WETHERBY, Thomas

A prominent and controversial figure in the bitter factional disputes which afflicted Norwich during the first half of Henry VI’s reign, Wetherby was admitted to the freedom of the city as a mercer in 1416-17. NCR 17c, f. 44. His parentage is unknown although he had an uncle of the same name, Reg. Wylbey, ff. 30v-32. A Thomas Wetherby of Norwich (evidently not the MP and probably the uncle) exported cloth from Gt. Yarmouth in the mid 1390s and was sued for debt in the early 1400s: E122/149/27; CP40/559, rot. 338. and his family appears to have hailed from the Buckenham area of south Norfolk. In the early 1400s, for example, he and a kinsman, John Wetherby, were defendants in a lawsuit at Westminster in the capacity of executors of the chaplain, Paul Wetherby of Buckenham. The plaintiff, a grocer from London, sued them over a bond he claimed to have received from their testator nearly four years earlier, but in the event the court dismissed his action. CP40/582, rot. 492. For some years before becoming a citizen of Norwich, Wetherby himself lived at New Buckenham. CP25(1)/169/184/122; Cambridge Univ. Lib., Buxton mss, 10/36, 57. During Henry V’s reign he was sometimes known as ‘of Buckenham castle’, Norwich city recs., deed of 1418, NCR 4a/10; NCR 1/17, m. 13d. the residence of Sir John Clifton, indicating that he had entered the service of that knight, the head of one of the wealthiest gentry families in East Anglia. The Wetherbys enjoyed a longstanding association with the Cliftons. In a deed of 1426 Thomas was referred to as of the castle as well as of Norwich, Norwich ct. roll 1424-35, NCR 1/18, m. 20d. and in the later fifteenth century another kinsman of his named John Wetherby lived at the castle as a servant of Sir John Clifton’s nephew, John Knyvet, who had succeeded to the property after that knight’s death. CPR, 1467-77, p. 516; R. Virgoe, East Anglian Soc. ed. Barron, Rawcliffe and Rosenthal, 188, 192; idem, ‘The Earlier Knyvetts’, Norf. Archaeology, xli. 257. The castle was originally part of the old Tattershall estate, of which another part had descended to Henry VI’s councillor, Ralph, Lord Cromwell. Cromwell’s share included holdings in the Buckenham parishes, and he employed Wetherby as his receiver in Norfolk. Clifton and Cromwell were not the only prominent figures with whom Wetherby was associated in the early 1420s, for John Wakeryng (d.1425), bishop of Norwich, appointed him one of his executors. Virgoe, East Anglian Soc. 135-6; CPR, 1429-36, p. 233.

As his links with the Cliftons and Cromwell indicate, Wetherby’s interests were never wholly confined to Norwich, and on at least five occasions he attested the return to Parliament of the knights of the shire for Norfolk. A wealthy man (in early 1436 Henry VI’s Council asked him for a loan of 100 marks), PPC, iv. 323. he invested substantially in land in the county. By 1424 he had bought the manor of Intwood from Nicholas Appleyard, the son and heir of the late William Appleyard†. Situated immediately to the south-west of Norwich, the manor became one of his principal residences and it served as a useful refuge when the city’s politics became particularly heated. Possibly in connexion with this purchase, he took a bond for 40 marks from another William Appleyard, evidently a relative of the vendor in 1434. C241/230/64. Wetherby also purchased manors and lands in the neighbouring parishes of Cringleford and Swardeston, and at Brundall and Surlingham, a few miles to the east of Norwich. In his later years he possessed interests at Hingham and acquired a manor at nearby Welborne, although it is unclear whether he still owned the latter property when he died. F. Blomefield, Norf. ii. 454; iv. 388; v. 35, 40, 42, 50; Feudal Aids, iii. 589; KB27/698, rot. 100; CP25(1)/169/189/182; KB27/725, rot. 36. Welborne does not feature in Wetherby’s will: Reg. Wylbey, ff. 30v-32. Both Hingham and Welborne were in Forehoe hundred, and it was also late in life that he had dealings with Robert Morley, Lord Morley, chief manorial lord at Hingham and lord of the same hundred. In March 1440 Henry Sharington, esquire, Henry Sturmer of Norwich and others acting on Morley’s behalf entered into a bond with Wetherby in the Norwich staple, but for what purpose is unknown. The bond was a security for the payment of 100 marks by the following Michaelmas but he had yet to receive that sum at Morley’s death in late September 1442, prompting him to take legal action against the unfortunate sureties. C241/230/63; CIPM, xxvi. 70-72; C1/15/31. He probably did so with some relish in the case of Sturmer, a political and personal opponent. Norwich city recs., presentments taken by j.p.s, 1440-1, NCR 8a/10, m. 1; KB27/727, rot. 95; E13/142, rot. 36.

