BARBER, William II, of Stafford.

William Barber was rather overshadowed by his younger brother, John. Both men, like their father, made their careers in the service of Humphrey Stafford. William was active first, elected for his native borough in 1433 during their father’s lifetime and employed as a clerk of the Stafford household. C219/14/4. He is to be distinguished from a namesake who, in 1411, was granted an annuity of £5 by Henry, prince of Wales, and in 1438 was appointed porter of Cardigan castle: CPR, 1422-9, p. 62; 1436-41, p. 143. In March 1441 the earl granted both him and his brother life annuities of five marks. Five years later, he pardoned them, as their father’s executors, of the debts due to him from their father’s time as his receiver. NLW, Peniarth mss, 280, pp. 14, 41. No doubt their mutual service to this great man was a factor in their election together for their home town to the Parliaments of 1453 and 1455. C219/16/2, 3. William survived at least into the 1460s, for both he and his brother were jurors at the inquisitions post mortem, both held at Stafford, of Thomas Stanley I* in September 1463 and Sir William Trussell† in April 1464. C140/9/16, 17. It may also have been the MP who, in 1472, sued some tradesmen for close-breaking at Forebridge, near Stafford, probably in respect of property he had inherited from his father. A Chancery petition shows that he was dead by 1483. At some date before the spring of that year (and perhaps as early as 1465) William Hynd, bailiff of the duchy of Lancaster in Staffordshire in the 1460s, complained that he had purchased lands in ‘More Holme’ from Barber for ten marks, but that, after Barber’s death, Ralph Machyn and John Churchyard, sureties for the conveyance of the property, had refused to settle the land on him. CP40/844, rot. 280d; 846, rot. 105; C1/32/2.