CANYNGES, William (c.1402-74), of Bristol.

A rich and powerful merchant, Canynges was a member of the extended Canynges-Young family that enjoyed great prominence in the affairs of Bristol and the city of London. It is generally believed that his father John Canynges, one of the principal property owners at Bristol, was the son of another William Canynges†, the burgess who sat for the town in four Parliaments of the reigns of Edward III and Richard II. Like the elder William Canynges, John was a prominent clothier and merchant and the two men enjoyed a close connexion, particularly in their trading ventures. The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 475. When John died in 1405, all of his six children were minors with the subject of this biography being an infant of only some two years of age. By 1408 his widow Joan had found a new husband in Thomas Young†, a Welshman who had settled at Bristol and become a leading merchant. In January that year Young assumed custody of four of his stepchildren, including the young William Canynges and his elder brother Thomas, and raised them with the two sons and a daughter that Joan bore him. This upbringing left its mark, since throughout their lives William and Thomas Canynges enjoyed a close relationship with their half-brothers Thomas and John Young. While William remained at Bristol, Thomas Canynges and John Young chose to make their careers in London and the other sibling, Thomas Young junior, opted to enter the law. All of them had successful careers but that of the younger Thomas Young was the most wide-ranging and politically significant. He is famous for having advocated the dynastic claims of Richard, duke of York, in the Parliament of 1450-1, although to varying degrees the other three men were also associated with Yorkists during the turbulent years of the mid fifteenth century.

The careers of the four siblings did not properly begin until after the death of the elder Thomas Young in the spring of 1427, and on 11 June that year William Canynges came before the court of orphans at Bristol. He made his appearance to declare that he had received his share of his father’s personal estate, £72 13s. 6d., from his stepfather’s executors, his mother Joan and half-brother John Young. At the same time, he also acknowledged that he had taken possession of those portions of John Canynges’s personal estate that had passed to him because of the early deaths of three of his siblings, John, Agnes and Margaret. Bristol RO, Bristol recs., ct. of orphans, recognizance bk., BCC/J/Or/2/1, ff. 72-73. Sherborne, 7, mistakenly states that Canynges appeared in the ct. on 3 June. Canynges also inherited a part of the real property formerly held by his father, which at the time of the latter’s death comprised 22 shops, six tenements, three halls and five gardens in Bristol and, outside the town, a reversionary interest in a house in Netherwere, Somerset. In his will, John Canynges had left all this property to his widow for life and provided for its division between his sons after she died. In the event, the early death of his son of the same name meant that the two survivors, Thomas and William, ended up receiving half shares after their mother’s death in 1429. The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 476. William came to hold 14 shops, at least 17 tenements, a close and a couple of gardens in Bristol, as well as lands in Westbury-on-Trym, Gloucestershire, and in Wells and the hundred of Wells in Somerset. E.M. Carus-Wilson, Med. Merchant Venturers, 79; Topography of Bristol, i. (Bristol Rec. Soc. xlviii), 12, 33, 36, 68, 98, 110, 113, 122, 129, 157. Both Canynges’s father and putative grandfather had resided in the Bristol parish of St. Thomas but he chose to move to a substantial site on the west side of Redcliffe Street that backed on to the river Avon. It was there that he built for himself an extremely fine stone house with a tower, owned a warehouse and kept a private chapel, for which he gained a licence from the bishop of Bath and Wells in 1454.

