ROUS, Thomas

The Rouses of Rous Lench were cadet members of a well established family, the senior branch of which was seated at Ragley in Warwickshire. They owed their association with Rous Lench to John Rous of Ragley, who in the early 1380s purchased the manor there, a property his parents, John and Christine, afterwards held of his gift. T.R. Nash, Worcs. ii. 85; VCH Warws. iii. 29; VCH Worcs. iii. 498; Old deeds of Rouse Lench, 6683/1/1/2. He died, just four days after his father, on 23 Oct. 1396 and was succeeded by his brother Robert, CIPM, xvii. 895-900. although Rous Lench was reserved for Henry, another younger brother. Old deeds of Rouse Lench, 6683/1/1/3.

The father of the MP, Henry was perhaps the Henry Rous whom Thomas of Woodstock, duke of Gloucester, retained in 1392 to accompany him on his proposed but subsequently aborted expedition to Ireland. E101/74/1/21. Henry married before December 1401 when Christine Rous, his widowed mother, settled Rous Lench on him and his wife Maud and their heirs. In return, the couple agreed to pay an annual rent of 12 marks during her lifetime to Christine, who survived until February 1415. Old deeds of Rouse Lench, 6683/1/1/3; CIPM, xx. 567. But a subsequent inq., held in 1425, found that Christine had died in Feb. 1416: ibid. xxii. 387. According to the visitation evidence, Maud was a daughter of John Throckmorton I*, a prominent Worcestershire lawyer whose own estates included holdings at Rous Lench, but Throckmorton’s will shows that his Rous son-in-law was not Henry but his cousin, John Rous of Ragley. Vis. Worcs. (Harl. Soc. xxvii), 113; PCC 31 Luffenham (PROB11/3, ff. 251, 251v). Whatever Maud’s links - if any – with Throckmorton, the latter would enjoy a good relationship with her son Thomas, the subject of this biography.

During the reign of Henry V, Henry Rous entered the service of the widowed Joan Beauchamp, Lady Abergavenny, and he was one of those who entered recognizances on her behalf in the spring of 1418, to guarantee that she would keep the peace towards her adversary, the Warwickshire esquire, Nicholas Burdet (son of Sir Thomas*). CCR, 1413-19, p. 500. Over a decade later, Joan was found to have incited disturbances at Birmingham in May 1429 and March 1431, and on the strength of the recognizances the Crown began proceedings against her and her sureties in the court of King’s bench. The plea rolls reveal that Henry died some time before 18 June 1431, meaning that he was no longer alive when the court subsequently ruled that Joan and her surviving sureties should forfeit £1,200 under the terms of the recognizances of 1418. PROME, xi. 55-62; CPR, 1429-36, p. 295; E159/210, brevia Trin. rot. 4d; The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 141-2.

The first known reference to Henry’s son and heir is provided by a settlement of the spring of 1427. John Throckmorton was a party to the settlement, made for Thomas Rous and his first wife Anne, a grand-daughter of the former diplomat and would be Speaker, Sir John Cheyne†. It related to two manors that Anne had inherited, Westmancote in Bredon, Worcestershire, and Bulby in Irnham, Lincolnshire, and provided for these holdings to descend to the couple’s children. It appears that Thomas resided at Westmancote in the early 1430s, for it was as ‘of Westmancote’ that he was assessed for the purposes of the subsidy of 1431. CP25(1)/292/66/57; Feudal Aids, v. 332. Possibly, although for some no longer apparent reason, he was not in possession of Rous Lench at that date – in spite of the settlement of 1401 – a hypothesis supported by a transaction he concluded with his uncle, Baldwin Rous, in June 1438. The two men agreed an exchange, by which Baldwin granted the manor and advowson of Rous Lench to Thomas and his heirs in perpetuity, in return for the Rous manor of Stanley Pontlarge and other lands in Gloucestershire. It is nevertheless impossible to ascertain whether Baldwin had actually previously occupied Rous Lench and Thomas the other manor, or whether what was termed an ‘exchange’ was intended to confirm an existing status quo. Old deeds of Rouse Lench, 6683/1/1/5.

