BURY, Thomas

Both the representatives for Weymouth in the Parliament at Bury St. Edmunds in 1447 are difficult to identify, although one of them, Ralph Beere*, is thought to have been a native of Dorset who made his career in London. Neither MP is known to have had any link with the lord of the borough, Richard, duke of York. It has been speculated that Thomas Bury was the man of this name who lived at Berrynarbor in Devon, but no evidence has been found to connect him with Dorset, let alone with Weymouth.1 HP Biogs. ed. Wedgwood and Holt, 142. Berrynarbor was in the north of the county, and the man concerned, Thomas Bury or Bery, died in 1493 possessed of a manor there, together with a moiety of that of Martinhoe and lands in the vicinity, in all valued at £11 15s. p.a.: CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 576. In the early 1480s he had brought suits in Chancery against John Scarburgh, clerk, one of the feoffees to his use, regarding settlements of these same properties at a time when his heir apparent was his cousin Ralph Bury. Subsequently, his wife Elizabeth died, and he then married a woman named Anne, who survived him. His heir was their six-year-old son, Nicholas: C1/35/33; 62/240-3; 65/218. Nor is there any reason to suppose that the MP was the Thomas Bury of Bury St. Edmunds itself, who towards the end of the century sold a messuage in the town for £13 13s. 4d.2 C1/184/28.

It is just possible that the man returned was a servant of another of the MPs of 1447, the notorious Thomas Daniell*, then sitting for Buckinghamshire. That Thomas Bury, referred to as ‘late of Castle Rising, Norfolk’ was later indicted along with his master for a forcible entry into the manor of Stanhoe in north-west Norfolk in December 1456.3 KB27/783, rot. 56; 786, rots. 40, 40d, 53, 70; KB9/285/65. Perhaps it was the same man who was named as a commr. of arrest in Norf. and Suff. in May 1459, and as an attorney to deliver seisin of the manor of Denever in Norf. in 1464: CCR, 1461-8, pp. 207-8, 227.