HORDE, Thomas

By the time of Thomas Horde, his branch of the Horde family enjoyed a unique position: they were the most important family in one of Shropshire’s parliamentary boroughs, having acquired large holdings in Bridgnorth through his paternal grandmother, Alice Palmer, and among the leading families in the other through the property in Shrewsbury which came to the family through our MP’s mother, Agnes Perle. The inquisition taken after his death shows that this urban estate was substantial: it then comprised 20 messuages and 170 acres, valued at £10 p.a., in Bridgnorth, and 20 messuages and 100 acres, valued at 20 marks, in Shrewsbury.7 CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 1067. Indeed, since Shropshire possessed few substantial gentry families, this estate was enough to make the family one of considerable account outside the boroughs. Thomas’s father served as escheator of the county and as verderer of Morfe forest, and he himself built substantially on these foundations.

Horde’s advancement began with a favourable marriage, contracted for him by his father, to one of the coheiresses of John Stapleton. It is an open question as to whether this marriage took place when the bride’s prospects of inheritance were certain. As late as 1443 her elderly father expected to maintain his patrimony in the male line: by a final concord of that year he settled his manor and advowson of Stapleton, a few miles to the south-west of Shrewsbury, on himself with remainder in tail to his only son, Leonard Stapleton. Only on the failure of Leonard’s issue was the property to be divided between John’s five daughters, save for some 100 acres of land and a substantial annual rent of £9 4s. in Stapleton which, by another fine, was settled on our MP’s future wife and one of her sisters. It is not known when Leonard died, only that he died without issue. The probability is that he was dead when, in Michaelmas term 1446, Horde’s parents made a generous settlement on him and one of these daughters: the couple were to have in joint tail general 14 messuages, a toft, 200 acres of land, six acres of meadow, 40 acres of pasture and 18s. 8d. of rent in Bridgnorth, Shrewsbury, Astley Abbots, near Bridgnorth, and further afield at Northwood Hall and Wem.8 CP25(1)/195/22/26, 27, 31.

To these advantages of inheritance Horde added another: his long service on the quorum of the county bench and his well-documented involvement in the legal affairs of the borough of Shrewsbury demonstrate beyond doubt that he had a training in the law. In such circumstances it is not surprising that he should have begun his long and active career even before he inherited either the family patrimony or his share of his wife’s lands; and it is a fair speculation that he was a student at an inn of court or chancery when returned to represent Bridgnorth in the Parliament of 1442.9 His s. John is known to have attended M. Temple, and it may be that our MP did also: CP40/896, rot. 181d. Two years later the burgesses of that borough chose him as their bailiff, and in receiving this election he was following in his father’s footsteps; but, in another, he was to exceed his father’s achievements even very early in his career. Added to the county bench in the late 1440s, a distinction never accorded to his father, Thomas quickly became one of the most active of the county’s j.p.s. He also took responsibility for delivering indictments into the court of King’s bench, implying that he was often present at Westminster.10 KB9/260/4, 51; 274/25.

By the spring of 1450, while Horde was representing Bridgnorth for the second and last time, his wife had inherited her share of the Stapleton lands. The couple joined with the other coheirs in conveying the manor of Stapleton to three local dignitaries, William, earl of Arundel, Sir John Talbot and John Talbot, Lord Lisle, and a prominent local lawyer, William Burley I*.11 Salop deeds 6000/2838. The purpose of this feoffment is unknown, but, in the context of our MP’s later career, it is interesting to find him already associated with the Talbots. Indeed, it may be that he had already acted as feoffee for Sir John: at an unknown date he was one of four men, again including Burley, who settled the manor of Shifnal on Sir John and his wife, Elizabeth Butler. If this represented a jointure settlement made at marriage then it is to be dated to the mid 1440s, but it could equally have been later. In any event the important point here is that Horde’s personal connexion appears to have been with Sir John, who succeeded to the earldom of Shrewsbury in 1453, rather than with his father.12 C140/46/51; CP, xi. 704-5. In this context he may have been in a position to do the second earl an important service. The first earl of Shrewsbury had attempted to deprive Sir John of a large part of the Talbot patrimony to provide for his second wife, Margaret Beauchamp, and his family by her. It was thus fortunate for Sir John that Horde should have been in office as escheator when the inquisition contingent on the first earl’s death was taken in Shropshire. On 18 Oct. 1453 our MP presided over an inquiry which supported the second earl’s title.13 A.J. Pollard, ‘The Talbots’ (Bristol Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1968), 54-55, 59; C139/154/29.

