HINTLESHAM, Thomas (by 1475-c.1515), of Brentwood, Essex.

Published in The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1509-1558, ed. S.T. Bindoff, 1982
Available from Boydell and Brewer

Constituency

Dates

Family and Education

b. by 1475. m. Margaret, wid. of William Salmon of Brentwood, at least 1da.2

Offices Held

Biography

In December 1533 Thomas Hintlesham’s son-in-law was admitted a freeman of Maldon without paying a fine on the ground that Hintlesham had been one of the town’s Members 30 years before. Although the names of its Members for the Parliament of 1504 are lost, Hintlesham cannot have been one of them since the town insisted on its representatives being freemen and he was not to be made free there until 1510, immediately following his election to the Parliament of that year. He had leased some property outside Maldon belonging to the town since 1497, but his return was probably the work of the 13th Earl of Oxford, to whom the town was amenable, assisted by Hintlesham’s neighbour and fellow-Member Sir Richard Fitzlewis.3

Hintlesham came of a gentle family that took its name from a village in Suffolk and was perhaps a descendant of one Thomas Hintlesham born at Bures on the border with Essex and made a freeman of Colchester in 1441. He himself lived in south Essex where in 1496 he bought some land at Navestock in conjunction with Richard Churchyard and Sir Richard Fitzlewis, but he had an interest in the locality of Bures; in 1503 he purchased property at Mount Bures and Earls Colne, where the de Vere earls of Oxford had their mausoleum. His ties with Bures suggest that he had a hand in the election of Thomas Cressener at Maldon in 1512, and he may even have been Cressener’s fellow-Member whose name is lost: this would be to assume that when three years later the King asked for the re-election of the previous Members he was dead or incapacitated and his place filled by John Strangman. Hintlesham’s death can only be dated approximately by that of an action in the court of requests, heard between 1514 and 1519, following the removal of beds and horses from the Crown inn at Brentwood by Fitzlewis and a judgment by the bishop of London that only three horses owned by Hintlesham before his marriage should pass to the administrator of his estate.4

Ref Volumes: 1509-1558

Author: D. F. Coros

Notes

  • 1. Essex RO, D/B3/1/2, f. 66v.
  • 2. Date of birth estimated from first reference. Req.2/11/196; Essex RO, D/B3/1/2, f. 109v; PCC 4 Adeane.
  • 3. Essex RO, D/B3/1/2, ff. 66v, 109v, 165v.
  • 4. Essex Feet of Fines, iv. ed. Reaney and Fitch, 98, 101, 108; Colchester Oath Bk. ed. Benham, 113; VCH Essex, iv. 145; Req.2/11/174, 196.