HERT, Nicholas

A tanner by trade, Hert lived in Northgate Street, Gloucester, where he was a co-lessee of a tenement belonging to the local hospital of St. Bartholomew.4 Gloucester Rental 1455 ed. Cole, 68-70. In all likelihood, he was a native of the town and related to three other Herts active there in the early years of Henry VI’s reign: Walter Hert, rector of the parish church of St. Mary de Crypt and dean of Gloucester, Walter’s brother, Thomas, and Thomas’s son, Walter. Quite possibly, he was another son of the same Thomas Hert, presumably the man who received an exemption for life from holding office under the Crown in July 1448.5 Gloucester Corporation Recs. 384-5; C115/81, ff. 79v, 107; C1/1489/49; CPR, 1446-52, p. 166. It is unclear whether the MP was the Nicholas Hert who had inhabited a tenement at Thornbury in south Glos. at an unknown date before 1428: CAD, i. A859. If in fact an outsider, Hert had certainly settled in Gloucester by June 1445 when St. Bartholomew’s hospital granted a 70-year lease of six shops situated on the banks of the Severn to him, his wife Alice and their six children.6 Gloucester Corporation Recs. 395.

Having held the office of steward of Gloucester in 1456-7, Hert went on to serve at least two terms as a bailiff of the town, and it was shortly before the end of the first of these terms that he was returned to his only known Parliament. Nearly 12 years later he and his erstwhile co-bailiff of 1470-1, John Chaunterell, were sued in the Exchequer by Sir Richard Beauchamp†. When their attorney Thomas Leckhampton went to that government department in April 1472 to present their account, Beauchamp appeared in person to lodge a bill against them. The bill related to a suit for a debt of £500 which he had brought in the previous spring against William Brokwod* (Hert’s fellow MP in the Parliament of 1460) in the court of piepowder at Gloucester, a tribunal over which the town’s bailiffs presided. The debt arose from a bond for that amount which Brokwod had given Beauchamp as a security for its repayment as far back as October 1459 but subsequently had failed to honour. As it happened, the suit at Gloucester had not gone as the knight had hoped. Brought into that court under the custody of one of the town’s serjeants of the mace in May 1471, Brokwod had attended several hearings there before absconding. In accordance with local custom, the court had awarded Beauchamp £505, comprising his debt and costs and damages of £5, but the judgement was meaningless since Brokwod had disappeared and, in any case, lacked the means to pay any part of this sum. This completely unsatisfactory outcome prompted the knight to bring his action in the Exchequer against the former bailiffs, on the grounds they should have ensured the safe custody of an attached debtor and that they bore responsibility for levying any monies recovered by award of that court. In response to Beauchamp’s bill, Leckhampton secured a licence to imparl with him. There is no further record of the case in the Exchequer plea rolls, so it is quite possible that the parties achieved an out of court settlement.7 Sel. Cases Law Merchant (Selden Soc. xlix), pp. lxx, 122-6.

The Exchequer proceedings appear to have taken place right at the end of Hert’s career, for want of evidence about him after he attested the return of the town’s burgesses to the Parliament of 1472. Just under ten years later, the prior of St. Bartholomew’s hospital granted Thomas Hert and his wife Marian a 99-year lease of the six shops that previously his priory had leased to the MP and his family. Thomas was almost certainly Hert’s son of that name. He was one of the first burgesses to serve as an alderman of Gloucester, an office created by the charter which Richard III granted to the town in 1483. The charter also gave Gloucester two sheriffs and a mayor, both offices in which Thomas also served.8 Gloucester Corporation Recs. 414; HMC 12th Rep. IX, 430; T.D. Fosbrooke, Hist. Gloucester, 208; S. Rudder, New Hist. Gloucester, 141.