In Norwich itself Wetherby owned a messuage in the parish of St. Stephen and another in that of St. Julian. The latter property, probably his city residence, lay in Conisford, the ward he represented as an alderman. Reg. Wylbey, ff. 30v-32. In 1451 Wetherby’s widow, who held a life interest in the bulk of his lands, was assessed for the purposes of a royal income tax. She was found to hold real property worth £20 p.a., R. Virgoe, ‘Norwich Taxation List of 1451’, Norf. Archaeology, xl. 149. but her late husband (sometimes known as an ‘esquire’), C219/14/4. must have owned lands worth at least that amount as early as 1430, when he was first distrained for knighthood. Virtually nothing is known about the commercial activities which gave Wetherby the means to invest so heavily in land but he probably traded abroad like other Norwich mercers. Cloth was not the only commodity in which he dealt: in the late 1420s, for example, he sold 60 ‘okes’ to the city, timber which went towards building new mills on the river Wensum. NCR 18a, f. 174. He may also have had business dealings with the obscure Rutland esquire, Robert Scarle†. C241/222/13; 223/19.

Wetherby’s first known civic office was that of sheriff. While sheriff, he represented the citizens in negotiations with the prior of Norwich, with whom the city was engaged in a long-running quarrel over conflicting jurisdictional rights. The two sides eventually came to an agreement in 1429, but this was so obviously in the prior’s favour that it only sowed the seeds of future trouble. Norwich city recs., assembly roll, 1420-6, NCR 8d; P. Maddern, Violence and Social Order, 181-3. By that date, Wetherby had already served his first term as mayor, during which he had his brother, Walter, already a member of the guild of St. George in Norwich, admitted to the freedom of the city. Norwich city recs., guild of St. George acct., NCR 8e; NCR 17c, f. 46d. Of Wicklewood, Norf., rather than Norwich, Walter went to France in the early 1430s as a member of the duke of Bedford’s retinue: DKR, xlviii. 289. During the same term, Wetherby entered the Commons for the first time. He spent 128 days attending and travelling to and from the Parliament of 1429, and he and his fellow MP, Thomas Ingham*, received daily wages of 3s. 4d. each. While the Parliament sat they made representations on behalf of their city in connexion with the dispute with the priory. To cover their extra expenses in this matter, the city granted them an additional £28 4s. 8d. Norwich city recs., view of treasurers’ acct., 1429-30, NCR 7d.

