BROMWICH, Thomas

The family of Bromwich had a distinguished recent history. Our MP’s great-uncle, Sir John Bromwich† (d.1388), had a remarkable career, successively holding prominent places in the employ of three of the greatest magnates of his day. He moved from the service of Lionel, duke of Clarence, whom he accompanied to Milan in 1368, to that of Edmund Mortimer, earl of March, for whom he acted as justiciar in Ireland during Mortimer’s lieutenancy there, and finally to that of John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, serving, during the last years of his life, as surveyor of the lands of Gaunt’s son, the future Henry IV.4 Private Indentures (Cam. Miscellany xxxii), no. 66; CPR, 1370-4, p. 87; R. Somerville, Duchy, i. 386; N. Saul, Knights and Esquires, 93. He also made a marriage far beyond the expectations of his birth: in about 1360, quite early in his career, he took as his wife the wealthy and high-born Elizabeth Comyn of Badenoch, niece and heiress of Aymer de Valance, earl of Pembroke, and widow of Richard, Lord Talbot (d.1356). The match, however, although it brought him considerable wealth, had the disadvantage that the bride was then beyond child-bearing years, being some 30 years his senior. Not until her death in 1372 did Sir John have the chance of remarriage and legitimate issue, but his new wife brought no children and, regrettably for his heirs, was young enough to long survive him.5 CCR, 1354-60, p. 158; CP, xii (1), 614; The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 572-3.

Sir John’s career marked the highpoint of the family’s fortunes. Two circumstances ensured its decline, at least relative to Sir John: first, he settled a life interest in his principal properties – the manors of Credenhill and Eaton Tregoes in Herefordshire, and Nailsworth and Bromsberrow in Gloucestershire, all of which he acquired rather than inherited – on his young second wife; and, second, when these manors descended on her death in 1420 to his nephew and heir, our MP’s father, Thomas, defects of title meant that he was only to hold on to the manor of Bromsberrow.6 C260/153/16. Thomas was the son of Walter, who, like Sir John, had also been a retainer of Edmund, earl of March: Private Indentures, no. 59. For the purchase of the manor of Eaton Tregoes: CCR, 1374-7, pp. 257-8; CPR, 1374-7, pp. 235-6; 1377-81, p. 391; 1385-9, p. 50. For that of Bromsberrow: CIPM, xxi. 580. That of Credenhill, which Sir John had held in fee tail with reversion to the Talbots, was reclaimed by John, Lord Talbot; that of Eaton Tregoes, seemingly quite improperly, was acquired by his widow’s second husband, Sir Hugh Waterton, for his own daughters; and that of Nailsworth was retaken by a butcher, John Basset of Stanley (Gloucestershire), who had originally sold it to Sir John.7 By a fine of 1375 the manor and advowson of Credenhill had been settled on Sir John and his issue, with remainder to his stepson, Gilbert, Lord Talbot, and his issue: CP25(1)/83/47/260; CCR, 1374-7, p. 112; 1381-5, p. 408. At her death Katherine was said to hold the manor of Eaton Tregoes by royal grant rather than the 1387 fine, and soon after our MP’s father tamely made a quitclaim: CCR, 1419-22, pp. 96-97, 195; CIPM, xxi. 581. It then descended through the daughters of Waterton: CIPM, xxi. 578-9. The manor of Nailsworth, again according to Katherine’s inquisition post mortem, had been demised to Sir John by John Basset. Our MP’s father complained that Basset had disseised him, but the manor was not regained: CIPM, xxi. 580; C1/5/16-17; CPR, 1416-22, pp. 326-7; 1429-36, p. 373; VCH Glos. xi. 211. To these losses is probably to be added the small manor of ‘Le Halle’ in Bishop’s Frome, Herefs., purchased by Sir John Bromwich in 1354, and alienated, seemingly permanently, by our MP’s father in 1421: CP25(1)/83/43/165; CCR, 1422-9, pp. 69, 77-78. In this situation it was fortunate for our MP’s father that he had not been solely dependant on his uncle for an inheritance. His mother, Alice, although her precise identity is unclear, was an heiress. In 1366 a small estate in Weobley, Norton Canon and Sarnesfield Coffyn was settled on his parents and their issue, with remainder to her right heirs, and her inheritance may also be the explanation for a more important later settlement. On 6 Aug. 1424 Richard de la Mare* and George Breinton* quitclaimed to our MP’s father their right in the manors of Sarnesfield Coffyn and ‘La Ley’, and it was at Sarnesfield, either at this date or, more probably, before, that he took up residence.8 CP25(1)/83/45/215; E40/5974. In 1377 our MP’s gdfa., Walter, had had licence to enclose some 220 acres of land at Sarnesfield: CPR, 1377-81, p. 69.

