BISLEY, Thomas

A lawyer and ‘gentleman’, Bisley was one of the guests who attended the wedding of John Heyward of Gloucester in about 1417. Some decades later Heyward’s son and namesake became prior of Llanthony by Gloucester, a house of Augustinian canons for which Bisley’s father, another lawyer, had acted as a steward. Bisley also served the priory, witnessing conveyances to it in 1430 and 1432 and arbitrating in a quarrel between it and Robert Bentham II* in 1439. By the early 1440s, however, he himself had fallen out with the prior and canons, who accused him of failing to surrender six properties in Gloucester which should have passed to them under a 14th-century will. He did arbitrate in a dispute between the burgesses of Gloucester and Prior John Garland in 1456, although as a nominee of the town rather than Llanthony priory.5 Cal. Regs. Llanthony Priory ed. Rhodes (Bristol and Glos. Rec. Soc. xv), pp. xvii, 3, 26; C115/83, ff. 120-1; 84, ff. 122v, 161; R.A. Holt, ‘Gloucester’ (Birmingham Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1987), 215.

Bisley inherited most of his family’s extensive holdings in Gloucester,6 The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 240. to which he must have added further acquisitions of his own. By 1455, he was the biggest individual owner of property in the town, where he held over 30 houses, including his own residence in Westgate Street. The majority of his tenants were from the lower end of the social scale, as were those of his fellow lawyer, Thomas Deerhurst*, the next most considerable property owner among the burgesses at that date.7 Gloucester Rental, 14, 28, 30, 34, 42, 46, 54, 58, 60, 62, 68, 70, 72, 74, 76, 78, 88, 90, 108; Cal. Regs. Llanthony Priory, pp. xvii, 3n; Trans. Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc. ciii. 155-6. A royal pardon of July 1437 identifies Bisley as the son and heir of John Bisley senior,8 C67/38, m. 9. but presumably he was John’s youngest son, since at Gloucester the custom of borough English applied. Within the town, his own heir was his youngest son, another John Bisley, rather than his eldest son and namesake.9 C1/51/186. There is no evidence that Bisley succeeded to any of his family’s properties in the wider county of Gloucestershire where the normal rules of primogeniture applied, and it seems likely that most, if not all, of these lands passed to his elder brother.

In spite of his extensive interests in Gloucester, it appears that Bisley did not follow in his father’s footsteps by holding municipal office there. Outside the town, he served on a handful of ad hoc commissions and attested the return to Parliament of the knights of the shire for Gloucestershire on at least eight occasions. Over the years he acted as a witness and trustee on behalf of various gentry from the county, including his fellow lawyers, John Langley II* and William Nottingham II*. Langley made Bisley a feoffee to the use of his last will and, in turn, was one of Bisley’s own feoffees, while Bisley was acting as a feoffee for Nottingham, the King’s attorney-general, by 1457.10 Gloucester Corporation Recs. ed. Stevenson, 389-90; CPR, 1446-52, pp. 159-60; CCR, 1435-41, p. 135; 1447-54, p. 181; 1454-61, pp. 82, 133; C1/51/186; CP25(1)/79/89/66; 92/142; C1/51/186.

It is unlikely that Bisley survived for many years beyond that date, for it would appear that he was no longer alive when his son and heir John conveyed lands in the Gloucestershire parish of Hazleton to Nottingham in May 1463.11 CCR, 1461-8, pp. 180-1. In this enrolled deed the MP is described as ‘late of Gloucester, gentleman’. Soon after this transaction was completed, John Bisley himself died leaving two young daughters as his heirs. Later, at some point in the mid 1470s, the elder daughter Margaret and her husband Thomas Payn began an action in Chancery against her uncle, the MP’s eldest son and namesake. According to the Payns, this other Thomas Bisley had abused his position as the guardian of Margaret and her younger sister Margery by treating the girls’ inheritance in Gloucester as his own. They claimed that he had allowed some of the properties in question to fall into decay; that he had sold or otherwise disposed of others; that he had conspired to allow John Guise (evidently a relative) to take possession of two messuages belonging to the inheritance; and that he had removed Margery to a place unknown to her maternal relatives. In response to the Payns’ bill, Thomas claimed that the MP had assigned him an annuity from his estate, and that the girls’ father had granted him one of the shops he was supposed wrongfully to have sold. He asserted that Margaret, stated to be 15 years old in the bill, had yet to reach the age of 13, and that Margery would be 12 on 2 Feb. 1476. He also claimed that about five years previously one Watkyn Lentell of Gloucester and 11 other ‘misdoers’ had broken into his house at Sandhurst just to the north of the town, abducted the girls and taken away many deeds and other evidences relating to their inheritance. Some three years after the abduction, Margaret’s father-in-law, another Thomas Payn, took possession of her and some of the documents and married her to his son, contrary to her father’s will. Bisley added that he had petitioned the King in person about the actions of the elder Thomas Payn when Edward IV was at Ludlow around Whitsuntide 1473, although Payn had defied a subsequent royal order to surrender Margaret. Finally, he denied conspiring to deprive the girls of any part of their inheritance, asserting that John Guise had proved his title to the messuages in question. The depositions of five witnesses examined locally in Gloucestershire in connexion with this case have also survived, two of which upheld the claims of the plaintiffs and three those of the defendant, but the outcome of this apparently bitter dispute is unknown.12 C1/51/185-6.