When his stepfather died, Canynges was about 25 years of age and probably already married to Joan Burton, who was certainly his wife by September 1429. Joan’s father John Burton was an old friend of William’s stepfather, Thomas Young, and Burton found a husband for his other daughter, Isabel, in the person of Young’s son and namesake. Given that Canynges was still a relatively young man at his stepfather’s death, it is likely that he looked to Burton for encouragement and guidance in the years immediately following. A prominent merchant who was mayor of Bristol in 1429-30, Burton was in a good position to promote the interests of his son-in-law. By then, Canynges had already embarked on a mercantile career and he exported several consignments of cloth to Bordeaux in that year. E122/18/22, 25. It was to the overseas trade that he devoted his attention and he was never a clothier (in the sense of a producer of cloth) like his father and putative grandfather. Most of his overseas ventures were probably directed towards Gascony and the Iberian peninsula, but he also invested (and lost money) in a disastrous Mediterranean expedition of 1457-8, traded in the Baltic and, for over 20 years, in Iceland and north Norway. Invariably cloth was the chief export although in Iceland there was a demand for foodstuffs and consumer goods as well. Typical imports from France and Spain included wine, woad, iron, oil, sugar, salt and fruit while from the far north came fish, in particular stockfish. The breadth of such interests perhaps explain his success in increasingly lean economic times for Bristol, although in the latter stages of his career he appears to have operated largely if not solely as a shipowner, making his money in carrying the merchandise of others rather than trading directly on his own account. He had acquired an interest in shipping by June 1436 when the Crown licensed him to arm the Holy Spirit, a balinger of which he was part owner, so that it might resist the King’s enemies at sea for a period of two months. Gt. Red Bk. of Bristol, i (Bristol Rec. Soc. iv), 184, 186-7; Overseas Trade (Bristol Rec. Soc. vii), 103; Foedera ed. Rymer (Hague edn.), v (2), 8; CPR, 1429-36, p. 603. Sherborne, 8-9, fails to note that Canynges was no more than a part owner of the Holy Spirit.

In the following autumn, the Crown authorized Canynges to send the Holy Spirit with cloth and other goods overseas but with the stipulation that he should not trade with Iceland. Iceland belonged to the king of Denmark, who had decreed that foreign merchants trading with his territories should do so only through the staple at Bergen in Norway, a decree upheld in the Parliament of 1429, for the sake of the longstanding friendship between England and Denmark. Overseas Trade, 65-66; PROME, x. 400-1. In practice, as Canynges’s ventures to Iceland demonstrate, it was a frequently over-ridden prohibition. Both the English and Danish monarchs frequently sold licences to English merchants wishing to bypass the staple and trade with Iceland directly. In March 1439, for example, Canynges and two business partners, Stephen Forster* and Jordan Spryng, were licensed to send their ship, the Katherine, to Iceland and Finmark (the extreme north of Norway), and in the following January, he, Spryng and two other associates, George Roche and Richard Alberton, gained a similar licence for the Mary Redcliffe. Later, in December 1450, Canynges was licensed to trade with Iceland for two years with a couple of ships, and again in the following March with Iceland and Finmark for five years, likewise with two ships. The King issued the licence of March 1451 in consideration of his ‘many notable and faithful services’ to the Crown and the debts that he was owed by the people of those parts, and with the agreement of the king of Denmark, whose ambassador had appeared in the Chancery in support of Canynges’s application. Canynges was not however always punctilious in acquiring these licences. The letters issued to him, Forster and Spryng in 1439 mentioned the ‘great debts’ owed to them by the people of Iceland, suggesting that they had undertaken earlier ventures there without the necessary authorization. Canynges and Forster certainly neglected to obtain a licence before dispatching the Katherine to Iceland and Finmark in the spring of 1442, since in June that year the Crown issued them with letters pardoning them for that very offence. In the same letters, the King granted them permission to send the Katherine and Mary Redcliffe to the same parts over the next four years, provided they paid the Crown all customs, subsidies and other dues arising from these expeditions. Overseas Trade, 71, 72, 94-95; CPR, 1441-6, p. 81. It is not clear whether the royal pardons that Canynges subsequently obtained in 1446, 1452, 1455 and 1458 were likewise related to trading offences: C67/39, m. 47; 40, m. 28; 41, m. 23; 42, m. 32. No doubt, the Crown treated Canynges as leniently as it did because he was so useful to it. The ‘many notable and faithful services’ he performed for Henry VI are not enumerated in the licence of 1451 but he did allow a royal messenger passage on the Katherine when it was sailing to Bayonne in 1443. PPC, v. 248. The Lancastrian Crown may well have looked to him for loans although he is not recorded as having made any.

