NOTEFIELD, William

Notefield’s origins and early life are obscure, but by the reign of Henry V he was established among the merchants of the port of Dartmouth, where he resided in a tenement with an adjoining garden, the property of a later mayor of the town, William Clerk.2 Ibid. 110, 112, 116. His public career remained limited: his single return to Parliament in 1426 aside, he only served once as bailiff of his home town, and never rose to the mayoralty.3 Ibid. 101, 184.

Notefield nevertheless seems to have been a merchant of some wealth. He was engaged in the profitable overseas trade in both cloth and wine, although it is not possible to quantify his dealings with any precision.4 E122/40/30, m. 2. In 1433 he was trading to Portugal in partnership with John Gayncote*, his colleague in the 1426 Parliament. Between them they had loaded a ship of theirs called the Grace Dieu of Dartmouth with 140 woolen cloths and other goods and hired a Portugese merchant, Alvaro Gonzales, as their factor to take the cargo to Lisbon and return with other commodities. This Gonzales duly did and by January 1434 he had brought the Grace Dieu and a new cargo back to the port of Southampton. However, when the two Dartmouth merchants tried to take possession of their vessel and imported goods, they found that Gonzales had also brought a sizable number of his Portugese friends with him: about 100 foreign merchants and mariners claimed to have rights and interests in the ship and its cargo, leaving Notefield and Gayncote with no option but to appeal to the authorities and have the ship and its contents arrested pending an inquiry by a royal commission.5 CPR, 1429-36, p. 351.

In spite of his limited public career, Notefield clearly commanded some respect among his fellow burgesses, who periodically chose him as a feoffee and called upon him to attest their property deeds. Prominent among the men with whom he was thus connected was his business associate Gayncote, who not only named him as one of the feoffees of property in Dartmouth and Norton entrusted to him by the former bailiff John Ford to his wife’s use,6 Watkin, 108. but who some years later also included him among the trustees of the chantry set up in the chapel of St. Saviour for the benefit of Richard London and his family.7 Ibid. 116, 118. In these activities, Notefield formed part of a circle which included many of the leading townsmen of Dartmouth, men like Thomas Asshenden*, Robert Bowyer, Richard Carswell, John Foxley†, John Hawley* and John More II*.8 Ibid. 114.

Few other details of Notefield’s career have come to light. He was not, apparently, a quarrelsome or litigious man, and is only rarely found pursuing his interests in the courts. Among the exceptions was a dispute in the second half of 1425 over a small debt of 60s. owed by William Hythe, a man from Taunton, a matter to which Notefield nevertheless attached sufficient importance to pursue it in person in the court of common pleas.9 CP40/658, rot. 285; 660, rot. 171. Perhaps more seriously, about the same time Notefield was one of a group of important Dartmouth men headed by Richard Rowe and Henry Goldsmith (respectively a past and a future mayor of the town) accused by John Burley† of encroaching upon his property.10 KB27/655, rot. 43. Regrettably, no details have been discovered of a potentially more damaging disagreement with the prominent landowner Baldwin Fulford* who in 1433 released all personal actions to Notefield.11 Watkin, 112, 113.

The exact date of William’s death is unknown. He was still alive in September 1439 when he last appears as party to a local deed, but was certainly dead two years later.12 Ibid. 118, 122. He had apparently lived in some style, for after his death his house and garden were taken over by one of the most important burgesses of fifteenth-century Dartmouth, Nicholas Stebbing*.13 Ibid. 144.