WALDEGRAVE, Thomas

Waldegrave played a prominent role in the affairs of Leicester for more than 30 years. He must have been set up as a draper there by December 1404, when he was appointed as alnager in Leicestershire, but it is not until a few years later that he began to take a public role in what was almost certainly his native town. In October 1407 he stood as a mainpernor for Thomas Denton† on his election to Parliament, and in November 1408 he witnessed a deed for John Loveday, a former mayor. Within three years, when probably still a young man, he was elected to the first of his own three terms in that office, and it was as mayor that he headed the attestors to the parliamentary election of 23 Oct. 1411.3 Ibid. 413; C219/10/4, 6. Thereafter he seems to have maintained an interest in the town’s parliamentary affairs. He was one of the few burgesses who routinely attested its elections, and he was himself returned to successive Parliaments in the mid 1420s.

Waldegrave’s commercial interests are reflected in the many actions for debt he brought in the court of common pleas. He seems to have provided cloth for several of the leading gentry of his home county. In April 1414, for example, he sold 20 ells of woollen cloth to Sir Robert Woodford of Sproxton for 50s., but had still not been paid more than ten years later.4 CP40/657, rot. 271. Other Leicestershire knights he sued for debt included, in 1411, the brothers, Sir John† and Sir Henry Neville†, and, in 1423, Sir Robert Moton*.5 CP40/601, rot. 76d; 650, rot. 224. He appears to have enjoyed more harmonious relations with his fellow townsmen. In November 1428, for example, William Asty alias Skinner, who had recently completed a term as mayor, granted him his goods; and in the following October he acted as one of six arbiters in a dispute between Ralph Brasier alias Humberston* and a local saddler, Thomas Gaddesby, over a sizeable estate in the town. More interestingly, in October 1433 he headed the jury which found in favour of Thomas Charite*, who had been wrongly claimed as a villein by Henry, Lord Grey of Codnor.6 Wyggeston Hosp. Recs. ed. Thompson, 340; CP40/682, rot. 319; 692, rot. 106.

Waldegrave died between 30 Sept. 1438, when he is last recorded as witnessing a charter, and 24 Sept. 1442, by which date his property in the Swine Market had passed to William Waldegrave, who was almost certainly his son. The rental of the Corpus Christi guild, compiled in 1459, shows that William lived in a tenement on the High Street in the parish of St. Martin, and it is probable that this is where Thomas had also lived. William took over our MP’s business, for he too was a draper, but although one of the stewards of the fair in 1453-4 and an attestor of the parliamentary election of 1455, he played a less active part in Leicester’s affairs.7 Wyggeston Hosp. Recs. 342; Leicester Bor. Recs. ii. 253, 267, 453; CP40/785, rot. 91d; C219/16/3.