SKARGILL, Thomas

Skargill came from Yorkshire, but to which of the families of this name he belonged is unclear, since although he referred in his will to lands he held in the county he failed to specify their location. Perhaps he was related to the Skargills of Thorpe and Stapleton, who in the early fifteenth century were headed by the influential William Skargill, sometime escheator of the county. In 1429 William stood surety for the earl of Northumberland and other custodians of the estates of the late earl of March. Using the income from six of his manors, he founded a chantry at Whitkirk in the West Riding, by licence of 1448, and he also leased substantial lands at Templenewsam.5 C67/38, m. 10; CFR, xv. 286; CPR, 1446-52, p. 167; CAD, i. A686, 691. It was prob. that William who received a pardon on 28 Jan. 1460 but died bef. 10 Mar. that year: C67/43, m. 6; CFR, xix. 246. Another William Skargill was a j.p. in the W. Riding 1461-70 and died in 1497, leaving his considerable estates, worth some £82 p.a., to his grandson Sir William (b.c.1467): CIPM Hen. VII, ii. 140. Alternatively, the MP may have belonged to the Skargills of Lede Grange in the parish of Ryther, near Towton (in the same Riding), and if so he could have been the grandson to whom another Thomas Skargill left ten marks in his will of 1433.6 Test. Ebor. ii (Surtees Soc. xxx), 35-36.

Whatever his relationship to these Skargills, it would appear that Thomas was a younger son, dependent for his income on his membership of the royal household, and like many of his fellows benefiting from the lavish generosity of the young King Henry VI. Although there is no firm evidence that he crossed the Channel in 1430 for Henry’s coronation as king of France, by October 1435 he had been made one of the yeomen of the chamber, as such being assigned livery at the great wardrobe and wages of 6d. a day from the revenues of his native Yorkshire. Skargill was promised these wages for life, and other posts were granted him on a similar basis: the keepership of the royal park at Havering in Essex, along with the dues of herbage and pannage, worth £8 p.a.,7 CPR, 1429-36, p. 491; 1436-41, pp. 67, 74, 124, 136, 182, 362; E101/409/2, f. 45v. and the office of rider of Waltham forest, with wages of 6d. a day, which he shared with William Bolton.8 CPR, 1436-41, p. 306; CCR, 1435-41, p. 228. Other grants soon followed, but not all of them led to further profit. Although, on 2 Nov. 1439, Skargill shared with the Exchequer official Thomas Thorpe* the wardship and marriage of the son and heir of an Essex esquire, Thomas Leigh, and the ward was duly handed over to them by his guardian Thomas Arblaster*, the latter recovered the wardship from the Crown just a few months later.9 CFR, xvii. 110, 121; E159/216, brevia Easter rots. 6d, 12, Trin. rot. 23d, recogniciones, Mich. In 1440 Skargill secured the office of tronager in Ipswich, which was also conferred on him for life; and from 1442 he and a fellow courtier, Bartholomew Halley*, received in survivorship a tun of red wine yearly in the port of London.10 CPR, 1436-41, pp. 406, 521; 1441-6, p. 42. In a mutually advantageous arrangement probably negotiated between themselves, Skargill and another colleague, John Penycoke*, each obtained a reversionary interest in the other’s office, so that Skargill would become keeper of Byfleet park if he outlived Penycoke, and the latter keeper of Havering should he survive Skargill.11 CPR, 1436-41, p. 560; 1441-6, p. 74. As it happened, Hen. VI’s removal from the throne in 1461 meant that both offices passed to the new King’s supporters. His relations with a fellow Yorkshireman, John Gargrave*, the marshal of the Marshalsea were much less amicable. He asserted in the court of King’s bench in Michaelmas term 1443 that Gargrave had wrongfully released a debtor of his from prison and should therefore be held liable for the £20 and 10s. damages awarded to him by the justices, and in addition should be fined £5. The court awarded in Skargill’s favour, albeit reducing his compensation to £21.12 KB27/730, rot. 83.