On this evidence of the family’s landholdings, although far more attenuated than in the time of Sir John, were ample, yet the subsidy returns of 1450-1 give a different impression. Our MP was assessed at a meagre £10 p.a., his mother £6, his son and heir, another Thomas, also at £6, and his brother, Robert, at £2.9 E179/117/64. No doubt these are under-assessments, yet other evidence supports the impression that the fifteenth-century Bromwiches did not number among the local gentry elite. Neither our MP nor his father is recorded among those distrained to take up the rank of knighthood; neither held office as sheriff; and our MP’s own son and heir replicated this lack of distinction. On the other hand, if one were to judge status in terms of connexions among the leading gentry, the family’s place in the county appears more exalted. Our MP’s mother, for example, was (in all likelihood) an Oldcastle; his putative aunt, Elizabeth, was the mother of Walter Devereux I*; and in 1426 his sister, Elizabeth, married Thomas Skydemore of Rowlstone, a kinsman of Sir John Skydemore*.10 Sir John Skydemore witnessed the deed by which Rowlstone was settled on the couple in jointure: Herefs. RO, Kentchurch Court mss, AL40/13/791. There is no direct contemporary evidence for this marriage between Devereux and Bromwich, but it is noted in a ped. of 1619: Vis. Warws. (Harl. Soc. xii), 279.

The difficulty of coming to an unambiguous picture of the family’s status is matched by that of accurately demarcating the overlapping careers of the three Thomases, who headed the family in the fifteenth century. Between about 1410 and 1470 the records are careful to differentiate between two Thomas Bromwiches, senior and junior, but, regrettably, the eldest Thomas’s date of death is not certainly known. The best hypothesis is that he died in the late 1430s, when there is a break in the designation of ‘senior’ and ‘junior’, and that the re-emergence of the designation ‘junior’ about ten years later marks the start of the career of our MP’s son.11 There is little of note about the career of the eldest Thomas, although, in 1408, he was one of several Herefs. gentry retained by Henry, prince of Wales: Private Indentures, no. 107. It is on this assumption that this biography is constructed.

Our MP first occurs in the records in 1416, when he and his father numbered among many defendants in an assize of novel disseisin successfully brought by Margery Massy in respect of land in Mansell Lacy and Brinsop (near Sarnesfield). He was probably quite young at this date, perhaps even under age, for he makes only sporadic appearances in the records over the next 20 or so years. Early in 1420 both he and his father appear in a list of Herefordshire esquires fit to undertake military service. In the following year, he presented to the church of Credenhill, in a failed attempt to resurrect Sir John’s hereditary claim to the manor. John, Lord Talbot, quickly asserted his own right to the patronage.12 JUST1/1525, rot. 10; E28/97/12, B and C; J. Duncumb, Hist. Herefs.: Grimsworth Hundred (continued by Cooke), 79-81. More importantly, by the end of that decade Bromwich had married into another local family formerly connected with the Mortimers, the Lingens of Lingen, about ten miles to the north of Sarnesfield. This is clear from a final concord of November 1429, which was probably levied to mark the birth of our MP’s first son. The manor of Bromsberrow was settled on our MP’s parents in fee tail, with successive remainders, in fee tail, to him and his wife, their son, another Thomas, our MP’s younger brothers, Robert and William, and Thomas, younger brother of Walter Devereux I, with a final remainder to the right heirs of our MP’s father.13 CP25(1)/83/54/31. The Lingens had been Mortimer retainers and tenants: G.A. Holmes, Estates of Higher Nobility, 61; CIPM, xxii. 507, 510. The settlement was a curious one: in the naming of the family’s male members it took the form of one designed to secure the property to the male line, and yet the entails were in tail general not male. Equally interesting, particularly in light of the later close association between our MP and Walter Devereux, is the distant remainder interest conferred upon Walter’s younger brother in what was clearly an expression of kinship.

