WILLIAM, John

It is possible that the MP was the John William who in 1428-9 paid 6s. 8d. p.a. to the steward of Southampton for the use of a certain pool (‘gurgite’) in the water opposite the town, although there was a namesake then living in Southampton. The latter, the holder of a tenement on the east side of French Street from 1436 to 1445 and a garden by the West Hall from 1435 to 1450,8 Stewards’ Bks. 5; Cart. God’s House, ii (Soton. Rec. Ser. xx), 386, 390, 407. The MP has also been distinguished from John William of Kingswear, Devon, master of Le Jesus and other of Hen. V’s ships, who received an annuity of 20 marks from the customs of Southampton until his death on 29 June 1447: CCR, 1447-54, p. 1; CPR, 1416-22, pp. 121, 257, 267; 1422-9, p. 13; The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 864. was a cooper from Chichester who is recorded trading in the port in oil, wine, alum, soap and iron – commodities which he shipped along the coast to his home port.9 Port Bk. 1435-6 (Soton. Rec. Ser. vii), 6, 20, 38, 58. In 1439 the cooper was sued in the ct. of c.p. for damages of £40 by Thomas Canynges* of London after failing to carry 120 woollen cloths safely from Southampton to Hamble according to their agreement: CP40/715, rot. 437d. Since John the future MP also dealt in such goods it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between the two men. However, at least by 1437 our John William was trading in wine and cloth, and in the 1440s his interests extended also to canvas, salt, figs, raisins, onions and wax. The large quantities involved are a measure of the success of his enterprise.10 E122/140/62, ff. 1v, 2, 18, 19, 22, 64v; 141/23, ff. 8v, 12, 26; 141/25, ff. 12v, 14, 35v; 141/29, ff. 3v, 10v, 20v, 25v, 26v, 39, 54, 56v; 209/1, ff. 12, 35, 82; Port Bk. 1439-40 (Soton. Rec. Ser. v), 2, 98; H. Bradley, Views of Hosts of Alien Merchants, 54. Part of his profits were derived from the carrying trade, for his boats were used to bring to the quayside cargoes of wine and other commodities such as almonds and woad from Mediterranean carracks lying in Southampton Water, and in this way he evidently established close contacts with visiting Italian merchants, on occasion standing surety for their payment of local tolls.11 Port Bk. 1439-40, passim, esp. 9, 33, 95; Port and Brokage Bks. 1448-9 (Soton. Rec. Ser. xxxvi), 6-8, 26-27, 51. William also possessed larger sea-going vessels on which his business partners, such as Walter Clerk*, made shipments of corn and other produce.12 E122/141/25, f. 11. As part owner of The Thomas of Southampton, he was licenced by the Crown in March 1450 to use the vessel to trade in all manner of merchandise (except that pertaining to the staple at Calais), in order to raise money for the ransom of John Melton, esquire. In June 1451 his ship The Edward joined the fleet assembled to carry to Aquitaine the forces of Richard, Lord Rivers, and he and the master were granted £65 from the wool customs in London to pay the wages of the crew.13 Letters and Pprs. Illust. Wars of the English ed. Stevenson, i. 514; CPR, 1446-52, p. 448; CCR, 1447-54, pp. 219-20. Similarly engaged in 1451 was the Mary of Southampton, which belonged to Thomas William, probably his kinsman. John obtained a licence in September 1455 to trade with Brittany, and another in the following June to carry pilgrims to Santiago de Compostella on The Edward.14 DKR, xlviii. 409, 414. When mayor of Southampton in January 1457 he borrowed from the town a ‘bower ancer’ worth £8, doubtless to use on one of his ships, and later he seems to have planned to build his own dock, for in August 1469 he took out a 99-year lease from the commonalty of a plot on the ‘West Kay’, 20 feet wide and 54 feet long, together with the adjacent sea bed to a distance of 39 feet from the land, with permission to build on both.15 Remembrance Bk. i. 1; Soton. recs., SC4/3/9.

William’s inland trade was also busy, for he supplied tradesmen and inn-keepers of Winchester, Oxford, Andover, Newbury and Salisbury with wine and fish.16 Brokage Bk. 1443-4, i (Soton. Rec. Ser. iv), 55, 63; ii (ibid. vi), 179, 198, 210, 299; Port and Brokage Bks. 1448-9, pp. 112, 117, 120, 141, 147, 171, 190, 219. Naturally, he sometimes had to go to law to recover debts owed to him. For instance, he brought actions in the common pleas against a husbandman from Kent for the sum of £3 3s. 4d., and against a merchant from Kingsbridge in Devon regarding a debt of £15, but both men obtained pardons of their outlawry for failing to appear to answer him, and it is uncertain whether he ever recovered his money.17 CPR, 1452-61, p. 382; 1467-77, p. 228; C241/247/31. He himself was the subject of legal actions, too, which may explain why he took out a general pardon in January 1458; and he was outlawed on more than one occasion, notably after failing to answer a plea of debt for £40 brought by Thomas Hexstall*. To escape the rigours of the law, however, he either used his local influence with the mayor of Southampton so that the writ capias utlagiata was not executed (or so a creditor complained to the chancellor in the late 1470s), or else managed to obtain a pardon of outlawry, as he did in the Hextall case on 6 Oct. 1472.18 C67/42, m. 40; CPR, 1467-77, p. 324; C1/66/40.