It was also by virtue of his first marriage that Rous came into possession of the manors of Boughton and Southoe in Huntingdonshire, of Skillington, Aunby and a moiety of that of Manthorpe in Lincolnshire and of other holdings in the same two counties. Held by Anne Rous’s aunt Joan Cheyne in the previous decade, these estates were transferred to Rous in late 1439, evidently with the agreement of Joan’s sister Elizabeth and her husband John Boyville*. Through the agency of Boyville’s younger brother Hugh*, they were settled on Rous for life on 20 Nov. that year, with successive remainders in tail to Thomas, his eldest son and heir; to his younger sons, Richard and William; to William Cheyne, probably Anne’s uncle; to John Boyville, his wife and her issue; and then to the right heirs of Anne’s grandmother Margaret, the recently deceased widow of the elder Sir John Cheyne, to whom she had brought these lands in marriage. VCH Hunts. ii. 351; CCR, 1435-41, p. 343. Anne Rous was no longer alive when this settlement was made, and Rous remarried, certainly before 30 Sept. 1445 when the bishop of Worcester granted him and his second wife Elizabeth permission to hold services in their household chapel at Rous Lench. Assoc. Archit. Socs. Reps. and Pprs. xxv. 195. Of unknown parentage, Elizabeth bore him no fewer than seven children, although of which sex is not recorded.

A few months after the previous settlement was made for the benefit of him and Anne in 1427, Rous attested the return of the knights of the shire for Worcestershire. He was to take part in subsequent parliamentary elections, although he played a more limited role in the administration of the county than one might expect of an esquire of his standing. It was not until six years later that he was appointed to the first of his two terms as escheator and he was appointed to just a couple of ad hoc commissions, of which the first arose from his Membership of the Parliament of 1437. His time in the Commons was perhaps not his only involvement with Parliament, since at some unknown date between about 1415 and about 1440 a Thomas Rous petitioned the Upper House, requesting that his dispute with one ‘Aynesworth’ be brought to judgement. SC8/138/6854. It is impossible to tell whether Rous was helped by a patron to gain his seat in the Commons, although he was probably part of the connexion of the Beauchamp earls of Warwick. While an MP, he stood surety at the Exchequer for John Throckmorton, a trusted servant of the Beauchamps, a family to which the Rouses of Ragley were also linked. CFR, xvi. 321. By the mid 1440s, however, both Rous and his cousin, John Rous of Ragley, were associating with the Beauchamps’ distant relative, Sir John Beauchamp of Powick, who headed the feoffees of an important settlement that the MP made in 1445. C. Carpenter, Locality and Polity, 320n, 412, 464n, 684; C1/51/158.

By means of an indenture of 6 Apr. that year, Rous conveyed his estates at Morton, Westmancote and Rock in Worcestershire to Powick and four other feoffees, John Throckmorton, Robert Russell II*, John Rous of Ragley and the lawyer Thomas Lyttleton. In the indenture he declared his will, stating that he intended to go on pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostella and directed the feoffees to hold the lands for the benefit of Thomas and William, his surviving sons by his first marriage, both of whom were still minors. The feoffees were to provide for the pair with the income from these properties. Should both Thomas and William die without surviving children, they were to settle the lands on John Throckmorton and his issue, an indication of the strong ties – certainly of friendship if not of kinship – that existed between Throckmorton and the MP. C1/52/68-70.

It is not known whether Rous, in the middle of his second term as escheator of Worcestershire when he made this settlement, ever embarked on his proposed pilgrimage. It is unlikely he died abroad since he participated in the election of the knights of the shire for Worcestershire to the Parliament of February 1449 and was appointed a subsidy commissioner in August the following year. According to visitation evidence, he died in 1453 but an entry in the close rolls indicates that he was no longer alive in the autumn of 1450. On 30 Nov. that year the Chancery issued a writ directing the sheriff of Worcestershire to elect a new verderer of the royal forest of Feckenham in place of the deceased Thomas Rous. Vis. Hunts. (Cam. Soc. xliii), 42; CCR, 1447-54, p. 203. Confusingly, a like writ was issued on 19 Nov. 1454 (CCR, 1447-54, p. 11), raising the possibility that the authorities had been misinformed when they issued the earlier writ and that Rous did in fact survive until 1453. How long he had held that office is not known.

