FLETE, William

More can be added to the earlier biography. The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 88-91.

It was perhaps through his service to John Beaufort, earl of Somerset, for whom he was acting as an attorney as early as 1408, that Flete first came to the attention of the earl’s brother Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester. Although the bishop was probably his most important patron, Flete was also linked with other members of the aristocracy, among them Joan Beauchamp, Lady Abergavenny. The Ricardian, x. 5; C. Carpenter, Armburgh Pprs. 7-8. In 1436, when his landholdings in Hertfordshire, Lincolnshire, London, Middlesex and Surrey were said to be worth some £128 p.a., he was also in receipt of annuities of £10 from the abbot of Croyland (as whose parliamentary proxy he had acted in 1410, 1414 and 1425), and 66s. 8d. from the prior of St. Denis, in addition to the £10 he drew every year from the Exchequer. E159/199, brevia Hil. rot. 13, Mich. rot. 6; 200, brevia Mich. rot. 11; 212, recorda Hil. rot. 14(ii)d; 220, recorda Easter rot. 7.

Flete entered the Mercers’ Company in 1410-11, when he paid £6 13s. 4d. to gain admission to its ranks. His ability to find this far from insignificant sum shows that he was already a man of substance; his willingness to pay it demonstrates the advantages that membership of one of the great city Companies could bring. Becoming a member of the Company meant that he also became a citizen of London, an important means for an ambitious man to advance himself in business and public life. Involved in the overseas trade during his mercantile career, Flete dealt in a wide range of commodities, making it unlikely that he ever became a working mercer, unlike his younger namesake (probably a relative) who joined the Company in 1427-8 and served as its warden in 1438-9. It was this latter William, not the MP, who had an apprentice named Richard Lesyngham and acted as the executor of the prominent mercer William Cavendish. Likewise, it was the younger William Flete, not the MP, who married Isabel (née Strete): although the MP probably outlived his wife Alice, there is no evidence that he remarried after her death. The Ricardian, x. 2, 3-4, 12; A.F. Sutton, Mercery of London, 206, 209, 556. The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 91 mistakenly assumes that there were two Isabels, one of whom married the MP.

The wealth Flete accumulated through trade enabled him to make several very substantial loans to the Crown between the late 1420s and early 1440s, E403/692, m. 12; 695, m. 3; 709, m. 1; 712, m. 10; 723, m. 2; 729, m. 7; 740, m. 13; 745, m. 3. and gave him the means to build a fortified house or castle on his manor of Moor at Rickmansworth. Twentieth-century excavations have revealed that he demolished the existing 14th-century manor-house to make way for his brick-faced building, which would have resembled the later Herstmonceux castle in Sussex (built in 1441), at least in appearance if not size. Completely surrounded by a moat, it received its water supply through a wooden pipe, presumably from a source on a nearby hillside. It is possible that at least part of the castle was completed by March 1427, since it would appear that Flete was living there at that date. The Ricardian, ix. 290-2. Certainly, it was in the second half of the 1420s that Flete made himself increasingly unpopular with his Hertfordshire neighbours, and he first had to pay the price of his high handed conduct when in December 1428 his arrest and imprisonment was ordered following his breach of a bond to keep the peace towards a client of the earl of Salisbury, Henry Wenge, the farmer of the parsonage lands of Watford. C1/20/157; E159/205, brevia Mich. rot. 39d, recorda Mich. rot. 6d.

The Moor and Flete’s other manors at Rickmansworth lay near the town of Amersham, a hotbed of heresy in this period. In May 1431 Flete was among the Hertfordshire gentry who attended a meeting at Hertford priory at the Crown’s request, to discuss measures to be taken against the lollards of Amersham. The Ricardian, x. 9. Another problem at this time was the general lawlessness and disorder affecting the country as a whole. It was a matter of particular concern in Flete’s final Parliament, and both the Lords and Commons swore an oath to refrain from the practice of maintenance. Shortly after the assembly was brought to a close, Flete, his fellow Member for Hertfordshire, William Newport*, and all the other knights of the shires were commissioned to administer the oath to the residents of their respective counties. PROME, xi. 79-80; CCR, 1429-35, p. 271.

Not long before this Parliament assembled, a line had been drawn under the tumultuous events of two years earlier, when a group of the tenants of the abbot of St. Albans had appeared outside the gates of the Parliament house at Westminster, demonstratively bearing their plough-shares on their shoulders, to complain of Flete’s high-handed conduct. The matter had eventually been referred to the chancellor, Archbishop Kemp, for adjudication, and in the spring of 1433 one of the complainants admitted before the master of the rolls that the charges against Flete had been deliberately trumped up. C4/1/5, 3/33. Yet, the ill feeling between Flete and the Hertfordshire tenantry continued. In 1435-6 there was a renewed lawsuit over an alleged right of way between Rickmansworth and Watford (which had formed part of the complaints against Flete in 1431), between on the one hand the abbot’s tenant, Thomas Lavenham (one of the demonstrators of 1431), who farmed the land in Watford across which the disputed right of way ran, and on the other John Wynkebourne, a tailor from Rickmansworth, and William Creke, gentleman. Wynkeborne and Creke, who must have been acting on Flete’s behalf, claimed that there was a public right of way between his manors of Moor and Britwell and the church and market place in Watford, and that it crossed the land held by Lavenham. Lavenham won the case, so Flete must have had to find an alternative route to Watford. The Ricardian, x. 9.

A more important concern for Flete in his later years was his quarrel with William Ryman* and William Okehurst* of Sussex, both former servants of the late Thomas Fitzalan, earl of Arundel. Early in Henry V’s reign the earl, then treasurer of England, had ordered the seizure of Flete’s wool at Calais, although on what basis is not known. Flete had reacted by petitioning the Parliament of 1417, prompting the King to commission several of his councillors to examine the by then dead Arundel’s executors and tenants about the matter. In spite of the Crown’s positive response, Flete was still seeking redress as late as the early 1440s, when he claimed that Ryman, one of the earl’s executors, had deliberately obstructed his attempts to regain what was rightfully his. Before his death in May 1443, Ryman made Okehurst the trustee of his lands and goods, and in the following July Flete obtained a writ to secure the latter’s appearance in the court of common pleas, under pain of 1,000 marks. CP40/730, rot. 117. It is nevertheless unlikely that Flete was able to make good his claims before his own death, which had occurred by 10 May 1444. CFR, xviii. 276.

Flete’s will has not in fact survived, although he is known to have appointed at least three executors: John Fray†, Edmund Brudenell and the clerk, William Byngham, who were all occupied in the settlement of his tangled affairs for some years after his death. C143/452/2; C1/1489/78; The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 9, mistakes the will of Flete’s namesake, the London mercer, for that of the MP. Confusingly, the younger William also died in 1444 and likewise chose Fray as one of his executors: PCC 28-29 Luffenham (PROB11/3, ff. 226v-227).