It is not entirely clear that this Katherine and the ship of that name that Canynges owned in later years were the same vessel, for the ship he co-owned with Forster and Spryng in 1439 was described as ‘100 tons or less’ and the latter Katherine as of 140 tons. The Katherine of 140 tons features in a list of ships built by Canynges at Bristol that the locally-born antiquary William Worcestre drew up in 1478, as does a Mary Redcliffe of 500 tons, clearly not the previously mentioned vessel of that name, since that was of only 140 tons or less. Overseas Trade, 71; William Worcestre: The Topography of Med. Bristol ed. Neale (Bristol Rec. Soc. li), 263. In Williams, 17, it is assumed that the Mary Redcliffe of 1440 was one and the same vessel as that in Worcestre’s list. The list shows that towards the end of his career Canynges owned no fewer than nine ships, not counting an unnamed vessel that he had lost off Iceland. Worcestre estimated that he employed no fewer than 800 men to build and crew these ships, which had a combined total tunnage of nearly 3,000 tons and included the enormous Mary and John of 900 tons, a vessel that alone had cost 4,000 marks. Modern historians have been inclined to accept these figures, leading one of them to suggest that Canynges came to control perhaps one quarter of all shipping at Bristol, and that he could have received as much as £10,000 p.a. (before profit) in freights. If accepted, these statistics only emphasize the pre-eminence in Bristol’s economy enjoyed by Canynges, one of the greatest English shipowners of the later Middle Ages. Carus-Wilson, 87, 89-90; E.M. Carus-Wilson, Merchant Venturers of Bristol, 16-17; Howard Household Bks. ed. Crawford, p. xxii.

The success and prosperity that Canynges achieved at Bristol justified his decision to remain in his native town rather than follow the examples of his brother, Thomas Canynges, and half-brother, John Young, in making their careers in London. His siblings nevertheless provided him with strong connexions to the City. In April 1432 he and his other half-brother and business partner, Thomas Young, took a statute staple for £20 from a London vintner to whom they had sold ‘divers merchandise’ on credit, and it was on the strength of this security that they began legal action against their debtor in the following autumn. C241/225/55. Some two decades later, Canynges and his other Londoner brother, Thomas Canynges, began legal action in the court of common pleas against Thomas Buckland* of Gloucester, an attorney in the central common law courts at Westminster, over another debt. It is not however clear whether the suit was concerned with commercial matters, since the plea rolls do not reveal the circumstances of the debt, a sum of 20 marks. According to the plaintiffs, it arose from a bond that Buckland had given them at London in November 1451 but he claimed that he had entered the security under duress, while a prisoner of the brothers and their ‘coven’ at Gloucester, not London. CP40/768, rot. 130. Whatever the truth, William Canynges had strengthened his links with the City between these two lawsuits, since he joined its Grocers’ Company (of which John Young and Thomas Canynges were already members) in 1441. As well as widening his business opportunities, gaining admission to the Grocers’ Company involved becoming a citizen of London, but he was very much an ‘absentee’ freeman and never served in local government there. P. Nightingale, A Med. Mercantile Community, 451, 453.

By contrast, Canynges played a very full part in the administration of Bristol, for which he sat in each of his Parliaments. So far as is known, he was initially admitted into the municipal administration in 1432 when he was elected to a term as one of the town’s bailiffs, and three years later he began the first of several terms as constable of the local staple. Canynges was first considered for the position of sheriff when he was nominated for that office in the autumn of 1436 although on that occasion Walter Power* was the man appointed. Similarly nominated after Power died in office in the following summer, and again in the autumn of 1437, he did not finally become sheriff until September 1438. CFR, xvi. 301, 348; xvii. 5, 61. Canynges also served five terms as mayor of Bristol, and while mayor he was simultaneously mayor of the staple. The ‘Great Red Book’ of Bristol records ordinances made during his mayoralties, including a ruling of January 1450 reducing the wages that the town paid its MPs to a daily rate of 2s. Furthermore, Canynges regularly attended meetings of the common council, whether or not he was holding other borough offices at the time, Gt. Red Bk. of Bristol, i. 119-26, 128-31, 132-3, 135, 253-5; ii (Bristol Rec. Soc. viii), 48-52, 55-57; iii (Bristol Rec. Soc. xvi), 80-84; Little Red Bk. Bristol ed. Bickley, i. 86-88; ii. 49-51, 169. and he served the Crown on various ad hoc commissions. In June 1459 he obtained royal letters exempting him from all office-holding but he continued to receive appointments after this date.

