THOMASYN, David

A resident burgess of the borough he represented in Parliament, it was ‘of Chipping Wycombe, yeoman’ that Thomasyn sued a Cambridgeshire man in the court of common pleas in the mid 1450s, for a debt contracted at Norwich. A tenant of the duchy of Lancaster manor of Bassetsbury at Wycombe, he paid the duchy a rent of 10s. p.a. for copyhold land known as ‘Borsham’. He was dead by May 1459, when this land was granted to Thomas Paxman for the same rent. The grant to Paxman, and the fact that no heriot was collected by the duchy after Thomasyn’s death, suggests that the MP died without heirs. Thomasyn had also held a tenement in Frogmore Street, Wycombe, which was referred to in the will of another burgess, Edward Care senior, made in about 1473.1 CPR, 1452-61, p. 313; St. George’s Chapel Windsor, recs., XV/15/1, m. 1d; First Ledger Bk. High Wycombe (Bucks. Rec. Soc. xi), 46-48. The Commons of 1453 contained a significant number of Household men, but there is no evidence that this MP and David Thomas, alias Thomasson or Thomlynson, a King’s serjeant and yeoman of the saucery of the mid 15th century (CPR, 1436-41, p. 256; E404/62/143; CCR, 1447-54, p. 201; PPC, vi. 230; DKR, xxxvii. 708) were one and the same person.