FOWLER, William

Recognized as a ‘gentleman’ by his contemporaries,8 CPR, 1416-22, p. 216; 1446-52, p. 26; CCR, 1429-35, pp. 316-17; 1435-41, p. 344; CP40/751, rot. 395. Fowler owed his standing to his mother’s family and his marriage since he was of obscure paternal lineage.9 Somerville, i. 592, identifies him as the son of Edw. IV’s servant Thomas Fowler, but that William Fowler was a younger namesake. Initially of Weston Turville,10 CFR, xv. 295, 330; CCR, 1429-35, pp. 29, 316-17. he was to inherit from his maternal relatives manorial and other holdings in the town of Buckingham and its vicinity, as well as the manors of Worton in Cassington, Oxfordshire, and Water Stratford, Buckinghamshire. While it appears that he disposed of Worton (presumably by sale), he probably made Water Stratford one of his residences since he was of that parish in July 1443 when he and his wife Cecily received a papal licence to keep a portable altar.11 VCH Oxon. xii. 43; VCH Bucks. iv. 261; Add. Roll 217; CPL, ix. 370; CP40/791, rot. 334d. Cecily, a daughter and coheir of a former household servant of Richard II, brought to him moieties of Combe Gernon in Great Milton, Oxfordshire, and Easterton Gernon in Market Lavington, Wiltshire, both manors which had belonged to the Rycotes, the family of her maternal grandparents.12 VCH Oxon. vii. 128; VCH Wilts. x. 90; Feudal Aids, iv. 199. Fowler also possessed a landed interest at King’s Sutton, Northants. by the mid 1440s (E13/143, rot. 39), although whether through inheritance, his marriage or by purchase is not known. It is quite likely that Fowler never knew his father-in-law, for the match was contracted after the death of Nicholas Englefield in the spring of 1415.13 CIPM, xx. 329. Cecily was the second of three sisters, of whom the eldest, Sibyl, was married to Richard Quatermayns*, a considerably more prominent figure than Fowler.

Fowler first comes into view in 1418, when he and William Buktoft stood surety for Richard Brunt, a parker from Buckinghamshire who had become embroiled in a dispute with John Sewell from the same county. They pledged that Brunt would come before the King at Westminster in the quindene of Michaelmas that year, but he failed to appear, so exposing them to the penalties of the bond (fines of £40 each) they had entered on his behalf. The Crown pardoned them these penalties in the following spring, after it had emerged that the parker had not absented himself wilfully, having suffered an assault of sufficient gravity to leave him bed-bound and unable to appear at Westminster.14 CPR, 1416-22, p. 216. Fowler had begun to play a part in the public affairs of Buckinghamshire by the autumn of 1420, when he attested the return of the county’s knights of the shire to the Parliament of that year. By the late 1420s, he was serving as one of the coroners of Buckinghamshire, an office once held by his maternal grandfather, William Barton.

Coroners were not necessarily lawyers,15 The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 139; VCH Wilts. v. 29. but Fowler’s career as an office-holder suggests that, like his Barton uncles, he was a member of the legal profession, as does the role he played as a feoffee and witness on behalf of other landowners in Buckinghamshire and elsewhere.16 CPR, 1416-22, p. 262; CAD, i. B1458; vi. C4939; CCR, 1429-35, pp. 316-17; 1435-41, pp. 236-7, 377; 1441-7, p. 197; 1447-54, pp. 100, 342-3. At some stage during 1429 and again in January the following year the Crown ordered the sheriff of Buckinghamshire to remove Fowler from the position of coroner because he was ‘insufficiently qualified’ to hold it, but it is difficult to ascertain the true reasons for such dismissals. It was on the same grounds that the sheriff was instructed to dismiss him as verderer of Bernwood forest in May 1434, although in this instance it would appear that he was deemed unqualified to serve as such because he resided outside the forest. As it happened, he remained a coroner until at least February 1441 when the authorities ordered an election for a replacement, this time because he had recently become a j.p. and could no longer devote the necessary time to his duties as coroner.17 CCR, 1429-35, pp. 9, 29, 273; 1435-41, p. 400; VCH Wilts. v. 25. His appointment to the commission of the peace, along with his service as a bailiff on the estates of Queen Joan, widow of Henry IV, in Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire and employment as a feodary of the duchy of Lancaster and escheator in the same two counties, do not suggest a man of limited administrative abilities. Apart from the dowager queen, Fowler had at least one other patron, Richard Grey, Lord Grey of Wilton, who bestowed on him an annuity of 20s., for his past and future counsel, in 1434.18 CIPM, xxv. 589. Lawyer or not, the burgesses of Wycombe held Fowler in sufficient regard to return him to two consecutive Parliaments. Whether he possessed any property or other interests in the borough prior to his first election is impossible to tell, but he was by no means the only outsider to represent it in the Commons during Henry VI’s reign.

