HOO, Thomas II

In contrast to his half-brother and namesake, the future Lord Hoo and Hastings, the younger Thomas Hoo eschewed the career of a professional soldier, choosing instead a lawyer’s training and specialization in estate management. His growing expertise in the laws relating to land made him much sought after as a feoffee and executor, and his skills in dealing with complex financial affairs led to employment by the leading nobility and gentry of his home county. The Mowbray dukes of Norfolk and the Percy earls of Northumberland looked to him for counsel, and his dealings as their principal man of affairs in the south of England affected many lives, for good or ill. Yet in the profusion of transactions to which Hoo was a party in the course of a career lasting 45 years the most abiding theme was the promotion of the interests of members of his own family: to Hoo these interests were always paramount, even though his attempts to manage one sibling’s business might lead to the sacrifice of another’s expectations.

Several years younger than his famous half-brother, Thomas was not born until after 1415.13 When his father’s 1st w. Eleanor was still alive: Add. Ch. 19566. Within a few years of his father’s death in 1420, his mother, Elizabeth, herself the offspring of the prominent Sussex family of Etchingham, married the wealthy Sir Thomas Lewknor, and produced at least eight more children. For the rest of his life Hoo was to be intimately bound up in the affairs of his stepfather and five younger half-brothers, notably those of John*, Richard* and Thomas Lewknor*. His career began by September 1442 when, in association with his stepfather, he was enfeoffed of property in London, and he was party to other conveyances in the City not long afterwards. As a ‘squier’, two years later he joined the prestigious fraternity of St. John the Baptist founded by the capital’s tailors.14 Corp. London RO, hr 171/38; 172/51; Guildhall Lib. London, Merchant Taylors’ Co. accts. 34048/1, f. 388. From then on he was kept constantly employed by his many relations to deal with their legal affairs, and through them he came into contact with some of the most powerful figures in England. Thus, in February 1446 he was among those headed by William de la Pole, marquess of Suffolk, who were enfeoffed of the barony, honour and rape of Hastings on behalf of his half-brother (Sir) Thomas Hoo, then chancellor of France and Normandy. The feoffees sued out a royal pardon in the following July, and in the process of mollifying Sir John Pelham (now deprived of this important part of his inheritance), Hoo took on the stewardship of Pelham’s remaining estates.15 Add. Chs. 23808, 30047; E159/235, brevia Trin. rot. 14. Another pardon of the same year referred to his executorship of the will of his uncle, Sir Thomas Etchingham (a duty he shared with his mother and stepfather),16 C67/39, m. 13; C241/233/22. and also in 1446 he assisted his stepfather to found a chantry in Canterbury cathedral in memory of Sir William Brenchesle, j.c.p. In this matter Hoo took instruction from his great-aunt Joan, Brenchesle’s widow, who seven years later was to entrust him with the endowment of another chantry, the Batisford chantry at Bexhill, where prayers were to be said for Hoo and his mother as well as for the soul of the founder. In her will Joan left him her manor of ‘Southye’ in the liberty of Pevensey, provided that he gave her chantry priest an annual stipend of £4 from its revenues.17 CPR, 1446-52, p. 21; 1452-61, p. 89; Suss. Arch. Collns. liii. 80-87; Reg. Bourgchier (Canterbury and York Soc. liv), 280-1. The same eventful year of 1446 saw Hoo associated with his mother’s cousin (Sir) James Fiennes* in a suit in the court of common pleas in which they successfully recovered possession of the Sussex manor of Gotham, and together with Sir James’s brother Sir Roger Fiennes*, the treasurer of Henry VI’s household, he acquired property in London. Clearly, Hoo had made an entirely favourable impression on his influential kinsmen: early in 1447 he helped to finalize the landed settlement for the double marriage of Sir Roger’s sons, Richard and Robert Fiennes*, to the Dacre coheiresses.18 Add. 39376, ff. 40v, 41, 41v; London hr 174/28; CP25(1)/293/71/332.

This marriage settlement coincided with Hoo’s election on 2 Feb. 1447 as a knight of the shire for Sussex to the Parliament summoned to assemble at Bury St. Edmunds eight days later.19 C219/15/4. There, immediately after the death in custody of the duke of Gloucester, he witnessed Sir James Fiennes’ elevation to the peerage as Lord Saye and Sele and replacement of Gloucester as warden of the Cinque Ports. Young Robert Fiennes also entered the Commons for the first time on this occasion (as an MP for Hampshire), and it may well be the case that these two newcomers’ links with the powerful marquess of Suffolk, facilitated by their close kinsmen, encouraged them to lend support to those now pre-eminent in government. Hoo soon made himself known to others favoured by the King. In the following year he stood surety in King’s bench for Thomas Kemp (one of his stepfather’s relations), whom Henry VI had promoted to the bishopric of London;20 KB27/750, rex rot. 34. and this too proved to be a lasting connexion, for in later years he served Kemp as steward of his episcopal estates.

