ranked among the county gentry, albeit the lesser ones, and the marriage served to confirm the social advance of a lawyer who had turned himself from a citizen of Hereford to a royal officer in the county.18 Baker, i. 363; Reg. Myllyng, 76, 87. Robert was briefly removed from Breinton’s custody by a local labourer: CP40/885A, rot. 6d. He died on 5 Feb. 1488, leaving a son and daughter by Joan, and the bp. then effectively renewed his earlier grant by entrusting the wardship of the son, Roger, to our MP and his son, John: CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 191.

Breinton’s administrative role survived the usurpation of Richard III and the accession of Henry VII. He maintained his place on the bench through this troubled period, and the family made a further social advance in the early part of Henry VII’s reign. In November 1485 he was named for his second term as escheator of Herefordshire, and, more significantly, his son John, a lawyer of Lincoln’s Inn, was appointed as feodary of the manor of Fownhope. Soon afterwards the latter contracted a marriage that firmly established the Breintons among the county gentry. On 4 Jan. 1487 John was dispensed to marry Sibyl, widow of Richard Hakeluyt of Eaton Gamage and one of the daughters of the influential Simon Milborne of Tillington.19 CPR, 1485-94, p. 41; Baker, i. 363; Reg. Myllyng, 109. Now a more important man than his father he was elected to the Parliament of 1491, not for his native city, but for the county of Herefordshire. Thomas continued in his lesser role, receiving commissions into the 1490s. He was last appointed to the bench in April 1494, and death is the most likely explanation for his exclusion from the next bench of December 1495.20 CPR, 1485-94, p. 488; 1494-1509, pp. 641-2.

During the course of this long career, Breinton acquired a landed estate in Herefordshire, but the process of acquisition can only be dimly grasped in the surviving records. From his mother he appears to have inherited property in Yarpole and Orleton in the north of the county, and by early in his own career he also had land at Wellington, a few miles to the north of Hereford, for he was described as a gentleman of that place when offering surety in 1450.21 The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 351; CFR, xviii. 155-6. He added to his property there in 1474, when a yeoman, Thomas Restard, granted him and his feoffees all his lands in Wellington and nearby Marden, Bodenham, Lower Lyde and Burghill.22 C146/6622. On 20 Mar. 1494 Breinton conceded Restard’s widow a life interest in her late husband’s lands in Wellington: C146/1214. Three years later, in what looks like the resolution of a dispute, his son John gave Restard’s heir, Eleanor, an interest in fee tail in the property in Wellington and Bodenham, saving the reversion to himself, in return for her quitclaim of the other Restard property: C146/81, 4292, 6729, 7153. Breinton also bought further property in Hereford: in 1482 one of the leading citizens, William Mey, alienated all his tenements there to our MP, his sons and others, to the disinheritance of his cousin and heir, John Chippenham.23 C146/4215, 6498, 7028. Unfortunately it is not possible to say whether the manor of Stretton Sugwas, a little to the west of the city and not far from Wellington, was our MP’s acquisition or his son’s. All that is certain is that it was owned by the Breintons by 1510, when it was settled on John and his wife.24 C142/46/94.