CHARWALTON, Thomas

It is likely that Thomas was a native of Huntingdonshire, if not of Huntingdon itself. A contemporary, John Charwalton, a yeoman from Offord Darcy, was probably a relative,4 CFR, xvii. 219, 329; xviii. 40; CP40/664, rot. 271d. not least because for a time Thomas was bailiff of Toseland, the hundred in which Offord Darcy lay. Thomas appears in the records from the beginning of January 1403, when he was a party to a transaction involving property in Huntingdon and nearby Brampton.5 Add. Ch. 33533. During Henry V’s reign, he witnessed the return of the knights of the shire for Huntingdonshire to the Parliament of 1415, fell into dispute with the prior of Caldwell, Bedfordshire, and a clerk from Bedford over a debt he allegedly owed them,6 CPR, 1422-9, p. 244. and served as bailiff of Toseland. An Exchequer plea roll records a suit that John Hore* brought in November 1417 against the outgoing sheriff of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire, Robert Scott*, in pursuit of the wages of £7 due to him as a knight of the shire for Huntingdonshire in the Parliament of October 1416. In his defence, Scott asserted that in December 1416 he had ordered Charwalton, then bailiff of Toseland, to pay that sum to Hore, so that Charwalton might in turn cancel some of the debts he had happened to owe Scott.7 E13/133, rot. 11.

Assuming he was not a native of Huntingdon, Charwalton might have had yet to settle in the borough when he was serving as bailiff of Toseland, although he was certainly associated with the town soon after the accession of Henry VI. In the spring of 1423 he and John Colles* acquired the custody of the castle and honour of Huntingdon, with its appurtenances in Huntingdonshire, Cambridgeshire and other counties. The honour had come into the King’s hands after the death of John Hastings, earl of Pembroke, and the grant was for 20 years, backdated to Michaelmas 1421, for a rent of five marks p.a. Charwalton and Colles appear to have kept it for the full term of their lease, after which the Crown granted it to Roger Hunt*.8 CFR, xv. 33; xvii. 194. There is no evidence for any other holdings that Charwalton might have possessed: although he was one of those to whom Robert Peck* and his wife conveyed an inn on Huntingdon’s High Street in 1431, it was almost certainly in the capacity of the Pecks’ feoffee.9 King’s Coll., Cambridge, deeds, HUN/13.

Later in the 1420s, Charwalton was involved in several suits in the court of common pleas. In one of these actions, he and Thomas Beville† sought to recover a debt of £10 but the defendant, John Selys, a yeoman from Caxton, Cambridgeshire, claimed that it arose from a bond extorted from him while a prisoner of the plaintiffs and their followers at Cambridge in December 1424. In another, Charwalton and John Wafarer of Grantchester stood accused of having detained two written obligations. It was in relation to this latter suit that John Bickley*, John Abbotsley* and John Chiksond* stood surety in the common pleas for Charwalton in Trinity term 1427.10 CP40/664, rots. 86d, 87, 212; 665, rots. 151d, 186; 666, rots. 37, 100d. At that date Bickley was one of the bailiffs of Huntingdon, an office to which Charwalton gained election just a few months later.