Possibly private affairs had prompted Canynges to seek his letters patent, since he had important family and business matters to attend to in the late 1450s. First, he was the executor of both his eldest son and namesake, who had died in the summer or autumn of 1458, and his business partner Stephen Forster who died later in the same year; PCC 15 Stokton (PROB11/4, ff. 112-13). secondly, he had incurred serious losses through an ill fated mercantile venture. Some years earlier, the younger William Canynges had married Isabel, daughter of William Vowell*, a burgess who had sat alongside the groom’s father in the Parliaments of 1439 and 1450, in his case for his home town of Wells. Just months before the younger William Canynges’s death, the couple had benefited from a settlement by which the MP had settled on them lands and rents in Bristol, in the city of Wells and elsewhere in Somerset and in Westbury-on-Trym. The younger William made his will, dated 8 June 1458, at Stephen Forster’s house in London. He died before the following 20 Nov. when the will was proved and was buried in the Greyfriars’ church in the City. In the will he left his funeral arrangements to his father and directed that, should Isabel die without issue of their marriage, all his property at Bristol and Wells was to pass to his brother John, with remainder to the MP if John were also to die childless. As for Canynges’s failed trading venture of this period, in mid 1459 he and other Bristol merchants were preoccupied with seeking compensation for the losses they had incurred as investors in an expedition conceived by their fellow Bristolian, Robert Sturmy. Sturmy had perished a year earlier on the return leg of a pioneering voyage to the Middle East, when Genoese freebooters had attacked and plundered his ships off the Maltese coast. The mayor of Bristol, Philip Meede*, petitioned the Crown for compensation and in due course those Genoese residing in England were condemned to pay £6,000 to the English merchants, of Bristol and elsewhere, who had suffered losses. Just days after obtaining his exemption, Canynges was appointed to a commission, headed by John Stourton II*, Lord Stourton, to which the Crown entrusted the task of distributing the compensation money. Almost immediately, however, a third of the same sum was diverted to the more immediate needs of the King, to whom by the following month the commissioners had agreed to lend £2,000 in support of an embassy to the Pope. On 26 Aug. they received letters patent granting them repayment of £1,800 of that loan from the issues of 22 counties in southern England and from the subsidy and alnage of cloth in Bristol, Wiltshire and Salisbury, and of the other £200 from the proffers made by sheriffs and others of the King’s officers at the Exchequer. Overseas Trade, 117-18; CPR, 1452-61, pp. 511, 517; Oxf. DNB, ‘Sturmy, Robert’; E207/17/9/39.

Apart from his official career at Bristol, Canynges’s parliamentary career added to his administrative burdens. He entered the Commons for the first time in 1439, just weeks after standing down as sheriff of Bristol. The town’s return for that year has not survived but it is unlikely that he was still sheriff at the time of the election, since the Crown summoned the Parliament on 26 Sept., only four days before he relinquished that office. In each of his Parliaments Canynges gained election alongside his half-brother Thomas Young. Although a novice to the Commons, he could look for help and advice from Young, who had already represented the town in the two preceding assemblies. In total, Young would sit in no fewer than 11 Parliaments, so becoming one of the most experienced of all fifteenth-century MPs. As the other Member for Bristol, Canynges witnessed Young’s daring advocacy of the duke of York in the Parliament of 1450-1, as he did his half-brother’s appeal to the Parliament of 1455 when, in seeking compensation for the imprisonment he had suffered for his previous audacity, Young claimed the right of free speech for the Commons.