By the time Wetherby was elected to his second term as mayor in 1432 the ruling oligarchy of Norwich had split into two factions. Having assumed the leadership of one of these groupings, he sought to prolong his control of the city’s government by trying to arrange for one of his allies, William Grey, to succeed him as mayor. For a spirited but unconvincing defence of Wetherby’s involvement in the faction-fighting which afflicted Norwich in this period, see W. Blake, ‘Thomas Wetherby’, Norf. Archaeology, xxxii. 60-72. His efforts to influence the nomination process during the mayoral election of 1433 proved unsuccessful, since the ‘commons’ of Norwich, whose role it was to put forward the names of two candidates, refused to select Grey. A double election then followed, Wetherby and a minority of the aldermen choosing Grey and their adversaries electing Richard Purdance†. Both sides appealed to the chancellor and Wetherby’s opponents also asked the bishop of Norwich, William Alnwick, to intervene. In due course Wetherby, who by then had retreated to Intwood, appeared before the bishop, who managed to persuade him to accept Purdance as mayor. Yet divisions within the city remained as strong as ever, and in February 1434 a panel of arbiters, approved by the chancellor and William de la Pole, earl of Suffolk, was asked to investigate the disputed election. Wetherby refused to co-operate with the panel, because it included several of his opponents, and in March that year the arbiters removed him from the office of alderman and fined him no less than £100. They also warned him that he would lose his civic liberties if he failed to pay the sum within 40 days, but he declared that he had no intention of complying with this demand. In due course he and several of his supporters, among them the city’s common clerk, John Hawk, were stripped of the franchise. Maddern, 184-6; B.R. McRee, ‘Peace Making and its Limits in Late Med. Norwich’, EHR, cix. 855-6; Blomefield, iii. 144; Recs. Norwich, i. p. lxxxv; C49/49/9.

After his exclusion from civic affairs Wetherby must have spent much of the following two years at Intwood. Yet he did not stay away from Norwich altogether, for in 1435 John Warde, describing himself as a draper of the city, sued him in the court of King’s bench for assaulting him there in March that year. In response he pleaded that the alleged assault had arisen from an attempt to apprehend Warde, actually a bondman who had absconded from his manor of Surlingham. KB27/698, rot. 100. In the autumn of the same year the government appointed Wetherby a customs collector at Great Yarmouth, an office he retained for several years, and during the second half of the 1430s he was placed on at least three ad hoc commissions in that port. No doubt these appointments were at least partly intended to keep him occupied away from the political controversies at Norwich.

At some stage during Wetherby’s term as a customer at Yarmouth, two other Norwich merchants, John Reyner and Richard Vergerous, sued him in the Chancery for abusing that office to their hurt. C1/45/252. Damage to the plaintiffs’ bill makes it impossible to discern the details of their suit. It is possible that their action was linked with the faction-fighting at Norwich, since Reyner had quarrelled with Richard Moneslee*, one of Wetherby’s allies there, just a few years earlier. C1/12/12; 73/91. On the other hand, the animosity between Wetherby and Reyner was perhaps also born out of business dealings between the two men. The Chancery suit, just one episode in their quarrel, was followed by litigation in the common law courts. At the beginning of 1442, Wetherby began a suit against Reyner in King’s bench. In pleadings of Trinity term that year, he alleged that his opponent and ‘many other unknown malefactors’ had attacked and attempted to kill him at Norwich on 14 May 1436, meaning that he dared not go about the city or elsewhere in the county. KB27/725, rot. 36. Just a few weeks before those pleadings, however, there had been an auditing of accounts between the parties at Norwich, and after Wetherby’s death Reyner would claim that the audit had found that the MP owed him no less than of £333 6s. 8d. CP40/751, rot. 334; 755, rot. 138. The King’s bench action against Reyner was not the only suit that Wetherby initiated in that court at the beginning of 1442. He also sued several butchers and artisans from Norwich there, for assaulting him in the city in June 1438, although whether this incident was related to his quarrel with Reyner is unknown. KB27/725, rot. 36d; 726, rots. 18d, 57.

In spite of the setback of 1433, Wetherby still retained considerable support within Norwich, and the city’s prestigious guild of St. George was packed with his supporters. B.R. McRee, ‘Religious Gilds and Civic Order’, Speculum, lxvii. 87; Maddern, 186. His fortunes began to change during the second half of 1436. The then mayor, Robert Chaplain*, was one of his allies, and by that date he felt confident enough to style himself an ‘alderman’ again. (It was subsequently alleged that Chaplain illegally restored him to that rank in January 1437, forcing several uneducated citizens (‘ideotos’) to seal a blank charter, to which he added a text asserting that he was indeed an alderman of the city.) KB9/241/20. It was also during Chaplain’s mayoralty that Wetherby gained election to his second Parliament and took a couple of bonds in the Norwich staple (of which he was then clerk) from Robert Norwich, a gentleman from Beeston, Norfolk, and others. By means of the bonds, they undertook to pay him the substantial sums of 250 marks and £100 before the end of the decade. The circumstances in which he received these securities, both of which subsequently led to proceedings against Robert and his associates for non-payment, are unknown. C241/230/1, 62.

