BEAUFITZ, William (d.1463), of London and Gillingham, Kent.

William was probably John Beaufitz’s second son, and never inherited the principal family property at Gillingham. It is unlikely our MP was William Beaufitz, clerk, brother of John Beaufitz, as asserted in F.F. Smith, Rochester in Parlt. 74. After becoming vicar of Halstow, that William died in 1433. A window and sepulchral brass in Gillingham church existed in his memory, alongside similar monuments to his brother and oldest nephew, John: Archaeologia Cantiana, lxi. 160-9. Theirs was an established gentry family in north Kent by the beginning of the fifteenth century, with a seat acquired through the marriage of our MP’s great-grandfather, Robert, to the daughter of Roger de Twidall. Archaeologia Cantiana, lxi. 170-1. William’s father appears to have played little part in the affairs of the county, but he and other members of the family did take an interest in the administration of Rochester bridge. By 1403 a John Beaufitz was a member of the bridge council, and in Henry V’s reign he was named on a couple of local commissions, including one to collect the loan of 1419. By 1422 he or his son and namesake was one of the two wardens of the bridge, and although he had been replaced by Michaelmas 1424, in 1426-7 he was associated with John Darrell* and others of the ‘commonalty’ of the bridge as an auditor of the wardens’ accounts. Rochester Bridge Trust, wardens’ accts. 1406-7, 1424-5, 1426-7, F 1/16, 32, 34, 36; CPR, 1416-22, p. 267; CFR, xiv. 317-18. John the son took a more prominent role in Kent society: on six occasions between 1416 and 1431 he attested the shire elections to Parliament. C219/11/8, 13/1, 2, 5, 14/2. When he died in 1433 his property in Kent apparently passed to his widow, Alice. Archaeologia Cantiana, lxi. 170-1. Alice, who was an heiress (CP25(1)/114/304/254) went on to marry the Sussex lawyer William Ryman* and then Sir John Passhele (d.1453) of Evegate.

The first mention of William was his election in March 1425 to sit in Parliament as one of the burgesses for Rochester, which may have come about through his family’s connexion with Rochester bridge. The elections appear to have been heavily influenced by Bishop Langley of Durham, an important patron of the bridge, and Beaufitz’s fellow burgess was the bishop’s nephew, James Hopwode*. Nevertheless, soon afterwards William, presumably still a young man, moved to London to follow a career in trade. There is no conclusive evidence of the manner of his introduction to the city but the family had links with the mercantile community and before too long William married Elizabeth, the daughter of the prosperous London fishmonger, Thomas Badby. The marriage had probably taken place by February 1431 when Beaufitz acted alongside his father-in-law as one a group of feoffees for a London skinner. Corp. London RO, hr 159/53. By then he had been admitted to Badby’s company, the Fishmongers’, and was of sufficient standing the following year to act as surety for John Bedham, to whom the civic authorities had committed the keeping of the children of a deceased alderman, Richard Goslyn†. In August 1433 he was one of the ‘masters and goodmen’ of the Company who asked the mayor and aldermen to allow William Combes* to translate from the Glovers to the Fishmongers. Beaufitz was also developing important trading partnerships. Along with Stephen Forster*, his fellow fishmonger, and other Londoners in 1437 he shipped merchandise to Bayonne, only for the authorities there to levy new tolls on the cargo in retaliation for an action of debt which Beaufitz and the rest had begun in London against certain Gascon merchants. The seizure of the Gascons’ vessel led to a major trade dispute between the two cities, which Beaufitz, along with his partners, was responsible for settling in June 1442. They were rewarded by the City with the sum of 100 marks, taken from the duties levied on trade between the two ports. Cal. Letter Bk. London, K, 121, 168-9, 218, 270-1.

Beaufitz’s trading interests in Bayonne, which focused primarily on wine, reflected his role in royal service. By the spring of 1440 he had been made clerk of the King’s cellars, and as such he took charge of the supply of wine to the Household. By July of that year he was handling the business at the Exchequer of the chief butler of England, Sir Ralph Butler (shortly to be made Lord Sudeley), and it may well be that he was already acting as Butler’s principal deputy. CPR, 1436-41, p. 434; E403/739, m. 10. This role also explains his later appointment in 1448 as gauger of wines in Bayonne and supervisor of merchandise shipped into that port and its neighbour St. Jean de Luz. CPR, 1446-52, p. 163. Unusually, as well as holding administrative office in the domus providencie, Beaufitz was also a member of the King’s household-above-stairs. In the royal wardrobe accounts of 1441-2 he received robes as a yeoman of the King’s chamber and in the following year was listed among the esquires of the hall and chamber. E101/409/9, f. 36v; 11, f. 38v. His links with both the royal household and the mercantile community of London ensured that he was also well placed to secure an office in the customs administration. Accordingly, in early 1442 he was appointed controller of the tunnage and poundage in the port of London, on condition that he wrote the rolls of controlment in his own hand and exercised all other duties in person. He retained this post until June 1447 when he was appointed, along with the Exchequer official John Poutrell, to collect the customs and subsidies on wool in the same port. Beaufitz and Poutrell rendered account for the customs until Beaufitz’s replacement in May 1452. CPR, 1441-6, p. 33; CFR, xviii. 55. A year earlier he had also been appointed as one of the collectors of tunnage and poundage, an office which he continued to hold until Michaelmas 1462. CFR, xviii. 234; xix. 97; E122/203/4.