In much of the business undertaken on behalf of his relations, Hoo was associated with Bartholomew Bolney*, a Lincoln’s Inn lawyer from east Sussex. The two men acted for their mutual advantage, with Hoo helping Bolney in his acquisition of property in the county, and Bolney serving as Hoo’s feoffee. Such links bound them together for over 30 years,21 CP25(1)/241/89/29; Bolney Bk. (Suss. Rec. Soc. lxiii), 75, 77. a period in which they served together on the local bench (generally as members of the quorum), and acted in tandem on many ad hoc commissions. Hoo’s regular appearance on such bodies began in the year after his first election to Parliament. Not long before that initial return, he had established himself as a landowner in the county. As a younger son, he was largely dependent for an income on the generosity of his kinsmen and on his own ability to earn fees. Nevertheless, the high standing of the families of Lewknor, Etchingham and Fiennes enabled him to contract an advantageous marriage to the only child of Walter Urry, a former shire knight and prominent retainer of the earls of Arundel. This marriage may well have taken place before August 1445, when Hoo and certain of Urry’s feoffees (including John Wody*, the husband of Urry’s niece), took possession of land in Horsham. There, Urry had built up an estate comprised of 22 messuages and more than 1,400 acres of land, extending from Warnham in the west to Rusper in the east, which he intended to settle on his daughter Alice and her new husband in tail. Alice came into her inheritance on her father’s death, at some point before July 1447, and perhaps even before Hoo’s election to Parliament earlier that year, although according to a later suit in Chancery her father’s feoffees retained seisin of her lands for the rest of her lifetime, no doubt holding them to the couple’s use. Hoo took up residence at Roffey, a manor to the north-east of Horsham, and over the years consolidated his holdings in the neighbourhood.22 CAD, iii. B4042-3, 4052-3; vi. C4324, 4703; The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 692-3; C1/33/17; VCH Suss. vi (2), 160-1. The marriage also presented an opportunity for him to acquire estates beyond the borders of Sussex, through dealings with his wife’s maternal uncle, Sir John Burcester. Later in 1447 he and his nominees acquired from Burcester and his wife the manor of Benwell and some 1,200 acres of land as far away as Northumberland.23 CP25(1)/181/15/13. As both of Hoo’s wives were called Alice, it is difficult to ascertain when Alice Urry died, especially as the MP successfully contrived to keep her inheritance for himself (and to pass it on to members of his own family) even though the couple produced no surviving children. This end was achieved by settlements recorded in two final concords made in 1457, whereby he and Alice put the manors of Warnham and Roffey, eight messuages, 930 acres of land and rents of £14 p.a. into the hands of one group of feoffees, and a separate block of property comprised of two more messuages and 330 acres of land in Horsham and Itchingfield into those of another.24 Add. 39376, f. 92; CP25(1)/241/91/19, 21.

In the period after he first entered the Commons, Hoo established a reputation as a man of business and as legal adviser to several prominent landowners besides Sir John Pelham. For instance, two months after the Parliament at Bury was dissolved, he and his stepfather, together with John Michelgrove*, offered Robert Lisle* a mortgage of £200 on his manor at Pulborough.25 CCR, 1441-7, pp. 471, 473, 477. To the next Parliament, early in 1449, his half-brother was summoned for the first time as Lord Hoo and Hastings, while he himself was returned again for Sussex. Probably during the first session and acting alongside Reynold Boulers, abbot of Gloucester, as an official spokesman for the duke of Somerset, the lieutenant-general of France, Lord Hoo communicated to the Lords and Commons the dangerous military situation the English authorities were currently facing in Normandy. On the promise of tax grants made by the Commons in July, loans were raised (with the assistance of our MP acting as a commissioner in Sussex) to finance the defence of the duchy. The gesture proved to be too little too late to prevent the fall of Normandy in the autumn. Of Thomas Hoo’s movements during the winter of 1449-50, which also witnessed the dramatic impeachment of the King’s chief minister the duke of Suffolk, who was murdered in May 1450, there is no precise record. Yet, although not a Member of the Commons in the Parliament then in being, Hoo was present at Leicester where it was meeting for its third and final session, for it was there that on 1 June he joined in offering sureties in £150 for John Troutbeck*, the chamberlain of Chester, to guarantee his appearance in Chancery to answer serious charges. In the tumultuous events of the next few weeks his kinsman Lord Saye was murdered by Cade’s rebels, and Lord Hoo’s life was threatened by mutinous soldiers returning from France, who held him responsible for the catastrophic defeats across the Channel. Yet Thomas Hoo does not appear to have taken any major role in the restoration of order in the south-east – indeed, for a while he was removed from the quorum of the Sussex bench. The pardon he purchased two years later may not have been linked to these events.26 CCR, 1447-54, p. 187; C67/40, m. 25. Hoo is only known to have attested the shire elections once; this was on 22 Feb. 1453 when his stepbrother Roger Lewknor* was returned in company with Lord Audley’s son John*, who had married his kinswoman Anne Etchingham.27 C219/16/2. Hoo had earlier acted as a feoffee of estates Anne held in jointure from her previous marriage, to John Roger: CPR, 1446-52, p. 411.

