HENDELOVE, William, of Devizes, Wilts.

A clothier or draper by trade, Hendelove was probably a son or other kinsman of the man of the same name who represented Devizes in 1419. The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 347. The older man must have died at some point after 1437, when the MP of 1449 was still described as ‘junior’. Wilts. Hist. Centre, Wilts. deeds, 212B/2281. The younger man was evidently a merchant of some substance, whose commercial contacts extended into Oxfordshire and London. CP40/756, rot. 337; 768, rot. 269; 800, rot. 159. The range of his dealings is evident from the goods that he was said to have purchased from the London mercer John Salman on a single occasion in 1443, which included 50 hats, a gross of pins, 200 skins of budge, and quantities of paper, feathers, tartarin and lawn cloth, as well as velvet cloth of gold. CP40/757, rot. 391. The loss of most of the Devizes borough records makes it impossible to tell when he first held local office, but he served as mayor at least once, in 1467-8, and his standing in the community of Devizes is indicated by the frequency with which he was named in an increasingly prominent position after the mayor in the lists of witnesses to local property deeds, and was called upon to act as a trustee of his neighbours’ property (on more than one occasion in conjunction with John Decon, a fellow clothier and one-time mayor of Devizes). Wilts. deeds, 212B/2281, 2284, 2286; Hants RO, Jervoise of Herriard mss, 44M69/C/536; CCR, 1454-61, p. 456; C1/11/385.

Nothing is known of Hendelove’s contribution to the deliberations of the Commons in two of the most dramatic assemblies of Henry VI’s reign. It is, however, possible that for at least part of his first Parliament he was his borough’s sole representative, since his colleague, the lawyer Thomas Norris*, spent at least part of the late spring session of 1450, when the Commons were gathered at Leicester, pursuing his own affairs in London. Earlier that year, Norris (alongside John Uffenham alias Laurence* and two other men) had stood surety for Hendelove in a suit over a bond for £12 brought by Thomas Brampton, an Oxfordshire man, CP40/756, rot. 337. and at the time of the final session of the Parliament he was appearing as the clothier’s attorney in the court of common pleas, where John Salman was seeking payment for the goods he had supplied seven years earlier. CP40/757, rot. 391; 758, rot. 115d.

Few details of the second part of Hendelove’s life have come to light, but he evidently survived into the mid 1470s, and is last recorded in 1475 among the witnesses to the endowment by John Coventre III* of a chantry in the parish church of St Mary, Devizes. Wilts. Arch. Mag. ii. 251.