Of non-gentle origin, Nottingham came from a family of weavers long settled at Cirencester. Very likely a relatively substantial tradesman, his father and namesake was not always of irreproachable conduct. At the end of Henry IV’s reign and again shortly after the accession of Henry V, a royal serjeant-at-arms was commissioned to arrest the elder William Nottingham and several other residents of Cirencester and to bring them before the King in Chancery. Early in the following year, however, William and many of his fellow townsmen purchased a royal pardon for any offences they might have committed.
Destined for a career in the law rather than trade, their son must have attended an inn of court in London, whether solely with their support or with the assistance of a now unknown patron. Already an attorney in the court of King’s bench at Westminster by 1430, the younger William acted as a surety for a fellow lawyer, John Whittocksmead*, in the spring of 1436.
An early associate of Nottingham’s was another Gloucester-based lawyer, John Kendale. In February 1440 he, Kendale and three associates entered into a recognizance for £60, to guarantee that they would pay the Crown certain sums due for 2,000 woolfells recently impounded at Great Yarmouth. Evidently he and his fellows, having become involved in a commercial venture to export the fells, had neglected to pay customs or other taxes for which the merchandise was liable, but it is hard to understand why they should have chosen to use an East Anglian port if the fells had originated from the south-west.
At the beginning of the 1440s Nottingham had little to distract him from his private work as a lawyer, since there is no evidence of his holding office, whether under the Crown or any other authority or individual, before the middle of the same decade. His public career began in earnest with his inclusion on a commission of gaol delivery in early March 1445. In the middle of the same month he was placed on the commission of the peace for Gloucestershire, on which he remained – as a member of the quorum – for the rest of his life, and later that year he began a term as escheator of the county. Nottingham’s first appointment of particular significance was that of attorney-general, to which he was appointed for life in mid 1452, following the death of John Vampage*. Perhaps reflecting the growing importance of the office, he was the earliest of its holders to take the title attorney-general rather than King’s attorney, and his letters patent were the first to include the right to appoint clerks and other officers in all royal courts of record. The position of attorney-general gave him a political and legal role at the centre of the realm’s affairs, and it demanded considerable personal energy in return. His main role was to represent the King’s interests in the central courts at Westminster, but he also carried out many other miscellaneous tasks on the Crown’s behalf.
While making considerable demands on Nottingham’s time, the office of attorney-general also brought important rewards. As its holder he received a comparatively modest fee of £10 p.a., but he also benefited from frequent ad hoc payments from the Exchequer and from ready access to royal patronage. He appears not, however, to have exploited his position to the same extent as had John Vampage as King’s attorney. Although he secured the reversion of a duchy of Lancaster stewardship in Wiltshire, Dorset and Gloucestershire in October 1457 it was scarcely a grant of major significance. The reversion was dependent upon the death or surrender of another, far less distinguished, Gloucester-based lawyer, John Edwards*, who survived until January 1462. Evidently the stewardship was intended as a sinecure since, under the terms of his grant, Nottingham was to hold it for life once the reversion had vested, with licence to exercise it through a deputy if he so wished. When the grant was made he was already associated with the duchy, which had retained him for his counsel in the same year he became attorney-general. For his office as one of its apprentices-at-law, which he held until 1481, he received a fee of 40s. p.a. It was certainly no sinecure: for example, it was as such that he was commissioned to inquire into any activities of the farmers and officers in the south parts of the duchy which were damaging the King’s interest in May 1458.
Even if Nottingham failed to exploit the possibilities of royal patronage as fully as Vampage had done, the influence and prestige attached to his office of attorney-general also ensured that he won retainers from non-royal patrons, both institutional and individual. In October 1453, for example, the mayor and aldermen of London retained him as an attorney for the City, with a fee of 20s. p.a.;
Given his connexion with Gloucester, it is scarcely surprising that Nottingham came to represent the town in Parliament. Unlike some of the other members of the legal profession based at Gloucester in this period, he never served in the municipal administration but he was still involved in local affairs. In April 1456 its burgesses nominated him to arbitrate in a dispute between them and the prior of Llanthony by Gloucester,
It may well have particularly suited the burgesses of Gloucester to return Nottingham, the most prominent lawyer in their midst, to the Commons of November 1449, given the poor state of relations then existing between them and Reynold Boulers, abbot of Gloucester, an influential courtier. It was at some stage in 1449 that a mob of townsmen, supposedly angered by the abbot’s association with an unpopular government and court, ransacked his manor and vineyard at nearby Highnam.
When returned to his second Parliament in 1453, Nottingham still lacked estates of any significance outside Gloucester. He must therefore have owed much to his standing as a law officer for his election as a knight of the shire for Gloucestershire to a Parliament in which the Commons included a high percentage of royal servants. By virtue of his office of attorney-general, he also received an individual writ of summons to this and subsequent assemblies, meaning that in 1453 he waited upon the Lords as well as sat in the Lower House. Parliament was not the only royal assembly to which he was summoned during his career, since he was called to attend a great council at Leicester in the spring of 1455. In the event, the council never met because its summoning prompted Richard, duke of York, and his allies to take up arms and to confront a hastily raised royal army at the first battle of St. Albans.
Ironically, one of the Yorkist lords attainted at Coventry was Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, who had acted as a feoffee for Nottingham a little over a year earlier.
There is no evidence that Nottingham acquired any property in London – and none is mentioned in his will – even though he spent a great deal of his working life in the City, served its corporation as an attorney, acted as an arbiter and trustee on behalf of its residents and helped to found a fraternity in the church of St. Bride, Fleet Street. He did however receive a quitclaim of all lawsuits from the prioress of St. Helen’s Bishopsgate in February 1473, a release which covered real as well as personal actions, so raising the possibility that he held property in London at one stage.
