LEDE, William, of Chichester, Suss.

Lede is recorded in the rolls of the court of common pleas as residing in Chichester and occupied variously as a vintner, an ‘ostler’ (innkeeper) and a husbandman. In the Michaelmas term of 1419 he was named as the defendant in two suits. In the first of these a number of retainers of John Mowbray, the Earl Marshal, including John Lancaster*, alleged that he, as ‘tounclerk’ of Chichester, had unjustly detained £40 belonging to them. This is the sole reference to Lede’s tenure of the office, which presumably required a high level of literacy. In the second suit Thomas Patching†, the former mayor of Chichester, claimed that Lede owed him £9. CP40/635, rots. 49, 486. In the Michaelmas term of 1423 Lede appeared in the court in person to sue a chapman from Chichester and the parson of the church at nearby Middleton for a debt of £2. CP40/651, rot. 477. Whether this particular debt had arisen from his official commitments or from his private commercial concerns is not recorded.

Lede was returned by his fellow citizens to three consecutive Parliaments of the 1420s, and was serving as bailiff when elected to the second of them, which assembled at Leicester in February 1426. While the Parliament was still in progress in the Easter term that year he was one of the defendants in actions begun in the common pleas by Henry Shamelere and William Pyper, who separately alleged against him as bailiff that in association with the mayor, Henry Grenelef*, some ‘servants’ and a tanner he had unjustly and with force seized their goods worth £80. The court ordered that Grenelef and Lede, who had presumably been acting in their official capacities, should be attached by the sheriff to appear in Trinity term to answer the charges. CP40/661, rot. 193.

In July 1427 Lede purchased from Alice, widow and executrix of Richard Rykeman, a tenement in North Street, Chichester, which her late husband had instructed his executors to sell. However, within a few days he conveyed it to a clerk called John Muleward. Suss. Arch. Collns. lxxxix. 130-1, 134. The executors of Thomas Patching, who included Henry Grenelef and his wife, sued him in the summer of 1432 for the large debt of £40, but he himself brought pleas a year later against John Dolyte* for £10 and a Havant man for £2, appearing in court in the Michaelmas term to do so. CP40/686, rot. 255; 691, rot. 543. He was styled ‘husbandman’ in 1439 when defendant in another suit, but ‘ostler’ in 1442 when he allegedly owed 22 marks to a local clerk. CP40/715, rot. 15; 724, rot. 242d. In Trinity term 1445 Grenelef’s widow and executors were suing him for £40 (quite likely in a continuation of the suit of 13 years earlier), at the same time that William Hore I* commenced an action for trespass against him. Although still engaged in lawsuits in 1446, CP40/738, rots. 13d, 53, 258d; 740, rot. 51d. Lede does not appear in the records thereafter until 1467, when Roger Rudby, a local gentleman, was pardoned his outlawry for failing to pay his fine to the King for neglecting to bring Lede before the justices to answer Hore’s charges. Hore had died 19 years earlier, in 1448, and whether Lede was still living so long afterwards is also unlikely. CPR, 1467-77, p. 37.