LOKTON, Thomas

Of obscure origin, Lokton was perhaps related to the Yorkshire family of the same name.10 VCH Yorks. (N. Riding), ii. 151. In his early years he was known as ‘Thomas Lokton the younger’ to distinguish him from a namesake who was under sheriff of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire in 1426, and it was as such that he was acknowledged in a quitclaim of February 1434.11 E13/138, rot. 18; CCR, 1429-35, p. 299. At the beginning of the 1430s he had been the fellow plaintiff in a plea of debt for a local magnate, Sir Walter de la Pole*, for whom he was subsequently a feoffee.12 CP40/677, rot. 90d; CPR, 1429-36, p. 333. Quite possibly he received a legal education, since it was as ‘of St. Andrew, Holborn’, close to the inns of court and Chancery, that he was sued for debt at Westminster over three decades later.13 J.H. Baker, Men of Ct. (Selden Soc. supp. ser. xviii), ii. 1025. It is not known when the older Thomas Lokton, perhaps his father, died, but it was probably the future MP who attended the Cambridgeshire county elections of 1435, 1436 and 1447.

It is possible that his association with de la Pole led Lokton to join the interest of John, Lord Tiptoft†, then the leading magnate in Cambridgeshire, for when Sir Walter died in July 1434 his heir was his young grandson, Edmund Ingoldisthorpe*, Tiptoft’s ward and soon to be son-in-law.14 CIPM, xxiv. 206-13. In all likelihood, he owed his appointment as bailiff of the honour of Richmond in 1438 to the peer, to whom the Crown had granted part of the honour the previous year.15 CPR, 1436-41, pp. 120-1, 193-4; VCH Cambs. viii. 14. While there is no evidence that Lokton attended the Cambridgeshire election to the Parliament of 1439, contested between the rival interests of Tiptoft and Sir James Butler, the future earl of Wiltshire, he was involved in a connected incident soon afterwards. Exactly what happened is impossible to ascertain, for the only evidence relating to the incident is Butler’s answer to a now lost petition of complaint that Tiptoft made against him to the King’s council. According to Butler, a small group of his men, headed by Henry Filongley* and William Tyrell I*, had gone to Cambridge in early 1440, to purvey supplies for his household and for other ‘disportez’. Upon their arrival in the town, a force of some 120 of Tiptoft’s followers, led by Lokton, had confronted them in the market place. Sorely outnumbered, they had sent to the Butler residence at nearby Fulbourn for help, so that they could return home safely. At this point, however, Master Richard Caudray, along with Master John Tylney, vice-chancellor of Cambridge university, and the mayor of Cambridge, had intervened to avert violence and both sides had agreed to withdraw.16 Egerton Roll 8791. Shortly afterwards, Lokton was caught up in what appears to have been another episode in the Tiptoft-Butler quarrel. On 22 Feb. 1441, a group of j.p.s. headed by Sir Nicholas Styuecle* took an indictment for murder against Henry Brokesby, a resident of Butler’s manor of Fulbourn and from a family closely connected with the Butlers. Brokesby countered with litigation in the common pleas, claiming that this indictment arose out of a conspiracy at Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, between Tiptoft, Styuecle, Everard Digby* and many others, including Lokton, the previous November. Tiptoft’s death in January 1443 strengthened Brokesby’s position, enabling him to secure his acquittal at a special commission of gaol delivery on 6 Apr. that year and to win very substantial costs and damages at the Worcester assizes of the following 18 July. Thereafter his luck ran out. When the case returned to the common pleas, the justices failed to award judgement. First, they had doubts as to the disallowing of letters of protection that Digby had produced at the assizes; secondly, they wondered whether Brokesby had acted lawfully in pursuing two separate actions on a single original writ. Numerous adjournments failed to give the justices time to resolve these difficulties and the unfortunate plaintiff was still vainly awaiting judgement in 1449.17 CP40/727, rot. 600; Year Bk. Hil. 21 Hen. VI, pl. 12, Mich. 22 Hen. VI, pl. 5 (Reports del Cases en Ley, 1679).

Within a year of her husband’s death, Tiptoft’s widow Joyce appointed Lokton her receiver-general, with a fee for life from the Cambridgeshire manor of Harston,18 E159/220, commissiones Mich. and at Michaelmas 1445 he replaced William Cotton* as steward of that lordship, a position he still held 24 years later. Briefly married to Sir Christopher Talbot* after Tiptoft’s death, Joyce also named Lokton as one of her executors.19 CP40/758, rot. 19. In April 1446, a few months before she died, her son John, 2nd Lord Tiptoft, likewise appointed Lokton as his receiver-general.20 E159/226, commissiones Easter. Four years later, Tipftoft would sue his mother’s executors at Westminster, alleging that they were detaining £100 from him.21 CP40/758 rot. 19. Notwithstanding this suit, Lokton spent much of his career serving that lord, created earl of Worcester in 1449.22 CP, xii (2), 842-3. It was through the earl that in 1452 he became clerk of the estreats at the Exchequer, because the office, worth as much as £15 p.a. in fees and wages, was then in Tiptoft’s gift as treasurer of England.23 ‘Exchequer Officers’, 86.

While clerk, Lokton remained active at a local level. In October 1452 he was on the grand jury which indicted those involved in a conspiracy by adherents of the duke of York at Cambridge and elsewhere in the shire the previous February,24 KB9/7/1. and he served as escheator in Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire in 1453-4. During his term he was appointed a commissioner to raise loans for the Crown, and, a year later, he joined the bench, probably through the influence of Tiptoft. Though never a member of the quorum as a j.p., his later appointment to commissions of oyer and terminer in 1461 and 1463 suggests that he possessed at least some legal knowledge.25 CPR, 1461-7, pp. 68, 281.

