Gille’s background and parentage are obscure, but it is possible that at an early stage in life he received some training in the law. He is first heard of in 1412, when he was in dispute with Walter Bishop and others over property in Kingsbridge, a few miles from Totnes,
Gille’s connexion with the Dynhams also produced indirect benefits. Thus it was that John Wroughton (d.1429) of Broad Hinton, a feudal tenant of the family, leased his Devon manor of Woodhouse and borough of West Alvington to Gille for his life at an annual rent of £26.
The full extent of Gille’s landholdings is obscure. Woodhouse and West Alvington and his tenement in Kingskerswell aside, he held the manor of Hatch Arundell, worth £20 p.a., and other lands in Culverhill and Cogworthy (in Yarnscombe) and Kingsbridge.
By the early 1430s Gille had established a prosperous and growing shipping business. In early 1431 he claimed that a crayer of his had been taken from ‘Bateston’ with anchors, cables and other equipment.
In that same summer of 1433, Gille was returned to the Commons for a second time, on this occasion by the townsmen of Dartmouth, two miles south of his principal residence at Nethway. He had probably already attracted the government’s attention, for four days after the end of the first session he was appointed one of the customs collectors in the south-Devon district, beginning a career of Crown service that would span more than two decades. By contrast, no details of Gille’s part in the Parliament’s deliberations are explicitly recorded, but it is highly likely that he took a personal interest in a petition placed before the Commons in the final days of the autumn session by the Lisbon merchant John de Port. The Portuguese trader claimed that on 8 Aug. he had lawfully brought a cargo of salt, oil, hides and other merchandise worth some £400 to Dartmouth and had paid the customs to Gille (who had presumably absented himself early from the first session of Parliament, which continued for five further days). On 12 Aug., so de Port’s petition continued, a group of Exeter merchants, including William Attwyll*, the searcher of ships in the port, and the deputy butler, John More II*, as well as the wealthy John Hull*, had boarded his ship with an armed following of some 60 men, and had cut the vessel’s sail from the yardarm, before raiding the cellars where de Port’s property was stored and carrying off his property. In October de Port had ridden to London to seek redress, but had been intercepted at Honiton, dragged off to Exeter, and clapped in strong irons. De Port had succeeded in regaining his liberty by a royal writ of corpus cum causa, but the writs of sub poena summoning de Port’s assailants into Chancery had never been served, as the Exeter men had curtly informed the messengers bearing them that any attempt to deliver them would prove fatal. The Commons and Lords passed the petition and it had received the royal assent by 12 Dec. when the sheriff of Devon was ordered to act upon it. In January de Port’s assailants appeared in the court of King’s bench and claimed that two of their number had struck a bargain to buy part of the cargo, and had made partial payment, but that the Portuguese merchant had subsequently refused to honour the agreement, and had consequently been arrested by the officials of the Exeter staple court. He had been bailed, but had sought to make for London, and had thus been intercepted and returned to Exeter by Hull, one of his sureties. The claims and counter-claims evidently baffled the justices, and in September a commission of four Dartmouth men, including Gille and his fellow customer Nicholas Stebbing*, was appointed to investigate the matter further.
Gille would continue to serve as one of the customers at Dartmouth for some seven years until 1440, when he took up a similar post in the port of Southampton for a further period of two years. It is probable that these appointments were at least in part intended to give him preferential access to the Crown’s revenues in order to be able to commandeer the shipping that was desperately needed to transport ever fresh expeditionary forces and garrisons to and from France. Dartmouth shipmen had long played an important role both in assembling the necessary flotillas, and in keeping the seas by harassing enemy (as well as all too frequently neutral) vessels by their privateering activities, and it seems that Gille eventually inherited the mantle of the distinguished John Hawley*, for many years the Crown’s principal servant in the south-Devon ports. He was first charged with the provision of shipping in 1434 and was tasked to do so on frequent subsequent occasions throughout the 1430s and 1440s, drawing substantial sums from the Exchequer for the wages of masters and mariners.
