Thomas Gournay II (fl. c. 1430 – d. 1471)

Narrative

Thomas Gournay II is, for this stretch of the line, unusually well attested — not through Crown office or court appearance, but through a cluster of documents culminating in his will, dated at West Barsham and proved on 27 July 1471. That will, which genealogist Daniel Gurney drew on heavily in the Record of the House of Gournay, is the earliest Gurney will to survive with full personal detail, and it contains more about its maker’s daily life than any other document in the early West Barsham sequence. ¹¹² Thomas was born around 1430, son and heir of Thomas Gournay I (G21) by Catherine Kerville of Watlington. ¹ His father had himself inherited the West Barsham estates only recently — through the collateral succession that followed the death of Sir John Gurney V (the d. 1408 sheriff and MP) when John’s only son Edmund died as a minor, sending the inheritance sideways to Sir John’s nephew Thomas I. ¹¹ By 1445, a Thomas Gurnay, Esq., was one of the sealers of an East Barsham feoffment (land-transfer deed) preserved at Hunstanton Hall; because Daniel Gurney’s Supplement separately says Thomas I was probably dead before 1444, this is most likely Thomas II’s first known adult attestation, showing him already acting in the family network by the mid-1440s. ¹⁵ Around the middle of the century he married Margaret Jerningham, daughter of Sir Thomas Jerningham, Knt., of Somerleyton, Suffolk. The Jerninghams were among the most prominent Catholic gentry families of East Anglia. ⁵⁸ The marriage gave Thomas strong Suffolk connections and placed his descendants inside a kinship network of recusant families that would still be politically consequential a century later — when Francis Gurney G16’s widow Helen Holditch married a Jernegan in the 1560s, the family was re-entering a kinship circle that Thomas II had first joined a hundred years earlier.

A single dated letter places Thomas inside Norfolk gentry politics in his early adulthood. On St George’s Day 1452, Thomas signed a petition from Norwich to the Duke of Norfolk’s deputy at Framlingham, complaining of “dyvers assaughtes and ryottes made be Charles Nowell and other ageyn the Kyngs lawe and peas… up on John Paston and other of owre kynne, frendes and neyghborys.” The co-signers included Sir John Heveningham, John Ferrers, John Groos, William Rokewode, the two John Bakons, John Pagrave, Robert Mortimer, and Nicholas Appleyard. The letter shows Thomas with Paston-friendly signers at that moment; the later contrast is that his 1471 will named John Heydon of Baconsthorpe as supervisor. The source-backed arc is local rather than total: in 1452 Thomas appears in a Paston-side petition against violence by Charles Nowell and others; by 1471 he trusted the Heydon legal circle enough to make John Heydon the senior overseer of his will. ¹⁴Thomas’s principal documentary moment is his will. Dated at West Barsham on 18 March 1469/70 and proved by the Norwich Consistory Court on 27 July 1471, it is one of the richest Gurney family documents before the Tudor period. ¹² It names three simultaneous family residences — West Barsham Hall in north Norfolk, a house at Harpley twenty miles to the west, and a town house in St Gregory’s parish in the heart of Norwich — and directs that Thomas be buried in the chancel of St Lawrence at Harpley if he dies there, or in the Greyfriars’ church at Norwich if he dies there. The Norwich house was to be sold to his son William for 80 marks (about £53 in the money of the time), the first quantified valuation of any Gurney urban property. The Hardingham manor of Swathings, which Thomas had bought from a Catherine Sturmer at some earlier date, was to descend with the rest of the patrimony. Bequests of 40 shillings to the Norwich Greyfriars and 20 shillings each to the Augustinian Friars, the Dominicans, and the Carmelites placed Thomas inside the standard “all four orders” benefaction pattern of substantial Norfolk gentry. His personal confessor was John Bernard, a Franciscan friar at Norwich. The will’s most personal touch is a gold ring set with a turquoise, left to the chapel of the Annunciation at Walsingham Priory, together with £10 to the prior toward a building project in exchange for entry into the priory’s beadroll “as brother and sister of that priory” — a perpetual-prayer commitment to what was then the principal Marian pilgrimage shrine of England. ¹² The will named three sons. William IV was the heir; two further sons, John and Edmund, were confirmed in grants out of the Suffolk manor of Depden. The executors were Margaret his wife, John Jerningham (almost certainly Margaret’s brother, of the Somerleyton Jerninghams), and Edmund Bokenham Esquire of Old Buckenham. The supervisor — the senior overseer of the executors — was John Heydon of Baconsthorpe, the most powerful Norfolk lawyer of the mid-fifteenth century and the principal antagonist of the Paston family in the famous Paston Letters correspondence. The Gurney-Heydon alliance documented in this 1471 will would be sealed thirteen years later by the marriage of Thomas’s grandson William V (G18) to John Heydon’s granddaughter Anne Heydon. ¹³

The will’s most personal bequest is to Margaret. Thomas left all the household’s “woolen and linen cloths” to his wife, Daniel Gurney noting specifically that these were “being her own work and that of her servants.” ⁹ Daniel Gurney uses this bequest alongside William IV’s later 700-sheep will clause to describe a Norfolk wool economy in which gentlemen prepared wool for market and household women spun yarn or sometimes wove prepared wool at home. The stronger published claim is therefore not that Margaret’s work can be quantified as a commercial business, but that the will gives rare household-level evidence for the textile labor behind a substantial Norfolk gentry estate. ⁹ He died in 1471, in the same summer that Edward IV returned to the throne after defeating the Lancastrians at Barnet in April and Tewkesbury in May. ¹⁰ His son and heir William Gurney IV was about 21 years old when he inherited — young enough to grow into the Crown offices (escheator for Norfolk) and council role (to the Duke of Norfolk by 1477) that would establish the family firmly in Yorkist administrative Norfolk. ¹¹