Thurland was by far the richest merchant in the Nottingham of his day. His antecedents are obscure, but it is fairly certain that he was not a native of the town. Given his close association with William Thurland, a wealthy merchant from Boston in Lincolnshire, and his own connexions with that port, it is a reasonable speculation that he was born there.
The first evidence of Thurland’s move from Boston to Nottingham comes from a deed dated at Chesterfield on 21 Dec. 1439 in which he is described as ‘of Nottingham’. His appearance in this conveyance implies that he had married by this date for, while there is nothing to suggest that he ever had any landed interests in Derbyshire, his wife remembered the churches of Chesterfield and nearby Brampton in her will. This in turn suggests that his arrival in Nottingham was not the result of marriage.
Given the very active part Thurland was later to play in the administration of Nottingham, it is curious that, in February 1444, he sued out an exemption for life from holding office.
Notwithstanding his dispute with the merchants of Leiden, Thurland’s mercantile expertise brought him diplomatic employment. On 18 Feb. 1446 he was one of those ordered to repair to Calais on pain of £100 to treat with the commissioners of Holland, Zeeland and Flanders. Three years later, on 28 July 1449, soon after the end of the first Parliament of that year, he was among those commissioned to negotiate with the emissaries of the duke of Burgundy. He was very well qualified to serve on this latter commission for not only was he then mayor of the staple but he was also a Member of the Commons, who had been full of invective against the Burgundians with whom relations had become gravely strained.
Thurland’s status ensured that he was one of the original body of seven aldermen established by the royal charter granted in the following June and which his efforts as MP may have done something to gain. On the following 13 Oct. he was again returned to Parliament. This assembly was of particular importance to him as a stapler rather than as a townsman for it came at a time when arrangements were being made for the repayment of substantial loans made by the staplers to the Crown. On 20 Oct., before Parliament met, he and two of his close associates, his putative brother William and John Williamson of Louth, had licence to ship wool from Boston free of customs in repayment of the £412 17s. 8d. they had contributed to loans amounting to £10,700 the staplers had made over the previous four years. While Parliament was in session arrangements were made for the repayment of a further loan of £2,000 advanced by the staplers for wages for the defence of Calais. Thurland was a member of two of the syndicates which had contributed to this loan, and, as such, he received licences to ship wool from Boston with 15 others in repayment of 1,000 marks and from Kingston-upon-Hull, with 14 others, in repayment of 1,200 marks.
Trading on such a considerable scale it is not surprising that, by the late 1440s, Thurland was wealthy enough to turn his attention to the acquisition of a substantial country estate. By fines levied in Easter and Michaelmas terms 1449 he acquired the reversion of the manors in Haughton and Gamston in north Nottinghamshire, expectant on the death of Margaret, wife of John Cockfield of Nuthall (near Nottingham) and widow of a former lord of the two manors, Ralph Monboucher. It is easy to see why the reversion of these manors should have come onto the market. Monboucher’s death in 1416 had marked the end of the male line of the Nottinghamshire branch of an ancient family. His widow had a jointure interest in these manors and her long survival kept out Ralph’s two sisters and coheiresses. They tired of waiting and, in their widowhoods, proved willing to sell the reversion to our MP.
The intensity of Thurland’s involvement in the affairs of Nottingham did not slacken in the 1450s. In September 1450 he was re-elected as mayor after a break of only a year; and a month later he was returned to Parliament for the third successive occasion. Before the end of the decade he had served three further terms as mayor. These onerous administrative responsibilities were maintained alongside undiminished activity as a wool merchant. On 2 June 1451, a few days after the end of the Parliament of 1450 in which he had sat, he was one of many staplers who had licence to ship wool free of customs from Kingston-upon-Hull in repayment of a loan of 3,000 marks; and on 6 Nov. 1454 he secured a further similar licence, on this occasion for export from Boston, as he still awaited full repayment of the loan he had advanced several years before.
More successful than this failed purchase was Thurland’s re-endowment of the guild of Holy Trinity in Nottingham’s principal church, that of St. Mary. On 20 Feb. 1447, in company with Ralph, Lord Cromwell, he had paid 20 marks for a licence to found a guild, to be named in honour of the Holy Trinity, and for that guild to acquire lands in mortmain to the yearly value of 20 marks for the support of two chaplains. It must be doubted whether this was a new creation: a guild of the Holy Trinity had already been established in the town in the 1390s. The licence thus probably marks a proposed further endowment of this guild. Cromwell’s part in the endowment is obscure, and it must be seen as Thurland’s project. Initial progress was very slow. Not until June 1460 did commissioners ad quod damnum sit to inquire into the grant of land he now proposed to make to the guild. Presumably this delay was occasioned by Thurland’s need to extend his property in the town before he was able to make the proposed endowment comfortably. By 1460, however, he was in a position to conclude a handsome settlement of 11 messuages, nine cottages and other property, including two booths in the Saturday Market, an estate conservatively valued by the local jurors at four marks p.a. On the following 10 Nov. Thurland was duly given licence to make the grant.
By this date Thurland and his fellow townsmen had other more pressing matters to consider. In July 1460 they had been called upon to make a contribution to the Lancastrian army on its way to defeat at the battle of Northampton. Thurland’s wealth is reflected in the fact that he paid £4 whereas the other leading men of the town paid only £2 each. Moreover, in the following March he paid as much as 20 marks towards the ‘gift’ the town made to Henry Beaufort, duke of Somerset, when the Lancastrian army was in the town shortly before the battle of Towton, with a further £2 as a ‘reward’ to the duke’s servants.