In July 1454 Hoo, together with his cousin Thomas Etchingham and half-brother John Lewknor, entered into bonds totaling 1,500 marks and payable in six instalments spread over the next three years to Robert Tanfeld*, the queen’s attorney-general.28 CCR, 1454-61, p. 31. Why they did so is not stated, but the undertaking may have had something to do with the enormous debts incurred by Lord Hoo. The disgraced peer died early the following year, while staying at Thomas’s house at Roffey. The provisions of his will, made on 12 Feb. 1455, were to cause Thomas considerable difficulties for decades to come. He and his sister-in-law, Lady Eleanor, were named as executors, but, doubtless well-aware of the parlous state of the testator’s finances, they declined to act. Eventually, on 7 Dec., with these two acting as his sureties, Richard Lewknor, Hoo’s half-brother, agreed to undertake the will’s administration, as authorized by Archbishop Bourgchier.29 C1/44/187; Suss. Arch. Collns. viii. 119-21; C139/156/11; Reg. Bourgchier, 173. Lord Hoo was succeeded by his four daughters, but Thomas, as his nearest male heir, now inherited under the terms of entails made in 1445 the family manors of Offley and Cockernhoe in Hertfordshire and Luton Hoo in Bedfordshire.30 VCH Herts. iii. 40; VCH Beds. ii. 355; CP, vi. 565; CCR, 1468-76, no. 1199. The disposition of the peer’s other estates caused him many more problems, besides incurring costs on a large scale.31 For instance, in Aug. 1455 he was bound over to pay £400 to the former chief baron John Fray† and the latter’s wife and brother-in-law, Richard Danvers*, and he later owed Danvers’s brother Henry £100: C1/45/303; 54/228. Lord Hoo had left instructions for the rape of Hastings to be sold and 1,000 marks of the proceeds used to provide marriage-portions for his three young un-wed daughters by his second wife, but according to petitions sent to the chancellor by the administrator Lewknor in the late 1450s the surviving feoffees of the rape (as appointed by Lord Hoo in 1446) refused to sell it as instructed. Meanwhile, in May 1455 Sir John Pelham had confirmed Hoo and a different body of feoffees in their possession,32 Add. Chs. 23802, 30052; C1/26/117-19. and six years later, in November 1461, as a consequence of financial pressures, or more likely of the changing political circumstances of the civil war, this group conveyed the lordship, barony and rape to Sir William Hastings, the friend of the new King Edward IV, who was promptly given the title Lord Hastings.33 CCR, 1461-8, pp. 92-93; CPR, 1461-7, pp. 137-8. Something of the background to the transaction is revealed in the depositions of a suit brought in Chancery ten years later by James Carew and Eleanor his wife, one of Lord Hoo’s daughters. In this, her uncle Thomas Hoo stated that on finding that the sale of the rape would not suffice to cover his late brother’s debts he had expressed his own willingness to buy it if he might have a sure title, ‘which as yet he cowde never have’. Nevertheless, out of the kindness of his heart he had found suitable husbands for his nieces and had shared out 1,000 marks between them for their portions. Eleanor’s share had been paid to his cousin, now Sir Thomas Etchingham, to seal a contract of marriage with Etchingham’s son Thomas, but the latter had died before Eleanor had come of age; she had then married Carew without Hoo’s assent, and Sir Thomas had declined to return the money. Despite his version of events, Hoo lost the case: in November 1472 he was bound to pay Carew £240 in annual instalments of £20 over the next 12 years.34 C1/44/185-9; CCR, 1468-76, no. 979; C253/44/291.

In addition, conflict arose over the Hoo family manors of Wartling, Bucksteep and Brookesmarle in Sussex, which our MP’s mother Elizabeth Lewknor held for life as jointure from her first marriage. Lord Hoo had instructed that after her death Thomas and his male issue should inherit lands there to the value of £20 p.a., the rest being left in reversion to his own widow. However, in 1466, after Elizabeth’s death, Lady Hoo and her new husband James Laurence, an esquire from Lancashire, petitioned the chancellor to say that they had not received seisin of her entitlement, even though Lord Hoo’s debts had been paid. At Thomas Hoo’s request Richard Lewknor came to court to testify that our MP had contented a number of his late brother’s creditors, but that the widow had taken away jewels, goods and bonds which she had converted to her own use.35 C1/41/239-44; Procs. Chancery Eliz. ed. Caley and Bayley, ii. pp. li-liii. It would appear that Hoo did take possession of the three manors, or at least part of them, over the next few years. He contrived to have a grant in tail-male of a moiety of all three, and in 1467 he paid homage to Lord Hastings for Wartling, which was held by service of five knights’ fees as of the honour of Hastings. Yet the claims of his nieces still had to be met, and although he or his assigns held courts on the manors in the late 1470s and early 1480s, arrangements were made for Eleanor Carew and Elizabeth Massingberd to receive their inheritances.36 SC11/658; Add. Chs. 23800, 23822-7, 31315; VCH Suss. ix. 138.

