MARSHALL, Thomas

The attenuated survival of the Carlisle records makes it impossible to discount the possibility, perhaps the probability, that Marshall was a now undocumented resident of the city he represented. None the less, the irregular way in which his name and that of his fellow MP, Robert Mabson*, appear in the 1437 return – Christian names in one hand, surnames in another – raise the presumption that they were outsiders. Even, however, accepting this assumption, Marshall cannot be certainly identified. The most interesting possibility is that he was the Lincoln’s Inn lawyer who had just completed the first of his many terms as governor there. The election for Carlisle in 1422 of Richard Drax*, a Lincoln’s Inn man with no connexion with the city, provided a precedent for such a return, and the 1437 Parliament was noteworthy for the number of fellows of Lincoln’s Inn among its Members.1 Admitted in 1423, Marshall was pensioner in 1432-2 and governor for a remarkable ten annual terms between 1434 and 1464: J.H. Baker, Men of Ct. (Selden Soc. supp. ser. xviii), ii. 1065. He was alive as late as November 1466, when the authorities of the Inn licensed James Hobart† to have his chamber there after his death: L. Inn Black Bks. i. 41. More suggestively still, this lawyer had north-western connexions: a ‘Marschall de hospicio Lincoln’ delivered an indictment from Westmorland into King’s bench in response to a writ of 24 Jan. 1453. It was presumably this lawyer who was retained by Durham cathedral priory in the 1440s and 1450s.2 KB9/270/27d; Baker, ii. 1065.

There is, however, a more likely candidate. In February 1434 a Thomas Marshall appeared as a witness to a conveyance of property in Ulverston, Lancashire, in company with John Broughton*, who was the Cumberland MP in the 1437 Parliament. Broughton was of the Percy affinity (although he is not certainly known to have been so until the late 1440s) and it is therefore possible that his fellow witness in 1434 is to be identified with the Thomas Marshall, who in May 1443 was associated with Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, in the taking of bonds.3 Cumbria RO, Kendal, Le Fleming of Rydal mss, WDRY/92/83; CCR, 1441-7, pp. 139, 143. One might additionally surmise that this Thomas is to be identified with the surety, who as ‘of Yorkshire, gentleman’ acted in February 1442 for another Percy connexion, Sir Brian Stapleton*, who had also been an MP in 1437; and with, in all probability, the man commissioned in June 1446 to make an inquiry in Northumberland in respect of goods taken from a shipwreck.4 CFR, xvii. 207; CPR, 1441-6, p. 464. The namesake from Thirsk, an assessor of the 1431 subsidy in the N. Riding in 1431, is likely to have been another: CPR, 1429-36, p. 139.

There is no evidence that the Percy servant and the Lincoln’s Inn lawyer were the same man, and the former is to be preferred as the Carlisle MP.5 It is straining credulity to suppose that the Thomas Marshall, who was named to the quorum of a Canterbury gaol delivery comm. in 1451 and to the Kent bench in 1460, was the Lincoln’s Inn lawyer; and that he had come to play a part in Kent as a Percy servant because the Percys had acquired the Poynings lands there in 1446: C66/472, m. 18d; CPR, 1452-61, p. 668. His election is thus probably to be seen as a prelude to the influence the Percys exercised over the city’s representation from the late 1440s. Only one piece of evidence suggests his precise local origins. In 1476 a settlement was made on Christopher Helton of Burton near Appleby and his wife, Margaret, daughter of Thomas Marshall, once of Kirkoswald, some 15 miles from Carlisle. It may be that she was our MP’s daughter or perhaps grand-daughter.6 Cumbria RO, Carlisle, Wybergh mss D/Wyb2/127.