Such sterling service in the townsmens’ interest resulted in Thurland’s election in September 1462 as mayor for a remarkable eighth term and his re-election in the following year. Less happily, while still mayor, in April 1464 he was indicted with three other Nottingham men in the sheriff’s tourn at Saxondale, just outside the town, for using ‘strikes’ of false measure for the purchase of grain – an indication that his commercial interests extended beyond the wool trade.
By the time Thurland acquired his country estate he must have been over 60 and it is not surprising that the pace of his career now began to slacken. Nonetheless, although he never again served as either mayor or MP, he continued to play a part in Nottingham’s affairs. On 29 Apr. 1465, with the mayor, recorder and other aldermen, he heard indictments for riot against the servants of the town’s powerful neighbour Henry Pierrepont†, an episode in a dispute over a mill obstructing the river Leen, and on 31 July 1467 he was one of those who swore an oath in St. Mary’s church in accordance with an award settling the dispute. In the meantime he had attested the parliamentary election held on the previous 4 May.
Thurland had drawn up his will on 16 Jan. 1471. In view of his generous patronage of the Holy Trinity guild it is not surprising that he bequeathed his body for burial in the church of St. Mary, although he was prepared for burial where ‘God wyll dyspose’ in the event of his death outside Nottingham. However, the church that gained most under the terms of his will was not St. Mary’s but that of Gamston. He left as much as £40 for the building of a steeple there, no doubt intended as a physical expression of his family’s new lordship there. He also remembered his native town of Boston, leaving 20s. to the guild of Corpus Christi and 6s. 8d. to every other guild of the town of which he was a brother. His will is, however, chiefly notable for its proposed expenditure for the salvation of his soul. He set aside a lavish £100 for the expenses of his burial, most of which was to be distributed to the poor, and his executors were to provide 20 priests to say divine service for his soul and those of the faithful in the year following his death. More strikingly, he instructed his executors to pay 13d. per week for ten years to 13 people to ensure that there were for that period eight men and five women adding their prayers to those that the priests had already offered. This alone represented a proposed expenditure of £366 3s. 4d. Thurland’s bequests of ready money to his family were almost equally generous. His widow was to have 100 marks; his grandson and heir, Thomas, 200 marks when he reached the age of 21; and John and Joan Rochford, children of his daughter Joan, £20 each. He named as his executors his wife Joan, Gervase Clifton, his old friend Thomas Tototh, William Bond, vicar of Burgh-le-Marsh not far from Boston, and Thomas Hunston of Nottingham. Clifton was to have ten marks for his labour; the others £5 each. Only part of his once magnificent tomb survives: probably only the elaborate canopy of the present tomb in the north transept of St. Mary’s belonged to his monument.
Thurland’s widow did not long survive him. She made her will on 8 June 1477 and was dead by 21 July 1479 when it was proved. It was modelled closely on that of her late husband. She wished to be buried next to him in St. Mary’s church, and like him also made provision for 20 priests to pray for their souls. The largest of her many charitable bequests was one of ten marks to the church of Gamston. It is curious to note that both she and Thomas made small bequests to the church of St. Stephen in Coleman Street, London.
As the most prominent townsman of his day Thurland had close connexions with some of the leading gentry of his adopted county. His eldest son Richard married Alice, daughter of the wealthy esquire, Thomas Neville of Rolleston. On Richard’s death in the mid 1450s Alice married Gervase, son and heir-apparent of Sir Robert Clifton*, and later our MP employed Gervase among his feoffees and executors. Yet closer was Thurland’s long association with William Babington*, who lived at Chilwell just outside Nottingham and whose brother, Thomas, was his colleague as Nottingham’s representative in the Parliaments of 1450 and 1461. William acted with him in the acquisition of the Monboucher manors in 1449, and ten years later roles were reversed when the esquire employed him in the foundation of a chantry in the church of Flawford. Their relationship continued until Thurland’s death: in his will he bequeathed William £5 ‘to be of gode counsell’ to his executors. He also had dealings with the Willoughbys, another important gentry family resident within the vicinity of Nottingham. In 1472 he acted in a settlement made in favour of Robert Willoughby, whose daughter Joan was already or was soon to be the wife of his second son, Thomas. For a spouse for his daughter Joan, however, he looked to the gentry of his native rather than of his adopted shire. In about 1460 she had married Henry Rochford (d.1470), a wealthy esquire with considerable landholdings in the vicinity of Boston.
Like other men whose careers made them rich in cash rather than land, Thurland advanced money on mortgage. One of these mortgages is reasonably well documented. On 12 Aug. 1465 two Nottinghamshire esquires, Thomas Staunton of Staunton-in-the-Vale and William Thorp of nearby Thorpe, feoffees of Henry Hussey of Flintham, demised their feoffor’s manor of Fenny Drayton (Leicestershire) to Thurland for the term of ten years. A later conveyance reveals what lay behind this arrangement: in June 1468 Staunton and Thorp granted the manor to Thurland, William Babington, Gervase Clifton, and two aldermen of Nottingham, Thomas Lokton (who, like our MP, was also one of the aldermen of the Trinity guild) and Roger Hudson, on condition that the manor would revert to them after 16 years (from Whitsun 1468) if Thurland had untroubled possession during that period.
Thurland appears to have intended his elder son, Richard, for a legal rather than a mercantile career. Richard was a member of Lincoln’s Inn by 1450, when he served in the junior capacity of collector of the coal money there, but his career was cut short by premature death. He did, however, live long enough to produce a son, also named Thomas. This Thomas, who was born in about 1453, succeeded our MP in 1474, and when he died without issue was in turn succeeded by our MP’s second son, another Thomas. The latter’s will, made on 26 Apr. 1497, shows that the family had completed the transformation from wealthy merchants to gentry of middling rank. He was to be buried not in the church of St. Mary but in that of Gamston.