Shortly before Wetherby took up his seat in the Parliament of 1437, his associate, John Hawk, became under sheriff of Norwich. Hawk’s appointment was a clear challenge to Wetherby’s opponents, given that the new under sheriff had been banned from civic office in 1433, and it prompted a group of them to protest to the chancellor. The government reacted by sending William Goodred†, j.KB, to Norwich to investigate their complaint and by commissioning the earl of Suffolk and other royal councillors to settle the trouble there once and for all. Goodred held his inquiry in early January 1437, just before Wetherby’s second Parliament opened. Few of those whom he summoned for questioning were the MP’s supporters, since the great majority of those who gave evidence condemned the part which Wetherby and his faction had played in the city’s affairs over the previous few years. Wetherby’s civic career was saved from a premature end in the following March when the earl of Suffolk came to Norwich to announce a settlement. On 21 Mar. he presented his award to a meeting of the city’s assembly at which Wetherby was present, even though Parliament was still sitting. Suffolk decreed that all documents and legal proceedings relating to the quarrel between the pro and anti-Wetherby factions were now invalid and commanded Wetherby and his opponents to cease their attacks upon each other. He also ordered the city authorities to reinstate Wetherby as an alderman and to restore the franchise to those of his supporters who had forfeited their civic liberties. Maddern, 186-9; McRee, ‘Peace Making and its Limits’, 859-61; Norwich city recs., assembly bk. 1434-91, NCR 16d, ff. 2-3. Suffolk’s award, so at odds with the findings of Goodred’s inquiry, failed to heal the divisions within Norwich. Some historians have questioned his neutrality, believing that he had become Wetherby’s patron, an understandable assumption, given that the MP counted among his allies the lawyer, John Heydon*. One of Wetherby’s Cringleford feoffees, Heydon was briefly recorder of the city in the mid 1430s and he would earn no little notoriety in de la Pole’s service. McRee, 860-1; Maddern, 186; C. Rawcliffe, Medicine for the Soul, 148.

Whatever the earl’s motives with regard to the award of March 1437, his settlement broke down within weeks. On the following 17 Apr. the Council, perhaps prompted by complaints from the citizens, ordered Wetherby to appear before it a week later, and there were disturbances at the mayoral election on 1 May. The government had expected trouble, for it had sent two commissioners (the bishop of Carlisle and John Cottesmore, j.c.p.) to Norwich to observe the election, which degenerated into a rowdy confrontation between the two factions. The only account of what happened is contained in a justices’ certification drawn up by Wetherby and his supporters. According to this, his political opponents had assembled a large crowd of rioters to prevent him and the majority of aldermen and ‘well-ruled’ freemen from attending the election. The certifiers further alleged that the mob had assaulted Wetherby and others, and that Robert Chaplain (the outgoing mayor) and the city’s j.p.s had dared not, ‘for dred of ther deth’, arrest the misdoers, whom a local jury was too terrified to indict. Needless to say these were partisan claims. It is almost certain that they were made in order to annul the election of John Cambridge (one of Wetherby’s opponents) as mayor, for it was necessary to allege riot to overturn an election, and certification was the legal process used in the case of riot. In June the Council summoned Robert Toppe* and nine other leading citizens whom the certificate had accused of misconduct to London, and in the following month the Crown confiscated the city’s liberties and appointed John Welles II* keeper of Norwich. Toppe was temporarily exiled to Bristol but Wetherby was not seen as an innocent party, since he was also sent away from Norwich for a period. PPC, v. 15, 33; Maddern, 188-90; KB9/229/1/106; McRee, 861-2. It is not known whether the general pardon Wetherby received in May 1440 was directly connected with his role in the disputed election: CPR, 1436-41, p. 393.