From this point Bromwich, despite his father’s continued survival, began to play an independent part in local affairs. In 1430 he sued a husbandman of Brinsop for close-breaking there, perhaps on property settled upon him by his father at the time of his marriage; and on 21 Apr. 1431 he joined his brother-in-law, Ralph Lingen, at Hereford to sit as a juror in the inquisition taken on the death of (Sir) Richard Hankford*.14 CP40/678, rot. 261; CIPM, xxiii. 570. In 1431 he was returned as holding a tenth of a knights’ fee in Brinsop, once of Sir John Bromwich: Feudal Aids, ii. 418; CCR, 1360-4, p. 158. In the following autumn he acted with his father in the jointure settlement made on the marriage of their kinswoman, Elizabeth, sister of the Devereux brothers, to Richard Walwyn of Much Marcle, and soon after, on 16 Nov. 1431, father and son were jurors at Hereford in an inquiry, held for the purpose of assessing contributions to a subsidy payable to the Crown, into landholding in the county.15 Herefs. RO, Walwyn mss, GL37/II/156; Feudal Aids, ii. 416. It was also at this date that he started to attest the county’s parliamentary elections, continuing, in the frequency of his attendance, a practice initiated by his father in 1411. On 5 Apr. 1432 he was one of some 200 present at the county parliamentary election, and he also attested the much less well attended election of the following year (the last of the 11 elections attested by his father).16 C219/14/3, 4. With his father and two brothers he was among the Herefordshire gentry required in 1434 to take the parliamentary oath not to maintain peace-breakers. More surprisingly, in Trinity term of the same year, he troubled to appear personally in the court of King’s bench to pursue a plea of trespass against a gentleman of Shelwick, near Hereford.17 CPR, 1429-36, pp. 376-7; KB27/693, rot. 64d.

Not until the late 1430s did Bromwich succeed to the family estates. The eldest Thomas last appears in the records in December 1437, when, as a feoffee under a settlement made as long before as 1404, the Crown licensed him to make an enfeoffment of the Herefordshire manor of Brimfield, and he probably died soon afterwards.18 CP25(1)/83/51/10; CCR, 1435-41, p. 76; CPR, 1436-41, p. 125. No doubt this augmented our MP’s wealth, but the gain was lessened by his mother’s survival: she continued to hold the manor of Bromsberrow, presenting to the church there in 1447.19 Reg. Spofford (Canterbury and York Soc. xxiii), 367. None the less, from the late 1430s, Bromwich cut a figure of some standing, making a greater impact on local affairs than his father had ever done. In the mid 1430s he was one of those entrusted by John Russell I*, a prominent local lawyer, with the endowment of a chantry in Hereford cathedral; in June 1438, as a feoffee of his neighbour, Thomas de la Hay*, he was party to an important resettlement of the de la Hay estates, principally the manor of Urishay; and in 1441 he was named among the feoffees of Sir Robert Whitney*.20 Herefs. RO, LC deeds, 6566, 9132 (no. 136); Urishay Estate mss, W85/4; CIPM, xxv. 415.

