New Life Records for Thomas Usk

Extract

A great deal is known about the poet and scribe Thomas Usk’s life and death, but new records shed a small amount of additional light on his early activities in London, before the tumultuous period scholars tend to focus on, of his political ascent in the 1380s, followed by the appeal of treason that led to his execution in 1388.¹ Typically, the first known record is the 1375 document in which ‘Thomas Vsk filius David Vsk’ [Thomas Usk, son of David Usk] grants to John Curson and his wife Alice all his rights in a tenement in the London parish of St. Nicholas Shambles, understood to be the same property ‘opposite the Bulstake’ that David Usk and his wife Alice acquired in a deed of 1363.² In 1375, Thomas Usk’s name is also recorded in a quitclaim from Margaret Mitford, and in 1376 he is recorded as a mainpernor for skinner Robert Markeby in one document and an attorney for haberdasher John Bere in another.³ In 1380, he witnesses various documents such as the will of the widow Alice Spicer and a deed from Henry de Frowyk, documents for which he could also have served as scribe, and by 1382, he is recorded as a scrivener in the Coram Rege Roll (1384).⁴ In 1382, he was admitted as a clerk of the Goldsmiths’ Company, and much of his scribal work would have been devoted to their official records and documents.⁵ He seems to have been doing work for them years sooner: although neither Alice Spicer’s husband William nor her executor William Waryn was a goldsmith, the other witness that proves the will alongside Usk is Thomas Farnham, named as an apprentice of the Goldsmiths’ Company in 1366–67.⁶ According to the Westminster Chronicle, Usk was also copying documents for the Sheriffs of London from 1384 onwards; although he was appointed Under-Sheriff of London and Middlesex in 1387, there is evidence of his handwriting in the Sheriffs’ documents from earlier years.⁷