LOVELL, William I, of Wincanton, Som.

A lawyer, Lovell normally resided at Wincanton in Somerset, C67/39, m. 6. situated not far from Shaftesbury, the Dorset borough which he represented in five consecutive Parliaments of the 1430s. The start of his career as an attorney in the central courts at Westminster coincided with the beginning of this parliamentary service: in Trinity term 1431, just after the dissolution of his first Parliament, he acted in the common pleas for Hugh Yon*, the merchant from Dartmouth. Five years later he took on briefs in the same court on behalf of John Sydenham* and the latter’s kinsman by marriage the important landowner (Sir) John Stourton II*. CP40/682, rot. 119d; 700, rot. 358; 703, rot. 459. After sitting in Parliament for the last time he began regularly to serve the sheriffs of Somerset and Dorset as their under sheriff (doing so for William Stafford*, Robert Cappes, Sir Edward Hull* and Thomas Tame*), and when not specifically described as ‘under sheriff’, he was kept busy as one of the sheriffs’ officers, receiving and returning writs on their behalf. Thus, for example, he was responsible for returning into King’s bench an inquisition held at the sheriff’s tourn by Sir John Chideock* in the spring of 1448. KB9/259/43. Lovell also appeared as an attorney in the court of the Exchequer for the former sheriffs Cappes, Tame, Richard Warre* and William Carent*. E13/144, Mich. rot. 2; 145B, rots. 1d, 4, 19; E159/226, recogniciones Easter; 232, brevia, Trin. rot. 9d. That he proved to be so useful to the sheriffs of the 1440s was largely due to the more permanent position he occupied in the King’s bench, as clerk of the rolls in the early years of the decade and as a filacer for 12 years from 1441.

Naturally, Lovell’s work constantly brought him into association with other lawyers frequenting the Westminster courts who also came from Somerset, among them the brothers Alexander* and John Hody*. Together with Alexander he was party to transactions regarding land in their home county, and when (Sir) John (who had risen to be chief justice of the King’s bench), made his will in December 1441, he left Lovell a bequest of 20s. Som. Feet of Fines (Som. Rec. Soc. xxii), 99; Reg. Chichele, ii. 606. On the following 1 Jan., just a few days after Sir John’s death, Lovell attested the election of Alexander as a shire knight for Somerset in the forthcoming Parliament. C219/15/2. In May 1444 Lovell stood surety at the Exchequer for William Bochell*, the clerk of the peace in Somerset, and he succeeded Bochell in this office some three years later. CFR, xvii. 295; KB9/255/2/39d. In this role he continued his connexion with Alexander Hody, one of the j.p.s of the quorum, but it was no doubt their personal rather than professional links which led him in Trinity term 1447 to stand bail in the King’s bench for Hody and others who stood accused of abetting the murderers of Edward Cullyford*, the coroner and under sheriff of Somerset who had been killed the previous August. KB27/745, rot. 28. Lovell himself appeared as a defendant in the law-courts on less serious charges: in 1449, when sued by the executors of John Stopyndon, the master of the rolls of Chancery, on a bond in £40 he had entered some three years earlier; and in the spring of 1451, when the sheriffs of Middlesex were instructed to bring him to answer Isabel, widow of John Hore, for a debt of £20 and damages of £2. CP40/753, rot. 319; KB27/760, rot. 29d.

There are few signs that Lovell ever received extraneous rewards for his work in the King’s bench, save that on 8 July 1451 he shared at the Exchequer a ten-year lease of property in Okeford in Marshwood, Dorset. Robert Cappes, the former sheriff and a local landowner, stood surety for him. CFR, xviii. 211-12. Otherwise, in May 1452 he witnessed the sale of the manor of Ranston in Dorset by Henry Bruyn* to the future judge Richard Chokke, and in March 1453 he was a mainpernor when William Carent received a fresh grant of the wardship and marriage of the heir of William Westbury, j.KB. CCR, 1447-54, p. 347; CPR, 1452-61, p. 46. Lovell ceased to be a filacer in the King’s bench that summer, for reasons which remain obscure. He was summoned to a different court, that of the common pleas, in Trinity term 1455 to respond to the allegation of the widow of Sir John Chideock that he had failed to pay £40 of the sum of £200 in which he had been bound to Chideock when he was sheriff on in March 1448. Lovell asked for leave to take counsel, but when he failed to appear again in court in Hilary term 1456 judgement was given in the widow’s favour. CP40/778, rot. 107. Styled as a gentleman ‘late of Wincanton alias late of St. Clement Danes outside the bar of New Temple’ he was sued for a debt of 40s. by a London tailor just over a year later. He is not recorded thereafter, unless he was the William Lovell ‘of Raffeston, gentleman’ said early in 1458 to owe the same sum to a merchant from Poole. CP40/786, rot. 405; 788, rot. 41. Although it must have been a younger namesake, William Lovell of ‘Raffeston’, esquire, the son-in-law of William Twyneho*, who was active in 1482: Dorset Feet of Fines (Dorset Recs. x), 399-400; CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 177. Perhaps that William was the MP’s descendant.