BRIDGES, William III, of Highworth, Wilts.

The family background of this William Bridges is obscure, but he was known as a ‘gentleman’ and may have been the attorney of this name engaged in suits for Wiltshire litigants in the common pleas in the summer of 1442. CP40/726, att. rot. 10d. Early in 1445 he acquired from Thomas Wethyk of Oxford and his wife four messuages, four tofts, two mills and 68 acres of land in north Wiltshire at Highworth and nearby Eastrop, Westrop and Hampton, probably by purchase. Wilts. Feet of Fines (Wilts. Rec. Soc. xli), no. 569. The link with inhabitants of Oxford suggests that it was this William Bridges who together with his wife Margery obtained in November 1446 an Exchequer lease of a toft and garden in the town’s suburb outside the south gate, formerly held by the late parson of St. Michael’s, and also a messuage in the parish of Holy Cross in the same district, forfeited by an Irishman who had bought it without royal licence. The lease was granted on generous terms: for 60 years, at an annual farm of little over half a mark, the only condition being that Bridges was to re-build a house on the site. CFR, xviii. 59-60.

Highworth was just a few miles from Wootton Bassett, and a much stronger case may be made for the gentleman of Highworth to be that borough’s MP in the first Parliament of 1449 than for William Bridges II* of Southwark, who sat for two other Wiltshire boroughs subsequently. Furthermore, Bridges of Highworth is known to have had dealings with the other Member for Wootton Bassett, the lawyer Thomas Norris*. In Michaelmas term 1455 Bridges was attached to answer Norris in a suit in the common pleas over a bond for £20. Norris asserted that the bond had been entered at Swindon on 18 Nov. 1454, but that the defendant had failed to pay him the sum due on the appointed day. In his defence Bridges said that the condition of the bond was that if Norris and his feoffees had peaceful possession of a corner messuage and two shops opposite the market in Highworth, and a stall and three acres of land in Eastrop, without being expelled by him and his wife, the bond would be cancelled. CP40/779, rot. 480.

In the meantime, between the end of his Parliament and his further dealings with Norris, Bridges had been in more serious trouble. He was among the associates of the Wiltshire lawyer Thomas Hasard* (MP for Malmesbury in the same Parliament), who together with Hasard and his son Richard* were imprisoned in the gaol of Gloucester castle for nearly five months from 1 Nov. 1452, until on 27 Mar. 1453 they were acquitted and released by Sir Maurice Berkeley II* and his fellow justices of gaol delivery. It transpired from pleas which Hasard later brought in the King’s bench that their imprisonment was linked to a quarrel they had with the Gloucestershire esquire Giles Brydges*, who had allegedly conspired with others to bring about their arrest on a trumped-up charge of breaking into a close at Minety and stealing a sheep back in February 1452. The Hasards and their associates including Bridges had been indicted at sessions of oyer and terminer in the following autumn where Giles was one of the justices. CPR, 1452-61, p. 62; KB27/769, rots. 47, 63; 774, rots. 73, 73d. There was no known kinship between him and Giles. How Bridges had come to be involved in the quarrel is not explained.

Bridges himself was occasionally nominated to be a juror at sessions of oyer and terminer in Wiltshire, for instance at Malmesbury in July 1452, and at Bradford and Salisbury in February 1453, but on the latter occasions (when he was in prison in Gloucester) he was not pricked. KB9/134/1/16, 34; 134/2/114, 157. He did, however, serve later as a juror at inquisitions post mortem, doing so at Marlborough in September 1456 and at Salisbury in July 1461. C139/162/28; C140/4/36. He is not recorded thereafter.