Horde’s connexion with the new earl appears to have added to his standing, as too must have his inheritance, on his father’s death in about 1451, of that part of the family lands not settled upon him on his marriage. On 19 June 1455 he was elected in company with Burley, another man on intimate terms with Talbot, to the Parliament that met after the first battle of St. Albans. The earl, who had, perhaps deliberately, arrived too late to fight in the battle, may have been particularly anxious to have his own men in this assembly, and his support could have been a factor in Horde’s return.14 CCR, 1447-54, p. 482; C219/16/3; Paston Letters, ed. Gairdner, iii. 30. None the less, Horde now had lands and experience enough to stand, in his own right, as an important member of the local gentry, a point emphasized by his pricking as sheriff in November 1456.15 At the end of his term he was granted a pardon of acct. in £40: E159/234, brevia Mich. rot. 31d.

Yet, even though Horde now had the status to take the most important offices of county administration, he continued to be heavily involved in his native Bridgnorth. Indeed, when named as sheriff, he was serving as bailiff there and he continued to serve regularly in that office, just as his father had done, until the late 1470s. And, although he never held borough office in Shrewsbury, the authorities there retained him, from early in his career, as their legal counsel at an annual fee of two marks.16 He first appears in the borough accts. in 1449-50: Shrewsbury recs., bailiffs’ accts. 3365/377, m. 8. In the late 1450s this role involved him in intense activity as several prominent townsmen fell victim to a series of assaults at the hands of a group of Lancashire men. The borough accounts for the year September 1457-8 record several payments to him. He and a fellow lawyer, Thomas Acton* (the husband of another of the Stapleton coheiresses), shared food and wine worth 3s. 10d. when drawing up bills of indictment against the assailants; and they were soon after provided with a meal and wine worth as much as 8s. 5d. when the borough authorities found themselves at a loss as to how to reply to their powerful neighbour, Richard, duke of York, who, seemingly in connexion with the same matter, had demanded surety of the peace from them. Horde’s advice appears to have been that personal representations were required, for he himself, at a cost to his employers of 4s. 10d., rode to Ludlow to ask the duke to cancel the demand. On his return the grateful authorities rewarded him with a further generous meal, as they did again when he came back to the town to attend the assize session. Clearly the costs of retaining a lawyer went far beyond his fee if he was to be called upon to do anything.

The Shrewsbury accounts for 1459-60 show Horde again busy on the town’s behalf. In company with John Trentham*, one of the bailiffs, and others, he rode to Nottingham in connexion with unspecified business, for which he and his colleagues received as much as £10 from the borough authorities. The fact that the King was briefly at Nottingham castle in the campaign that ended in the rout of the Yorkist lords at Ludford Bridge on 12-13 Oct. makes this a tantalizing reference. It is possible that the delegates were sent to intercept the royal army, perhaps to declare the town’s support.17 Ibid. 3365/387, mm. 1, 2; 388, m. 7d; B.P. Wolffe, Hen. VI, 318. If so, Horde was a natural choice to convey the message for his own political sympathies, as far as one may judge, lay with Lancaster. He was elected to represent Shropshire in the Parliament that met at Coventry to attaint the Yorkist lords in the wake of Ludford Bridge; he was nominated to the commission of array issued at the end of the Parliament; and he was removed from the county bench when the Yorkists were in control of government during the autumn of 1460. Such an allegiance is consistent with his service to Talbot: the second earl, after a period of equivocation in 1455, had thoroughly committed himself to that cause and died for it at the battle of Northampton in July 1460.

None the less, if Horde was a Lancastrian during the great crisis of 1459-61, this did not prevent him from adapting to the new political dispensation of the early 1460s. His absence from the bench was brief, and he was sufficiently trusted by the new regime to be appointed to a commission of array in August 1461. His rehabilitation, if any rehabilitation was needed, may have been the prelude to his entry into the service of an important Yorkist lord, John Tiptoft, earl of Worcester. The earl had been absent in Padua during the civil war of 1459-61, but he returned in September 1461 to take, as constable and treasurer of England, a senior place in the new government. Horde entered his service as one of his receivers. This, at least, is the implication of a later legal action: on 1 Sept. 1465 he appeared at Westminster before the earl’s auditors and was found in arrears in his account in the sum of £40.18 CP, xii (2), 843-4; CP40/822, rot. 127.