By that date William had served five terms as mayor and for more than 30 years had occupied a leading position among the rulers of Southampton. He had been the first sheriff elected after the granting of the royal charter of 1447 which turned the borough into an urban county. As mayor in February 1449 he was party to the electoral indenture to Parliament, and during this term of office he evidently tried to impose his authority over local trouble-makers in an attempt to put an end to the political dissension of the previous few years.On 19 Apr. certain of his leading opponents, John Payn I* and the latter’s son-in-law Thomas White among them, made a formal quitclaim and relaxation to him and others of all the actions, suits and quarrels between them from the beginning of the world to date. Yet underlying grievances were not laid to rest, for Payn, always one to harbour a grudge, brought a suit against William in the central courts at Westminster in October 1456, and accused Walter Clerk (the sheriff during William’s second mayoralty) of maintaining him in breach of the statutes. Although William was not to be a principal figure in the increasingly vituperative litigation between Payn and Clerk over the next four years, he remained on Clerk’s side. The two men had also been associated in a quarrel with John Chapman of Shaftesbury, the yeoman-porter to the duke of Somerset, who alleged that he had been wronged by them and Nicholas Holmehegge* during the latter’s mayoralty of 1454-5. Chapman had to be paid 33s. 4d. from the town funds before he would make a quitclaim of all his actions against them in November 1457.19 KB27/794, rex rot. 6; Soton. stewards’ bks. SC5/1/9, ff. 32v, 33. Payn pursued William in the law-courts until 1465: CP40/811, rot. 199.

Meanwhile, William had been one of 16 burgesses named on the parliamentary indenture of March 1453, and had himself been elected to Parliament in June 1455. His second election as mayor during the parliamentary recess that autumn led inevitably to neglect of his duties at home when the Commons were called to two more sessions, lasting 12 weeks altogether, before the dissolution in March 1456.20 C219/15/6; 16/2; E326/11801. He received £2 from the steward as part payment of his parlty. wages, but not until 3 Apr. 1457, during his third mayoralty: Soton. stewards’ bks. SC5/1/8, f. 13v. William’s actions as mayor were at least three times the subject of petitions to the chancellor. He had allegedly seized without cause a tun and four barells of oil worth £20 from Damiano de Pesaro, a Genoese merchant who felt he deserved better treatment since he had been living in Southampton for more than 15 years, had paid all ‘lottez and scottes’ and been sworn as a freeman of the town. In April 1456 William confiscated and sold a cargo of wheat which the owner had licence to ship overseas, ‘havyng no consideracion [except] to his own malicious and wilfull opynyon’. And in his third mayoralty (1469-70) he brought an action of debt before himself as judge in the mayoral court.21 C1/17/255; 32/313; 49/58.

William’s final mayoralties of 1469-71 coincided with the gravest crises of Edward IV’s reign, and presented the MP with certain political dilemmas, which he seems to have resolved by quickly coming to terms with changes of regime. On 15 Oct. 1470, two days after Henry VI had been re-crowned, William instructed the steward of Southampton to pay 2s. to a gentleman in the service of Richard, earl of Warwick, to take a letter to him, and in January 1471 he authorized delivery of £11 to Warwick himself from the purser of the royal ship The Gracedieu. Meanwhile, he had proved willing to represent the borough in the Parliament of the Readeption. He had left Southampton on 23 Nov., returned home for Christmas, and gone back to Westminster on 19 Jan. for the second session, then staying there another 38 days. In all he was paid a total of £10 13s., but part of this was reimbursement for various payments he had made at the Exchequer. These had been necessary for a plea which Sir John Langstrother, the treasurer of England, instigated before the barons on 10 Dec. Langstrother informed the court that William, as mayor of Southampton, had seized for the King 40 butts of alum from an alien merchant who had failed to pay subsidies. Ownership of the cargo was claimed by John Neve, a London mercer, who asserted that the subsidies had been paid and William had wrongly seized the alum (a plea which later won the support of the restored Edward IV). A messenger who came to Southampton on 15 Apr. from the Lancastrian prince of Wales, recently arrived from Normandy with his mother Margaret of Anjou, was rewarded with 20d. Southampton was currently engaged in a lawsuit with Henry, duke of Buckingham, over the title to some local property, and at some point in 1470-1 William stayed in London at the Cardinal’s Hat near Newgate to have talks about it with the young duke’s council. Perhaps Southampton’s liberties came under threat when Edward IV regained his throne; in the summer William supervised a ‘grete serche’ in the Exchequer for evidences regarding the payment of Southampton’s fee farm over the centuries since the days of King John.22 Soton. stewards’ bks. SC5/1/13, ff. 18, 21, 26, 29, 31, 34v; E159/247, recorda Mich. rots. 1d, 2.