By the mid 1440s Beaufitz had also emerged as an important figure in royal financial administration (despite not holding any formal position in the Exchequer), and in the mobilization of the merchant capital of London on the Crown’s behalf. He frequently received tallies of assignment from individuals who had found it difficult to realize them from Crown revenues, and negotiated at the Exchequer for their reassignment. Although the treasurer of the Household was the person who most frequently called on Beaufitz’s services in this regard, he also dealt with tallies held by the archbishop of Canterbury, the abbess of Barking, Sir Henry Percy (warden of the east march), John Gedney* the London draper and many others. E403/757, m. 11; 759, mm. 4, 10, 13, 14; 765, m. 12. Furthermore, he evidently bought tallies at a discount and used his contacts at the Exchequer and access to royal patronage to obtain payment at face value. Given the frequency with which he appeared in the records of the Exchequer of Receipt as recipient of tallies this must have been a lucrative venture. Occasionally, however, things went wrong and Beaufitz was forced to appeal to the King for special favour. On 12 Nov. 1447 he received a grant of yearly sums from the wool customs in the ports of Southampton, Ipswich, London (where he was himself collector), Sandwich, Hull and Bristol, and from the tunnage and poundage in London to repay just over £1,555 outstanding from almost £2,000-worth of tallies originally assigned to Sir Roger Fiennes*, when treasurer of the Household; CPR, 1446-52, p. 118. and on 11 Jan. 1449 he was awarded another grant, this time allowing him to ship to Italy 450 sacks of wool entirely free of customs, so he might recover £1,200, the value of 24 tallies he had returned to the Exchequer. These included tallies previously assigned to the duke of York, and even some assigned on he himself as collector of customs in London CPR, 1446-52, p. 206; E404/65/92-3. A third grant, authorizing repayment from the customs of some £1,672 in returned tallies, was issued on 25 Sept. that year. Beaufitz’s collection of these sums was threatened by the projected expiry of the current grant of the wool subsidy to the King (due to happen on 3 Apr. 1454), but in anticipation of that event in December 1453 he obtained a further grant allowing the collection of nearly £770 still outstanding, mainly from the wool customs and tunnage and poundage (of which he was still collector) in London, and on the following 12 Apr. he was allowed to continue exporting wool to Italy regardless. CPR, 1452-61, pp. 164-5. The difficulties experienced in collecting these sums did not discourage Beaufitz from further trading in discounted tallies: in May 1456 he surrendered 11 tallies, worth over £1,500, handed to him by John Stourton II*, Lord Stourton, for the purchase of wine for the Household, of which Stourton had formerly been treasurer. This time, however, Beaufitz was careful to specify repayment from sources other than the over-burdened customs. CPR, 1452-61, pp. 359-60. His relations with various royal creditors aside, Beaufitz himself lent money to the Crown. In January 1453, for instance, as part of a syndicate that included Poutrell, the Exchequer officials Thomas Pound* and John Wood III* and the London alderman, William Gregory, he forwarded the sum of £600, receiving repayment in the form of assignments on the customs. E401/830, m. 25; E403/791, m. 12; 793, mm. 17, 18.

As his dealings in discounted tallies show, Beaufitz was able to secure royal patronage with apparent ease. This was due to his place in the Household and his apparently close personal relations with his superior, Lord Sudeley. In April 1440 he had received a grant in survivorship with his patron’s mother Dame Alice Butler (Henry VI’s former nurse), of an annuity of 40 marks charged on the fee farm of Great Yarmouth, which he carried on receiving after her death. CPR, 1436-41, p. 434; E159/217, recorda Trin. rot. 3d; 223, brevia Trin. rot. 12d. In 1442 when Lord Ralph, then the King’s chamberlain, had been sent to Brittany with the duke of Orléans, Beaufitz received at the Exchequer the reward of £200 on his behalf, E403/745, m. 10. and following Sudeley’s appointment as treasurer of England in July 1443 he regularly collected his fee for that office and for attendance upon the King’s Council. E403/753, mm. 4, 5, 9; 754, mm. 11; 757, m. 3; 765, m. 12; 769, m. 1; 771, m. 6. Throughout, he continued to serve Sudeley as his deputy in his capacity as chief butler of England, an office which Sudeley did not surrender until May 1458. C67/42, m. 9.