A few weeks before Fowler’s election to his second Parliament, the elder of his two maternal uncles, John Barton senior, died. Barton had not left any surviving children, and he bequeathed estates in Buckingham, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire to his younger brother and namesake and their sisters Margaret and Isabel in succession for their lives. This was upon condition that they paid a priest ten marks p.a. for daily prayers and supported the foundation of a group of almshouses in Buckingham, and it was further stipulated that the properties were to pass to Fowler and his children after the life interests of the testator’s siblings had expired.19 The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 139-40; VCH Bucks. iii. 484-5; VCH Oxon. xii. 43. In due course, the MP inherited these considerable holdings, although not without quarrelling with another Isabel, the widow of Barton’s younger brother and namesake. According to a Chancery bill he brought against her and her feoffees in 1438, they had fallen out over certain lands in the two counties he expected to inherit through the elder John Barton’s will. He claimed that he and Isabel had referred their quarrel to arbitration, only for her and her feoffees to refuse to obey the arbiters’ award. Dated 13 Aug. 1437, this had ordered them to convey the lands to him and his heirs. Fowler’s mother also took action in Chancery in this period, alleging in a bill of 1439 that Thomas More and another Barton feoffee had likewise refused to allow her possession of lands left to her in the elder John’s will.20 C1/9/136-7. Fowler’s mother called herself ‘Isabel Amcotes’ in her Chancery bill, suggesting that she had remarried. A John Ampcotes or Amcotes attested the elections of the knights of the shire for Bucks. to the Parls. of 1407 and 1414: C219/10/4; 11/4. Fowler must have resolved his differences with Isabel Barton relatively quickly, since he was associated with her in several transactions relating to parts of her late husband’s estate soon afterwards, and subsequently he acted for her as a feoffee. There was nevertheless more controversy over the Barton estates in the late 1440s or early 1450s when Fowler took further action in Chancery against a number of other feoffees.21 CCR, 1435-41, pp. 377; 1441-7, p. 141; CP25(1)/22/122/26; Staffs. RO, Bagot mss, D4038/A/11/10-11; CPR, 1467-77, p. 112; C1/18/64.

The mid fifteenth century also saw Fowler engaging in other lawsuits. In Michaelmas term 1448 he began action in the common pleas against Thomas Kempston* of Bedford, over an alleged debt of 40s., and in the same term he appeared in person in that court to answer Richard Vyse, master of the hospital of St. John the Baptist, Oxford. Vyse’s suit was for the unjust detinue of an obligation for £100 his house had received from the clerk Walter Bonde. The master claimed that he had recently delivered the document to Fowler for safekeeping, but that the MP had refused his request to return it to him and his brethren. In response, Fowler acknowledged having taken custody of the obligation at Buckingham but asserted that he needed Bonde’s consent before he could redeliver it to Vyse. A few years later the MP, along with Humphrey, duke of Buckingham, and others jointly sued a husbandman from Buckinghamshire for debt.22 CP40/751, rots. 26d, 353, 395, 485, 508d. His ties with the duke were of some substance, for held a considerable number of his properties in Buckingham from that lord.23 CP40/771, rot. 628; Add. Roll 217.