Horde’s connexion with the earl aside, his career in the 1460s followed the same pattern as it had in the previous decade. For his documented activities, the main source is the Shrewsbury bailiffs’ accounts. They show that in 1462-3 he accompanied the sheriff of Shropshire, Roger Kynaston, into Wales, for an unknown purpose, and that on 29 Apr. 1463 he was present at the county election. Thereafter, he received many payments for offering counsel and acting as a mediator in various legal matters. In 1465, for example, he and another lawyer received as much as four marks in attending a tractum et colloquium between the town community, on the one hand, and William Eyton and John Elys on the other; and in 1468 he rode to Westbury to represent the town to Richard, Lord Grey of Powis, with whom it was at odds.19 Shrewsbury bailiffs’ accts. 3365/391, mm. 1d, 2; 396, m. 1; 401, m. 2. Bridgnorth, however, remained the centre of his borough interests if one may judge by his three further elections as bailiff there in the 1460s, although, in the absence of records comparable to those for Shrewsbury, no more can be known of his activities there.

Horde also maintained his connexion with the Talbots, who escaped attainder despite the second earl’s death in the Lancastrian cause. On 13 Jan. 1466 he joined the second earl’s widow in a series of bonds, registered before the Shrewsbury bailiffs, to Sir William Chaworth of Wiverton (Nottinghamshire), probably in connexion with the marriage of her daughter, Margaret, to Chaworth’s son and heir apparent, Thomas. Soon after, he acted for the new earl, who, despite still being a minor, had had livery of his estates in 1464. As one of the earl’s feoffees, he granted an annual rent of £19 to Nicholas Stafford, a leading townsmen of Shrewsbury, in discharge of certain agreements made between Stafford and the earl.20 Shrewsbury assembly bk. 3365/67, f. 57v; CP40/852, rot. 521d; C1/54/121.

Continued service to the Talbots helped Horde keep his prominent position in county affairs. Shropshire returns are lost for all the Parliaments of the 1460s, but the tax allowance commissions enrolled on the fine roll show that he represented the county again in 1467. Given that he also sat in 1459 and 1472, there must be a strong possibility that this Parliament was not the only one in which he was elected during the decade.21 CFR, xx. 230, 240. Further, although he did not serve as sheriff during the 1460s, he remained an active member of the county bench. As such he was called upon to act against one of the county’s leading gentry, (Sir) Roger Corbet II*, who in February 1466 forcibly entered the manor of Poynton. Since the victim of this disseisin was John Neville, earl of Northumberland, this entry had a clear political significance, and on 5 Mar. the j.p.s were ordered to investigate. Not, however, until 13 June did Horde, in company with Roger Kynaston, ride to Poynton to act on the order. Not surprisingly they found the disseisors gone, a result their delayed action had no doubt been intended to bring about. A few months later, on 12 Jan. 1467, Horde was among a powerful group of j.p.s, headed by the young earl of Shrewsbury, who, purportedly at least, took another important indictment concerning Corbet’s affairs. According to the record, he and his colleagues accepted from a jury a malicious indictment contrived by Corbet to discredit his wife’s stepmother, Alice Hopton, with whom he was in dispute. The jurors indicted her for poisoning her husband, Thomas Hopton, one of the leading county gentry, as long before as 1434. Since Thomas did not die until 1453, this cannot have been true, and it is likely that the indictment was fraudulently drafted and returned into King’s bench without the knowledge of the j.p.s, perhaps by John Salter, the clerk of the peace.22 KB9/313/15-16; 317/5-6.

Horde’s attitude to the Readeption may have been influenced by the earl of Shrewsbury. Although the earl had been treated with generosity by Edward IV, he followed the duke of Clarence into support for the restoration of Henry VI. This may explain why our MP was the new regime’s choice as sheriff in Shropshire in November 1470, with the generous concession of a pardon of account in the sum of 100 marks in anticipation of his ‘grete charges and losses’, and why the electors of Bridgnorth returned his son, John, to the Parliament which met in the same month.23 E404/71/6/26; Bridgnorth ct. leet bk. BB/F//1/1/1, f. 6v. But, just as the earl took Clarence’s lead into opposition to Edward IV, he did so again in the spring of 1471 when Clarence aided Edward IV in reclaiming the throne. As a result, the Hordes did not suffer for their activities during the Readeption. Although our MP was removed from the bench in July 1471, he was restored when a new commission was issued two years later. In the meantime, he had once again been returned to Parliament. On 17 Sept. 1472 he was elected for Shropshire in company with John Leighton†, his wife’s nephew and another of the Stapleton coheirs, to a Parliament in which his son again represented Bridgnorth and his kinsman, another John Horde*, sat for Shrewsbury.24 C219/17/2. For the second time the Hordes had emerged unscathed from choosing the wrong side in the game of fifteenth-century politics.

