Sir Thomas Cotton, Sr., Knight

Not the husband of Alice Hastings

Sources include

• Page 21 of The Visitation of Cambridge Made in a ̊(1575) Continued and Enlarged with ... By Henry St. George, Sir Henry Saint-George. “Cotton and Hind of Maddingly in Cambridge”. The name of his wife is wrong in that document.
• Proceedings of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, Vol 37. “Landwade and the Cotton Family.” Printed page 4-5. PDF page 14-15. link
  • The last male of the [Hastings] family died. childless about 1373, leaving all his property to his widow Elizabeth Sybile. She sold it to her brother Walter, a London citizen, for an annuity of 20 marks a year. On Walter Sybile's death his widow Margaret married John Grace, also a London citizen. Margaret was still alive in 1421, but in 1419 Nicholas her son had granted his reversion of the manor. to various men, of whom Thomas Cotton was one. In 1420 Thomas Cotton .of Cambridgeshire and Walter Cotton of Oxfordshire bought land in Fordham and Chippenham, and shortly afterwards Walter Cotton, citizen and mercer of London, and Thomas Cotton, clerk of Cambridgeshire, bought the manor of Landwade. That is a brief but true account of how the manor of Landwade came to the Cottons. In various printed works you will find different stories. But they are wrong.: There is between the last member of the Hastings family and the first. member of the Cotton family such a mass of Latin and French documents relating to the many trusteeships which the estate suffered, that the pedigree maker may be forgiven for making guesses. But he had.no need to include amongst the quarterings of the Cotton shield the arms of Fleming and Hastings as he has done in Harleian Soc. vol. XLI, p. 20.
  • The origin of these imaginary accounts of the Cotton family is T. Wotton, English Baronetage, 1741, vol. ii, p. 112, which states that Sir Thomas Cotton married Alice, daughter and heir to John Hastings of Landwade and had issue John Cotton who was M.P. for Cambridge temp. Rich. II; that he married Bridget, daughter of Richard Grace of Norfolk, by whom he had two sons, 'Thomas .and Walter,. This account is repeated in J. P. Hore, Sporting Records of Cheveley, 1899., p. 17. But I think the charters printed in the appendix prove that no Cotton married a Hastings or a Grace. The Cotton' family, is one of respectable antiquity, but not nearly so ancient as the pedigree makers of the seventeenth and eighteenth century claimed ... “