While just starting to deal with the claims of creditors and family-members to the estate of the late Lord Hoo, in the spring of 1455 Hoo had once more been elected as knight of the shire for Sussex. This was to the Parliament summoned in the aftermath of the Yorkist victory at the battle of St. Albans. No electoral returns for the county survive, and the name of his fellow MP is not known. What is recorded is that in November, during the second session, one of Hoo’s servants, who had been arrested at the suit of Robert Poynings*, was able to sue out a writ of parliamentary privilege on the basis of his employment by our MP.37 KB145/6/34; Parliamentarians at Law ed. Kleineke, 42. For Hoo’s involvement in a related suit: KB27/779, rot. 83. In the course of the previous five years or longer, Hoo and his kinsmen from the families of Fiennes and Lewknor had been united in their opposition to the ambitions of Poynings, who by challenging the claims of his niece, Eleanor, to inherit the entirety of the estates in Sussex and Kent previously held by his father, Robert, Lord Poynings (d.1446), had emerged as a principal promoter of rebellion in the south-east (allegedly as Cade’s sword-bearer), and as a consequence had been imprisoned as a traitor. While Robert’s fortunes were in eclipse, Hoo had helped to manage the affairs of the Poynings heiress, Eleanor, who her grandfather had married to Henry Percy, the heir to the earldom of Northumberland. Percy inherited the title on his father’s death at St. Albans, but the change of regime led to the release of Robert Poynings from prison and the resumption of his opposition to the claims of his niece the countess and her husband the new earl. Hoo himself was bound over in the King’s bench to keep the peace towards his lady’s uncle, and became intimately involved in the financial dealings of the impecunious earl. As Percy’s agent, in 1457 he was engaged in shipping wool through the port of Chichester by licence of the King.38 KB27/787, rex rot. 5d; English Trade in 15th Cent. ed. Power and Postan, 308-9; C1/26/341. See also C1/26/558; C241/258/30; 264/43 for suits arising. At an unknown date the earl granted him the Suss. manor of Chinting for life: C141/2/26. This and his other commitments made him increasingly vulnerable to litigation. The four separate pardons he sued out in October 1458 referred not only to his role as a feoffee of the Percy and Pelham estates but also to his executorship of the wills of Sir Thomas Etchingham, Joan Brenchesle and Lord Hoo, all of which were causing him severe difficulties.39 C67/42, mm. 4-6; E159/235, brevia Mich. rot. 16, Trin. rot. 14. In the late 1450s numerous creditors, notably members of London’s Grocers Company, lined up to sue for enforcement of bonds Hoo had entered at the staple at Westminster in substantial sums of money. Listed among his debts were £140 owed to John Payn I*, and a massive £587 due to the Genoese merchant Galeotto Centurione. On occasion Hoo managed to wriggle out of a prosecution on a legal technicality governed by the Statute of Additions – that the writ referred to him as resident at Horsham, rather than at Roffey.40 CP40/793, rots. 489, 518; C131/236/21. For proceedings in the Payn suit, in 1465: KB27/817, rot. 92.

Hoo’s dispute with the London grocer John Nicoll landed him in trouble in the King’s bench. He and John Lewknor had defaulted on separate bonds for £190 2s. and £197 2s. entered in October 1456, and a year later the two men together with three associates were each bound to Nicoll and Chief Justice (Sir) John Fortescue* in £487 4s. 5d. Fortescue and Nicoll tried to enforce payment on the bonds in the summer of 1459.41 KB27/793, rots. 113d, 125d. The electoral returns for Sussex to the Parliament summoned to assemble at Coventry that November do not survive, but there is at least a possibility that Hoo was re-elected to the Commons on this occasion, and very likely that he was instrumental in promoting the election of two of his half-brothers, John and Richard Lewknor, as the representatives of his home town of Horsham. Immediately after the dissolution he was appointed to commissions of array to raise forces to combat the Yorkist lords attainted in the Parliament. Hoo’s movements during the next few months of civil warfare are uncharted, and the circumstances which led to him being in close proximity to Henry VI on the battlefield at St. Albans on 17 Feb. 1461 remain obscure. After their defeat on that field the Yorkist leaders withdrew, leaving the King unattended. An eyewitness to the events, who described Hoo as an esquire ‘doctus in lege et satis facundus’ [learned in the law and sufficiently eloquent], reported that he personally advised Henry to send a message to the commanders of the northern army (serving under the queen’s banner) to signify that he was willing to associate in a common cause with them, and that Hoo himself undertook this mission, seeking out the Percy earl of Northumberland, to whom he was personally known. As a consequence, the King was led to the tent of Lord Clifford where he was reunited with his queen and the prince of Wales.42 Reg. Whethamstede ed. Riley, i. 393; Suss. Arch. Collns. viii. 123-4. The tables turned in a matter of weeks. Doubtless because of his connexion with Percy, who was killed on the Lancastrian side at Towton in the following month, Hoo was regarded with suspicion by the new regime under Edward IV: he was appointed to only two royal commissions (both of them in 1462) in the first seven years of Edward’s reign.

During the 1460s Hoo was constantly troubled by prosecutions for debt brought by his creditors. Just a few days before the battle of St. Albans he had been outlawed at the suit of the executors of Simon Eyre, a former alderman and clothier of London. Brought to the court of common pleas in Michaelmas term following and committed to the Fleet, he was allowed bail on pleading that the writ of outlawry was invalid as it gave his place of residence inaccurately.43 The matter was still unresolved three years later: CP40/802, rot. 426d; 809, rot. 114d; 810, rot. 470. Thomas Swetenham, a London grocer, pursued him in 1462 for payment of £400 under a bond entered two years earlier; he was outlawed in Leicestershire at the suit of Thomas Staunton*; while in 1464 an Essex esquire revived an action on a bond in £200 to which Hoo had been party 15 years before, in company with relations (mostly now dead) including his aunt Joan, the widow of John Rickhill*.44 C241/247/3; 248/59; CP40/810, rot. 470d. Another creditor, Geoffrey Spryng, to whom he owed £100, had him arrested in London, though when Hoo begged him not to bring him to trial (for, he said, if he was put in prison he was likely never to come out ‘for the grete other daungers that he at that tyme stode in’), generously let him off in return for a recognizance for £200. This, finalized on 3 Oct. 1464, bound Hoo to pay Spryng the amount due in two instalments before the following Whitsun. Yet Spryng’s trust proved to be misplaced and he was forced to take his case to the chancellor for redress.45 C131/75/7; C1/28/502; CCR, 1461-8, p. 243. Together with John Fust† of Warnham, Hoo owed £200 to Nicholas Sharp who took action against them in 1465, while in November the following year after a delay of 15 years Godard Pulham* of Winchelsea finally achieved some small satisfaction with regard to a debt of £500, when the sheriff of Sussex handed over to him Hoo’s manor of Buckholt and 100 acres of land in Hastings, Hooe and Westfield, valued at over £20 p.a.46 C131/239/7; 241/17; E13/151, m. 49; C241/250/31.

