Thomas West, 1st Baron West

He was the only son of Sir Thomas West (1321–3 September 1386^[3]) of Hempston Cauntelow in Devon (named after its lords the Cantilupe family whose heiress Eleanor de Cantelowe married Sir Thomas West (1251–1344)), by his wife Alice FitzHerbert (died 1395), a sister and co-heiress of Sir Edmund FitzHerbert, both children of Sir Reynold Fitzherbert of Midsomer Norton, Somerset, members of the venerable Winchester family.^[4] Sir Thomas West (d.1386) had fought in the Battle of Crécy and the subsequent siege of Calais under the command of Richard FitzAlan, 10th Earl of Arundel. The younger Thomas almost certainly served alongside his father under King Richard II; one of them was in active service in Calais in 1386, the year of his father's death. A knight banneret, he served in Ireland with the Duke of Aumale in 1399, and attended Richard's young Queen Isabella of Valois homeward to Calais in 1401.

When West was seventeen, he and his mother and sister Eleanor were assaulted and robbed, by Sir Nicholas de Clifton, who carried his sister off; he was probably the same Nicholas de Clifton who later married her.

West was knighted in 1399, and summoned to Parliament as Baron West in 1402, by which time he held the manor of Harby, Nottinghamshire. He inherited the manor of Newton Tony, Wiltshire, from his father, and the manors of Midsomer Norton, Somerset, and Hinton Martell, Dorset, from his mother. He was later granted joint custody of Beaulieu Abbey. He died in 1405 and was interred alongside his mother at Christchurch Priory, Dorset.^[5][6]