Following the trouble of 1437, Wetherby seems again to have lost influence in civic affairs. When the Parliament of 1439 was called, the electors of Norwich elected Toppe and another of his opponents, William Ashwell*. It was probably in the early 1440s that Wetherby was driven to seek the help of the duke of Norfolk, who wrote two letters to the city authorities to warn them that their adversary enjoyed his ‘good lordship’. Norwich city recs., docs. relating to city’s legal disputes, c.1442, NCR 9c/13. By now the city’s long-running jurisdictional quarrel with the prior of Norwich, which had lain in abeyance for several years, was again coming to a head. The prior and other ecclesiastical figures in dispute with the city had brought a number of legal actions against it, suits which Wetherby’s opponents subsequently alleged that he had encouraged. This allegation probably had some foundation, for in October 1441 a Norwich jury indicted several of the prior’s men and the MP’s relative and servant, John Wetherby, for assaulting and imprisoning the mayor, William Ashwell, the sheriffs, Henry Sturmer and John Gosselyn, and other important citizens. NCR 8a/10, m. 1. It would appear, therefore, that Wetherby’s desire to take revenge against his enemies in the civic hierarchy caused him to form an alliance with the prior. In the same October the city, no doubt prompted by external authority, agreed to submit all its quarrels with the prior and other churchmen to the arbitration of the earl of Suffolk, but his award, published in June 1442, proved highly unpalatable. He decided that the citizens should tear down certain of their mills, since these were prejudicial to the interests of the prior and the abbot of St. Benet of Hulme, and that the prior should enjoy reasonable jurisdictional rights in Norwich. The city had still to accept the award when the corporation met on 25 Jan. 1443 to discuss whether to seal it. Passions ran high at this assembly, which ended in chaos after a group of citizens seized the common seal to stop any such sealing from taking place and was followed by a week of disturbances, subsequently known as ‘Gladman’s Insurrection’. Wetherby was in the city at the time, for subsequent indictments found that he was one of those from whom the rioters had extorted money. KB27/728, rex rot. 24; KB9/84/1/3

Following the disorder, Wetherby seized the opportunity to act against his enemies, most of whom were implicated in it. He and the abbot of St. Benet’s charged them with insurrection before the King and his Council, and the mayor, William Henstead*, was summoned to London and committed to prison for several weeks. According to one hostile account, Wetherby and his allies took control of the city during Henstead’s imprisonment. They were said to have implemented Suffolk’s unpopular award of June 1442 by delivering bonds to the citizens’ ecclesiastical opponents and by having the disputed mills torn down. Wetherby was also blamed for appointing Thomas del Rowe* to act as the city’s attorney in early March 1443, when a commission of oyer and terminer charged with investigating the recent disturbances arrived at Norwich. Del Rowe proved an ineffectual advocate (deliberately so according to Wetherby’s opponents) and on 14 Mar. the government seized the city’s liberties into the King’s hands for a second time and appointed Sir John Clifton its governor. Maddern, 192-3; Recs. Norwich, i. pp. lxxxvii-lxxxix, xci. Wetherby also seized the opportunity to sue particular enemies at Westminster in the wake of Gladman’s Insurrection. His servant, John Wetherby, took action in King’s bench, alleging that William Ashwell, deeply implicated in the disturbances, and Henry Sturmer, had assaulted him at Hingham, KB27/727, rot. 95. while on 30 Jan. 1443 the MP commenced proceedings in the Exchequer against Sturmer and Gosselyn, the sheriffs of 1441-2. According to his bill, in November 1441 they had deliberately acted against his interests by freeing from custody a merchant of the city whom he was suing for debt in the sheriffs’ court. E13/142, rot. 36.