When not attending to his duties at Court, Skargill lived in Essex, and he was appointed escheator of the county when the incumbent James Gresacre died in 1445 (even though the queen had asked the treasurer to appoint one of her own servants, so he might do her ‘good service in the said occupacion’).13 Letters of Margaret of Anjou (Cam. Soc. lxxxvi), 58-59. Since Skargill was pardoned in November 1446 as ‘of Havering atte Bower, yeoman of the Crown’,14 C67/39, m. 22. he was evidently not a resident of the Wiltshire borough of Great Bedwyn, which returned him to the Parliament summoned to meet at Bury St. Edmunds three months later, on 10 Feb. 1447. Nor was his fellow MP, who is thought to have been Thomas Daniell*. Since neither of them is known to have been connected with the duke of Buckingham, to whom the borough belonged, it must be assumed that their election came about through the influence of the Court. Skargill and Daniell joined several other household men in a Commons dominated by courtiers, many of whom benefited from royal grants immediately after the death of the duke of Gloucester, which occurred during the short parliamentary session. Skargill’s own reward was a comparatively modest one: shortly after the dissolution he was granted an 80 year-lease of a messuage and three acres of land called ‘Clemans Dodes’ in Rainham, Essex, along with rents from certain tenements there.15 CPR, 1446-52, p. 52.

Skargill was again in breach of the statutes regarding the residential qualifications for MPs at his second election to Parliament, early in 1449 (this time being returned by the Dorset borough of Bridport), for when he attested the Essex elections to the same Parliament (held at Chelmsford on 21 Jan.), he was stated to be living in that county. The four men from Bridport who ostensibly stood surety for the appearance of him and his fellow MP John Burgess II* may have been simply acting for the latter, who was a local man.16 C219/15/6. While the Parliament was in progress Skargill did not neglect his duties at Havering, for in May, during the second session, he resisted the removal from the park of 40 oaks, which the King had granted to the black friars at Beverley to rebuild their dormitory and library, insisting that the oaks should be kept at Havering for paling the park.17 E404/65/179. At the same time he brought a suit in the court of common pleas against Edmund Wykes of Canterbury, who, or so he said, had engaged him in July 1443 to ride from London to Havering and Hertford on his business, but had failed to pay him the promised fee of six marks. Wykes made a stout defence, and the justices found Skargill’s claim to be false.18 CP40/753, rot. 327.

Skargill’s third consecutive Parliament, which met in November the same year, saw him representing Westbury, another Wiltshire borough, which was then electing MPs for only the second time in its history. There is no reason to doubt that he was a placeman yet again. Furthermore, he was a late replacement, for on the return his name appears written over an erasure.19 C219/15/7. The government had need of loyal supporters in the Commons in the crisis occasioned by the fall of Rouen and imminent collapse of English rule in Normandy, and to help resist the opposition to the King’s chief minister the duke of Suffolk. In the event, they were unable to prevent Suffolk’s fall early in 1450, nor the passage of an Act of Resumption, although many of the King’s retainers managed to secure letters of exemption from the Act’s enforcement. Skargill, as an usher of the chamber, was permitted to keep an income of £20 a year.20 PROME, xii. 125; E163/8/14. Parliament was dissolved in early June 1450, when news of Cade’s rebellion reached Leicester, where it was sitting for the third session. Skargill played a useful part in tracking down malefactors in Kent and Essex: for his costs and expenses in riding about the two counties with a posse, ‘to take and ceesse them’, he earned a reward of £10 on 18 Sept.21 E403/781, m. 2; 785, m. 3; E404/67/27. Inquiries were made in 1451 about his lease of crown property in Rainham, which had not been resumed in accordance with the Act, but nothing was done about it, perhaps because the land, prone to flooding by the Thames, was almost worthless. The terms by which he held the herbage and pannage at Havering, however, were changed, and from then on he had to pay the Crown £4 p.a.22 CIMisc. viii. 220; CFR, xviii. 253. Partly as a consequence of the Resumption, in March 1452 Skargill encountered difficulties at the Exchequer regarding payment of his wages as a yeoman of the Crown, but a fresh grant reassured him that he could retain his post for life; in January 1453 he and Bolton also obtained confirmation of their wages at Waltham forest;23 CPR, 1446-52, pp. 526, 542; 1452-61, p. 39; CCR, 1447-54, p. 375. and a few months later the ‘Clemens Doddes’ property was leased to him again, for 20 years.24 CFR, xix. 32.