The access to royal patronage that his court connexions gave him and his close working relationship with a variety of royal officials ensured that Beaufitz was well placed to petition the King and this may explain the eclectic collection of grants that he received from the early 1440s. Besides those already mentioned, these included a seven-year lease of the gold and silver mines on the lordship of Clevedon, Somerset, lands in Purley, Essex, a tun of Gascon wine every year in the port of London, and (in survivorship with Henry Somer*, the former chancellor of the Exchequer), an annuity of £15 from the port of Sandwich. CFR, xvii. 208, 294-5; CPR, 1441-6, p. 459; 1446-52, p. 30. Beaufitz also received grants of wardships of lands of the King’s tenants-in-chief which were in the gift of the treasurer of England: in December 1446, along with the Oxfordshire gentlemen, Drew Barantyn* and Richard Quatermayns*, the wardship and marriage of the daughters of Sir Stephen Popham*, and a month later, along with John Holme, one of the barons of the Exchequer, that of the heir of John Tatersale. CFR, xviii. 60, 64. As clerk of the King’s cellars Beaufitz had no difficulty in securing exemption from the Act of Resumption passed in the Parliament of 1449 (Nov.), with respect to all his grants and assignments except for his annuity of £15 from Sandwich, nor from that passed in the Parliament of 1453. PROME, xii. 136, 251.

The flow of royal patronage slowed up in the 1450s but Beaufitz continued to be well connected, working closely with successive treasurers of the Household, although the range of individuals with whom he dealt at the Exchequer was narrower than in the previous decade. There is no obvious explanation for this, although perhaps the difficulties that he had encountered in receiving payment upon his returned tallies had discouraged him from further speculations. Equally, however, his reluctance to deal in discounted tallies may reflect a more general lack of confidence in the Crown’s credit-worthiness. Beaufitz was no political partisan and the grants of December 1453, April 1454 and May 1456 allowing him to recover sums still owed to him for returned tallies in the 1440s show that he was equally able to secure favours from the duke of York during his protectorates as from the King. R.A. Griffiths, Hen. VI, 729, 786, 788. He was successful too in his petition to the King during the Parliament of 1455-6, which pointed out that although for the repayment of ‘great sums’ he had spent on wine for the Household he had been granted the customs in various ports and a licence to export wool he was still owed the major part of his outlay. The Lords agreed that the grants and licence would be exempted from the Act of Resumption. SC8/28/1377; PROME, xii. 416.

More may be said about Beaufitz’s private and business affairs in this period, when his connexions, not surprisingly, were predominantly with Londoners and royal servants. In 1440 he had received a licence for himself and the vintner William Halle to ship 1,000 quarters of cereals from Great Yarmouth to London, CPR, 1436-41, p. 361. and this as well as his involvement in the wine trade with Gascony suggests his mercantile activities were both wide-ranging and concerned with a variety of commodities. Among them was iron, which he shipped through Sandwich. E122/127/8, f. 23. In 1441 a commission was appointed to investigate the seizure of one of the three Dutch vessels in which he, along with his father-in-law and fellow Londoners, had placed cargoes of fish, only for them to be taken by pirates operating out of Plymouth. CPR, 1436-41, p. 506. Beaufitz frequently acted as a grantee of the goods and chattels of other Londoners and on occasion of foreign merchants. Cal. P. and M. London, 1437-54, p. 174. Fellow citizens often called upon him to act as their feoffee, Corp. London RO, hr 169/14, 176/13, 177/10, 14, 181/12. and sometimes such arrangements also included men with whom he was associated through service in the royal household and in the collection of the customs. For instance, in 1448 the heirs of the London fishmonger Geoffrey Maughfeld released their interest in property in St. Botulph’s parish, Billingsgate ward, to a group of feoffees that included Beaufitz, Stephen Forster, Richard Quatermayns and Thomas Pound; and in 1451 Sir Henry Norbury* conveyed land in St. Alban’s parish to him and Lord Sudeley, among others. Hr 178/11, 180/31.

