HUNT, Thomas

Hunt was a wealthy draper and one of the most substantial men to represent Northampton during the reign of Henry VI.2 He is to be distinguished from his namesakes: a gentleman of Thrapston in the east of the county; a fuller who served as bailiff of Northampton in 1473-4 and coroner there in 1490; and a draper of Rothwell in the north of the county, who sued out a general pardon in 1452: CP25(1)/179/95/118; CP40/786, rot. 226d; CCR, 1476-85, no. 145; HP Biogs. ed. Wedgwood and Holt, 488. Nothing is known of his antecedents but it is probable that he was a native of the town. In common with the pattern established among the burgesses, he was still a young man when he first held the lesser borough office of bailiff and sat in Parliament, and it is not until some time later that he begins to make regular appearances in the records. During the first of his four terms as mayor he was inconvenienced by an outbreak of serious disorder. Late in the evening of 25 June 1457 an affray broke out at Le Hert in the eastern part of the town. Hunt, as mayor, came to proclaim the peace and arrest the rioters. While there, however, the proprietor of the inn, John Avoures, a recent bailiff of the town, was killed with a pole-axe by one of the current bailiffs, a glover named Simon Kesteyn. Kesteyn was a wealthy man – on the following Monday a jury sitting before the town coroners valued his goods at as much as 100 marks – and Hunt was responsible for accounting for these forfeited goods to the Crown. His failure to do so resulted in the issue of distraints for his appearance in the court of King’s bench.3 KB9/288/77; KB27/789, rex rot. 34d. He had his own connexion with Kesteyn. In Trin. term 1458 the two men were joint-defendants accused of taking goods at Quarndon, Leics.: CP40/790, rot. 30.

In the late 1450s Hunt was living in a tenement called Le Blakehall, rented from Thomas Tresham*, one of the most substantial of the county gentry who was later attainted as a militant Lancastrian.4 Northants. RO, Finch Hatton mss, 548. In the spring of 1465, during his second mayoralty, he took an inquisition into his former landlord’s forfeited property in the town, and soon afterwards, on 25 May, the Crown granted this property (in fee from 1461) to three of the leading men of the realm, George Neville, bishop of Exeter, Richard Wydeville, Earl Rivers, and William, Lord Hastings, together with our MP and Thomas Merton, a servant of the Tresham family. This was part of a complicated arrangement by which Tresham was allowed to use the collateral of his forfeited lands to raise the capital necessary to repurchase them from their royal grantees. To this end, on the following 14 July, Hunt’s four co-grantees farmed the property at a nominal rent to our MP and three other prominent townsmen, Thomas Braunfeld*, William Hayrofe* and Thomas Saxby, to hold for a term of five years from the following Easter. The lease was to terminate when Tresham discharged the farmers of the sum of 200 marks they had advanced to him. This arrangement was favourable to the debtor in that the issues of the leased lands were to count towards the discharge of the debt, but on the termination of the lease he was no doubt required to buy out the fee simple interest of the grantees.5 C145/321/3; CPR, 1461-7, p. 470; Add. Ch. 22374. Hunt thus stood to benefit from both the grant and the making of the loan, but he must be seen here acting as a friend of the attainted man. Interestingly, when Tresham sought to complete his rehabilitation by securing election to Parliament in April 1467, Hunt joined with another townsman, William Meye*, in offering mainprise for his attendance. Further, it is probably more than coincidental that, on 3 Oct. 1477, six years after Tresham’s execution, the same two townsmen sat on a county jury of inquiry into his lands. Their inclusion was probably due to their particular knowledge of his affairs.6 C219/17/1; C145/328/5.

The profits of business enabled Hunt to extend his landholdings beyond the boundaries of Northampton. In Hilary term 1465 he acquired by final concord some 50 acres of land in Easton Neston and neighbouring Hulcote, a few miles to the south of the town. By another fine levied later in the same term some seven virgates of land in nearby Green’s Norton and Duncote were conveyed to our MP together with a local esquire and the vicar of Hardingstone, and this may represent a further purchase on his part.7 CP25(1)/179/96/9, 10. But if he was, in some small way, becoming a county landholder, the town remained at the centre of his interests. On 16 Nov. 1467 he was one of the former mayors present at the court of hustings in the guildhall. On 1 Apr. 1472 he attended a meeting of the fraternity of ‘the Holy Rode in the Walle’ in the church of St. Gregory the Pope, in company with several leading county men, and he was again his fellow townsmen’s choice as mayor at the following Michaelmas.8 Northampton Recs. i. 309; HMC Hastings, i. 141-2. While in office he was one of a group who leased from the corporation some waste ground at the town’s south gate together with buildings recently constructed there at the modest annual rent of 2d. His prominence in Northampton’s affairs continued into the early 1480s as reflected in his appointment with the then mayor to a royal commission in 1482.9 Northants. RO, Northampton bor. recs. private ch. 52; CPR, 1476-85, p. 344.

There is little evidence of Hunt’s trading interests, but surviving alnage accounts for the 1470s show that he and William Hayrofe were then the town’s principal traders in cloth. For example, between Michaelmas 1472 and 1473 Hunt paid the levy on 40 cloths, and from June 1476 to Easter 1478 he was one of a syndicate of five who sealed as many as 106.10 E101/343/19. More is known of his property transactions. In 1475 he numbered alongside Lord Hastings as a feoffee for a gentleman of Coventry, John Hyde, in property at Farthingstone, ten miles to the west of Northampton. Later, in the reign of Richard III, he leased a shop in the town from Sir Edward Brampton, who held the Tresham lands by royal grant. In the following reign this led him into dispute with a former bailiff, Thomas Horne, to whom the restored John Tresham had conveyed the same property. If Horne’s petition to the chancellor is to be believed, Hunt forcibly ousted him. Less contentiously, in July 1488 he leased his tenement outside the south gate of the town to the couple who inhabited it, a glover called William Perewyncle and his wife, for term of 12 years at an annual rent of two marks.11 CAD, iv. A6469, 7628; C1/139/45; Add. Ch. 736.

The date of Hunt’s death is unknown. He was still numbered among the 24 comburgesses in February 1490 and Horne’s petition against him may be dated as late as 1493.12 Northampton Recs. i. 312. Another chancery petition, however, shows that he was dead by 1502 and implies that he had then been so for several years. It also claims that he died leaving goods worth as much as £1,000. Nothing known about his career is suggestive of such wealth, and the petition is to be treated with scepticism. John Pecok, as great-grandson and heir of William Stevens, complained that Hunt, as Stevens’s executor and last surviving feoffee, had retained property in the town worth 20 marks p.a. in his own hand without implementing the provisions of Stevens’s will, and that the profits had made a significant contribution to the £1,000 of goods Hunt left to his daughter as his executrix. The daughter and her husband, John Lolle, presented a detailed rebuttal, claiming to have purchased part of the property supposedly enfeoffed and asserting that the rest was in other hands. They also denied that our MP acted as executor to Stevens, whom, they had been credibly informed, died a poor man. This rebuttal must be accepted. There is no evidence to suggest that the supposed testator, a mercer who had served as one of the borough chamberlains in the late 1430s, had so significant an estate in the town. Further, it is hard to explain why the complaint was delayed for more than 40 years after William’s death, and why so valuable an estate should have been placed under feoffment for term of 20 years to accomplish the modest project – the funding of a chantry priest and an obit – specified in the petition.13 C1/106/20-23; Northampton private ch. 48.