The summer of 1453 proved to be a time of personal tragedy and financial insecurity for Skargill. First, in the early evening of 8 July his brother Robert was violently assaulted in the London parish of St. Anne, near Aldersgate, by Thomas Dawne, another yeoman of the Crown, and died of his injuries. Although Skargill, as Robert’s heir, appealed Dawne for homicide, the defendant was granted bail in October (on sureties provided by Sir John Boteler* of Lancashire), and eventually restored to his position at Court.25 KB27/770, rot. 50; CPR, 1452-61, p. 471. Then, the King’s mental collapse led the Council to reform the Household, and in the ordinances introduced in November 1454 Skargill was no longer listed among the four ‘gentlemen ushers of the chamber’, or among the yeomen of the Crown or chamber.26 PPC, vi. 223-5. When another Act of Resumption was passed in the Parliament of 1455, he sent in a petition for exemption on the grounds that in consideration of his long service (over 20 years), it had pleased the King to make him ‘squier’ and to grant him 6d. a day from the issues of Yorkshire. The Lords, considering that his only income was this wage and the fee for his parkership of Havering ‘by the which he hath but lytle avayle over his charges’, agreed to the provision.27 SC8/28/1373; PROME, xii. 414. Despite losing his post at Ipswich in November 1456, he regained it a year later, albeit no longer for life.28 CPR, 1452-61, pp. 329, 415.

Skargill was placed on the Essex bench for the middle years of the decade, but it was in the neighbouring county of Suffolk, at the shire court at Ipswich on 12 Nov. 1459, that he attested the elections for the Coventry Parliament. The two men elected, (Sir) Philip Wentworth* and William Tyrell I*, were both members of the Household, and Tyrell is thought to have been Skargill’s brother-in-law.29 C219/16/5. He himself was named on the commissions of array appointed in December to confront the forces of the Yorkist rebels, attainted at Coventry, and his continuing attachment to the Lancastrian regime is confirmed by a fresh lease of the ‘Clemens Doddes’ property, granted him in May 1460. Less easy to interpret is Skargill’s reappointment as tronager at Ipswich, for this was made on 31 July by bill of the new treasurer, Viscount Bourgchier, within a few days of the Yorkist victory at Northampton.30 CFR, xix. 268-9; CPR, 1452-61, p. 590. Perhaps for the time being the treasurer’s concerns were for preserving continuity in the customs’ service, rather than examining political allegiance. Nevertheless, it was inevitable that following the accession of Edward IV Skargill would lose both this post and his keepership of Havering.31 E101/465/13; CPR, 1461-7, p. 27.

