BROCKET, Thomas

A man of obscure origins who married an heiress from Hertfordshire, Brocket was possibly the son of a namesake from Yorkshire,6 CCR, 1385-9, p. 434; 1392-6, p. 273; CFR, xii. 71, 153, 313. who initially had made his way in the service of the Scropes of Masham. In 1410 Henry Scrope, 3rd Lord Scrope, became treasurer of England, and in July that year he appointed the elder Thomas treasurer’s remembrancer. Scrope, who surrendered the office of treasurer in December 1411, was executed for treason in 1415, but Thomas, who remained in office under subsequent treasurers, survived his downfall unscathed.7 CP, xi. 565-7; PRO List ‘Exchequer Officers’, 54. He was one of those who seized Scrope’s goods and jewels for the Crown in 1419,8 CPR, 1416-22, p. 213; Issues of the Exchequer ed. Devon, 359-60, 361. when he also received a grant awarding him a share in the reversion of two manors in Yorkshire that had belonged to his former master.9 CFR, xiv. 286. In 1427, the Crown commissioned him and Thomas Levesham, the King’s remembrancer at the Exchequer, to survey the royal armoury at the Tower of London,10 CPR, 1422-9, pp. 465, 467. and it was with Levesham that he helped the treasurer, Ralph, Lord Cromwell, to draw up a statement of the realm’s finances presented to the Parliament of 1433.11 PROME, xi. 102-13; J.L. Kirby, ‘Issues of Exchequer’, Bull. IHR, xxiv. 121, 131-4, 135. The elder Thomas relinquished his position in the Exchequer in the autumn of 1435, possibly dying in office.12 PRO List ‘Exchequer Officers’, 54. It is possible that the elder Thomas was related to William Brocket, a clerk dismissed from the Exchequer in 1433 for fraudulently altering the record of an inquisition post mortem: CCR, 1429-35, pp. 254-6; J.F. Baldwin, King’s Council, 525-9.

While it is possible that the Exchequer official was the MP of 1435, it seems safe to assume that the subject of this biography was his younger namesake, who had formed a connexion with Hertfordshire through marriage. Almost certainly a lawyer, given his service as a j.p. and justice of gaol delivery, the younger Thomas began his public career in the Commons and it was to his time as an MP that he owed his first recorded commission. In early 1436 he, his fellow knight of the shire, Nicholas Morley*, and others were appointed to assess the residents of Hertfordshire for the tax which the Parliament had granted the King, and for the purposes of the tax he himself was found to enjoy an income of £40 p.a. in lands and fees.13 H.L. Gray, ‘Incomes from Land in Eng. in 1436’, EHR, xlix. 634. Whatever the accuracy of this assessment, Brocket was of sufficient landed means in later years for the Crown to distrain him for knighthood on at least three occasions. It is possible that he had inherited land at Selby in Yorkshire,14 In 1483 Robert Stillington, bp. of Bath and Wells, settled lands at Selby, some of which formerly had belonged to Thomas Brocket esq., on the college he founded there: PROME, xv. 48-49; CCR, 1476-85, no. 1156; VCH Yorks. iii. 360. although he held most of his estates in the right of his wife, Elizabeth. She had inherited several manors and other properties at Hatfield, Sandridge, Bengeo and Ippollitts in Hertfordshire from her maternal grandfather Edward Fitzsymond, the rest of whose estate had passed to her aunt Christine, the wife of John Moseley.15 VCH Herts. ii. 434; iii. 26, 424; CP25(1)/91/113/88; 118/1; 119/42; C140/62/47; 80/46; CIPM Hen. VII, i. 406; P. Morant, Essex, i. 234. When the landowners of Herts. were assessed for taxation in 1428 ‘John’ Brocket was found to hold a knight’s fee in Hatfield (Feudal Aids, ii. 450), but this is probably a scribal error. Brocket and Elizabeth also held the manor of ‘Haghames’ in south-east Essex, a property which they sold to Thomas Cook II* of London in the mid 1450s, but it is not clear whether it was part of the Fitzsymond inheritance or a property which the couple had purchased.16 Essex Feet of Fines, iv. 50; C1/66/400. In terms of purchases of land, Brocket’s only known investment of any significance was the reversion of the manor of Herons in Wheathampstead, bought in 1448 and which vested after the death of Anne, widow of William Cressy.17 VCH Herts. ii. 302. The exact date of Anne’s death is unknown. After Robert Moseley died without heirs in October 1474, Elizabeth succeeded to the former Fitzsymond lands that Robert had held at East Tilbury in Essex, consisting of the manor of St. Cleres and the reversion of another known as Oldhall that the wife of John Welles held for life. Soon afterwards, she and Brocket sold the reversion of both manors, to vest after their deaths, to Sir John Scott†.18 C140/53/39; 62/47; Morant, i. 234; E405/62, m. 2; Essex Feet of Fines, iv. 73-74.