At the end of that year Bromwich attested the election to Parliament of his putative kinsman, Henry Oldcastle*, and John Abrahall, and very soon afterwards he was to be drawn into a curious affair involving both these men and one in which he might have been expected to have a personal interest.21 C219/15/2. On 14 Sept. 1443 he and Oldcastle, acting on what was the first ad hoc commission of local government directed to our MP, presided over an inquiry that found that Abrahall died seised, among other things, of a moiety of the manor of Eaton Tregoes, once held by Bromwich’s great-uncle. This finding was much to the disadvantage of the serving escheator, Thomas Fitzharry, for he stood as his brother’s heir-presumptive to the moiety, and he reacted angrily. According to a later complaint, he threatened to cut up the jurors, ‘as smalle as haukes mete’, for their false finding, and pursued a campaign of intimidation against Oldcastle, whom he seems to have blamed for the whole affair.22 CPR, 1441-6, p. 201; CIPM, xxvi. 74; KB27/734, rot. 36; E28/71/54; KB9/245/113. There is no evidence to suggest that Bromwich also suffered at Fitzharry’s hands (he seems to have surrendered meekly whatever claim he may have had to the manor), although the episode may have played a part in the later rivalry between the two men, who were later to find themselves on different sides in the disturbances that divided county and country in the following decade.23 Relations between Bromwich and Fitzharry were also complicated by Fizharry’s marriage, in 1453, to the widow of Ralph Lingen. This provoked a dispute between Bromwich’s nephew, John Lingen, and Fitzharry, in which, on the little evidence available, our MP supported the former: Procs. Chancery Eliz. ed. Caley and Bayley, i, p. xlviii; KB27/785, rot. 43.

Bromwich also had difficulties with others at this date. In Trinity term 1444 he again troubled to attend the court of King’s bench to pursue two actions: the one brought against a large group of minor individuals from the neighbourhood of Abbey Dore, in the far south-west of the county, for assaulting and wounding him there; and the other, against a husbandman for close-breaking at ‘Wydmersshmore’.24 KB27/733, rots. 24d, 54d; 739, rot. 78. More happily, in June 1446 he and his brother, Robert, were among 21 of the Herefordshire gentry in receipt of annuities, Thomas of ten marks and Robert of five, from the Beauchamp lordship of Abergavenny, when that lordship was in the hands of royal custodians. The purpose of these grants was the protection of the lordship against Edward Neville, Lord Abergavenny, a rival claimant (in right of his wife), but it is not known whether they were made by the young Henry Beauchamp, duke of Warwick, recently-entered into his inheritance, or by the keepers. In any event, Warwick’s premature death on 11 June 1446 meant that the associations established by these annuities were of no long term significance. None the less, Bromwich’s appearance among these annuitants is a clear sign of his standing in the county. Only (Sir) Walter Devereux I, Sir John Barre and Thomas Parker were in receipt of greater sums, and the ten marks awarded to Bromwich was the same as that paid to such senior county gentry as (Sir) John Skydemore* and Henry Oldcastle.25 E368/220, rot. 122d; M. Hicks, Warwick, 33-35. Bromwich’s high status is also apparent in his appearance at the head of the jury at the inq. post mortem held at Hereford on 7 Nov. 1447 in respect of Humphrey, duke of Gloucester: CIPM, xxvi. 547. In this context, his election to Parliament is not surprising: on 25 Oct. 1449 he was returned (oddly, in view of later relationships, in company with Fitzharry) by attestors including his son, Thomas, and brother-in-law, Ralph Lingen.26 C219/15/7.

