HEWES, Thomas

The return of the knights of the shire for Gloucestershire to the Parliament of 1415 provides the earliest known evidence of Hewes, who attended the election as an attestor. In the spring of the following year, he obtained a royal pardon,4 C67/37, m. 6 (26 Mar.). and he stood surety for Robert Gilbert* upon the election of the latter as an MP for Gloucester to the Parliament of 1419.5 C219/12/3. On one occasion during the second of Hewes’s three known terms as bailiff of the town, the Gloucester assizes were held over for want of jurors. While at Gloucester, the under-occupied assize judges, John Hals and Thomas Rolf, fell into conversation with him and his co-bailiff, William Boteler, asking them in which hundred their town lay. When they replied that it was in fact a hundred in itself, the justices contradicted them, saying that it was part of that of Dudstone. The bailiffs nevertheless had precedent on their side, in the form of Edward II’s ‘Nomina Villorum’ of over 100 years earlier.6 Cal. Regs. Llanthony Priory ed. Rhodes (Bristol and Glos. Rec. Soc. xv), 45. No doubt Hewes’s final term as bailiff was a particularly memorable one, since the young Henry VI and his mother not only spent the Christmas of 1434-5 at Gloucester but stayed in the town until the middle of the following April.7 R.A. Griffiths, Hen. VI, 237, 264. Elected to at least two Parliaments, Hewes appears not to have held any other public office after leaving the Commons in late 1435.8 There appears to be no evidence to identify the Gloucester MP with Thomas Hewys, a yeoman of Hen. VI’s household in the second half of the 1440s: CPR, 1441-6, p. 328; 1446-52, pp. 112, 212. He died not long afterwards, for his wife, Ellen, was a widow by early 1437. She subsequently remarried, finding a new husband in another Gloucester burgess, Philip Bishop.9 KB27/703, rot. 71d; Gloucester Rental 1455, 66.

The evidence for the MP’s private activities is sparse. In November 1421, the Crown pardoned an outlawry incurred by the parson of Bicknor, Gloucestershire, for failing to answer a suit for debt that Hewes had brought against him at Westminster. The pardon refers to Hewes as a ‘burgess of Gloucester’ but not to his social rank or occupation.10 CPR, 1416-22, p. 356. He bears the same style in plea rolls of the mid 1420s, when he pursued other debtors, including William, Lord Clinton of Maxstoke, and a former steward of Lord Ferrers of Chartley, in the court of common pleas. It nevertheless appears, from another common pleas lawsuit he brought in this period, that he had an interest in the wool trade. In this suit, Richard Sherman of Gloucester stood accused of breach of contract, for having failed to cart five sacks of Hewes’s wool from Brimpsfield and Birdlip to Bristol within an agreed period.11 CP40/657, rot. 6; 658, rot. 21; 659, rots. 410d, 648; 660, rots. 6d, 24, 239. Quite possibly, Hewes owned lands in those Gloucestershire parishes, but there is a distinct lack of evidence for any real property he might have held, whether in the county in general or Gloucester in particular. In September 1429 he was associated with Thomas Stevens* and his wife in leasing out a tenement in the town, although in what capacity is not clear. According to the comprehensive rental made for Gloucester in 1455, on another occasion – the date is unrecorded – Stevens had mortgaged a tenement in Northgate Street and other properties in the town to the late MP.12 Gloucester Corporation Recs. ed. Stevenson, 387; Gloucester Rental 1455, 66.

By 1455 Ellen Hewes was also long dead, for it was as her widower and executor that Philip Bishop went to law at Westminster in Hilary term 1444. His action, brought in the common pleas, was a suit for debt against a London grocer, Thomas Selowe, from whom he sought £40. The plea roll refers to Bishop as executor of Ellen, in turn the late executrix of the MP, indicating that the alleged debt had arisen years earlier from dealings between Hewes and the Londoner.13 CP40/732, rot. 287d.