Over the years William was placed in positions of trust by his fellow merchants. Robert Hoton entrusted him with his goods and chattels in 1454, and in 1462 he was made a feoffee of the property of Joan, widow of both William Marche* and Nicholas Holmehegge, to implement her will with regard to the foundation of a chantry. He was one of the ‘venerable men of the town’ asked in 1463 by the relict of Adam Marsh to administer her four messuages for the rest of her life, paying her the rents and profits until they reverted on her death to the commonalty.23 CCR, 1454-61, p. 126; Black Bk. iii (Soton. Rec. Soc. 1915), 3; C1/28/98; Soton. recs., SC4/2/294, 297-8. William himself held a number of properties in Southampton, including three cottages and two vacant plots in the parish of St. Michael, where he lived in a capital tenement on the corner of Blue Anchor Lane. For several years he paid the town authorities 2s. p.a. for some land at the foot of the town wall.24 Southampton Terrier 1454, 164, 373-6, 384, 394; Soton. stewards’ bks. SC5/1/8, f. 5. Marriage to the widowed Ellen Halstede brought him property in Salisbury, too, but led to acrimonious exchanges with William Lightfoot* and Richard Walker, the executors of Ellen’s former father-in-law, William Halstede. In 1452 the executors accused John and Ellen in the King’s bench of conspiring with William Swayn* of Salisbury to forge muniments, and John had to sue an action of trespass against Walker for taking away the testator’s goods. Walker protested to the chancellor that when this action was brought in Southampton he had been arrested and imprisoned and the mayor refused to let him appoint an attorney. Furthermore, although he was afterwards given a day to make answer, and trusting on this went home to Salisbury, in his absense William ensured his condemnation in the sum of £300. He asserted that the Williams’ claim to the property in Salisbury was based on deeds forged by Ellen’s former husband.25 KB27/763, rot. 45; Procs. Chancery Eliz. ed. Caley and Bayley, ii. p. xxx (C1/2/41); C1/18/179.

William remained involved in Southampton affairs until late in life. He was one of 15 burgesses named on the parliamentary indenture of 1472, is recorded present in the ‘counsaile hous’ when a certain royal commission was delivered there on 5 Jan. 1474, and was still active as an alderman in August that year, by which date his son, Walter, was officiating as town clerk. Indeed, for some weeks in 1474-5 he acted as lieutenant for the mayor while he was away from the town, and at Michaelmas 1475 he served as a j.p. there. His trading ventures, too, continued into the 1470s.26 C219/17/2; Remembrance Bk. i. 5, 47; E122/142/8, f. 12v; Soton. stewards’ bks. SC5/1/15, f. 13v. On his failure to respond to the suit for debt brought by a Northampton mercer in the London court of husting, William was outlawed in May 1476, and the mayor of Southampton confiscated a few of his possessions, such as a horse, a length of cloth and a featherbed, but claimed that he held no lands or tenements which might be seized to recompense his creditor.27 SC11/597; E159/253, recorda Easter rot. 23. He probably died before 1480. His widow, Joan, petitioned the bishop of Lincoln as chancellor regarding her title to five messuages and other properties in Southampton, including gardens and a ferry, which she claimed had been sold to her and her late husband by William Fymark, who had intended them to pass to Joan’s heirs because of the affection he bore her. Her stepson, Walter, who was John William’s heir and executor, refused to relinquish the title deeds, and responded that he had generously leased this part of his inheritance to Joan for her lifetime, an arrangement which she had accepted of her ‘good and fre wille’ and not in response to any bullying tactics on his part.28 C1/50/27-30.

Walter William contested the claim of Agnes, widow of Vincent Pitlesden*, that his late father had failed to honour a bond in £20 to her previous husband Thomas Panter.29 C1/62/46. He was the mayor of Southampton who was forced to flee and take sanctuary shortly after his re-election in September 1483, when together with many other prominent figures in the locality he rose in rebellion against Richard III. He was attainted in 1484, but rehabilitated by the first Parliament of Henry VII’s reign.30 Davies, 175; PROME, xv. 26-27, 102-5.