The dramatic events Bromwich witnessed in this Parliament – the Commons’ attack on the government, culminating in the impeachment of William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk – provided him with a foretaste of the troubles that overtook his native county in the 1450s. In view of his longstanding connexion with his powerful kinsman, Sir Walter Devereux, one of Richard, duke of York’s principal local lieutenants, he could hardly escape involvement in this turmoil. Although, beyond pledging £200 for his friend’s good behaviour, he played no recorded part in the disturbances organized by Devereux early in 1452 in support of the duke’s failed Dartford rising, other evidence shows that he and his kinsman, Ralph Bromwich, numbered among Devereux’s closest associates. In Trinity term 1453 Ralph was appealed alongside Devereux as accessory to the murder of Ralph Hakeluyt of Leominster, and later in the same year our MP was nominated as an arbiter in a dispute between two of Devereux’s tenants.27 KB9/34/2/45, 46; KB27/769, rot. 52d; Longleat House, Wilts., Devereux pprs. DE/Box I/11. Two years later our MP acted for Devereux in two altogether more important matters. On 30 May 1455 he and the local lawyer, Thomas Mymme, were chosen by Sir Walter to negotiate with the representatives of the King’s esquire, Humphrey Blount†, over the manor of Ashton (Herefordshire), which Blount claimed by inheritance and Devereux as feoffee of Edmund Cornwall; and on 6 June he and Sir Walter were nominated as arbiters to resolve matters arising from an alleged murder by another claimant to this manor, Humphrey Stafford, elder brother of Fulk Stafford.28 KB9/35/69; Devereux pprs. DE/Box I/12, 13. It is significant that these efforts at dispute resolution were made in the immediate aftermath of the duke of York’s victory at the first battle of St. Albans, representing an effort to either resolve an important local dispute in the interests of a lasting peace or, conceived less charitably, impose a settlement when the Yorkists were in the ascendant. In this brief period of comparative calm that followed this victory, Ralph Bromwich was named as escheator in Herefordshire, and our MP himself, in January 1456, was one of the feoffees employed to settle a jointure on Sir Walter’s sister, Isabel, wife of Roland Lenthall.29 CFR, xix. 145; CIPM, Hen. VII, i. 445.

Soon thereafter, however, the politics of the county entered a period of crisis, provoked by the end of the duke of York’s protectorate and, more specifically, by the murder of a kinsman of another Yorkist, Sir William Herbert*, at Hereford. Bromwich was one of the many who took up arms in the cause of revenge: on 15 Mar. 1456 he numbered among a Yorkist gang, led by Herbert and Devereux’s son, Walter II*, who came to Hereford, intimidated the j.p.s (among whom was Fitzharry) into taking an indictment of murder against six citizens, and then promptly hanged the indicted. Perhaps chastened by this explosion of violence he did not, at least on the evidence of the indictments taken before royal commissioners at Hereford in April 1457, participate in the Yorkist raid on Carmarthen and Aberwystwyth castles in the following August. None the less, his alleged involvement in the earlier events was enough to ensure that these commissioners heard several indictments (all of which concerned the illegal hangings), and there followed an anxious period for him. On 9 May 1457 he appeared personally in the court of King’s bench and pleaded not guilty on the indictments, producing sureties for his appearance in the following term. These were headed by Devereux’s son-in-law, James Baskerville†, an obvious choice given Bromwich’s own affiliation with Devereux, but it is more surprising to find two junior members of the Lancastrian Skydemores, Philip and Richard, alongside Baskerville.30 KB27/784, rex rot. 7. Their willingness to act probably arose from the marriage of Thomas Skydemore to Bromwich’s sister or else to some political divide among the Skydemores. Beyond finding sureties of his own, Bromwich was also called upon to expose himself financially for others of the indicted. On the day of his own appearance, he stood bail for his kinsmen, Ralph Bromwich, John Lingen and Walter Devereux II, and his neighbour, Thomas Monnington of Sarnesfield. Four days later, he entered into a much more potentially burdensome undertaking. With several others, he entered into a recognizance in a massive 5,000 marks to William Brandon†, marshal of the Marshalsea, and John Wingfield†, that seven of the indicted, including his son, Thomas, would be true prisoners in the Marshalsea.31 CCR, 1454-61, pp. 222-3.

Bromwich, like the others, was made to wait for the alleviation of the financial and physical danger in which they stood, a danger increased by an appeal sued against them by Agnes Glover, a widow of one of the murdered townsmen. Over the next two terms he produced new sureties, including the two Devereuxs, father and son, and another Yorkist, John Clinton, for further appearances in King’s bench, and it was not until 3 Feb. 1458 that a jury came to Westminster to acquit him and the other principals of the charges against them.32 KB27/784, rot. 85, rex rot. 7. These verdicts were part of an ongoing process of reconciliation in the county. Only five days later Bromwich joined the leaders of the Yorkist faction, the two Devereuxs and Sir William Herbert, in entering a bond in £1,000 to the leaders of the Lancastrian, James, Lord Audley (one of those before whom the indictments had been taken), Sir John Barre, the ubiquitous Fitzharry and Thomas Cornwall (one of the grand jurors who had laid the indictments), undertaking to abide the arbitration of John Stanbury, bishop of Hereford, and John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury (then treasurer), and another before whom the indictments had been taken. Significantly, the point at issue was said to be the indictments themselves, suggesting that there was something suspicious about them. This is confirmed by a later action of conspiracy: in Trinity term 1460, and perhaps before, Bromwich was one of many who claimed that the indictments concerning the raid on Hereford were false, the product of a conspiracy by Barre, Fitzharry and other Lancastrians.33 Devereux pprs. DE/Box I/15; KB27/798, rot. 40d. Regrettably for an understanding of these events, the award of the arbiters, if any were made, does not survive. The fact of the subsequent conspiracy actions, however, suggests that no satisfactory award was reached.