Neither advancing age nor the death of his Talbot patron in 1473 (leaving a mere boy as his heir) did much to diminish Horde’s activities in the 1470s and 1480s. He continued to give legal counsel to the Shrewsbury borough authorities: in 1476 he and Acton were provided with a breakfast worth 10s. 3d. when they came to the town on the day of the assizes; and, in the early 1480s, he made several trips to the town to negotiate a settlement between the burgesses and Shrewsbury abbey.25 Shrewsbury bailiffs’ accts. 3365/410, m. 1d; 421; 425. He also remained willing to take his turn as bailiff of Bridgnorth, holding the office for the 11th time in 1476-7. More interestingly, soon after this term was concluded, he was involved in what appears to have been a major instance of local disorder. According to indictments laid at Shrewsbury on 9 Apr. 1478 before a session of the peace afforced by the presence of the two leading members of the prince of Wales’s council, John Alcock, bishop of Worcester, and Anthony Wydeville, Earl Rivers, our MP and his eldest son, John, had raised an insurrection of 200 armed men on the previous 1 Feb. at Bridgnorth, where they were joined by a further 80 led by George Lacon of Willey. No motive or purpose is attributed to them by the jurors but one may be inferred. The same jury indicted Thomas Blount, lord of Kinlet, a few miles to the south of Bridgnorth, for raising as many as 600 men at Kinlet on the following day. The probability is these offences arose out of some dispute between the young and probably impetuous Blount, who had recently succeeded his father, Sir Humphrey†, on the one hand, and either the Hordes or the men of Bridgnorth, on the other. It is also likely that the jurors exaggerated the numbers involved and the matter was less serious than they made it appear. In any event, our MP was able to purge the indictment against him by making a fine of 40s. in Michaelmas term 1480.26 KB9/353/27-28; KB27/876, fines rot. 2.

On 6 Nov. 1483, soon after Richard III had assumed the throne, Horde, although approaching old age, was pricked as sheriff of Shropshire for the third time, and was rewarded with a pardon of account in £100 in anticipation of his costs.27 E404/78/2/22. Whether he had any sympathy for the usurpation is impossible to say. There may be significance in the fact that, early in the reign, he was serving as steward in Shropshire of one of Richard’s principal supporters, Francis, Viscount Lovell, but he did not make the mistake of following Lovell into arms against Henry VII.28 He is not, however, to be identified with a namesake, who, a month after Hen. VII took the throne, was appointed to duchy of Cornw. office for ‘manifold services done at his great costs’: CPR, 1485-94, pp. 23-24. Just as in 1460 and 1471, he was not inconvenienced by the change of regime.29 His motive for suing out a general pardon was financial indemnity as a former sheriff rather than rather political insurance as a former Ricardian: C67/53, m. 5. Indeed, two years after taking the throne the new King was ready to trust him with the shrievalty. Important here may have been an ill-documented connexion between Horde and the younger brother of the third earl of Shrewsbury, Sir Gilbert Talbot†, who had distinguished himself at the battle of Bosworth in Henry Tudor’s cause. In the late 1470s Talbot had named our MP as one of only two feoffees in the manors he held in his wife’s right. While sheriff, Horde attracted the patronage of another influential figure in the county, for on 10 Mar. 1488 John, Lord Grey of Powis, granted life annuities of 20s. to both him and his son, John.30 CIPM Hen. VII, i. 924, 948, 982.

Horde survived his fourth and last shrievalty by ten years, remaining a j.p. until his death on 11 June 1498. His longevity is emphasized by the fact that he survived his son and heir, leaving his considerable estate to pass to John’s son, another Thomas, born in about 1476. In his inquisition post mortem, his property, confined to Shropshire, was valued at nearly £55 p.a., 20 marks of which was the land in Stapleton he held by courtesy.31 Ibid. iii. 1067.

Horde was exceptional among the fifteenth-century gentry in that he was intensively involved in both county and borough administration. Such a career would have been impossible in most counties where his landed estate would have been too small to command so prominent a place in a county’s affairs as he enjoyed. In impoverished Shropshire that was not the case. Another singularity of his career was his willingness to maintain his involvement in borough administration even after he had acquired the status to command county appointments, another indication, perhaps, that there was less of a demarcation in Shropshire between the elite of the county town and that of the county.