The tumultuous year of 1443 marked Wetherby’s final involvement in the turbulent politics of Norwich, since he retired from public life thereafter. By June 1445 he and his wife were living at a house within Carrow priory, a nunnery just outside the city walls where their daughter, Alice, was one of the sisters. CPR, 1441-6, p. 366. He died on the following 26 July. In his will, dated 12 Nov. 1444, he sought burial in Norwich’s Augustinian friary, to which he left five marks. He also bequeathed the same amount to each of the other friaries in the city and to the college of St. Mary in the Fields there. Other religious institutions and individuals to benefit from the will included Buckenham priory, the parish church at New Buckenham and Carrow nunnery and four friars whom he asked to pray for his soul. Two of the friars were John and Edward Pulham, both Franciscans and presumably relatives of his wife, Margaret. Wetherby provided for Margaret by awarding her a life interest in the bulk of his estate and by leaving her his household goods. He gave a silver chest to his daughter, Elizabeth, who had married the lawyer John Jenney*, and a gown to her husband. He also left gowns to his brothers, Walter and Richard, and to his nephew, John Brown of Wymondham. Other beneficiaries of the will included Walter’s son and grandchildren, Richard’s children, Margery Wetherby (widow of the MP’s uncle and namesake) and Joan Wetherby, a nun at Shouldham in west Norfolk. Wetherby named five executors, his wife, Walter Wetherby, John Brown, John Jenney and a former servant, the mercer John Edward. He asked Ralph, Lord Cromwell, to act as supervisor of the will, of which the well connected Henry Gray* was a feoffee. Reg. Wylbey, ff. 30v-32; C1/26/281.

Wetherby’s heirs were Elizabeth Jenney and his infant grand-daughter, Margaret Wynter. Margaret was the only child of Elizabeth’s deceased sister, Joan, by her husband, John Wynter. She cannot have reached adulthood, since she never succeeded to her share of the Wetherby estate, the manor of Brundall, the reversion to which Humphrey Bourgchier* bought from Wetherby’s executors in the mid 1450s. The reversion vested upon the death of the MP’s widow in the spring of 1458, when the Jenneys came into possession of Elizabeth’s inheritance, namely the manor of Intwood and other properties to the south-west of Norwich. Intwood had featured in a Chancery suit during Margaret Wetherby’s widowhood. Brought by Elizabeth and her husband, its purpose was to prevent her father’s old associate and feoffee, John Hawk, from conveying it to Margaret in fee simple. Such a transaction would have breached Wetherby’s will, which allowed his widow no more than a life interest in the property, and would have empowered her to alienate the most important part of Elizabeth’s future inheritance. C139/121/16; C1/17/136; 26/281. It is impossible to tell whether the feared conveyance would have taken place, but the fact that the Jenneys had felt it necessary to appeal to the chancellor suggests that they were not on the best of terms with Margaret, who excluded them from her will of January 1458. In the will she asked to be buried beside her husband in the Augustinian friary at Norwich. She left the friars 100 marks towards the building of a new library, upon condition that the names of both Wetherby and herself were inscribed in every book there and on several windows. The friars were also to provide a chaplain who would sing for her and her late husband, for John Wakeryng, the former bishop of Norwich, and for all those who had helped her and Wetherby in the past. She also arranged for a chaplain, William Walsingham, to sing for the souls of herself and Wetherby for a period of two years after her death. She included Walsingham and her daughter, Alice, to whom she left ten marks, among her executors. Reg. Brosyard, ff. 83-84. Just before she died, Margaret made a quitclaim of lands in Cringleford to John Selot, master of St. Giles’s hospital in Norwich, perhaps deliberately against the interests of her daughter and son-in-law, with whom Selot engaged in a bitter dispute over property there after her death. Norf. RO, Norwich municipal charities, misc. deeds, N/MC1/39; Rawcliffe, 147-50. But Rawcliffe suggests that the quarrel began in ‘about 1457’, probably because she mistakenly assumes that Margaret Wetherby died in that year rather than in 1458.