In this tangle of actions for debt, Hoo was generally cited as the sole defendant, yet it is sometimes possible to discern cases where in reality he was operating in the interests of one of his aristocratic employers. Throughout the 1460s he was actively engaged in the affairs of the widowed countess of Northumberland. The death of her uncle Robert Poynings at the second battle of St. Albans enabled her, with the help of Hoo’s kinsman Robert Fiennes, to wrest possession from Poynings’s widow of a number of properties in dispute between them. Hoo rendered assistance in this respect by acting as a feoffee of all the estates she had inherited from her grandfather Lord Poynings, including the disputed properties, but she needed his co-operation in other matters too. At the time of his death at Towton, her husband the earl had owed Hoo, as his agent, as much as £4,455 with which to satisfy his creditors. To pay off this enormous debt, it was agreed by an indenture made on 25 May 1463 between the countess and Hoo, that a new body of feoffees of her estates would grant from the income raised to such persons as he would name as many annuities as amounted to 400 marks p.a. for a period of 17 years. Receivers on the estates were only to be appointed with Hoo’s consent, although the dowager, who would receive any surplus revenues, could appoint stewards and other officials.47 Collectanea Topographia et Geneaologica ed. Nichols, iii. 266-70; J.M.W. Bean, Estates Percy Fam. 102-3; Suff. RO (Bury St. Edmunds), Hengrave mss, 449/2/651. Only one record of Hoo carrying out this task has been traced – i.e. his settlement of the earl’s debt of £435 to Thomas Herward of London by granting him in 1467 an annuity of 50 marks for 13 years: CP40/823, rot. 129d. However, John Worsop alleged that Hoo promised him annuities from the Percy estates of 100 marks for six years and £109 for three years in part satisfaction of a debt of £1,189: C1/43/109.

Surprisingly, Hoo’s service to the countess had proved to be no bar to his continued employment by the Mowbray dukes of Norfolk, whom he had served in the capacity of estates’ steward in Sussex for several years. In the early 1460s he acted as treasurer of the household of the young fourth duke, John Mowbray, whose livery he wore to the coronation of Elizabeth Wydeville in 1465.48 Howard Household Bks. i. 162, 165-6, 168, 452, 478. Even so, despite his links with two of the county’s most important landowners, when, in 1467, he was returned to Parliament again, after a possible lapse of 12 years, it was not as a knight of the shire but as a representative for the borough of Horsham, where, of course, he was very well known. In September that year, during the parliamentary recess, he was among the feoffees who were granted a reversionary interest in certain of the Mowbray estates, to fall in after the deaths of the duke and his duchess, and he was party to other transactions on the duke’s behalf a month later. Then, in May 1468, he was one of the men from Sussex, including his half-brother Richard Lewknor, who received possession from Duke John of eight manors in the county together with that of Ryersh in Kent. The same group dealt further with Mowbray estates in 15 other counties in 1469.49 Moye, 449-50; CP40/828, cart. rot. 1; CP25(1)/294/74/64; CPR, 1467-77, p. 130. Hoo went to the KB on the duke’s behalf in June 1469 to request the enrolment of royal letters patent regarding the duke’s manors in Glos.: KB27/833, rot. 25. That same year, in association with another Mowbray retainer, William Brandon†, he was sued by the earl of Arundel for a debt of £100, which had been owing for four years: C241/251/10; CP40/833, rots. 46, 331d. It is clear that the duke intended to sell certain of his manors to provide the balance of the purchase price of the former Fastolf estates, and that five of these manors (‘Shapwick’, ‘Egle’, Compton, West Marden and Littleworth), were snapped up by Hoo himself. However, it was later alleged in a Chancery petition that this ‘high and myghty prince’ had ‘gretely desired’ properties at Kettleburgh in Suffolk and Sisland in Norfolk which belonged to Thomas Charles, and enfeoffed Hoo and the rest in lands in Sussex to the equivalent value of £50 p.a. to the use of Charles and his heirs, so that he could have them in return. An agreement was made between Charles and Norfolk’s councillors, whereof Hoo was ‘one of the chiff of them’, and because of his confidence in Hoo’s integrity Charles allowed the duke to recover Kettleburgh in the common pleas, and released to him all his right and title, trusting Hoo to convey to him the Sussex properties in exchange. Nevertheless, Hoo allegedly defrauded Charles’s widow of land worth £18 p.a.50 Moye, 207, 211; C1/39/32. For Hoo’s grant to Charles in 1469 of an annuity of £9 charged on the Mowbray estates to compensate him for the difference in value between Kettleborough and the manors received by him in exchange see E. Suss. RO, Nevill mss, ABE/74.1/14. As one of the duke’s feoffees of the former Fastolf properties, on 8 Dec. 1470, during the Readeption, he gave them up to Bishop Waynflete when the duke, having been informed that the sale had been made contrary to Fastolf’s will, was forced to hand them over in return for 500 marks.51 CCR, 1468-76, nos. 622-3.

