BERWICK, Thomas

This MP remains an elusive figure, although he was almost certainly a Sussex man, and to judge from his activities as a feoffee he probably received some training in the law. Early in 1441, together with the Mille brothers, Edmund* and Edward*, both of whom were lawyers, he was enfeoffed of certain lands in Middlesex belonging to the Sussex esquire John Weston II*;1 CCR, 1435-41, p. 451. and there is a possibility that he was the Thomas Berwick who was left £2 in the will of the Essex landowner Edward Tyrell* in October 1442.2 Reg. Chichele, ii. 629. This was after Berwick’s only recorded Parliament had been dissolved. No evidence has been found to link him with the burgesses of Horsham, the borough he represented, and it is not known if he was then resident in the town. Berwick occasionally brought suits in the court of common pleas. For instance, he appeared in person in the Easter term of 1449 to sue a Chichester brewer for a debt of £20 and a chandler from the same city and a husbandman from nearby Bosham for sums amounting to £13 6s. 8d.3 CP40/753, rot. 120d; 757, rot. 65d.

Several years later, in 1472, Berwick defended himself in Chancery in a suit brought by John Gunter regarding land in Sussex which Gunter claimed had been sold to him by Edmund Mille’s widow. One of the trustees of this property, he had allegedly refused to transfer possession to the petitioner on the basis that the purpose of the enfeoffment, made at least 20 years earlier, had been to create an entail in favour of the heirs of Maurice Pomeroy.4 C1/44/73-76. The former MP had also been employed as a feoffee by the wealthy (Sir) Thomas Uvedale*, with respect to a manor in Hampshire and the family estate at Titsey in Surrey, which were settled on Uvedale and his wife in September the following year.5 CIPM Hen. VII, i. 392, 400. Berwick was then still living. He was perhaps an ancestor of Alfred Berwick† (d.1541) who sat for Horsham in the Parliament of 1529.6 The Commons 1509-58, i. 421.