Beaufitz’s personal wealth is impossible to estimate as he was not among those assessed for the subsidies on landed income levied in 1436 and 1450, either in London or Kent. A resident, like many other fishmongers, of the London parish of St. Magnus the Martyr, in 1448, as one of the brethren of the guild of Salve Regina in the parish church, he petitioned successfully for incorporation of the guild and its ability to acquire and hold land in mortmain. CPR, 1446-52, pp. 173-4. An indication of his continuing links with Rochester is a grant in 1452 of the reversion of a shop in the same parish to him and two ironmongers, Richard Fleming* and Nicholas Marchall, by Richard Cokflete of Rochester and his wife, the daughter of a fellow fishmonger. Cal. P. and M. London, 1437-57, p. 122; Corp. London RO, hr 182/3. Eight years earlier Beaufitz had joined his father-in-law Badby in obtaining a licence to found a perpetual chantry in the church at Danbury in Essex, to pray for the souls of their kinsfolk and of Sir Gerard Braybrooke†, the nephew of the former bishop of London, and this was a foundation he was to further augment in 1447. CPR, 1441-6, p. 357; 1446-52, p. 113; C143/451/8. Meanwhile, he had been named as one of the executors of his father-in-law’s will, made in August 1445, in which he and his wife had been left 12lb. of silver plate, while their son Thomas was left 8lb. of plate and their daughter Agnes received a primer covered in green silk. Guildhall Lib. London, commissary ct. wills, 9171/4, ff. 169v-71v.

After May 1456 Beaufitz received no further grants from Henry VI, and he was dismissed from his office as collector of tunnage and poundage the following year. Yet even after Sudeley’s replacement as chief butler in 1458 he did continue to supply wine to the Household for at least three years longer, as an assistant to both of Sudeley’s successors, the earl of Shrewsbury and (Sir) John Wenlock*. E403/815, m. 4; 817, mm. 4, 5, 7; 819, m. 1; 820, mm. 3, 7; 823, mm. 1, 2; 824, m. 3. Beaufitz’s apparent loss of favour in the last years of Henry VI’s reign may be evidence that he sided with the Yorkist lords in opposition to the Crown. Indeed, the first year of Edward IV’s reign brought a number of new concessions. As early in the reign as 2 Apr. 1461 he was reappointed collector of tunnage and poundage, and in February 1462 he received a handsome grant for ten years of the lands of several alien priories, provided that the income did not exceed 1,000 marks p.a. This may have been in recompense for Crown debts still outstanding from the 1440s and 1450s. It is very likely that the patronage from the new King owed something to the marriage (which probably took place in the mid 1450s), of Beaufitz’s daughter Agnes to (Sir) John Scott, who having been one of Edward IV’s firmest supporters was now made controller of the royal household. Together with this influential son-in-law Beaufitz shared the office of chirographer of the court of common pleas. CFR, xx. 7; CPR, 1461-7, pp. 79, 108, 150-1. He had also established useful links with another of Edward’s supporters from Kent, Sir John Fogg†, the new treasurer of the Household. E403/823, mm. 1-3; 824, mm. 1, 3, 4, 6; 825, m. 5; 827A, m. 2. That Beaufitz was a trusted servant of the Yorkist regime is revealed by a payment of July 1462 when one of his men was sent to Calais ‘on the King’s business’, at a time when the English stronghold was threatened by the newly-forged alliance between Margaret of Anjou and Louis XI of France. E403/825, m. 8.

Beaufitz died not long afterwards. As he had not made a will, on 8 May 1463 the bishop of London granted the administration of his estate to Reynold Pole and John Field. This proved an onerous task for they were quickly involved in litigation. In November 1464 they exhibited a bill before the barons of the Exchequer against Richard Spert* to recover a debt of £20 that Spert’s wife, Katherine, owed Beaufitz by reason of a contract made between him and her former husband, and more suits were to follow in the common pleas. E13/151, rot. 67; CP40/824, rot. 333. Yet the ‘executors’ successfully obtained letters of exemption from the Act of Resumption passed in the Parliament of 1463-5 with regard to Beaufitz’s lease of certain of the alien priory estates granted him by the King. PROME, xiii. 155. Our MP’s widow, Elizabeth, outlived him by some 25 years, making her will on 26 Mar. 1488. She asked to be buried beside him in the chapel of St. Mary in her parish church of All Hallows, Barking, and made a small bequest to cover ‘offrynges necligently forgotten’ when she had been a parishioner of St. Magnus the Martyr. Elizabeth’s other bequests reflect enduring ties with the Scotts. Her grandson, William Scott† (named as one of her executors) received silver and brass ware, while her grand-daughters, Elizabeth Bedingfeld and Isabel, wife of Sir Edward Poynings†, both received drapery and silverware. Her late husband’s membership of the Fishmongers’ Company was remembered by a gift of a ‘standyng cup with strawberey leaves’, and bequests to the unmarried men of the Company of 20s. each. In a codicil added on the following 2 Sept. she instructed her executors to acquire property in London worth 40s. a year and deliver it to ‘such place or crafte havyng auctoritee to take it as shall kepe myn obyte yerely forevermore’. Commissary ct. wills, 9171/7, ff. 129v-30v.