Bromwich had had dealings of his own with one of the arbiters, the earl of Shrewsbury, in 1457. Politically weakened by his involvement with Devereux, he had been unable to resist a final surrender of his longstanding, but spurious, claim to the earl’s manor and advowson of Credenhill. By a final concord levied in Easter 1457, only a few days after his first appearance in King’s bench, he and his wife warranted the earl’s title.34 CP25(1)/83/56/76. No doubt it was with mixed feelings that he was later brought to accept Shrewsbury’s arbitration, and perhaps the earl’s unimpeachable Lancastrian credentials proved a handicap to a settlement. However this may be, any award would have been quickly overtaken by events. A brief period of calm, locally and nationally, followed the submission to arbitration. During it, Bromwich secured a general pardon on 1 Oct. 1458, which, early in the following Hilary term, he pleaded to end the King’s suit against him on Agnes Glover’s appeal.35 C67/42, m. 5; KB27/784, rot. 85. On 22 Apr. 1459, Sir Walter Devereux, approaching death, named him as one of the trustees of his goods in the august company of the duke of York and Thomas Bourgchier, archbishop of Canterbury, and as one of his executors.36 Devereux pprs. DE/Box I/17; E13/157, rot. 52d. Thereafter crisis followed: the Yorkists took up arms, and on the night of 12 Oct. 1459 they fled ignominiously from their armed camp at Ludford Bridge, when outfaced by a superior Lancastrian force. Given Bromwich’s political sympathies, it may be that he too was part of this Yorkist force, but he behaved as though he had not been. On the following day he and his son, Thomas, travelled to Hereford castle to attend the county court for the election of MPs to the Parliament for which summonses had been issued on 9 Oct. The assembly must have been a tense one: the sheriff, (Sir) William Catesby*, a knight of the King’s body, presided over a gathering including Lancastrians, such as (Sir) John Skydemore and Thomas Cornwall, who, like Catesby, had probably been in the royal camp on the previous day, and Yorkists, namely the duke of York’s receiver, John Milewater, and the Bromwiches, who had probably opposed them. Not surprisingly the Lancastrian interest prevailed, and Barre and Fitzharry were returned.37 The Herefs. election was held so expeditiously because the writs of parliamentary summons had been issued at Leominster as the royal army moved to confront the Yorkists: C219/16/5.

In the months that followed Bromwich laid low in the hope, and (in view of the escape of the Yorkist lords abroad) perhaps the expectation, of better times ahead. He escaped attainder in the subsequent Parliament, probably because his personal connexion with York was slight, his principal allegiance being to the Devereux family rather than the duke (significantly, Walter Devereux II also escaped attainder, although not without entering heavy securities). Bromwich’s son, John, however, appears to have had more to fear than his father: on 17 Dec., three days before the end of the Parliament, he took the expensive precaution of having a pardon for treason and other offences enrolled on the patent roll. It was perhaps in further defence of the family’s interests that our MP travelled to Westminster: in Easter term 1460 he appeared personally in the court of common pleas to secure writs of outlawry against three Hereford tradesmen on pleas of debt and to defend a debt action sued against him by Catesby.38 CPR, 1452-61, p. 529; CP40/797, rots. 79, 198d. His fortitude was soon rewarded. In the following July, when the Yorkists defeated the Lancastrians at Northampton, political fortunes were again reversed, this time more decisively (at least viewed from the perspective of hindsight) than they had been at Ludford Bridge. Bromwich’s local friends were once more in the ascendant. In the following month, he had the satisfaction of a commission to arrest four of the county’s Lancastrians, headed by Barre, Fitzharry, Thomas Breinton and John Chippenham, all of whom were to be among those sued, in Michaelmas term 1460, by him and others for conspiracy in respect of the indictments of 1457.39 CPR, 1452-61, p. 612; KB27/798, rot. 40d.