Lokton remained clerk of the estreats until the end of April 1455. He was removed from office by none other than James Butler, by now earl of Wiltshire, who had succeeded Tipfoft as treasurer on the previous 15 Mar. He was not to regain the post following Tiptoft’s reappointment as treasurer in April 1462, or during Worcester’s brief third term as such in 1470, although he would return to the Exchequer in June 1462 to collect an assignment towards his recently re-installed patron’s fee.26 E403/825, m. 6.

A few months after losing office at the Exchequer, Lokton was elected knight of the shire for Cambridgeshire. The Parliament of 1455 was summoned in the aftermath of the Yorkist victory at the first battle of St Albans. Notwithstanding his membership of the grand jury three years earlier, Lokton must have followed the lead of his patron as far as political allegiances were concerned. By now Tiptoft was an ally of the duke of York, and it is likely that he exerted his influence to help his servant secure a seat in the Commons. Lokton could scarcely have stood for Parliament without Tiptoft’s backing, since he possessed no great landed wealth of his own. As recently as the beginning of 1451 he had been assessed as having a landed income of just over £11 p.a., less than the £12 he then earned in fees.27 E179/81/103. What evidence there is for his lands shows that his holdings lay south of Cambridge, at Sawston, Whittlesford and Meldreth, all not far from Tiptoft’s manor of Harston.28 T.F. Teversham, Sawston, 8; VCH Cambs. vi. 267; CP40/805, rots. 292, 382d.

Not long after the Parliament dissolved, Tiptoft’s brother-in-law Sir Edmund Ingoldisthorpe died, having appointed Lokton as one of his executors. It was as such that he took out a pardon on 25 Jan. 1459,29 PCC 7 Stokton (PROB11/4, ff. 53-54); C67/42, m. 42. and he and his co-executors, Laurence Cheyne* and (Sir) John Prysote*, c.j.c.p., obtained a royal licence to found a chantry at Burrough Green on the deceased’s behalf in the following year.30 CCR, 1454-61, p. 157. One of Ingoldisthorpe’s feoffees from as early as 1435,31 C139/165/20. Lokton must also have performed other services for the knight, who bequeathed him an annuity of five marks for life. In the later 1460s, however, Ingoldisthorpe’s daughter and heir, Isabel, and her husband John Neville, earl of Northumberland, filed a bill in Chancery against him for failing to enfeoff Isabel of Ingoldisthorpe’s manor in Tilney, of which he was by then the last surviving feoffee.32 C1/33/180. Lokton served other Cambridgeshire gentry as a feoffee as well, among them the Chicheleys and St. Georges, and it was possibly as a trustee of the Colville family that he was party to a settlement for the marriage of the widow of Henry Colville to Thomas Leventhorpe† of Hertfordshire.33 CIPM Hen. VII, i. 593; CCR, 1461-8, p. 308; CAD, v. A11497; Cambs. Archs., deed of 1442, P171/25/1. He was also on good terms with John Ansty* his fellow Member of the Commons in 1455, who, in his will of 1460, left him a black cloak lined with the fur of martens.34 PCC 21 Stokton (PROB11/4, ff. 161v-162).

During the 1460s Lokton was an estate officer for others besides the earl of Worcester. Between 1461 and 1464 he was steward at Sawston for John Sawston, and by 1467 he held the same position at Fen Ditton, a Cambridgeshire manor belonging to Tiptoft’s fellow humanist, William Gray, bishop of Ely. He may actually have held office in the episcopal liberty of Ely for some time before this date, since he attended the mass following Gray’s installation in March 1459,35 Reg. Gray, f. 120v. and the resignation of the prior of Anglesey before the bishop’s commissary in January 1462.36 E. Hailstone, Bottisham, 297. Lokton also had more personal dealings with the bishop, for in June 1457 Gray permitted him and his wife Agnes to hear mass at their oratories anywhere in the diocese for the next three years.37 Reg. Gray, f. 24. Later, in October 1459, Gray gave Lokton’s eldest son, Walter, licence to marry Anne Allington in the Ansty family’s chapel at Stow cum Quy.38 Add. 5826, f. 71. Anne was perhaps a da. and coh. of Robert Allington, yr. s. of the Speaker William Allington I. According to the visitation evidence, however, Walter married Joan Allington, Robert’s da. by his first marriage to Joan Argentine (yr. da. of John (d.v.p. c.1413) and gda. of Sir William Argentine†). The same evidence also records that Robert did have a da. named Anne by his 2nd w. and that she m. Thomas Berners: Vis. Cambs. (Harl. Soc. xli), 15. Anne’s relationship to the former Speaker, William Allington I*, is uncertain, but Lokton was afterwards a feoffee for the Speaker’s grandson, William Allington†, himself one of the Speakers in the reign of Edward IV.39 CIPM Hen. VII, i. 1075.

The accession of the first Yorkist King did not interrupt Lokton’s role in local administration, in which his final appointment was a place on the Cambridgeshire commission of the peace of 10 Dec. 1473. Possibly already dead when that commission expired in November 1475, he was certainly no longer alive in August 1480.40 CAD, vi. C6629. His successor was his son Walter, the escheator in Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire of 1469-71, and a j.p. in Cambridgeshire in the later years of Henry VII’s reign. He had at least one other son, since Walter made a release of land in Whittlesford to his younger brother Thomas in 1472.41 VCH Cambs. vi. 267. There were other Cambridgeshire Loktons: Edward Lokton of King’s College, Cambridge, was ordained deacon in the diocese of Ely in April 1460, John Lokton was a party to a fine involving land in the shire in 1479 and Robert Lokton was buried in the parish church at Sawston at the end of the fifteenth century, but their relationship to the MP is not known.42 CP25(1)/30/100/58; Add. 5826, ff. 196-8.