PAKYN, Thomas

Thomas first appears in the records in Hilary term 1431, when his father, the former mayor of Salisbury, was up at Westminster representing the city in Parliament. The two had probably travelled from Wiltshire together. Thomas came to the court of common pleas in Westminster hall to bring a suit against Edmund Dauntsey, a ‘gentleman’ from Laverstock, and his servants, for assaulting him at Clarendon (where his father was purveyor of the King’s works), and holding him prisoner against his will. Details of the offence emerged in pleadings two years later, when it was stated that the alleged assault had occurred on Christmas Eve 1430, and that although Thomas had been a captive for just seven hours he claimed damages of as much as £40.3 CP40/680, rot. 410d; 688, rot. 112. As later plea rolls show, Thomas received training in the law, which qualified him to make regular appearances as an attorney in the central courts for litigants from his home county. It may have been in order to further his practice as a lawyer that he sought election to two Parliaments of the 1430s for the decayed borough of Old Sarum: he could usefully combine his fee-earning business in the courts with service in the Commons. The Pakyns’ quarrel with Dauntsey had not been put to rest: both Thomas and his father were brought before the justices in the summer of 1435 to answer Dauntsey’s plea that they had stolen his crops worth £10 at Laverstock and harmed his servants at Malmesbury, both alleged offences being dated to the Christmas preceding Dauntsey’s own. The Pakyns asked licence to negotiate, and the suit continued until the next Easter.4 CP40/698, rot. 101. Thomas’s second Parliament assembled in the meantime.

By royal licence of November 1436, and together with William Temys* (who had been a fellow Member of the Commons four years earlier), Pakyn was named by William’s brother Thomas Temys* and his wife as a feoffee of the property in Netheravon, Wiltshire, which the couple held of the King in chief. They completed an entail of the estate in the autumn of the following year.5 CPR, 1436-41, p. 26; Wilts. Feet of Fines (Wilts. Rec. Soc. xliv), 506. That same autumn Pakyn’s father settled on him and his wife Elizabeth three tenements in Chipper Lane, Salisbury,6 Tropenell Cart. i. 258-60. properties which qualified him to be a member of civic assemblies and have a say in Salisbury’s government. Thus, he was serving on the lesser council of 48 when his father was elected mayor for the second time.7 First General Entry Bk. nos. 336, 345, 358, 377, 382, 386, 393.

Pakyn appeared in the marshalsea of the King’s bench in February 1439 to stand bail for John Martin, an esquire from Gillingham in Dorset, and his servant John Cornyssh. The two men were supposed to return to the court to stand trial on an appointed day, but in the event proved unable to do so because of illness. However, they successfully petitioned that as their default occurred through a ‘divine visitation’, they and their sureties should be exonerated from the usual penalties (in Pakyn’s case a fine of ten marks).8 CPR, 1436-41, pp. 442-3. He stood surety in the Exchequer in October that year for John Giles*, a filacer in the court of common pleas and clerk of the peace in Wiltshire, who had been a Member of both his Parliaments,9 CFR, xvii. 105. and this association with Giles may well have furthered his career as an attorney. That same law term he provided counsel for the widow of John Bromley*, a former mayor of Salisbury, and besides briefs from inhabitants of his home county he took on the pleas of prominent Dorset landowners, notably John Roger† and John Newburgh I*.10 CP40/715, rots. 358d, 436, 562d, 565d, 620, att. rot. 3; 720, rot. 120. On 4 Dec. 1439 Pakyn joined William Leyot* of Manston in standing surety in the Exchequer for Walter Veer*, the riding-forester of the New Forest, when he was given keeping of the priory of St. Helens on the Isle of Wight. This led to trouble for both men following Veer’s death in 1442, for the Exchequer held them responsible for an annuity of £7 previously granted from the priory’s revenues to the duke of Gloucester.11 CFR, xvii. 114-15; E159/220, brevia Trin. rot. 2d. The matter was resolved in their favour in May 1444. Undeterred, in May 1443 Pakyn agreed to be a mainpernor for another royal servant, William Ludlow II* (who had also sat with him in the Commons in his two Parliaments) and Simon Poy* of Salisbury, then appointed alnagers in Wiltshire, and he was also at Westminster that law-term to act as a bailsman for Thomas Freeman*, the former mayor of Salisbury. A year later he was briefed by William Carent*, the steward of Shaftesbury abbey.12 CFR, xvii. 259; Tropenell Cart. i. 321; CP40/729, rot. 110; 734, rot. 331.

Pakyn’s father died early in 1445, and he himself soon followed him to the grave, on 24 Mar. In the previous year the attorney had been bound in £20 that a local man, William Spaldington, would keep the peace. As Spaldington broke his promise the Crown made distraint on the late MP’s estate to recover the sum due. It was found that he had left certain lands and tenements in Fisherton Anger, on the outskirts of Salisbury, which his father and Simon Poy had settled on him six months before his death. The profits arising from the same were kept, presumably by members of the family, for Pakyn’s young son and heir William until April 1447, when an official inquiry was held and the property duly confiscated by the sheriff of Wiltshire. How long these holdings then remained in the Crown’s possession is uncertain, but in 1459 they were conveyed to Robert, 2nd Lord Hungerford, and others, apparently acting for the grasping lawyer Thomas Tropenell*. The heir William was persuaded to pass the Fisherton estate over to feoffees in October 1465, who promptly delivered seisin to another group headed by none other than Richard Neville, earl of Warwick. Pakyn received it back after he informed the earl that the intention of the transactions was to effect a sale to Tropenell.13 E199/48/14; Tropenell Cart. i. 160-6; CCR, 1454-61, p. 402. That the latter had involved the powerful earl in such a seemingly innocuous deal strongly points to some illegality in the arrangement. At the same time, William gave up his interest in the three tenements in Chipper Lane which his grandfather had settled on his parents back in 1437.14 Tropenell Cart. i. 260-2.