DERAUNT, Thomas

An ironmonger by trade, Thomas Deraunt is to be differentiated from his namesake and contemporary who belonged to a minor gentry family settled at Barcheston in Warwickshire. He conforms to the pattern normal among the MPs of Northampton in this period in serving early in his career as both MP and bailiff. His business interests were substantial enough to fund at least one purchase of property in the town. On 20 Jan. 1442 a fellow ironmonger, William Best, granted him a messuage in Abington Street charged with a pension of 12d. per week payable to Best and his wife for term of their lives. This was clearly a speculation on Deraunt’s part: the sale price was as much as £76 13s. 4d. and likely to be considerably greater if the couple survived for a long time. It may have been one he came to regret for he surrendered his interest in the property in 1451.2 Northants. RO, Charity of St. Giles mss, 37-38.

In other transactions Deraunt is found acting on behalf of others. In July 1442 he was one of a number of townsmen licensed by the Crown to grant property in mortmain to the town’s abbey of St. James; and at about the same time he joined with Master William Breton, vicar of All Saints, and others in conveying a tenement in ‘Golafrelane’, once held by the late Richard Wems†, to William Tresham*, Henry Stone* and the younger William Rushden*. Later, on 12 Oct. 1443, he was among those who quitclaimed to the town’s priory of St. Andrew a croft and a virgate of land in Hardingstone and Far Cotton on the outskirts of Northampton.3 CPR, 1441-6, p. 95; CCR, 1447-54, p. 46; Add. Ch. 47061.

Deraunt’s involvement in such transactions leaves no doubt that he numbered among the town’s elite, and this is underlined by his election as mayor in 1444. His year in office was the highpoint of his career and later references to him are scarce. In Easter term 1448 he was one of those who offered mainprise for his fellow townsman, Thomas Knightley*, distrained on a plea of trespass, and a year later writs were issued for the outlawry of a husbandman of Collingtree near Northampton and a spicer of Olney (Buckinghamshire) for failure to answer him on pleas of debt.4 KB27/748, rot. 58; CP40/751, rot. 62d; 753, rots. 19, 291. He was dead by Hilary term 1453 when his widow and executrix and her new husband, William Austen, a future mayor of the town, had an action pending against a servant, John Mounke, for taking our MP’s goods worth £10 at Northampton during his lifetime.5 CP40/768, rot. 232d.