The Moseley share of the Fitzsymond inheritance featured in one of the Chancery cases to which Brocket was a party in his later years. Two of these cases, dating from the late 1460s or early 1470s, arose from a couple of bills filed by Thomas Rogers, the son-in-law of the late Edmund Bardolf*, whom Brocket had served as a feoffee. Rogers claimed that Brocket and other Bardolf feoffees had denied him full payment of his wife’s marriage portion and breached their trust regarding other conditions of the settlement drawn up before the marriage took place. In the same period, Bardolf’s grandson and namesake sued Brocket and the other feoffees for refusing him seisin of a manor at Watton-at-Stone.19 C1/41/27-29, 128-30. Later, in about 1476, Brocket and his wife filed a bill of their own in the same court. This concerned St. Cleres and Oldhall (the reversions of which they were then in the process of selling to Sir John Scott) and two other manors previously held by the Moseleys, Brundish in Moreton, Essex, and Merston, Kent, both of which they claimed in her right as the surviving heir of the Fitzsymonds. They stated that Richard Winslow and other Moseley feoffees were refusing to release the properties to them, but Winslow asserted that he had bought Brundish from the Moseleys and claimed to hold St. Cleres and Oldhall in his own right.20 C1/51/12-15. By Brocket’s death on 22 May in the following year,21 C140/62/47. he and his wife were certainly in possession of St. Cleres (which in due course passed to Scott),22 PCC 15 Logge (PROB11/7, ff. 115-16); CIPM Hen. VII, i. 134. but had failed to make good their claim to Brundish.23 C140/79/16. His widow, who did not remarry, took further action in Chancery over the latter manor against Winslow and his brother, Thomas Winslow II* (a draper from London and another Moseley feoffee), but Thomas died seised of that manor in May 1481.24 C1/54/379; C140/53/39.

By then Elizabeth Brocket was no longer alive, for she herself had died on the previous 12 Jan. She had not borne her late husband any surviving children, and Brocket’s heir was his younger brother, Edward. The latter succeeded to the holdings at Bishop’s Hatfield, Sandridge and Ippollitts, as well as Herons, Brocket’s purchased manor at Wheathampstead, indicating that Elizabeth must have consented to a settlement by which these former Fitzsymond properties passed to her brother-in-law and his heirs and remained in the Brocket family.25 C140/62/47; 80/46. Edward also held a manor known as ‘Julens’ or ‘Julies’ in Yorkshire, but it not known whether this was a property which he had inherited from his brother. Aged over 50 when he succeeded Brocket, Edward made his will in July 1485. He asked for burial in the parish church at Wheathampstead and provided for a chantry priest to sing for the souls of himself, his late brother and sister-in-law and other relatives.26 PCC 21 Milles (PROB11/8, ff. 171v-172). He died three years later and was succeeded by his son John.27 CIPM Hen. VII, i. 406. The last Brocket in the male line was Sir John Brocket† whose estates were divided between his daughters following his death in 1598.28 The Commons 1558-1603, i. 486-7; VCH Herts. ii. 434.