If never as politically partisan as Young, Canynges also had links with York, an association he no doubt owed to his sibling. During 1448-9 and in early 1450 he was a party to transactions concerning the manor of Easton-in-Gordano, Gloucestershire, which York was to grant to Thomas Young soon afterwards, Som. Feet of Fines (Som. Rec. Soc. xxii), 113; J.M.W. Bean, ‘Financial Position of Richard, Duke of York’, in War and Govt. in the Middle Ages and he was of particular service to the duke a decade later. Coincidently or not, Canynges began his penultimate term as mayor of Bristol in the autumn of 1460, shortly after the Yorkists had won the battle of Northampton and regained control of the government. Later that year, the municipal authorities seized a quantity of gunpowder from a local merchant, Henry May, who was on good terms with York’s enemy the earl of Wiltshire and hostile to York himself. In the same period, Canynges and the common council occupied Bristol castle on behalf of the duke, as a pre-emptive measure against another of York’s enemies, the duke of Somerset. Following the gunpowder seizure, York periodically drew upon that supply for use against his foes, as did his son Edward IV until it ran out. Gt. Red Bk. of Bristol, i. 136-8; P. Fleming, ‘Politics and the Provincial Town’, in People, Places and Perspectives ed. Dockray and Fleming, 87-88. Again during Canynges’s fourth mayoralty, Bristol sent 60 men to serve with Edward IV at that King’s pleasure, at a cost to the burgesses of £160, and a contingent from the town fought for the Yorkists at Towton. In the same period, the burgesses provided naval assistance to the new King and lent him £200. Additionally, Edward received loans from individual townsmen, including Canynges who by August 1461 had loaned the Yorkist Crown no less than 500 marks. Canynges was still mayor when Edward visited Bristol early in the following month. The town laid on pageants of William the Conqueror and St. George and the Dragon for the King, to whom the mayor gave £50 towards the cost of the royal household and whom he may even have entertained in his own house. Conceivably Canynges took the opportunity to raise the subject of Bristol’s rights and privileges, so helping the town to gain a grant of admiralty jurisdiction in the following October and a new charter before the end of the year. Bristol Chs. (Bristol Rec. Soc. xi), 132-43. Canynges was also fully involved with another aspect of the royal visit, since on 5 Sept. he was one of the justices of oyer and terminer who took presentments against (Sir) Baldwin Fulford*, a Lancastrian rebel held in the town since his capture at sea. CIMisc. viii. 258. The King himself presided at the trial that followed and the royal party probably witnessed Fulford’s execution at Bristol on 9 Sept. Evidently impressed by the reception he had received from the burgesses, Edward referred to Canynges as ‘dilectus nobis’ when on the following 9 Nov. he licensed him to trade with enemy territories overseas. Overseas Trade, 127. Four days earlier, the King had granted the keeping of three crofts in ‘Knoll’ (probably Knowle in Somerset) to Canynges, the London grocer William Venour and John Bluet, for them to hold for as long as these properties should remain in the hands of the Crown. CPR, 1461-7, pp. 65, 78.

The oyer and terminer panel that dealt with Fulford was the first of several ad hoc commissions on which Canynges served after the accession of Edward IV, and in 1463 he was among those whom the Chancery appointed to conclude a dispute between a fellow burgess, John Sharp III*, and the Bristol parish of St. Ewen. Three years later and in spite of his advancing years, he began a fifth term as mayor of Bristol. This final term in that office coincided with a quarrel between the two nephews and namesakes of the late Thomas Norton* of Bristol. The younger protagonist came before Canynges and other members of the town’s hierarchy in order to complain about the attempts of his brother (a figure of considerable notoriety who made his name as an alchemist) to disinherit him. In the same period, Canynges remained fully active in commercial affairs. By the mid 1460s he had formed a business partnership with John Shipwarde*, John Gaywode and Robert Baron, and during 1465-6 he and his associates shipped through Bristol wine and other merchandise worth £4,769 11s. 1d. It happened that many of these goods, which were shipped free of customs in repayment of a loan to the Crown, belonged to fellow merchants who employed the extremely influential partnership for shipping purposes. In late 1465, however, the King licensed Canynges and his partners to import in their own names goods with a customs value of over £320 into the kingdom. They were to keep for themselves the customs and subsidies owed for this merchandise, to repay them for the silk and other cloths they had bought from a merchant of Lucca, evidently on behalf of the Crown. Just over two years later, Canynges was of further service to the King to whom in the spring of 1468 he furnished a loan of £200. Gt. Red Bk. iii. 139-42; E122/19/4; Overseas Trade, 296; Carus-Wilson, Med. Merchant Venturers, 83; CCR, 1461-8, p. 298; E405/48, m. 2; E403/840, m. 6.

