COKAYN, Thomas

More can be added to the earlier biography.5 The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 619-20.

On chronological grounds it seems unlikely that it was the MP, by 1432 already in the advanced stages of his career, who was admitted to Lincoln’s Inn that year. Conversely, it is possible, given his association in learned legal disputations with the later Chief Justice John Hody*, that like Hody he was educated at the Middle Temple.6 Readers and Readings, 144, 405.

There may have been something illicit about Cokayn’s return for Bodmin in 1423. His first name was placed over an erasure in the sheriff’s schedule in a darker ink than that otherwise employed in the document, and the elected man’s surname was altered in the same ink from ‘Colyn’ to ‘Cokyn’. It is possible that the man originally chosen was in fact John Colyn† of Helland (who was present at the shire elections), or one of his kinsmen.7 C219/13/2.

A fellow member of that Parliament was the Cornish-born London draper William Botreaux I*, who appointed Cokayn of one his executors, an onerous task that would occupy Thomas and his fellows (the mercer Everard Flete*, the draper John Norman*, John Peryn and Botreaux’s brother-in-law John Trenewith) for some years after the testator’s death in 1432.8 CP40/688, rot. 129; E13/140, rot. 26d.

Cokayn and his parents would later be remembered in the 1483 will of his nephew and heir, Nicholas Condorov*, who provided for annual obits for them in the parish church of Lostwithiel.9 PCC 8 Logge.