Hoo’s financial problems, unresolved throughout the 1460s,52 The pardons he took out in 1465, 1468 and 1472 referred specifically to his several executorships, which had undoubtedly exacerbated his difficulties: C67/45, m. 3; 46, m. 11; 49, m. 29. reached crisis-point when the Parliament summoned in the name of Henry VI had met a few days earlier, on 26 Nov. While the first session was in progress (up to 22 Dec.) he and some friends (including three of his Lewknor half-brothers) were bound in sums amounting to just over £806 to a number of creditors, undertaking that within six months of the dissolution he would give himself up to the Fleet prison to pay his dues. These included £134 14s. 7d. owed to James Laurence (the husband of his sister-in-law, Lady Hoo), £100 to Thomas Winslow II*, and £522 7s. 9d to John Worsop*.53 CCR, 1468-76, no. 650; C241/250/13; 253/4. This debt to Worsop may well have represented part of the £1,189 owed to the draper by the earl of Northumberland: C1/43/109. It might be conjectured that the postponement was allowed because Hoo was a serving Member of the Parliament and therefore protected by privilege, but even if so he was imprisoned in London on 28 Jan. 1471 (probably before the dissolution), to satisfy his debtors.54 KB29/100, rot. 13. Hoo’s quarrel with Winslow, a London draper, was of long standing, even though they shared a background of confrontation with Robert Poynings. In 1464 Winslow had brought a bill against Sir Thomas Etchingham for a debt of £400 8s. 2d. left outstanding for over five years. Etchingham testified that Hoo and John Lewknor had been bound to Winslow in this sum, and had re-paid £310 8s. 2d in cash and kind (including 55 tons of iron and barrels of osmonds), for which Winslow had given receipts. Hoo had then been bound to pay Winslow £100, the sum still outstanding in September 1471.55 E13/150, mm. 17, 18; C241/249/52, 58; C131/242/16, 17. According to a petition Winslow sent to the chancellor two months later, their dispute had started with his sale to Hoo of the Sussex manor of Moorhall in Ninfield, for Hoo had inveigled his way out of paying anything for it: ‘ymagenyng and entendyng fraudelently to disceyve him’, he persuaded Winslow to show him his evidences, and then successfully sued an assize against him at which he obtained judgement to recover Moorhall with damages. Whatever the truth of the matter, Hoo contrived to retain the property, and Winslow eventually gave up the struggle.56 CCR, 1454-61, p. 376; C1/40/20; C4/6/51; C253/44, no. 344; VCH Suss. ix. 248; E. Suss. RO, Add. mss, Catalogue C, AMS 3513-16; KB27/844, rot. 90.

The early years of Edward IV’s reign had also seen Hoo engaged in complex transactions involving the inheritance of Joan Halsham, the wife of his half-brother John Lewknor. Back in 1448 he had been party to a fine regarding this inheritance (which consisted of six manors in Norfolk, Brabourne in Kent and the reversion of Collingbourne Valence in Wiltshire), whereby it was arranged that the East Anglian properties were henceforth to be held to the use of Geoffrey Boleyn*, the London merchant who had married Lord Hoo’s eldest daughter, Anne. Perhaps this was done to compensate Anne for the loss of the principal Hoo estates, which three years earlier had not only been settled in jointure on Lord Hoo’s second wife but also entailed in the male line. If the Hoo brothers promised to make amends to John and Joan Lewknor for their loss, they long delayed doing so, and the Boleyns’ interest in the Norfolk estates was confirmed in 1462 when Thomas Hoo gave up his interest in fee simple to fulfill Geoffrey’s will.57 Wilts. Feet of Fines (Wilts. Rec. Soc. xli), 587; CPR, 1452-61, p. 215; 1461-7, p. 141; CCR, 1461-8, pp. 206-7; CP25(1)/170/192/11; Berkeley Castle mss, BCM/H/2/2/1. Boleyn sued him for £100 in Feb. 1460 (under a bond of Mar. 1459), and his widow did likewise on a bond dated 1464: C241/243/28; 254/105. It seems that he intended to compensate Joan Lewknor for the loss of her property, which was apparently worth 100 marks p.a., by obtaining for her the estates of his first wife’s uncle, Sir John Burcester, who was childless. He had an interest in Burcester’s property in London and elsewhere in the early 1450s, and purchased from the elderly Richard Wakehurst† his reversionary interest, as sole surviving feoffee, in the Burcester manors of Burghersh and Peasmarsh, Sussex, ‘The Maze’ in Surrey, and Ewell in Middlesex. In 1462 Sir John and his wife enfeoffed Thomas Urswyk II* and others of the same, with instructions that after their deaths the feoffees would hold the manors to the use of Hoo and his heirs. Hoo promised to pay them 100 marks, and then in the following April agreed with the Lewknors that this use should be transferred to them.58 CAD, ii. A2067, 2074; CCR, 1461-8, pp. 382-5; Add. 39376, f. 119; C1/38/105. For his dealings with the Burcesters’ substantial estates in Northumb. in 1463: CPR, 1461-7, p. 265; CP25(1)/181/15/1. Yet, according to a petition sent to the chancellor in the late 1460s by William Lemyng, another grocer of London, Hoo again deceived his relations by selling the reversionary interest in the Burcester estates to him, and when Sir John Burcester died the feoffees professed themselves unclear as to whether after the death of his widow the profits of the estates should be paid to the Lewknors or to Lemyng.59 C1/39/284-7. For the sale of Burcester property in London to Lemyng in 1453, see E40/2067, 2074. In 1469 the reversionary interest in the estates held for life by Elizabeth Burcester was said to pertain to Hoo: SC11/658. As a way out of their own financial difficulties, the Lewknors decided to sell Brabourne to Sir John Scott†, but in this instance Hoo was reluctant to relinquish his trusteeship until Joan had been formally examined in Chancery to make sure that it was truly her wish for this part of her inheritance to be sold.60 C1/28/85-89; CPR, 1461-7, p. 429, 493-4. John Lewknor, a supporter of the forces of Margaret of Anjou, was knighted on the battlefield of Tewkesbury on 4 May 1471, where he was killed. His widow later petitioned Chancery again about the legality of the transactions leading to the loss of her inheritance in Norfolk, and the arrangements made by Hoo regarding the Burcester estates, as Urswyk and his co-feoffees refused to transfer possession to her. Lemyng’s widow and the London mercer Roger Copley, who had married one of Hoo’s nieces, also put in a claim, the latter asserting that he had purchased the reversionary interest of some of the manors from the Lewknors, and the rest from Lemyng’s executors.61 C1/38/105; 39/284-7; 40/47-52. Copley appears to have triumphed in the long term: VCH Suss. ix. 196.

