One of the best known of all fifteenth-century Speakers,
Born in the late fourteenth century, Oldhall was the only son of a prominent Norfolk esquire. It is not certain who his mother was, since he came into possession of the lands brought to his family by both of Edmund Oldhall’s wives, although it is worth noting that his daughter and heir shared the same Christian name as Edmund’s first wife, Mary English.
The young William began his career as a soldier in 1415, having indented to serve with three mounted archers in the retinue that Henry V’s uncle Thomas Beaufort, earl of Dorset, took to France. Dorset was made captain of Harfleur after it fell in the following September, and he and his retinue were based in the town for the rest of the campaign. In spite of missing the battle of Agincourt, the English garrison at Harfleur saw plenty of fighting. During the winter of 1415-16, they made several forays out of Harfleur, incurring heavy casualties on one such sortie in March 1416. By then duke of Exeter, Beaufort spent the latter part of the following year and most of the first half of 1418 in England, but Oldhall must have remained in France, given that he was away from home when his father died.
There is no evidence for Oldhall’s activities between January 1419, when Rouen finally fell, and the French victory at Baugé in March 1421. Exeter was taken prisoner at Baugé but it is likely that his retainer, who was certainly in England shortly afterwards, had returned home before the battle took place. Trouble he had run into with his inheritance prompted Oldhall’s return. Taking advantage of his absence in France, one William Shelton had obtained administration of his father’s estate from the archbishop of Canterbury. Probably the William Shelton of Norfolk who had succeeded his father Sir Ralph Shelton† in 1414, Shelton had also managed to persuade the sole surviving feoffee of the Oldhall manors at Bodney and Narford in the west of the county to sell them to his own nominees, having convinced that trustee that Edmund’s only son and heir had died overseas. Upon arriving home, Oldhall succeeded in recovering the properties although only after presenting a bill to the chancellor and petitioning the Parliament of May 1421 for redress. Assuming that Shelton was Sir Ralph’s offspring and not a namesake, fears over his own inheritance might explain his behaviour, since Sir Ralph had arranged to exclude his son from some of his estates.
By the following autumn Oldhall was again back in England, probably to deal with further personal matters. During this lengthy visit home he stood surety in the Chancery for Robert Lathbury, who had undertaken to serve the King in France, and at the Exchequer for Sir Edmund Stradling, to whom the Crown had agreed to grant the keeping of certain estates which had belonged to the late Sir Gilbert Denys†.
During early 1424 Oldhall was in England seeking recruits for a substantial retinue of his own. Having indented to serve the Crown in France with 44 men-at-arms and 135 archers for six months, he took part in an expedition to Picardy in the spring of that year, an operation he helped the Regent of France, John, duke of Bedford, to plan.
Again in England in mid 1426, Oldhall was by now closely associated with the duke of Bedford, who in the summer of that year sent him on an embassy to the duke of Burgundy. It appears that the purpose of the mission was to improve Anglo-Burgundian relations, strained by the rift between Duke Philip and his cousin Jacqueline of Hainault, wife of Humphrey, duke of Gloucester. Escorted by 41 horsemen, he and his fellow ambassadors, Richard Wydeville*, Master John Estcourt and Nicholas Harley, left London for Flanders on 1 Aug. Before their departure, the Exchequer paid both Oldhall and Wydeville £50 and Estcourt and Harley 50 marks each towards their wages and expenses. Presumably Oldhall headed the embassy, since he was allowed daily wages of 20s., as opposed to the 13s. 4d. assigned to each of his fellows. Away for just over two months, the ambassadors reported back to the Council on the following 10 Oct. In February 1427 the Council granted a petition they had submitted over arrears of their wages, although Oldhall was still owed money for his part in the mission nearly 20 years later.
Possibly already back in France when the petition was granted, Oldhall had certainly returned to soldiering by May 1428 when he helped John, Lord Talbot, to recover Le Mans. Talbot meted out terrible retribution on those at Le Mans who had helped the French to seize it from the English, but later that year the King’s council in Normandy received intelligence that some of the inhabitants of Argentan had not heeded this dreadful warning and intended to betray their own town to the duke of Alençon. Reacting to this news, the council wrote to the lieutenant of the garrison at Argentan, to inform him that it was sending Oldhall to assist him there until the duke of Bedford ordered otherwise, and to instruct him that he and Oldhall should immediately expel any of the town’s inhabitants whom they suspected of disloyalty.
Amidst such exploits in the field, Oldhall remained in touch with home. On one occasion at the end of the 1420s he received a messenger from the corporation of Norwich, a body for which his father had acted as an adviser. He himself had links with Norwich, since Henry Sturmere, one of the city’s more prominent residents, served him as a feoffee.