Notwithstanding his professional talents, Nottingham lost the position of attorney-general soon after Edward IV took the throne. It is very unlikely that his removal from office had political connotations, for his role in the attainder of the Yorkist lords in 1459 was clearly that of a functionary rather than a political partisan. Initially reappointed attorney-general during pleasure on 8 Apr. 1461, he was replaced by Henry Sotehill just 12 days later.
By the late summer of 1465 Nottingham had another reason to spend time at Westminster, for it was as one of the King’s councillors that he was granted an annuity of £40 for life on 28 Aug. that year. The grant stipulated that half of the annuity should come from the fee farm of Gloucester and half from a farm the Crown received from the abbot of Gloucester. It was confirmed in the following spring, when the King issued further orders to ensure that the burgesses of Gloucester paid £20 of their fee farm to Nottingham forthwith, along with all arrears dating back to the same 28 Aug.
In all likelihood, Nottingham’s role as a royal councillor was confined to legal matters but there is little evidence for his activities as one of the King’s advisers. He is known to have attended the council at least twice between mid 1467 and the Readeption of Henry VI but he was probably present on other occasions as well.
In the same period Nottingham was associated with one of the most important men in the land, the King’s brother Richard, duke of Gloucester. In November 1469 he witnessed the transfer to Gloucester of the castle and lordship of Sudeley, Gloucestershire, wrested by the Crown from the unfortunate Ralph Butler, Lord Sudeley.
In spite of his links with Gloucester and service on the Yorkist Council, the essentially apolitical Nottingham suffered no interruption to his career as a servant of the Crown at the Readeption of Henry VI or the subsequent restoration of Edward IV. A j.p. and ad hoc commissioner during the brief second reign of Henry VI, he was also member of a commission sent, shortly after Edward recovered the throne, to deal with those who had participated in Fauconberg’s rising in south-east England. Having resumed his place on that King’s Council, he secured an exemption from the Act of Resumption passed by the Parliament of 1472 with regard to his annuity of £40.
A year later Nottingham’s legal career culminated with his appointment as chief baron of the Exchequer, in succession to the late (Sir) Thomas Urswyk II*. He was granted all the usual fees associated with that office, along with a customary annuity of 110 marks and two robes.
Readmitted as chief baron at the accession of Edward V, Nottingham formally surrendered the office just a few weeks later, by means of letters of 12 June 1483.
It is not known when or where Nottingham’s will, made just six days before his death, was proved, and it survives only in the form of an incomplete copy.
The remainder of what survives of Nottingham’s will is concerned with the arrangements he made for his third wife, Elizabeth Goldwell. He provided generously for this lady, who was probably considerably younger than him. First, he awarded her a life interest in all of his estates, save for the lands he had set aside for his foundation at Cirencester, the advowsons of the Gloucestershire parishes of Coates, Sapperton and Great Rissington and all wood and underwoods. By Nottingham’s own calculations, the lands he had assigned to her were worth £90 p.a. The will indicates that he had not fathered any surviving children, since he ordered his executors and feoffees to sell the reversions of these estates immediately after his death to the highest bidders (who would take possession when Elizabeth herself died), and to spend the money so raised on good works. Secondly, Nottingham directed that his widow should receive certain debts, totalling over £1,800, which were owed to him by Gherardo Caniziani, a prominent Florentine merchant and financier settled in London. The will shows that Caniziani was Elizabeth’s stepfather since it identifies him as the husband of her mother, another Elizabeth. Following the death of John Goldwell, the elder Elizabeth had married first one of his fellow mercers, Sir John Stocton, who had died in 1473, and then Caniziani, who had become her husband by January 1474.
The incomplete version of Nottingham’s will which has survived does not reveal the names of his executors, although the pardon rolls show that he appointed at least two, for both John Keke, a ‘gentleman’ from Cirencester, and Thomas Hancheche† were pardoned in their capacities as his feoffees and executors on 15 Nov. 1484.
Before 1485 Nottingham’s widow married again, becoming the third wife of Richard Pole†, an esquire of Richard III’s household. She and her new husband soon fell into dispute with the common clerk of London, William Dunthorne, who had in his custody bonds relating to Gherardo Caniziani’s debts to the late chief baron, and with John Alcock and his co-feoffees. According to a bill brought by the Poles in Chancery, Alcock and his associates were denying Elizabeth her right to the lands assigned in dower to her. The Poles also claimed that, while on his deathbed but before making his will, Nottingham had given a verbal undertaking that he would allow her an annual landed income of £132 rather than the £90 p.a. he had actually assigned her. The purpose of their bill was to demand that the feoffees should permit Elizabeth to receive the latter sum, along with an extra £42 p.a. to bring it up to the promised £132. The feoffees responded by asserting that Nottingham’s estates had proved less valuable than previously thought and that, in any case, Elizabeth was well provided for with the large amount of cash her late husband had bequeathed her. The parties appear to have come to terms with a compromise, by which the Poles lowered their demands, agreeing that Elizabeth should have £100 p.a. from Nottingham’s estates. In spite of this dispute, Pole took the opportunity offered by the late chief baron’s will to purchase the reversion of the manors in which his wife possessed a life tenancy, although he and Elizabeth were not to retain the manorial moiety at Great Rissington. In 1498 John Greville, the owner of the other moiety sold it to Nottingham’s surviving trustees, to whom the Poles then conveyed their share, and from whom Sir Reynold Bray afterwards acquired the whole property. Elizabeth died before mid October 1505 and was buried in the church of St. Vedast in London. She had not borne Pole any children, and after Richard’s death in 1517 the properties he had bought from Nottingham’s feoffees were shared among the sons of his previous two marriages.