Hoo remained active as a Mowbray feoffee as late as March 1475, when he was nominated to hold certain estates to the use of the Duchess Elizabeth,62 Add. Ch. 7629. and indeed he continued to serve the fourth duke of Norfolk until the latter’s death early in 1476, by acting not only as his councillor but also as steward for life of his estates in Surrey and Sussex and as one of his master foresters in St. Leonard’s forest, near his own lands. His fees and annuities charged on the Mowbray estates amounted to at least £40 13s. 4d. a year, and these he continued to receive even after the estates came into the possession of the young Prince Richard, duke of York, who was married to the Mowbray heiress, Anne. In December 1480 by the King’s command he delivered to Thomas Stydolf† muniments relating to Anne’s inheritance, and in the following year he was steward of the Mowbray rape of Lewes.63 Moye, 437-41; CCR, 1485-1500, no. 294; DL29/454/7312, 7313; KB145/7/21. Hoo claimed to have bought the reversion of the Leicestershire manor of Disworth from the late duke, and attempted to sell it to Robert Radcliffe† for £153, only for the transaction to become the subject of yet another suit in Chancery.64 C1/52/291.

The Percys and Mowbrays were not the only magnates who looked to Hoo for advice in managing their affairs. In 1469 William, Lord Hastings, asked him to conduct a thorough survey of the knights’ fees pertaining to the honour and barony of Hastings (a large number of which were held by Hoo himself),65 SC11/658. and in November 1471 he was among those who in association with Hastings were given possession of the estates of Richard West, Lord de la Warre, to hold to the use of Edward IV until 1,000 marks had been raised to pay de la Warre’s fine for fighting against the King at Tewkesbury.66 CCR, 1468-76, nos. 807, 1562. There is little sign that Hoo attracted direct royal preferment in the 1470s, and although in 1473 he and his half-brother Richard Lewknor, who was now married to his cousin Elizabeth St. Cler, obtained at the Exchequer a lease of the former St. Cler manor of Ospringe in Kent, they forfeited the concession when they refused to match the farm of £53 p.a. offered by someone else, since they were only prepared to pay £15.67 CFR, xxi. nos. 152, 215; E159/250, recorda Mich. rot. 3.

Hoo sat in two more Parliaments during the 1470s, again as a burgess for Horsham, and for most of the second part of Edward IV’s reign he was a member of the quorum on the Sussex bench. Richard III reappointed him as a j.p. and there is no hint that he supported the rebels of 1483. In May 1484, however, he came forward to offer sureties that Nicholas Gaynesford* would henceforth be a true and loyal subject to King Richard, and that the attainted Sir Thomas Lewknor (the son and heir of his stepbrother Roger), would stay under house arrest with (Sir) John Wood III* the treasurer until permitted to go at liberty. In July 1485 Hoo and his wife and Henry Keighley esquire obtained at the Exchequer a 20-year lease of a moiety of the manor of Hawksbourne and two advowsons which Lewknor had held before his attainder.68 CCR, 1476-85, nos. 1242, 1258; CFR, xxi. no. 891; VCH Suss. vi (2), 161. Another transaction, involving a bond to the King in £100, to which Hoo was party in December 1484 in association with other former Mowbray retainers, related to a lawsuit between (Sir) Gilbert Debenham II* and Robert Duplache.69 CCR, 1476-85, no. 1381. Initially dropped from the Sussex bench after Henry Tudor’s victory at Bosworth, Hoo was reinstated on 2 Oct. 1486, just six days before his death.70 On 1 Oct. he had taken out the last of several general pardons: C67/53, m. 18. He had continued to offer his services in property conveyances to the end; in the previous August licence had been granted by the King for an enfeoffment to the use of William Berkeley, earl of Nottingham, and Hoo was named among the feoffees.71 CPR, 1485-94, p. 119.

