STOKKES, Thomas

The earlier biography confuses Thomas Stokkes with an esquire of Smisby in the far south of Derbyshire: it was the latter who offered mainprise for the famous soldier Sir John Keighley in 1431 and attested the shire elections in 1453 and 1460. In 1440 the two men were named together on a jury panel: C260/144/18/14. Nor is our MP to be identified with the Derby bailiff of 1411-12 who was dead by early in 1414. CP40/613, rot. 156. What, fortunately, is not in doubt is our MP’s parentage and the identity of his first wife, two of the few fixed points in the genealogy of the prolific Stokkes family. His wife was related to one of the leading gentry families of the county, that of Fraunceys of Foremark, albeit through a junior branch. Such a match was generally beyond the expectations of minor provincial merchants and there can be little doubt that Thomas owed it to his father’s friend, the influential lawyer Henry Booth*. Booth and his kinsmen were in dispute with the bride’s father over the manor of Arleston just to the south of Derby, and the marriage may have been part of the reconciliation of this dispute. In any event, on 10 Aug. 1418 the manor was settled on our MP and his wife and their issue, subject to the payment of an annual rent of four marks to the bride’s father. This, however, was not to mark the establishment of Thomas Stokkes among the ranks of the minor local gentry, for on 30 Dec. 1421 he and his wife surrendered their interest to feoffees acting for the Booths. His marriage did, however, bring him property in his native town: by a fine levied in 1419 his father, presumably as part of the marriage settlement, conveyed to the couple and their issue eight messuages there. Derbys. RO, Harpur Crewe mss, D2375M/13/1, 3; Derbys. Feet of Fines (Derbys. Rec. Soc. xi), 1053, 1068.

In the early 1430s the peace of Derby was undermined by a factional struggle between the established borough elite, of which the Stokkes family were an important part, and a group of lesser townsmen headed by a butcher, Nicholas Meysham*. Our MP seems to have been less involved in this struggle than his father, although he did serve on the jury that laid indictments against Meysham and his confederates when commissioners of oyer and terminer came to the town on 1 Apr. 1434. KB9/11/17d. Further, his election as bailiff in the following autumn and as MP a year later may be taken to mark the re-establishment of the borough’s old elite.

Little evidence survives of Stokkes’s commercial activities, but in view of the fact that his father was a merchant of the Calais staple they are likely to have been significant. Two cases in the court of common pleas are suggestive. In 1430, with his father and brother, Robert, he had a plea pending against a London mercer for the sum of £40; and in 1441 the executors of Thomas Poge*, a prominent merchant of Nottingham who had died in 1428, sued him for a debt of as much as £90. CP40/677, rot. 7d; 722, rot. 394. Commercial interests in Nottingham may provide the context for Stokkes’s second marriage. In Easter term 1442 he and his wife were jointly sued for a debt due from her as the executrix of the Nottingham merchant, Robert Bercroft, and the strong probability is that she was Bercroft’s widow. CP40/725, rot. 251. Bercroft was alive in 1436: Nottingham Recs. ed. Stevenson, ii. 362.