During the same decade, Canynges had important personal affairs to attend to as well, above all his decision in 1467 to forsake the secular world for the Church. In 1464 he married his surviving son John to Isabel (or Elizabeth), daughter of the Somerset esquire, Thomas Middleton of Stanton Drew. The parties concluded a marriage settlement in August that year, so the wedding probably took place shortly afterwards. For his part, Canynges agreed (or so it was claimed later) that the couple should succeed to lands and other holdings in Bristol and Somerset worth £100 p.a., as well as goods, plate and money to the value of 4,000 marks, after his death. C1/44/163. In the event, the marriage was relatively short-lived, since John, like his brother William before him, predeceased their father. Canynges suffered other serious personal losses in the latter part of his life, for he also outlived both his brother of the full blood, Thomas Canynges, and his wife, Joan. Thomas died some time in the early 1460s, certainly by the summer of 1463, having appointed the MP an executor of his no longer extant will. CP40/821, rot. 447. Joan died in the autumn of 1467. Still alive on 8 Sept. that year, she was almost certainly dead by the 19th of that month when her husband visited an old friend, John Carpenter, bishop of Worcester, at Westbury-on-Trym. Carpenter had refounded the college at Westbury, a dependant house of Worcester cathedral, apparently with the considerable financial assistance of Canynges. During the visit, the bishop admitted his friend, yet to see out his final term as mayor of Bristol, as an acolyte of the chapel there. Canynges had not suddenly decided to enter the Church, for at this date he was already rector of the church of St. Alban at Worcester, a living that the bishop had granted to him earlier, apparently in anticipation of Joan’s death. There is little doubt that he was eager to join the priesthood although some of his contemporaries, no doubt taken aback by this seemingly sudden development, believed that his eagerness arose from a desire to escape a second marriage planned for him by the King. Whatever the truth it is possible that Canynges had somehow fallen out with Edward IV, for William Worcestre recounts that the King fined him the enormous sum of £2,000, ‘pro pace sua habenda’. Worcestre is nevertheless the only authority for this penalty, for which he did not provide an explanation or date, although it appears to relate to the latter stages of Canynges’s career. Assuming that there was such a fine, it may have had nothing to do with a proposed remarriage but the suggestion that Edward was punishing Canynges for an attachment to the Lancastrians is both very unlikely and contrary to the evidence. Equally unconvincing are two other hypotheses, that Canynges was simply transferring to the Crown money collected on its behalf, or that the fine was the price Bristol paid for its charter of 1461.

Whatever Canynges’s reasons for joining the Church, he had already begun thinking about his immortal soul before 1467. In May the previous year, he had paid the Crown £20 for a licence to found a perpetual chantry of one chaplain in the church of St. Mary Redcliffe, out of a desire, as he explained in his foundation charter of June 1466, to turn his mind to heavenly things after so many years of worldly success and prosperity. The chaplain’s duty was daily to celebrate divine service at St. Katherine’s altar in St. Mary’s, for the good estate of the King, queen and their daughter the Princess Elizabeth, for Cecily, duchess of York, for the King’s kinsman, George Neville, archbishop of York, for Canynges and his wife Joan and others, and then for their souls after their deaths. For the support of the chaplain, the Crown also granted Canynges licence to alienate in mortmain properties worth £10 p.a. and not held in chief, and accordingly in November 1466 he set aside 13 messuages at Bristol for the benefit of his appointee Peter Lawles. Notwithstanding the supposed fine of £2,000, these licences, along with another that the Crown granted to Canynges on 13 Oct. 1467, after he had embarked on a career in the Church, hardly suggest that the MP was then in the bad books of the King. Canynges’s reasons for obtaining a royal pardon in July 1468 are not known: C67/46, m. 32. In the licence of October 1467, Edward IV authorized Canynges to found a second chantry in the church of St. Mary Redcliffe, at its altar of St. George, served by a chaplain supported by a like endowment of £10. The chaplain of St. George, Thomas Haukessok (otherwise ‘Hankefot’ and probably the son of William Haukessok*) and his successors were to pray for the good estate of the King, queen and Canynges and others while they lived, for their souls after their deaths and for the soul of Canynges’s by now dead wife Joan.

