SPENCER, William

Of unknown antecedents, William was perhaps related to Thomas Spencer, a chandler who was a bailiff of Cambridge in 1420-1 and 1427-8 and who helped to reorganize the town’s common council in 1426.4 C.H. Cooper, Annals Cambridge, i. 175. It is impossible to prove a connexion between the MP and the Spencers of Hatley, 12 miles south-west of Cambridge. A William Spencer lived there in the second decade of the 15th century but he was dead by May 1421: CPR, 1392-6, p. 15; 1396-9, p. 271; 1399-1402, p. 256; 1416-23, pp. 23, 366-7. It is likely that it was the Hatley William who was a co-plaintiff of Robert Clopton* in the Chancery sometime between 1404 and the earlier 1420s: W.M. Palmer, ‘Hist. Clopton’, Cambridge Antiq. Soc. Procs. xxxiii. 25; C1/4/96. There was also a William Spencer who pursued a suit in the same court in the 1430s or the early 1440s, in an attempt to secure a legacy which he claimed his father, Richard, had left him. His bill reveals that he was a merchant but not his place of origin: C1/11/443. William was certainly active at Cambridge by the summer of 1426 when he served on a jury panel at the gaol delivery sessions there.5 JUST3/8/12/3. He may have had interests at Grantchester immediately to the south-west, for in October 1428 he made two releases of land in that parish to a couple of its residents.6 King’s Coll., Cambridge, GRA/104-5. . His election to Parliament in 1429 occurred at the end of his first term as bailiff and he was still alive in 1443. A John Spencer, possibly a descendant of his, was a resident of Cambridge in the early 1500s.7 Grace Book B, ed. Bateson, i. 212.