As the first mayor of Norwich under the charter of 1404, Appleyard occupies a special place in the city’s history, and his record of ten elections to Parliament is second only, in this period, to that of Walter Bixton. The son of a leading citizen of Norwich, he is first recorded in August 1367, when an inquest was held as to whether Bartholomew Appleyard and his sons William and Edmund might effect an entail of certain lands at East Carleton, some four miles south of the city, which were held in chief by the remarkable service of providing the King with 224 herring pasties whenever he visited the region. After obtaining a favourable verdict, the Appleyards completed the transaction without waiting for a royal licence to be formally issued, though for this misdemeanour they were pardoned six months later. William was admitted a freeman of Norwich on 23 Sept. 1367 when his father was a bailiff.
Appleyard inherited a number of properties in Norwich, situated for the most part in the parishes of St. Andrew, St. Michael at Pleas and St. Giles. The house occupied by his father, but largely built as it now stands by himself, is a noted building renowned for its wall of finely cut black flints. (It served from the late 16th century as the city bridewell and is now the Bridewell Museum.) He paid the city rent for part of ‘Cokeylane’ in St. Andrew’s, and also for a ditch outside Heigham gate where he owned water-mills. In addition, Appleyard was possessed of substantial landed holdings a few miles to the south of Norwich, having inherited, from his parents, manors at Intwood, Bracon Ash and Hethel as well as part of the manors of Stanfield in Wymondham and Rainthorpe Hall in Newton, and adding to these by purchase lands in the same region at Dunston, Wreningham and Swainsthorpe. In October 1391 he obtained for himself and his heirs a royal grant of the view of frankpledge regarding all his tenants at Hethel. A year later he acquired a neighbouring manor at Carleton.
Indeed, it was clearly the Appleyards’ wish to be accounted socially as one with the gentry of Norfolk. William’s early marriage linked him with the Cleres of Ormesby, who owned extensive estates in the east of the county. By the will made in 1384 by William Clere, his father-in-law, Appleyard and his wife received ten marks and a confirmation of their tenure of certain lands at Ormesby, Burgh and Runham, as well as a bequest of 40 sheep for their son John. For over 30 years Appleyard acted as a trustee of Clere’s estates on behalf of his mother-in-law, Denise, and her eldest son, John Clere, and as late as 1417 he made a settlement on another of his brothers-in-law, Robert Clere of Stokesby, of the reversion of the manor of Runham.
In 1384 Appleyard had assisted in the conveyance of the advowson of St. Peter Mancroft (Norwich) to the collegiate church of St. Mary in the Fields. And it was in the same church that, in 1388, he founded a chantry for the soul of his father and for his own spiritual welfare, donating 100 marks to that end. Another chantry was subsequently endowed there at the behest of William Rees of Tharston, esquire, whose first wife was probably Appleyard’s sister, and whose own sister may have been Appleyard’s second wife. Certainly, the two men were closely associated: Appleyard witnessed several deeds on Rees’s behalf, helped him to purchase part of the Nerford estate in 1393, and from 1401 acted as his feoffee of manors in Cambridgeshire. They both sat in the Parliament of 1397 (Jan.), when Rees was elected for Norfolk.
Appleyard’s will, made on 20 Apr. 1418, left his place of burial to wherever it pleased God, and instructed his executors to sell two messuages in St. Andrew’s parish to pay his debts. He died on 4 Sept. 1419 and his will was proved in the Norwich consistory court on 14 Oct.