The founding of these chantries was just one sign of Canynges’s attachment to the parish of St. Mary’s. He was an extremely important benefactor of its church, which owed its extensive reconstruction either mainly or entirely to his generosity, and he took decisive steps to arrest a decline in its organized worship. According to Ricart’s Kalendar, Canynges followed the footsteps of his putative grandfather in becoming involved in this work because in 1376 the elder William Canynges built ‘the bodye of Redclyf church, from the crosse Iles downewardes’. Yet this entry dates from the seventeenth century and architectural evidence indicates that Redcliffe church was completed after the elder William’s death. In fact, the MP was largely or wholly responsible for the rebuilding of its steeple, of which lightning had felled a substantial part, either in the early or mid 1440s. William Worcestre recorded that he employed 100 men for this project, which continued after his death. Whatever the exact extent of Canynges’s contribution to the restoration of the church, it was evidently very considerable, and in 1483 he was described as its ‘renovator and as it were founder and among others a very special benefactor’. Alongside his rebuilding work, in October 1467 Canynges generously assigned £340 to the vicar and churchwardens, to fund the regular observance of services there. In the past, the parish had financed such devotions from the revenues of various church properties but these had fallen into disrepair. Canynges made his gift upon condition that the money was used to repair these properties, to allow for the future support of two chaplains and three clerks, one of whom was to be called ‘the clerk of William Canynges’, who would daily conduct all customary services. About the same time, Canynges made over to the parish his rights in certain jewels worth £160 that Sir Theobald Gorges* had pledged to him in return for a loan, upon condition that the church’s own jewels, as well as its goods, chattels and ornaments, were restored and properly kept. In all likelihood, Canynges’s enthusiasm for his parish church was what prompted Thomas Middleton to petition the chancellor in 1468-9. Submitting his bill on behalf of his daughter Isabel, Middleton complained that, through his disposal of assets, Canynges was running down his son John’s inheritance, so breaking the marriage settlement made for Isabel and John in 1464. Rumour had it that Canynges’s real estate in Bristol and Somerset had declined to only two-thirds of its 1464 value of £100 p.a., and Middleton feared that the MP fully intended to divest himself of other lands, as well as of the greater part of his goods. He further alleged that Canynges had failed properly to provide for Isabel with a wardrobe and other necessaries suitable for her rank. Middleton’s bill is the only part of this Chancery suit to survive, and it is unclear whether he was still at odds with Canynges when John died some time after 1468, having failed to father any surviving children by Isabel.

Appropriately, it was in St. Mary’s church that Canynges celebrated his first mass, on Whitsunday 1468. He had received his ordination at the hands of Bishop Carpenter a month earlier, on 16 Apr., having only become a subdeacon on the previous 12 Mar. and then deacon on 2 Apr. On the day of Canynges’s ordination, Carpenter also collated his friend to the prebend of Goodringhall in Westbury College, obliging Robert Slimbridge, who had held it only since November 1467, to make way for him. It was probably at this point that Canynges left his house at Bristol and took up residence at Westbury. If he lacked the scholarship of the likes of Slimbridge (a canon lawyer of some repute), he possessed very real practical and organizational skills, thanks to his many years in the world of commerce and in municipal administration. It is therefore unlikely that it was out of pure favouritism that Carpenter appointed Canynges dean of Westbury in June 1469. As with the prebend of Goodringhall, no vacancy had arisen and the then dean, Henry Sampson, was obliged to resign to allow the appointment to happen. Later that year, Canynges applied to the Roman Curia for confirmation of his rapid entry into the Church and subsequent clerical advancement, and the pope gave his formal approval on 30 Oct. 1469. In his petition to the pope, Canynges declared that Joan Burton had been his only wife and a virgin at the time of their marriage, and that although in his past career as an office-holder he had exercised temporal jurisdiction, he had never actually pronounced nor delivered any sentence against malefactors that involved bloodshed or the death penalty. The second of these claims smacks of some sophistry, given his membership of the oyer and terminer commission that had sentenced Sir Baldwin Fulford to death.