Another of the co-plaintiffs in this latter suit was Fowler’s brother-in-law, Richard Quatermayns, with whom the MP evidently enjoyed a good relationship. A Quatermayns feoffee,24 CCR, 1441-7, p. 216; 1447-54, pp. 342-3; 1454-61, p. 268 ; C141/3/33. he co-operated with Richard in the mid 1440s, when together they asserted their wives’ claim to lands at Lavington in Wiltshire.25 CP40/732, cart. rot. Later, in 1454, Quatermayns and his wife agreed that her manor of Great Rycote was to pass to the Fowler family should they die childless, a settlement through which the MP’s eldest grandson would succeed to the property after Sibyl Quatermayns’s death.26 Harl. Ch. 4031. During the same period, Fowler assisted Richard in his quarrel with William Collingridge, another relative of the Quatermayns family, a dispute relating to an exchange of land between the pair nearly a quarter of a century earlier. In association with two other Quatermayns feoffees, Fowler sued Collingridge and his wife in King’s bench, a case that came to pleadings in Michaelmas term 1455. Fowler and his co-plaintiffs alleged that the Collingridges had neglected to pay a rent of 30s. p.a. from the manor of ‘Quatremains’ in Great Milton that Quatermayns had reserved for himself and his widowed mother at the time of the exchange. Alleging that the demand for rent was a ploy to disturb him in his title to that property, Collingridge responded with lawsuits of his own against Quatermayns in both King’s bench and the Chancery. In spite of these suits, Fowler and his associates won their case against him, obliging him to settle with them for £35.27 KB27/778, rot. 38; 781, rot. 40; C1/26/208 Fowler also came to the aid of his brother-in-law in 1458, when he and his eldest son Richard Fowler stood surety for Quatermayns, then facing charges in Exchequer chamber relating to his conduct as sheriff of Oxfordshire and Berkshire in 1454-5.28 Sel. Cases in Exchequer Chamber, i (Selden Soc. li), 171-2.

By the later 1450s Fowler was of advanced years but still active in public affairs. From his initial appointment as such, he served continuously as a j.p., perhaps until his death, in spite of having received an exemption for life from holding any office under the Crown as far back as November 1446,29 CPR, 1446-52, p. 26. and he was a member of at least three ad hoc commissions in Buckinghamshire following the accession of Edward IV. It is likely that he died soon after March 1469, when he obtained the keeping of a messuage and tenement in Amersham from the Crown.30 CFR, xx. 252. An Elizabethan plea roll from the ct. of KB erroneously states that Fowler died on 6 July 1452. The roll, for Hil. 1598, contains the records of a suit Theophilus Adams brought against John Lambert in the late 1590s for ejecting him from a messuage and land in Buckingham, once part of the holdings that had passed to the MP from the Bartons. These include a full transcript of the elder John Barton’s will and a list of those who had held the property at issue after him, along with the dates of their deaths. However, this descent is far from entirely accurate. Not only does it give an impossible date for Fowler’s death, it also records that his son Richard died in 1467, rather than ten years later: KB27/1348, rot. 747d. There is a transcript of the suit in Reps. of Sir Edward Coke ed. Wilson, pt. iv. 96-104, but a perusal of the original plea roll has confirmed that the mistakes belong to it and not to Coke. Not reappointed to the commission of the peace for Buckinghamshire in July the following year, he was certainly dead when his son Richard made his will in October 1477.31 PCC 32 Wattys (PROB11/6, ff. 248v-250). In the will, Richard provided for a monk or priest to sing daily masses for the soul of his late father in the chapel of St. Dunstan at Westminster abbey, where the MP lay buried. Perhaps Richard, a man of no little influence given that he had risen to the office of chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, had secured this relatively exalted burial place for his father, 32 The chapel lay within the abbey’s sub-hostelry: B.F. Harvey, Westminster Abbey and its Estates, 393n. but there is no way of knowing whether the MP had spent his final years in or around London.33 There was a William Fowler, ‘gentleman’, of Holborn, London and Westminster in the early years of Edward IV’s reign, but it is very unlikely that he was the subject of this biography. This William was married to a Joan (although it is possible that the MP had a second wife); he had an alias, ‘Caruar’, not associated with the Bucks. man; and he was retained to serve with the earl of Warwick in Calais for a year in 1465 (an unlikely undertaking for the by now elderly MP): CCR, 1461-8, pp. 159, 192, 366, 325, 367; C76/149, m. 20. Richard also set aside money for the churches at Thornton and several other parishes in Buckinghamshire, to satisfy a bequest which the feoffees of the late Isabel Barton, his father among them, had failed to fulfil. Of the MP’s daughters, Sibyl wife first of a member of the Brecknock family of Clewer in Berkshire, married in the later 1470s the lawyer Thomas Danvers*.34 F.N. Macnamara, Mems. Danvers Fam. 155-6; PCC 2 Fetiplace (PROB11/17, f. 11). The match with Danvers strengthened existing family connexions, since Thomas was a great-nephew of Richard Quatermayns and his sister, Jane Danvers, married Sibyl’s brother Richard Fowler.