During this initial double term as bailiff, Charwalton incurred the displeasure of the Crown, which in 1428 directed the sheriff of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire to bring him into Chancery,11 CFR, xv. 279. probably in relation to a bill that the prioress of the nunnery of Hinchingbrooke near Huntingdon had brought there against him and his fellow burgesses. She accused her opponents of assault, of breaking down a close and wrongfully claiming rights of way at Hinchingbrooke.12 C1/7/165. Her Chancery suit was part of a longer running quarrel over her refusal to allow access to pasture at Hinchingbrooke to the townsmen, many of whom probably relied on it to graze their livestock. Earlier, in July 1425, she had secured a commission and oyer and terminer to investigate her complaint that 18 men from Huntingdon had broken into her close, carried away crops and fodder and imprisoned two of her employees. Soon afterwards, she and the townsmen had put their names to a formal settlement, although this arrangement, probably imposed from above, had resolved nothing.13 The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 181; Add. Chs. 33616-17; CPR, 1422-9, p. 303. In all likelihood, the two sides were still at loggerheads in November 1429, when Charwalton, who had recently stood down as bailiff, entered into a recognizance with the prioress bearing a penalty of £100.14 CCR, 1429-35, p. 27. A prominent local knight, Sir Nicholas Styuecle*, also put his name to the recognizance, although whether as Charwalton’s surety or because he himself had played some part the dispute is unclear. Whatever the case, the security provides the first known evidence of Charwalton’s association with Sir Nicholas. Later, at the beginning of 1434, he witnessed a quitclaim of two manors in Great Stukeley by Thomas Beville to Styuecle and his wife, and he was also present when the knight’s relative, Ralph Styuecle, made a release of the same property the following May.15 CCR, 1429-35, pp. 296, 309. If not already well established, the connexion between the two men became a longstanding one. In the early 1440s Charwalton conveyed various holdings in Huntingdon to Styuecle and his wife,16 The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 529. and in the same period he and Sir Nicholas were associated with John, Lord Tiptoft†, in an episode apparently connected with that peer’s feud with Sir James Butler, son of the earl of Ormond. On 22 Feb. 1441, a jury indicted Henry Brokesby, a tenant of Sir James’s manor of Fulbourn, Cambridgeshire, of murder before Styuecle and other j.p.s. According to the jury, Brokesby had killed one John Paxton at Hilton in Huntingdonshire in March the previous year, but Brokesby immediately claimed that the indictment had arisen from a conspiracy at Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, among Tipftoft and his adherents, including Styuecle and Charwalton. Duly acquitted before a special commission of gaol delivery on 6 Apr. 1441, Brokesby subsequently sued Tiptoft and his coterie for conspiracy in the common pleas. Tiptoft’s death in January 1443 undermined the chance of a successful defence and, in the following summer, the plaintiff won damages totalling 1,300 marks. Yet this was not the end of the matter, for the justices reserved judgement while they debated various issues of law arising from the case. There followed numerous adjournments, and it is possible that the unfortunate Brokesby never achieved the justice he sought, since he was still awaiting judgement in 1449.17 CP40/727, rot. 600; Year Bks. Hil. 21 Hen. VI (Reports del Cases en Ley, 1679), pl. 12; Mich. 22 Hen. VI (ibid.), pl. 5. In the following year, Charwalton was also associated with Styuecle in another controversy, the disputed election of Huntingdonshire’s knights of the shire to the Parliament of 1450, when both of them supported the candidature of John Styuecle*, probably Sir Nicholas’s son.

As for his own parliamentary career, Charwalton gained election to the Commons on at least two occasions, and he sat in the Parliament of 1431 while serving as one of the bailiffs of Huntingdon. The question of law and order was a matter of concern for both that assembly and his next Parliament of 1433, and he was among the residents of Huntingdonshire who swore the oath for keeping the peace administered throughout the country in 1434.18 CPR, 1429-36, p. 376. Both coroner and bailiff of Huntingdon when he took the oath, he again served as bailiff at the end of the same decade and, for the last time, in the late 1440s. Just over a year after completing his final term as bailiff, he participated in the disputed Huntingdonshire county election of 1450, giving his voice to the eventually successful candidates, Robert Stonham* and John Styuecle, against Henry Gymber*. Charwalton features as a ‘gentleman’ in a certificate that Stonham, Styuecle and their supporters returned to Chancery, but as a ‘yeoman’ or mere ‘husbandman’ in other records.19 C219/16/1; J.G. Edwards, ‘Hunts. Parlty. Election of 1450’, in Essays presented to B. Wilkinson ed. Sandquist and Powicke, 393-5; CP40/666, rot. 37; 688, rot. 282. To some extent, the makers of the certificate may have exaggerated the status of the supporters of Stonham and Styuecle to make them look more impressive, although Charwalton had also been referred to as a ‘gentleman’ as early as 1431, when acting as an arbitrator between the Austin priory at Huntingdon and the community of Godmanchester.20 Hunts. Archs., Godmanchester recs. G3/5.

The Huntingdon return to the following Parliament of 1453 provides the last known reference to Charwalton. In the return, he is identified as ‘Thomas Charwalton senior’, suggesting that he had a younger namesake, perhaps his son.