TUST, William

For a man who had the good fortune to make two good marriages and to enjoy the style of a ‘gentleman’,2 C1/47/260; CIPM Hen. VII, i. 238. Tust is a surprisingly obscure figure. Almost certainly not from Maldon, he was possibly the son of the John Tust who attested the elections of Essex’s knights of the shire to the Parliaments of May 1421 and 1435. He first comes into view in the late 1450s, when he was party to several conveyances of land in Maldon and Essex,3 CAD, vi. C6513; CCR, 1454-61, p. 400; Essex RO, Maldon bor. recs., deed, 1459, D/B 3/11/17. and gained election to the Commons. The Parliament of 1459 was a partisan assembly packed with government supporters and William’s fellow MP was the royal servant, William Laweshull*, but it is impossible to tell whether he himself was a committed adherent of the Lancastrian Crown.

During the later 1460s, Tust quarrelled with the London mercer, Thomas Fyler, who likewise held property at Little Baddow. He sued Fyler and three co-defendants (probably the mercer’s employees or tenants) in the court of common pleas and, in turn, Fyler brought a counter-suit against him in the same court, an action to which Tust initially failed to respond, so incurring fines. Both cases came to pleadings in Michaelmas term 1468. First, Tust alleged that in July 1466 Fyler and his associates had broken into his close at Little Baddow, assaulted him, impounded half a dozen of his cattle and grazed the mercer’s own livestock on his pasture. Secondly, Fyler claimed that Tust had taken and impounded 30 cattle belonging to him, again at Little Baddow, in December 1467. It appears that neither suit progressed in the formal sense beyond pleadings: in each, the parties received licence to negotiate out of court and the plea rolls do not record any trial.4 CP40/829, rots. 142, 149.

Tust quarrelled with Fyler late in life, since he died on 30 Nov. 1470. In the following month, the government ordered the escheator in Essex to hold an inquisition post mortem into his lands, but no record of this hearing has survived.5 CFR, xx. 267; P. Morant, Essex, ii. 23. Later Chancery suits provide such evidence as exists about his real property. In the second half of the 1470s, his widow Margaret filed a bill against John Stangrif, master of Pleshey College, Essex, one of her late husband’s feoffees. She said that Tust had promised her a jointure estate, worth £20 p.a. and consisting of his manor of ‘Videlowes’ in Little Baddow and other lands in Essex, which would pass to their children after their deaths. She complained that Tust had never put the proposed settlement into effect and demanded that Stangrif should make a release to her of the lands in question, of which he was the sole surviving feoffee. Stangrif responded by requesting that Henry Tust, the MP’s eldest son and heir by his first marriage, should appear to answer her bill. Duly summoned, Henry asserted that ‘Videlowes’ was in fact among the holdings which William Tust had settled on his first wife, Katherine, and his children by her. He added that the MP, assuming that he would receive the marriage portion of £100 agreed to by Margaret’s father, had bought ‘Bassettes’, another manor in Little Baddow, to provide for her jointure. In the event, her father had never handed over the money, meaning that he could neither complete his purchase nor provide Margaret with any jointure. To make matters worse, he had forfeited the deposit that he had paid the vendor of ‘Bassettes’. Henry went on to state that ‘Videlowes’ had passed to him after his father’s death and that he had defended his right to the property against his stepmother’s claims in the court of King’s bench. The chancellor came to a decision in June 1477 when he dismissed Margaret’s petition, ruling that she had failed to prove her case. Some 40 years later Isabel, the MP’s daughter by his second marriage, fought a Chancery suit against the London mercer, William Berell, over a tenement in Chelmsford that had once belonged to her father. She returned to the same court in the mid 1530s, to resurrect her mother’s claim to the manor of ‘Videlowes’, and won a case against Thomas Salle, who was then occupying the property. Isabel, already a widow when she began the first of these Chancery actions, had married Thomas Smith of Rivenhall. Their son, Sir Clement Smith†, was the brother-in-law of Edward Seymour, duke of Somerset and Protector of England.6 Morant, ii. 23; CPR, 1485-94, p. 43; C1/569/6; 891/40-45. The Commons 1509-58, iii. 331, mistakenly states that Isabel was the da. of William Foster.