TOURGES, Robert

John Leland, the sixteenth-century antiquary, regarded the estate at Melcombe Bingham in central Dorset as ‘one of the fairest lordships in Dorsettshire that has been in mean mennes hands’, which in his day was worth about £100 p.a. ‘It was the oldest inheritance of the Turgesis’, and there was ‘an old maner place of the Turges in whose name this lordship was about three descents’, but by Leland’s time the family had failed in the male line. J. Leland, Itin. ed. Toulmin Smith, iii. 47. According to Dorset’s historian Hutchins, the family originally came from Hampshire, and acquired the estate at Melcombe from the heiress of the Brunyng family in Edward III’s reign. Nicholas Tourges, who was recorded as patron of the parish church in 1335, Hutchins, iv. 366-7, 380. was said in testimony given at an assize of novel disseisin in the spring of 1427 to have been the son and heir of Denise Brunyng, whose brother had died without issue. Our MP claimed to be Nicholas’s direct descendant, but at the assize it was alleged that he, his kinsman the cleric Stephen Tourges, and others had disseised Thomas Pelley and Christine his wife and Walter Quyntyn of a moiety of the former Brunyng holdings in Melcombe – that is, of a moiety of 12 messuages, three carucates and some 1,250 acres of land, mainly pasture. Quyntyn and Christine Pelley were said to be descended from a sister of Denise Brunyng, but the court found that no such woman had existed. JUST1/1540, rot. 26. Accordingly, Robert Tourges was confirmed in possession of his full inheritance, and took his place among the squirearchy of the county. Feudal Aids, ii. 71, 127. The value of his holdings was not recorded in his lifetime, but when his son died in 1504 the manor of ‘Turges Melcombe’ was said to be worth £40 p.a., and his other landed possessions a further £8. CIPM Hen. VII, ii. 845. This fell considerably short of Leland’s estimate.

Tourges is notable for the number of parliamentary elections he attested in Dorset – as many as eight between 1423 and 1450 – and at the beginning of his career he also made appearances at the hustings held in Somerset, in 1423 and 1425. This meant that he was at Ilchester on 4 Oct. 1423 and at Dorchester a week later, and at Ilchester on 19 Mar. and Dorchester on 26 Mar. 1425. C219/13/2, 3. In effect, this was a breach of the statutes which required attestors of parliamentary indentures to be resident in their counties on the date of the writ of summons. Presumably Tourges did hold land in Somerset, although its location is not now known. He himself was returned to the Parliament of 1427 as a representative for Shaftesbury, in the north of Dorset. There is no sign that he held property in the town, or that he was linked with the burgesses, although some such link may have been forged through his wife, whose aunt was the abbess of the great abbey there to which the farm of the borough pertained. During the first parliamentary session he was appointed collector of customs and subsidies at the port of Melcombe Regis, a post he subsequently occupied for nearly 12 years. The port was in decline, owing to depopulation and growing impoverishment, so that trade was being diverted to Poole. It was only logical that, in the spring of 1431, Poole would be added to Tourges’s brief. In 1433, as a response to petitions in Parliament, Poole replaced Melcombe as a head port, but Tourges continued in office, overseeing the collection of revenues in both ports until 1439. Given his status in the county and his position as customer it is strange that he was not included in the list of 59 men of Dorset required to take the oath against maintenance, as administered in the spring of 1434. CPR, 1429-36, pp. 382-3. It was while he was still employed as customer that he was elected as shire knight for the first time, to the Parliament summoned to assemble on 10 Oct. 1435. Service in the Commons was followed by commissions to distribute tax allowances (which applied to all shire knights), and a commission of array. In view of his office in the Dorset ports it was only to be expected that he would be sent instructions to requisition vessels to transport the forces of the duke of York and earl of Huntingdon over to France.

Robert’s first marriage linked him with the prominent lawyer William Carent, who, as a shire knight, had accompanied him to Westminster in 1427. Under a settlement made in 1430 he and Edith acquired a reversionary interest in property in Melcombe, entailed on the MP’s issue. Dorset Feet of Fines, 342-3. Tourges was drawn into the circle of his brother-in-law Carent and in the 1430s this also brought him close to the Newburghs. He was enfeoffed of manors which were later settled on another leading lawyer, John Newburgh II*, and his wife Alice, Carent’s daughter. In 1441 Tourges was party to conveyances on behalf of Thomas Hussey I*, in which he figured as a co-feoffee with the earl of Arundel and (Sir) John Stourton II*, whose sister was Carent’s wife. Ibid. 345, 349, 355; Hutchins, iv. 443; CCR, 1435-41, p. 481. It may have been while he and Hussey had been representing Dorset in the Commons of 1435 that they had struck up a friendship, which led to a tie of kinship. According to a pedigree of the Hussey family, Thomas’s eldest son John (c.1428-1484), married Tourges’s daughter Eleanor. Hutchins, iii. 162.

When Tourges was returned to Parliament again, in 1445, he was accompanied by John Newburgh. The commission to which he was appointed at the close of the Parliament was his last, even though he lived on for 15 years more. The reason for his exclusion from local government is not known. Tourges attested the Dorset elections to the next four Parliaments. The fact that he procured royal pardons in June 1452 and February 1458 may suggest that he became involved in the political disturbances of those times, C67/40, m. 15; 42, m. 41. but even though his participation in transactions regarding the Dorset manors of Manston and Wirgrede in 1453 and 1454, indicates a connexion with the affairs of James Butler, earl of Wiltshire, Dorset Feet of Fines, 374, 378-9. this did not lead to preferment when the earl was appointed treasurer of England.

Fortuitously, one member of the MP’s family entered the household of the duke of York, and served his son the future Edward IV, ‘while yet at a tender age’. As a consequence, Joan Tourges (whose relationship to Robert is not known) was rewarded in August 1461 with an annuity of £20. CPR, 1461-7, p. 520. The MP died shortly afterwards, on 20 Sept., leaving as his heir his son Richard. C140/6/59. On 4 Feb. 1462 his widow and executrix, Alice, obtained a royal pardon, which also offered her some immunity from prosecution in her role as executrix of her first husband, John Basket, a man of Dorset origins who had made his career in the service of Archbishop Stafford. Alice did not remain single for long. Within eight months she married again, this time becoming the fourth wife of the wealthy Yorkist William Browning I*. C67/45, m. 40; Hutchins, ii. 559-60. The couple sued Robert Tourges’s feoffees for Alice’s dower at Melcombe and elsewhere in Michaelmas term 1463. CP40/810, rot. 310. One of the feoffees, Nicholas Carent, dean of Wells (our MP’s former brother-in-law) exercised the patronage of the church at Melcombe Bingham in 1463 and 1465, before young Richard Tourges took possession of his inheritance in 1466. Hutchins, iv. 380.