BETTE, William

The earliest known reference to Bette is a fine of late 1427, by which William Rouell and his wife conveyed a messuage in Bedford to him, his feoffees and his heirs.2 CP25(1)/6/79/3. Other records show that he held a tenement called the ‘Crown’ in the town’s High Street and property in and around School Street.3 Beds. Historical Rec. Soc. xxv. 27, 29.

Bette stood surety for another Bedford burgess, William Chichele alias Spicer* in the spring of 1428 when the widow of John Meskeburgh, a servant of the Bedfordshire j.p., Hugh Hasilden†, brought an appeal for the murder of her late husband against Chichele and two other Bedford men, the mayor, Thomas Kempston*, and Thomas Cheltenham. By then the three accused were prisoners in the Marshalsea in Southwark, but Kempston and Chichele obtained bail after the referral of the case to a trial by jury. The relevant entry on the plea rolls of the court of King’s bench records that Bette, described as a ‘wolman’, was one of those who stood bail for Chichele, whom the jury acquitted with his co-defendants a few months later.4 KB27/668, rot. 78. Five years later, Bette (again referred to as a ‘wolman’) was himself the defendant in a case brought in the court of common pleas at Westminster, where two other townsmen from Bedford sued him over a bond for 100s. The plea roll does not reveal the circumstances in which he gave the plaintiffs this security, of 26 Sept. 1428, although it records that Bette pleaded that he had fulfilled its conditions. He also referred to a payment of 20s that he had made to them at Bishop’s Lynn in 1430, suggesting that he may have had business dealings in that port, in spite of the insignificance of the wool trade there during the fifteenth century.5 CP40/688, rot. 436; V. Parker, Making of King’s Lynn, 11.

Bette served at least three terms as a bailiff of Bedford. His fellow burgesses elected him to the Parliament of 1435 during the second of these terms, although he was no longer in office by the time the assembly opened. In June 1444, during his only known term in the mayoralty, Bette presented John Thorpe as the master of the local hospital of St. John the Baptist, the earliest known occasion of a mayor of Bedford’s exercising what was to become an established right of presentation.6 T.W.M. Pearse, Schedule of Recs. at Bedford, 20; F.W. Kuhlicke, Hist. Hosp. and Parish Church of St. John Baptist, Bedford, 10.