The surviving records provide few glimpses of Hoo’s private transactions, and where they do the lawyer’s intentions are not always clear. This was the case with his dealings with the manor of Deenethorpe in Northamptonshire,72 Add. Chs. 713, 7575. the inheritance of his first wife, Alice Urry, and the lands he himself purchased in and near Horsham.73 CP25(1)/241/91/28, 29; Add. 39376, ff. 108, 136, 136v. His first wife died probably in the mid 1460s, for in about 1466 John Wody†, her cousin’s son and heir, petitioned the chancellor to say that as she had left no surviving children he and his aunt Margaret Heansell were now entitled to the Urry estate in accordance with Walter Urry’s will, though the surviving feoffees (who included Hoo’s friend Bartholomew Bolney) refused to relinquish it.74 C1/33/17. There were other claimants, too. In 1472 Edward Goldesburgh formally recovered the estate against Hoo and his then wife and Roger Copley and his wife Anne (one of Hoo’s nieces and coheirs) in the common pleas, and at the end of Hoo’s life Sir Guy Fairfax and Sir John Catesby similarly made a recovery against the Hoos and Anne, by then the wife of William Greystock. These suits were probably collusive and intended to strengthen the title of Hoo’s nominees.75 CP40/842, rot. 320; 897, rot. 254. Hoo’s second wife may have brought him land in Westham and Pevensey, but if so she relinquished her title to it in 1482.76 CP25(1)/241/93/33.

In the course of his life Hoo had been engaged in organizing a number of religious foundations, besides the chantries in Canterbury cathedral and the church at Bexhill already mentioned. In 1457 he joined together with the earl of Arundel and fellow parishioners of the parish church of St. Mary in Horsham to establish a guild there, and in 1481 he exercised his right to present an incumbent to the same church, as son-in-law of Urry, one of the original trustees of ‘Boteler’s Chantry’. Nor were religious institutions near Hoo’s manor in Bedfordshire neglected: he witnessed deeds for the brethren of the ‘Domus Dei’ hospital in Luton in 1465, and the register of the fraternity of the Holy Trinity at Luton which was founded ten years later mentions him along with Lord Hoo and other members of their family.77 CPR, 1452-61, p. 414; VCH Suss. vi (2), 191; Add. Ch. 28882; CP, vi. 564-5. Of most importance was Hoo’s eventual fulfillment of his late half-brother’s will. Lord Hoo had asked that land worth 20 marks p.a. be granted in mortmain to Battle abbey to fund prayers in perpetuity on his soul’s behalf. Yet when Hoo eventually did this, more than 25 years later (in September 1480), he chose not to deplete the Hoo family estates; rather, he used the revenues from lands he himself had acquired – the manor of Roffey and property in the parishes of Horsham and Rusper which had belonged to his late father-in-law Urry; lands in the same neighbourhood which he had purchased from the executors of Henry Boteler I*, and the four manors which he had bought from the duke of Norfolk. This grant to the abbey was to provide prayers not only for his half-brother and the latter’s parents, but also for himself and his present wife, and for the souls of his first wife and her parents. To put this into effect he enfeoffed 39 individuals, headed by Bishop Story of Chichester and Lord Mautravers, who confirmed the arrangement with the abbey in December 1483.78 Suss. Arch. Collns. viii. 119-21, 125-6; London Univ. Senate House Lib., Fuller mss, Battle Abbey Chs. I/28/30; Huntington Lib., San Marino, California, Battle Abbey mss, vol. 53, no. 1146. It seems likely that the abbey subsequently encountered difficulties over this handsome endowment, for Hoo’s title to the manors he had acquired from the duke of Norfolk had earlier met with a challenge from Sir George Brown†, and it was stated after his death that Brown had settled them in jointure on his wife, but that Hoo had unjustly evicted her in her widowhood.79 Add. 39376, f. 164; CIPM Hen. VII, i. 322.

Hoo died without surviving issue on 8 Oct. 1486. The Hoo manors in Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire had been entailed on the failure of the male line on his eldest niece, Anne Boleyn, and now descended to her son and heir Sir William Boleyn. His other heirs were found to be the descendants of his aunt Margaret Hoo, who had married Thomas St. Cler (d.1435).80 CIPM Hen. VII, i. 160, 205, 322. The MP’s widow was still living in the Michaelmas term of 1491, when Sir John Lewknor’s widow sued her and Hoo’s niece Anne Greystock for the sum of £230.81 CP40/918, rot. 458. Where Hoo was buried is now uncertain. A canopied table tomb on the north side of the chancel of St. Mary’s church, Horsham, is said to commemorate him. Yet a monument of Caen stone thought to have been removed from Battle abbey at the dissolution of the monasteries and now in the church at Herstmonceux would seem to depict him and his half-brother Lord Hoo, for the effigies of two men wearing Lancastrian SS collars and armour dating from about 1480 are attired with tabards bearing the arms of Hoo, St. Omer and St. Leger.82 VCH Suss. vi (2), 194; ix. 135.