With the further Yorkist victory at Towton in March 1461, Bromwich’s decision to support the Devereux family was finally vindicated, but, perhaps because of a combination of his own advancing age and the death of his friend, Sir Walter Devereux, he benefited less from the change of regime than might have been expected. Although he was added to the Herefordshire bench in July 1461, and in the following month was nominated to a politically-sensitive commission of array, he did not cut much of figure in local politics. Some of his activities were, not surprisingly, informed by the rivalries of the previous decade: he continued to pursue his conspiracy action in the court of King’s bench, albeit without securing a verdict, and in July 1462 he and his son, Thomas, were members of a jury which acquitted John Kene, a local lawyer connected with the Devereux family, on a charge of theft from Fitzharry.40 CPR, 1452-61, p. 98; 1461-7, p. 565; KB27/809, rot. 60d; KB146/7/2/1. For the rest he took some small part in local administration, serving on four minor commissions and, with his sons, Thomas and John, attesting the county parliamentary election on 29 May 1467.41 C219/17/1. One aspect of his personal affairs in these years is, however, of interest. In the early 1460s he sued a petition in Chancery against the feoffees of Henry Oldcastle, who had died childless, for their refusal to sell him Oldcastle’s manor of King’s Caple, a few miles to the south of Hereford. He claimed that Oldcastle had instructed them to make estate of the manor to him and Eustace Whitney† for 80 marks, and, although Whitney did not want to go through with the purchase, he did. This option to purchase, if it is to be seen as a recognition of kinship, strengthens the probability that Bromwich’s mother had been an Oldcastle, for Whitney was certainly a kinsman of Henry Oldcastle, being the son of Henry’s cousin, Wintelan, daughter of Thomas Oldcastle†. Unfortunately for our MP, there was another version of the deceased’s wishes: in a counter-petition, Henry’s cousin, Henry Hakluyt, asserted that the feoffees, among whom, he claimed, was Bromwich, were under instructions to convey the manor to him in fee. Both claims were unsuccessful: Simon Milborne, Oldcastle’s stepson and adopted heir, made good his claim.42 C1/28/22; 29/141.

Bromwich was alive as late as 8 Mar. 1470, when, as feoffee of Thomas Walwyn of Much Marcle, he was party to the settlement of an annual rent of £5 on John, younger son of Sir Walter Devereux. His adherence to the Devereux family is enough to explain his omission from the Readeption commission of the peace issued during the following December, but death is another explanation. He was, in any event, certainly dead by October 1471, when he was noted as such in an action concerning Sir Walter’s executors.43 Herefs. RO, Sir Thomas Phillipps mss, AH81/4; E13/157, rot. 52d. By this date his eldest son, Thomas, was well into middle age, having attested a parliamentary election as long before as 1449. Indeed, he already had a married daughter: by February 1470, when a jointure settlement was made on the couple, this daughter, Joan, was the wife of Roger Bodenham of Much Dewchurch in the south of the county. Soon after he inherited the family lands he appears to have made an attempt to regain the manor of Credenhill: early in 1473 the fine of 1387, by which that manor had been settled on the right heirs of Sir John Bromwich, was called into Chancery, probably on his petition. Curiously, he made his career in the county town, serving as the mayor of Hereford in the late 1470s. Later another Thomas Bromwich†, mayor in 1546-7, sat as MP for that borough in the Parliament of 1554 (Apr.).44 Herefs. RO, Rotherwas Estate mss, AD2/II/135; C260/153/16; J. Price, Hereford, 256; The Commons 1509-58, i. 510-11.