BURYTON, Thomas

The Burytons were one of the leading and longest-established Hereford families with a distinguished record of parliamentary service. Thomas’s father and grandfather represented the city on five occasions each, a distinction Thomas himself was destined to match. The family’s local importance is demonstrated by our MP’s return to Parliament while his father lived: indeed, on 2 Jan. 1442 his father was among the electors who returned him.1 C219/15/2. Nor was it only in their native city that the Burytons were of significance. Thomas‘s nomination as escheator of the county in 1445 probably came very soon after his father’s death, justified by the family’s landholdings at Stoke Lacy, a few miles to the north-east of the city. A connexion with Thomas Spofford, bishop of Hereford, provided him with an additional distinction: on 25 Apr. 1448 the bishop granted him and his mother, Joan, an annual rent of 20s. to be taken for their lives from an episcopal manor within the city liberty. This rent contributed to the income of £5 p.a. on which mother and son were jointly assessed (no doubt conservatively) to the subsidy of 1451.2 CFR, xviii. 10; Reg. Spofford (Canterbury and York Soc. xxiii), 292; E179/117/64. It is an indication of the social breadth of the term ‘husbandman’ that our MP could be described as both ‘husbandman’ and ‘gentleman’ when sued for trespass by William Mason* in 1449: KB27/752, rots. 13, 65d.

Against this background, it is not surprising that Buryton should have been returned to at least three successive Parliaments in the late 1440s, and, as the city’s MPs for the assembly of 1445 are unknown, he may have been elected to five in a row.3 C219/15/4, 6, 7. In the return of Jan. 1449 our MP’s Christian name appears as an interlineation, but, on the dorse of the writ, it is given without amendment. It looks as though he could command one of the city’s seats for the asking, and it is thus curious that he played so little recorded part in local affairs in the 1450s. During that decade Hereford was disturbed by mounting tension in the county. (Sir) Walter Devereux I* sought support there for the cause of his lord, Richard, duke of York, and Buryton’s younger brother, John, was one of those who answered that call. Thomas, on the other hand, appears to have maintained a studied neutrality, at least this is one interpretation of his disengagement from city politics. He makes only two appearances in the records between 1451 and 1463: on 2 Mar. 1453 he attested the election of his younger brother as MP for the city, and, as if in an open demonstration of disinterest, he attested the city elections both to the Lancastrian Parliament of 1459 and the Yorkist assembly of the following year.4 C219/16/2, 5, 6.

In the 1460s and early 1470s Buryton was much more prominent. He was elected mayor in 1462, and, on 5 May 1467, he was again returned to Parliament, perhaps, given the loss of returns, not for the only time in the 1460s.5 Herefs. RO, Hereford city recs. MT/VII/14; C219/17/1. None the less, his other appearances in the records are few. On 26 May 1472 the feoffees of a local saddler conveyed to him in fee a messuage in Widemarsh Street in the parish of All Saints, and, on the following 20 Oct., he conveyed the same to feoffees of his own, namely John Fowler alias Stokton, David Woodward, both citizens of Hereford, and John Benles. He was still alive in September 1483, when he witnessed a local deed, but he probably died soon afterwards.6 Hereford city recs. MT/XI/2, V/25, VI/8. Robert Buryton, mayor of Hereford in 1488-9 and 1494-5, was probably his son or grandson, and another of the family, John Buryton of Stoke Lacy, served as steward of Sir Thomas Cornwall† (d.1537), but our MP was the last of the family to represent Hereford in Parliament.7 CPR, 1485-94, p. 318; Hereford city recs. MT/X/6; C1/150/43.