DEERHURST, Thomas

Deerhurst was a lawyer like his father, the founder of their family’s fortunes. Active in local government, John Deerhurst formed useful links with Edward III’s grandson, Edward, duke of Aumâle, and other important figures. When, for example, the Crown granted the keeping of the English estates of the alien abbey of Fécamp to Aumâle and Brother Hugh Veretot in January 1399, he stood surety on their behalf. He also acted as a mainpernor for Sir Hugh Waterton and his wife in the following November, when the couple obtained custody of the Gloucestershire manor of Michelhampton and other lands formerly held by the abbey of Caen in England.9 N. Saul, Knights and Esquires, 163n, 249; CFR, xi. 291; xii. 14, 41, 148, 257. In June 1400 John himself acquired a share of the keeping of Brimpsfield in the same county, a priory that the Crown had seized because it was likewise the cell of a French abbey. By 1403, he also had custody of another such priory, ‘Middleton’ in Wiltshire.10 CFR, xii. 64, 203; PPC, i. 194, 195. Elsewhere, he secured a 40-year lease of the vicarage of Prestbury from Llanthony priory in 1399, bought a considerable amount of property in Gloucester and acquired a share of a mill at Ebley a few miles to the south. By 1409-10, the town had retained him for his counsel, paying him an annual fee of 20s. and an additional 11s. for his robes, and he served as one of its bailiffs in 1418-19.11 Saul, 239; Gloucester Rental 1455 ed. Cole, 8; Trans. Bristol and Glos. Arch. Probably a relatively old man when he attested the return of the knights of the shire for Gloucestershire to the Parliament of 1420,12 C219/12/4. John is unlikely to have survived much beyond the early 1420s. His moiety of the mill at Ebley had passed to his son Thomas by 1426,13 Trans. Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc. xlvi. 344n. and he was certainly dead by July 1437 when Thomas, who was his executor, took out a royal pardon.14 C67/38, m. 13.

It is therefore unlikely that John lived to see his heir marry Anne Baynham, since the couple were not to become man and wife until after the death of her father Robert Baynham in 1436. Through this match, the Deerhurst family came into possession of the manor of Ruardean and lands at Bicknor, although it would appear that Anne was not Robert’s heir.15 VCH Glos. v. 236. Anne is said to have had a brother Thomas, perhaps the Thomas Baynham from whom John Deerhurst, her son by the MP, later held Ruardean and the Bicknor lands: Trans. Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc. lxxiv. 81; CIPM Hen. VII, i. 126. Shortly after their marriage, Thomas and his bride took action in the Chancery against John May, parson of Bicknor and a Baynham feoffee. The purpose of their suit was to recover 18 months’ worth of income from the Baynham estate. This amounted to 30 marks, suggesting that Anne’s inheritance was worth some 20 marks p.a.16 C1/39/101. Presumably it was through purchase that Thomas acquired two other Gloucestershire manors, Field Court in Hardwicke (which became one of his principal residences) and Eastbach in the Forest of Dean, and the other moiety of the mill at Ebley.17 C1/56/231; CFR, xvii. 256; Trans. Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc. lxxiv. 82. He also possessed lands at Prestbury and ‘Brighthampton’ and extensive holdings throughout Gloucester. His own residence in the town was a tenement in Southgate Street that his father had bought from William Haseley. By 1455, he was the second biggest individual property owner in Gloucester after his fellow lawyer Thomas Bisley*. It seems that he and his father had bought most, if not all, of the Deerhursts’ holdings in the town, and that both of them developed the plots they had acquired by rebuilding existing houses and erecting new ones. Deerhurst leased out the greater part of his Gloucester property, and in 1455 he enjoyed a rental income of nearly £6 p.a. from 14 of the 28 buildings he owned in the town at that date. His tenants were mainly from the lower end of the social scale, presumably because he found it most profitable to cater for that sector of the housing market.18 C1/56/231; Gloucester Rental 1455, 8, 10, 12, 14, 18, 38, 88, 100; Trans. Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc. lxxiv. 82; ciii. 155.

Such an accumulation of property made Deerhurst a man of considerable standing in the town, which he represented in at least four Parliaments and where he was bailiff in 1435-6. Later that decade, he served on his first commission of gaol delivery in the town, and he, along with Thomas Bisley and another local lawyer, John Edwards*, arbitrated in a dispute between their fellow burgess, Robert Bentham II*, and Llanthony priory in mid 1439.19 C115/83, ff. 120-1. Outside Gloucester, Deerhurst was a feoffee for the King’s attorney-general John Vampage*,20 C1/29/53. and served as an officer of the duchy of Lancaster and as a commissioner in Gloucestershire, Herefordshire and south Wales. He was also twice elected as a knight of the shire for Gloucestershire, and it was as such that he ended his time as an MP, having sat in no fewer than four of the five Parliaments of the 1440s. Yet his successful public career came to a sudden and premature end in 1450, following accusations that he had participated in treasonous activity at Gloucester.

In July that year, the authorities despatched one of the quarters of the defeated rebel leader Jack Cade to Gloucester, no doubt to serve as a warning to any who would oppose the Crown, including those townsmen who had attacked the property of the hated Reynold Boulers, abbot of Gloucester, an adherent of the unpopular government and court, in 1449. In the autumn of 1450, however, a commission of oyer and terminer, sitting at Gloucester on 19 Oct., uncovered evidence of further unrest. According to one of the indictments it took, just seven days earlier, Thomas Glover of Gloucester had entered into a conspiracy with a local chaplain, Stephen Bitte alias Vaughan, and Thomas Mascold, a yeoman from Cirencester, to rebel against the King, and they and their many unknown adherents had received Deerhurst’s support and advice. Subsequently arrested and taken to London, Glover was brought under custody to the court of King’s bench in Trinity term 1451. Pleading not guilty, he managed to obtain a royal pardon before his next appearance in that court, which then dismissed him sine die. Deerhurst himself remained at liberty until 25 June that year, when he gave himself up to the Marshalsea prison in Southwark. Brought before King’s bench, he claimed that the indictment against him was insufficient in law because it lacked specific information about the alleged conspiracy. By then, however, he had obtained a pardon of his own, which bore the date of the previous 22 May and in which he was styled ‘gentleman alias esquire’. He produced his letters of pardon, along with further letters, bearing the date of 28 May 1451 and showing that he had found sufficient surety in Chancery for his future good behaviour, and the court likewise permitted him to depart a free man.21 I.M.W. Harvey, Jack Cade, 145-6; J. Rhodes, ‘Anarchy at Gloucester in 1449 and 1463’, Glevensis, xxv. 39; Archs. and Local Hist. in Bristol and Glos. ed. Bettey, 27; PPC, vi. 108; KB27/761, rex rots. 15d, 16d; CPR, 1446-52, p. 429.

Whatever had actually happened at Gloucester in the autumn of 1450, Deerhurst was never to hold public office again. Following his brush with the authorities, he largely disappears from view, although in the mid 1450s he quarrelled with William Mille (son of Thomas Mille*) and John Cassy*, each of whom began separate suits for trespass against him in King’s bench. The date of his death is unknown, although the records show that his successor was his son John. John Deerhurst, who sued his father’s feoffees in the Chancery (either in the later 1470s or in Richard III’s reign), died in 1484. His heir was his infant son, another Thomas Deerhurst.22 KB27/774, rot. 54; 775, rot. 8; C1/56/231; CIPM Hen. VII, i. 126.