The 1460s proved a difficult period for Skargill. At some point before the spring of 1464 he was bound in recognizances for £80 to keep the peace towards a London fuller named Symkyn Brigeman, but his disruptive behaviour in the presence of the ‘chief juge’ resulted in the forfeiture of his bond.32 E404/72/4/41. However, at the time of a crisis born of Lancastrian plotting in the summer of 1468 he managed to procure a royal pardon.33 C67/46, m. 30. Even so, his appointment to a commission of inquiry in October 1470, during the Readeption of Henry VI, suggests that his loyalties remained with his former lord. In this he may have been strongly influenced by his close links with the Essex family of Tyrell. Skargill is said to have married a daughter of the sometime Speaker Sir John Tyrell, who had been treasurer of the Household when he joined it in the 1430s,34 Vis. Essex, ii3. and he was often recorded in association with her kinsmen. Her putative uncle, Edward Tyrell*, provided hay for the bucks at Havering when Skargill was parker there, and Skargill was present at the elections for Essex and Suffolk, respectively, of her presumed brothers (Sir) Thomas Tyrell* in 1449 and William Tyrell I in 1459, having earlier acted in land transactions and as a mainpernor on their behalf.35 E403/733, m. 9; Essex Feet of Fines, iv. 36, 53; CCR, 1441-7, p. 392; 1447-54, p. 255; CFR, xix. 133. William Tyrell was among his ‘friends’ who agreed to arbitrate in one of his disputes;36 C1/17/331. Further details of these disputes with Margery Sampson and William Ketill, which were serious enough for the parties to be bound over in £100, have not been discovered. and Sir Thomas was his co-feoffee of the manor of Southall in Rainham, by nomination of Robert Godstone (the two men later being accused by Godstone’s son John of refusing to carry out trusts stipulated in his father’s will).37 C1/31/397-400. Similarly, his links with fellow members of Henry VI’s household, such as John Martin, Henry Langton* (who like him was a Yorkshireman) and John Stoughton*, must have made it even harder to accept the transition to Yorkist rule.38 CFR, xvii. 69, 90; CCR, 1441-7, p. 64; 1447-54, p. 268.

Skargill had been party to deeds concerning property at Havering in the 1450s,39 CAD, iii. C3519, 3723; vi. C5508. but his own landed holdings and how he acquired them are somewhat obscure. If, as is supposed, his wife was the widow of a member of the Rookwood family,40 For the Rookwoods, see The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 233. The Elizabeth, w. of William Rookwood (fl.1440) referred to in Collectanea Topographica et Geneaologica ed. Nichols, ii. 132-4, 138, may have been the woman concerned, although other sources mention Elizabeth (fl.1444), wife of William Rookwood, who was da. and h. of Thomas Hales, himself h. to his bro. Sir Stephen Hales†: F. Blomefield, Norf. ii. 466; ix. 264; CP25(1)/169/189/191, 193. it remains uncertain what she brought to her new husband as her dower. His most important acquisition, made in 1446, was the manor of Bretons in Hornchurch, which he probably purchased.41 VCH Essex, vii. 33; Essex RO, D/DU 102/34, m. 5d; 35, m. 2. Curiously, in seeking a husband for his only daughter, Anne, Skargill chose a man who came neither from Essex or Yorkshire, namely John Throckmorton† of Gloucestershire. In his will, dated at Bretons on 18 Aug. 1475 and proved on the following 16 May, he stipulated that after the death of his widow the manor and lands called ‘Daniels’ in Hornchurch, a tenement at Havering, and his lands in Yorkshire were all to pass to this daughter. If she died without issue some of the property was to be sold and the proceeds used to mend highways and fund other good deeds. A tenement at ‘Colyersrowe’ and two more in London were settled in remainder on Elizabeth and Joan, the daughters of John Throckmorton, who were presumably the testator’s grand-daughters. Skargill named the vicar of Hornchurch as one of his executors, and left bequests to the high altar of his church, together with ten marks for the building of the steeple when the works began.42 PCC 22 Wattys (PROB11/6, ff. 168-9). It was in this church that he was buried. A monumental brass depicted Skargill’s armorial bearings and effigies of himself (in armour, with a talbot couchant at his feet) and his wife. The legend and three other shields have now been lost.43 VCH Essex, vii. 48; Trans. Essex Arch. Soc. n.s. xi. 323-4. Skargill’s property did not long remain in the hands of his descendants. In 1491 his grandson Christopher Throckmorton sold the London house in Aldgate Street, and ten years later he also disposed of Bretons.44 CAD, i. A1588, 1608 (where Thomas Skargill is called John in error); VCH Essex, vii. 33.