Having become dean, Canynges remained at Westbury for the rest of his life. Conventionally pious though no doubt he was, he did not suddenly become otherworldly after entering the Church. He acted as a feoffee for George, duke of Clarence in July 1472, CPR, 1467-77, pp. 346-7. and he quarrelled with the Bristol parish of All Saints during 1473-4. The dispute was over a rent that he claimed from a property in the Shambles that the parishioners asserted belonged to one of its chantries. He was no less a formidable opponent for having taken holy orders and the churchwardens of All Saints were obliged to retain lawyers and, perhaps, to go to London in pursuit of the chantry’s interests. Recs. All Saints Bristol, iii (Bristol Rec. Soc. lvi), 82, 147-8, 150. Even so, by now he was an old man and perhaps tiring of his responsibilities at Westbury. Earlier, in March 1473, Robert Slimbridge obtained a royal licence to apply at Rome for the office of dean of Westbury but it is impossible to tell whether Canynges had returned a past favour by resigning from the office so that Slimbridge might have it. In the event, Canynges remained dean until his death and only then did Slimbridge succeed him.

Slimbridge did not have too long to wait, since Canynges died on 19 Nov. 1474. His funeral took place at Westbury, after which his cortege processed to St. Mary Redcliffe where he was buried alongside his wife, in a tomb that he had constructed by the altar of St. Katherine in the south side of that church. An impressive monument that survives to this day, the tomb now stands in the south transept, adjacent to a fine effigy of him in his priest’s vestments. Originally located in the parish church at Westbury, the effigy was transferred to St. Mary’s only after the dissolution of the college in 1544, evidence perhaps that he had indeed provided considerable financial support to Carpenter’s foundation. Canynges made his will just a week before his death. Among his pious bequests were legacies to the vicar, chaplains, clerks and churchwardens of St. Mary’s, to the fellows, clergy, choristers and almsmen of Westbury, to an almshouse that he had founded on Redcliffe Hill at Bristol, to each of the friaries in the town and to the poor, sick and needy there. He also left vestments to his chantries of St. Katherine and St. George and left two service books to St. Mary’s church. These are the only books mentioned in his will, confirmation perhaps that he was no scholar and of chief service to the Church as a financial benefactor and administrator. The chief beneficiaries of the will were his daughter-in-law Isabel Middleton (in spite or possibly because of her father’s complaint to the chancellor) and his nephew and namesake, the son of his brother Thomas. At an earlier date, Canynges had assigned certain properties at Bristol to Isabel for life, and now he left her other holdings there, again for life. To the younger William Canynges, he bequeathed three tenements, an orchard, a close and a small garden in Bristol, the reversion of properties that he had assigned to Isabel, and the reversion of other properties in the town that his other daughter-in-law, Isabel Vowell, by now the wife of one ‘Powlett’, held. He further directed that the holdings he assigned to Isabel Middleton in the will should pass after her death to his niece Elizabeth, the younger William’s sister. Canynges’s house in Redcliffe Street was among those properties that do not feature in the will although it passed to the younger William. Similarly, the will does not mention any of the MP’s ships, the fate of which is unrecorded. Canynges appointed two executors, his servant Richard Hicks and William Spencer†, a fellow merchant of Bristol. It fell to Hicks and Spencer to dispose of the residue of Canynges’s goods, jewels and debts not specifically bequeathed in the will, and they spent some of the money so raised on building a water fountain in St. Peter’s Street and establishing an almshouse in Lewin’s Mead. In the later 1470s the testator’s nephew, the younger William Canynges, sued Hicks and Spencer in the Chancery, complaining that they had refused to make an estate to him of some of the properties bequeathed to him in the will. C1/53/35. He did not long survive the MP since he had died by 1480, leaving a son Thomas.

The church of St. Mary Redcliffe, acknowledged as one of the greatest achievements of English Gothic architecture, Carus-Wilson, Merchant Venturers, 17. is William Canynges’s greatest memorial. By the mid nineteenth century the church had again fallen into a parlous state of disrepair, and those who banded together to raise funds for its restoration called themselves the Canynges Society. Active to this day, the society raises funds for the upkeep and restoration of St. Mary’s where the anniversary of the first mass celebrated by Canynges is observed every Whitsunday.