SAMBOURN, Nicholas II, of Lushill, Wilts. and Fernham, Berks.

It is not always easy to distinguish this Nicholas Sambourn from his older namesake. However, it was probably he who, in September 1390, received a royal licence to travel overseas, taking £2 for his expenses. He may well have been bound for Rome, for he travelled in the company of a large number of clergymen, although he took with him a letter of exchange addressed by a Lombard living in London to his ‘brethren’ at Lucca. In this connexion it is worth noting, too, that, in the following July, he stood surety for five men bound for the Roman Curia, undertaking that they would do nothing there prejudicial to the Crown.CCR, 1389-92, pp. 478, 568, 570; 1392-6, p. 539.

Nicholas Sambourn ‘junior’ was returned in 1394 for Chippenham, in which borough his elder relation held property and where both men witnessed deeds between 1391 and 1414. His fellow Member on this occasion was Hugh de la Lynde, who had sat with Nicholas Sambourn I for Bath just three years earlier. In 1395 de la Lynde acted as his trustee when he purchased an estate in central Wiltshire, including land in Potterne and West Lavington. In the same year Sambourn’s daughter, Joan, was professed a nun at Lacock abbey, her expenses on this occasion being £17 5s.8d., an exceptionally large sum which reflects the high social status of this royal foundation. In 1398 Sambourn stood surety for Thomas Armourer of Langley (Buckinghamshire), who was being sued for illegal detention of a box of muniments.Tropenell Cart. ed. Davies, i. 82-83, 96-98, 105; Wilts. Feet of Fines (Wilts. Rec. Soc. xli), 180; Arch. Jnl. lxix. 117-18; CCR, 1396-9, p. 426. At the beginning of Henry IV’s reign, along with his neighbour, Robert Andrew II of Castle Eaton and two clerks, he was engaged in the alienation of the reversions of several small properties in the Malmesbury area to the local abbey, for the maintenance of a lamp. By this time he was himself in possession of third parts of the manors of Lushill (on the Wiltshire-Gloucestershire border) and Fernham, Berkshire, which he held in the right of his wife; and in 1403 he bought an additional third of Lushill from William Sybylle, his wife’s nephew. He evidently divided his time between the two manors, in both of which he was licensed to have mass said privately. In 1412 the property at Lushill was said to be worth £6 a year.CPR, 1401-5, p. 117; Wilts. Feet of Fines, 226-7; Reg. Hallum (Canterbury and York Soc. lxxii), 742; Feudal Aids, vi. 537.

By 1407 Sambourn was acting as bailiff of the abbot of Glastonbury’s extensive holdings in Wiltshire. These included the manor of Kingston St. Michael, where there was a Benedictine nunnery, the Liber Obitualis of which recorded his name as a benefactor and ordered prayers for his soul and that of his son, another Nicholas, every year on 16 Oct. Sambourn’s interests, however, were by no means confined to Wiltshire: all of his royal commissions concerned matters in Gloucestershire, and he was occasionally described as living in that county. Moreover, in 1412 his seal was attached to a deed relating to land in Berkshire, and he became a feoffee of the estates of Sir Peter Bessels situated there as well as in Oxfordshire, Somerset and Warwickshire.VCH Wilts. v. 70; Wilts. Arch. Mag. iv. 66; CCR, 1409-13, p. 346; 1422-9, p. 229; CPR, 1422-9, p. 535. On the second of the commissions on which Sambourn served in 1414 he was associated with Thomas Cricklade, whose daughter, Elizabeth, had married his own son and heir. No more is heard of him after this date, and he had died by 1425.Genealogist, n.s. xiii. 145-7; CCR, 1422-9, p. 229.