HUSSEY, Thomas I

More may be added to the earlier biography.9 The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 466-8.

The landed holdings accumulated by Hussey in his lifetime were valued at over £61 p.a. following the death of his eldest son,10 C141/3/36. and were probably worth much more. They were derived both from inheritance and two lucrative marriages. Hussey and his first wife, Marion, were engaged in 1431 in a suit brought in the common pleas by the widow of her kinsman Robert Tourney over the latter’s entitlement to dower from the Dorset manors of Shapwick, Champayn, Stourepaine and Pegges, but this suit was clearly collusive as the Husseys did not contest the claim.11 CP40/683, rot. 304. An assize of novel disseisin held at Shaftesbury in July 1441 concerned the manor of Edmondsham Payn, to which Marion claimed title as heir to her grandparents. Hussey represented his fellow defendants as their attorney, as well as successfully putting his own case.12 CP40/825, rot. 503; J. Hutchins, Dorset, iii. 160-4, 423. The fact that he was able to do so, and the record of his many appearances in person in the courts of King’s bench and common pleas to pursue his private interests strongly suggest that he had received an education in the law, a supposition confirmed by his appointment to the quorum of commissions of gaol delivery and the peace. These pleas for trespass, debt and the theft of livestock, pursued vigorously by the MP from the 1420s onwards, brought him up against Sir Walter Lucy of Richards Castle, Shropshire, merchants from Salisbury and the Dorset landowner Ralph Bush*, among others. They were sometimes put into train when he was up at Westminster to attend Parliament.13 KB27/646, rot. 28; 667, rot. 25; 693, rot. 66; CP40/667, rots. 266d, 269d; 689, rot. 98; 696, rot. 43; 701, rot. 205; 722, rots. 193, 293; 738, rot. 127. In his later years, however, he tended to employ attorneys to act on his behalf rather than to present the pleas himself.14 CP40/728, rots. 220, 393; 778, rot. 44d.

More information about Hussey’s public service has also come to light. Most notably, he served as under sheriff to the lawyer William Carent* in 1427-8, taking up the post when he and Carent were both sitting in the Commons, the latter as a shire knight for Dorset and he himself representing Melcombe Regis. The length of his service to the King’s uncle the duke of Bedford as steward of the duke’s estate at Wilton is not documented, but he is known to have entered Bedford’s employment by 1432. When Hussey was a j.p. for Dorset in the 1430s he regularly presided at sessions,15 E101/586/32, mm. 2, 3. even though it was not until later in his career that he was appointed to the quorum. More too is known about the assistance he gave to other landowners of the region in their private transactions. For instance, in 1440 he was one of the arbitrators asked to decide how much money John Newburgh II* should receive from the inheritance of his sickly daughter Agnes if she should die after the marriage of her sister to John Lye*.16 Harl. Ch. 54 D 18. Sir Walter Hungerford†, Lord Hungerford, awarded Hussey an annual fee of £2 for life at some point before 1444, and in 1447-8 this was increased to £3.17 SC6/1119/11, 12.

The marriages Hussey arranged for his children are also indicative of his standing and the importance of his connexions. His eldest son John (c.1428-1484) was wedded to a daughter of Robert Tourges* (Thomas’s fellow shire knight of 1435),18 Hutchins, iii. 162. and a younger son, Thomas, married a kinswoman of Gilbert Kymer, the dean of Salisbury cathedral who was employed as personal physician to Humphrey, duke of Gloucester. Our MP’s links with Kymer dated back to before the 1440s, for Kymer, as dean of the free chapel of Wimborne Minster (a position he held from 1423 until his death 40 years later), held property at Shapwick where the Husseys lived.19 Ibid.; CP40/728, rot. 66; Biog. Reg. Univ. Oxf. ed. Emden, ii. 1068-9. Friendship with Kymer may also account for Hussey’s second marriage, to the widow of William Alexander, the prominent lawyer from Salisbury who died in 1446, for Kymer was Alexander’s feoffee and close associate. The marriage brought Hussey for his lifetime a number of valuable properties in Salisbury (which Alexander had given to Isabel and her heirs), as well as Alexander’s lands at Winterbourne Cherborough and elsewhere in Wiltshire, Shipton Bellinger in Hampshire, and the manor of Thornton and advowson of Studland in Dorset.20 Salisbury Domesday bk. G23/1/215, ff. 7-8, 17; C139/130/10.

No satisfactory explanation has been found for Hussey’s absence from the Dorset bench in the 18 years from 1437 to 1455, or whether his removal in 1458 held a wider political significance. He twice obtained royal pardons during Henry VI’s reign: on 10 July 1446, as ‘of Winterbourne Tomson, Dorset, esquire’, and on 15 Nov. 1452 as ‘of Thornton, Dorset, esquire, formerly of Shapwick, gentleman’.21 C67/39, m. 32; 40, m. 5. On 20 Mar. 1460 he was sent a writ of sub poena in £200 to answer a suit of Robert, Lord Hungerford and Moleyns (Lord Walter’s grandson), but the background to their dispute is not revealed. The quarrel may, however, have fed into national politics, for Hungerford was a staunch adherent of the house of Lancaster, and the Husseys appear to have veered towards that of York in the course of the year.22 C253/37/82.

To the Parliament summoned to meet in October 1460, which followed the Yorkist victory at Northampton and was to witness the duke of York’s bid for the throne, the borough of Poole returned Hussey’s younger son, Thomas junior. Hussey had acquired property in the town through his first marriage, and two years earlier either he or his son (who had perhaps inherited it from his mother), had brought a suit against a local merchant for breaking into these buildings and assaulting his tenants.23 CP40/788, rot. 41; 789, rot. 39d. In Hilary term 1461, while the Parliament was still in progress and Thomas Hussey II was sitting in the Commons, he or his father brought a number of actions in the court of common pleas, concerning trespasses, theft of crops and poaching on the Hussey lands at Milborne St. Andrew. They were ancillary to a major dispute with Nicholas Latimer* over rights of jurisdiction, for our MP’s manor of Milborne St. Andrew was encircled by Latimer’s manor of Dewlish, and each challenged the other’s rights. The present suit, in which the plaintiff claimed damages of £40, was clearly opportunistic, and Latimer’s failure to come to court was scarcely surprising given his absence in the north of England (where he fought at Wakefield and Towton in the Lancastrian army).24 CP40/800, rots. 24, 84, 102d, 148d.

That Thomas Hussey senior was deemed to favour the Yorkists is indicated by his reappointment to the bench by the new regime in July 1461. He purchased another pardon in May 1462.25 C67/45, m. 23, as ‘of Shapwick, Dorset, senior, gentleman alias esquire’. In 1467 he began to put his affairs in order in preparation for death. That June he and his second wife placed the lands of her former husband, Alexander, in the hands of feoffees,26 Salisbury Domesday bk. G23/1/215, ff. 7, 7v. and in the Michaelmas term he and his son Thomas were engaged in further suits in the court of common pleas over the inheritance of his first wife. It is interesting to note that the record of the assize of novel disseisin of 26 years earlier was now brought into the court. Clearly, Hussey was intending to strengthen his sons’ title to their maternal inheritance in Edmondsham Payn.27 CP40/825, rots. 181, 503.