COTYS, Robert I

Few details of Cotys’ career have been discovered, and many of his activities are in any case difficult to distinguish from those of a younger namesake, possibly his son, who was usually, albeit not always, distinguished by being styled ‘junior’. On this basis, it would appear to have been the older man who attested the Somerset shire elections to the Parliament of 1450, and who three years later was serving as receiver of the sheriff of Somerset and Dorset, Nicholas Latimer.

While these activities and Cotys’ style of ‘gentleman’ indicate that he was a more substantial man than the limited details of his career that have come to light would otherwise suggest, it is not clear how he came to be returned to the Commons by the borough of Bridgwater. Like him, his parliamentary colleague, the London lawyer Thomas Burgoyne* had no documented links with the burgesses, and it is possible that the townsmen (like many of their counterparts in other south-western boroughs) simply had difficulty in finding men prepared to travel to the provincial backwater of Bury St. Edmunds. It is, however, just possible that by 1447 Cotys had already established a connexion with the eminent parliamentarian Alexander Hody,* a former Bridgwater MP, whom he would serve as a feoffee a few years later, and that it was on his recommendation that he was returned.3 C140/4/34, mm. 2, 3.

Little else is known of Cotys’ life. He was evidently still alive in 1460, when his putative son Robert II was still being styled ‘the younger’, and it may also have been he who in the summer of 1469 secured a pardon for his failure to answer in the King’s courts for a number of debts owing to, among others, the former treasurer, Henry, Viscount Bourgchier (by then the earl of Essex).4 CPR, 1467-77, p. 144; Bridgwater Bor. Archs. 1445-68, no. 814.