In February 1436 Gille was granted letters of marque licensing him to arm two ships, the Antony and the Katerine, as well as two balingers or barges to fight the French at sea for a period of four months, taking any goods and vessels captured as his reward,
It seems that about this time Gille fell seriously ill, for he had to write to the treasurer, Lord Cromwell, ‘with all lowelynesse’ to apologise for his shortcomings in the execution of his official duties, which he blamed on his unspecified ailment, and to thank him for his patience.
Gille’s rehabilitation, when it came, was more than complete: in February 1447 the men of Dartmouth once more elected him one of the representatives in Parliament (although perhaps motivated at least in part by a difficulty to find other men willing to travel to a provincial backwater like Cambridge or Bury St. Edmunds), on 27 May he was reappointed as a customer at Exeter and Dartmouth, and on the same day he was granted sweeping and unprecedented powers to inspect the records of all royal officials in the ports to the west of Poole.
While Gille’s service to the Crown was central to his career, he also maintained other connexions along with those to the Dynhams: in the summer of 1440 he found sureties before the justices of common pleas for the influential Sir William Palton*;
The years from 1447 were busy ones for Gille. As treasurer Lumley sought to balance the books, he placed considerable trust in Gille, who alongside his responsibilities for the maximization of the customs revenues was charged with a range of miscellaneous tasks, such as the sale of the marriages of the heir of Sir John Speke* and other wards, and investigations into the landholdings of tenants-in-chief.
With Normandy lost, attention now turned to the defence of what remained of the Lancastrian possessions in Gascony. In October 1450, even before Parliament had assembled in England, Bergerac had fallen to the French, leaving the Gascon capital of Bordeaux itself open to attack, while the preparations for the dispatch of an expeditionary force under Richard Wydevile, Lord Rivers, dragged on. The Crown was desperate not only for men, mariners and money, but also for reliable intelligence, and so Gille was ordered to sail for Gascony with Rivers’s force, and ‘to retourne ayen in all goodely hast after þe landing of þe said lord Rivers to lete us have knowlach of þe manor of þe disposicion of þe contrey þer’. He would never carry out this commission, for on 29 June 1451 Bordeaux fell, before Rivers had even embarked.
Once again, Gille’s duties in the King’s service may have prevented his election to the Parliament of 1453 – alongside his other offices, he was at the time serving a third spell as escheator of Devon and Cornwall – but it seems that he was nevertheless present at Reading at the time of its opening on 6 Mar., for the following day he was assigned his expenses for carrying a message from the King from Reading to London,
In spite of the substantial sums that Gille periodically advanced for the conduct of the war, his personal wealth was clearly substantial, and he displayed no more scruples about the methods by which he refilled his coffers in the early 1450s than he had done earlier in his career. By early 1453 he had sold a ship called Le George (probably the repaired wreck of the vessel he himself had rammed a decade earlier and presumably towed to safety at Dartmouth), to a London merchant, John Adam, and his Portugese associate Pedro Fernandes.
After Edward IV’s accession, Gille retired from the service of the Crown. It is probable that his advancing years were as much to blame for this as the change of dynasty, for his son Thomas developed close ties with the new rulers, and Gille himself remained active in his locality. He held a final office as bailiff of Dartmouth in 1463-4, and periodically still acted as a witness or feoffee for landowners of the region. There also continued to be occasional clashes with his neighbours: he perhaps availed himself of the turmoil of the early months of Edward IV’s reign when in the final days of June 1461 at Brixham he helped himself to 40 cartloads of bricks belonging to Joan, the newly widowed wife of Sir Robert de Vere*, as she complained before the justices of common pleas (a charge which Gille denied).
The exact date of Gille’s death remains obscure, but he died around the end of 1466, for a writ of diem clausit extremum was sent to the escheator of Devon on 18 Jan. 1467. He died intestate, and on 24 Jan. the administration of his goods was initially committed to his son and heir, but it was apparently eventually undertaken by his widow, Joan, who went on to marry the customs official William Fokeray†.