By the mid 1450s a dispute had broken out between Rous’s widow and Thomas, his eldest son and heir by his first wife. In a petition to the chancellor dating from 1454-5, Elizabeth Rous stated that the MP had been survived by two of his sons by Anne Cheyne, the younger Thomas and William, as well as by the seven children she herself had borne him. According to Elizabeth, while lying on his death bed he had ordered that William and his seven half-siblings should each receive 20 marks from the issues of his estates at Westmancote and Rock, and commanded his feoffees to retain possession of these lands until this direction had been fulfilled. She complained that her eldest stepson had breached his father’s will by taking the 20 marks due to William, by entering and occupying the properties in question and by preventing payment of the money due to her children. C1/24/205. Presumably Rous’s son Richard, who featured in the settlement of 1439 and was evidently another son by his first marriage, had predeceased him.

The younger Thomas died in 1473. In his will of 28 May that year, he referred to an indenture he had made with Elizabeth Fitzwalter alias Everdon, late the wife of William Fitzwalter, in February 1468. They had agreed that he should have the farm of the manor of Rous Lench for 20 years and that Margaret, daughter of the Gloucestershire esquire John Cassy, should enjoy the remainder of that term if he died before it had expired. Evidently Elizabeth was his stepmother, who after the MP’s death had successively married and outlived the obscure Fitzwalter and the Staffordshire lawyer, Thomas Everdon* (d.1471): it is hard otherwise to see how else she could have possessed any interest in Rous Lench. As for Margaret Cassy, at the time of the agreement she was Thomas’s betrothed. In the event, the couple were never to marry – why is not known – although in the same will Thomas, who always regarded her as his intended bride, appointed her his executor. PCC 9 Wattys (PROB11/6, f. 71); C1/52/71. It is not clear if Margaret’s father was the man who sat for Glos. in the Parls. of 1437, 1447, 1453 or his son and namesake.

After his death, Margaret married Richard Barneby, and by the mid 1470s she and Barneby had fallen into dispute with William, the childless Thomas’s younger brother and heir, over part of the Rous inheritance. There followed a series of suits and counter-suits in the Chancery, where both sides took action against each other and family feoffees for not conveying the lands in question to them. According to the Barnebys, Thomas had undertaken to have his manor of Westmancote and lands in Rock settled upon himself and Margaret when they married, also pledging that she should still enjoy possession of this estate for the rest of her life even if, as had happened, he should die before the marriage could take place. Furthermore, he had ordered his feoffees to convey the estate to her and her heirs in fee if his brother William attempted to disturb her life tenancy. As Thomas had feared, William had indeed reacted badly to the extremely generous provision made for Margaret, by preventing her from receiving the income of the disputed properties. For his part, William claimed that the property in dispute was rightfully his, by virtue of the will which his father, the late MP, had made in April 1445. Having considered all the evidence, including the examination of witnesses, the Chancery came down on the side of the Barnebys. By means of a decree of 15 May 1477, it ordered the feoffees to hold Westmancote and the Rock lands to the use of Margaret for life, or to the use of her and her issue in fee should William attempt to disturb the Barnebys in possession. C1/51/154-8; 52/68-72; 53/284; 56/9-10; 59/15. As later events showed, it was of little consolation to William that the chancellor had opted for the status quo ante, in so far as the Barnebys did not win the permanent ownership they had been seeking. Evidently deeply rankled by this outcome, he subsequently renewed his quarrel with the Barnebys, notwithstanding that in doing so he risked losing Westmancote and Rock for ever. In or shortly before 1500, the by then widowed Margaret returned to the Chancery, to complain that William had breached the decree, first by disturbing her and her late husband in their tenancy, and then by taking possession of the estate for himself, using ‘sinister and crafty means’ to have it assigned to him in fee. Acting upon a commission from the chancellor, in the spring of that year the clerk William Dallyng rode to Southoe to question William about these matters. C1/84/11-16. While the outcome of the case is unknown, the inquisition post mortem held in Worcestershire after William’s death in December 1505 found that he had died in possession of Westmancote. William’s heir was his son, another Thomas Rous. CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 107, 115.