Rokes’s parentage cannot be established with absolute certainty, but it is just possible that he was the ‘Thomas Roges, gentleman’, son of ‘Edmund Roges of Taunton, merchant’, whom John Roger†, the wealthy Dorset merchant, was suing for a debt in about 1439.
Little is known of Rokes’s early life: his name was not an uncommon one, but it is just possible that he was the man who in November 1418 joined the Harfleur expedition of Thomas Beaufort, duke of Exeter, as a mounted man-at-arms in the retinue of Sir Hugh Luttrell† of Dunster.
Like his putative father before him, Rokes established himself as a merchant of some standing, whose commercial dealings extended across much of southern England and beyond. Thus, in 1432 the Bridgwater gentleman Thomas Horsey owed him £34 for merchandise purchased in the Exeter staple (a debt still outstanding seven years later);
What other details of Rokes’s life have emerged chiefly relate to the kind of petty squabbles common among his contemporaries. Thus, at some point before 1438 he was said to have unlawfully deprived his neighbour John Ashford of a messuage in Taunton,