Eventually won by the priory, the quarrel lasted several years and was still very much in progress when Bedford appointed Oldhall lieutenant of Calais. The lieutenancy, which the latter assumed before the end of 1432, proved a difficult one since the garrison there mutinied in the spring of the following year. Protesting over their unpaid wages, the soldiers seized the wool lying on Calais’ wharves and refused Oldhall entry into the town, even though his wife was then staying within its walls. No doubt feeling thoroughly humiliated, Sir William rode to Bedford at Rouen to seek help. As it happened, the Regent was about to visit the Low Countries for his marriage to Jacquetta of Luxembourg, and he dealt with the troubles at Calais en route. Accompanied by Oldhall, he and his entourage took up lodgings at Balinghem castle, a few miles south of the town, while Richard Buckland*, the treasurer of Calais, was sent ahead to negotiate with the garrison. Having received certain assurances from Buckland, the soldiers permitted the duke and his company to enter in peace on 12 Apr. Once inside the town, however, the duke ordered the arrest of many of their number and certain customs’ obligations previously promised to them were withdrawn. A few days later Bedford left for Thérouanne, where he was married on the 20th. On his return to Rouen shortly afterwards, he again stopped off at Calais, to discuss the future conduct of the war with the duke of Gloucester and to mete out further punishment to the imprisoned soldiers. Bedford’s harsh measures provoked strong resentment in some quarters, and one chronicler sympathetic to the mutineers claimed that after these events the duke never had ‘bodily hele till he dyet’.
It is not clear if Oldhall accompanied Bedford when the Regent returned home in June 1433, although he was certainly back in England in the following spring when he attended a great council at Westminster. The French war was very much on the agenda, and Bedford, no doubt supported by Oldhall, was obliged to justify his conduct of it. The duke returned to France at the beginning of July 1434. Oldhall soon followed him, for on the 12th of that month he received royal letters of attorney prior to crossing the Channel. Later that year he helped to deal with the aftermath of an atrocity committed by a group of unwaged English soldiers. In early October 1434 these men massacred an entire local Norman militia at Vicques, near Falaise, causing uproar in that region of Normandy. Recognizing the seriousness of the situation, the bailli of Caen, Sir Richard Haryngton*, acted decisively to ascertain the facts and swiftly to send the results of his investigation to Bedford and the Grand Conseil at Rouen. In response, Bedford appointed a high-powered judicial commission, led by Sir John Fastolf, the master of his household, Sir John Salvain, bailli of Rouen, and Oldhall, to meet up with Haryngton at Falaise, and the ringleaders of the marauding soldiery were captured, tried and executed.
Having returned home, Oldhall was assessed for the purposes of the income tax the Parliament of 1435 had granted to the Crown. By now a knight banneret, he was found to enjoy a substantial income of £215 3s. 4d. p.a. from his lands and fees in Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire and the Skipwith estates in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, but it is unclear whether this included the £80 p.a. he received from Robert, Lord Willoughby. Granted before 1431 and drawn upon Willoughby’s estates in Norfolk and Suffolk, this annuity for life had been bestowed on him in return for a loan, evidently very substantial and possibly as much as £1,000, he had afforded his brother-in-law.
In common with Fastolf, Ogard and others who had served Bedford, Oldhall began to gravitate to the young Richard, duke of York, after their patron’s death. It is not known exactly when he entered the service of York, who began his first term as lieutenant-general of France and Normandy in the spring of 1436, but it was probably as one of the duke’s men that he made preparations to leave England in October 1437. His destination was Bayeux,
A few months after his reappointment as lieutenant-general of France and Normandy in July 1440, York issued instructions for the management of the war. He did so with the advice of Oldhall, Sir John Fastolf and another experienced soldier, Sir William ap Thomas. It was these men, all members of York’s ‘chieff councelle’, who counselled the duke to secure the wide-ranging powers granted to him as lieutenant and who closely advised him in his conduct of that office.
Both of York’s terms as lieutenant-general were criticized for their supposed inactivity, the result (it was alleged) of his counsellors’ fears for his personal safety, even though he and Talbot were able to break up the French siege of Pontoise in the summer of 1441. It was through sheer lack of manpower available to York and his commanders, rather than incompetence, that the enemy were able to retake Pontoise in the following autumn.
No doubt Oldhall had exaggerated his infirmities when petitioning the Roman Curia, since he remained active in a military capacity throughout York’s second term as lieutenant-general, during which he also served as a member of the court of requests in Rouen.
By the mid 1440s the King was actively seeking a peace treaty with France, and following his marriage to Margaret of Anjou he undertook to return the county of Maine to Margaret’s father, its ancestral count. Whatever his later criticisms of such a policy, York showed every sign of accepting it at the time. It was far less popular among his advisers in Normandy, and Oldhall must have found the proposed surrender of Maine, which he had helped to conquer, particularly galling.
It is likely that Oldhall accompanied his patron to the Parliament which opened at Bury St. Edmunds in the following February, since he witnessed a grant the duke made to the Franciscan house at Bury while the Parliament was sitting. In April 1447 York went to Windsor to attend a chapter of the Garter. During this meeting he nominated his retainer for election to the Order in place of the late duke of Gloucester, who had died suddenly shortly after his arrest at Bury, but in spite of this and Bedford’s previous recommendation Oldhall would never become a Garter Knight.
The corn and wine in question was shipped into London. Sometimes known as ‘of London’ in his later years,
No doubt the duke’s generosity was at least partly motivated by a desire to reward such a highly valued servant, although it is also possible that the financial problems he had run into lay behind some of the grants he made to his retainers.
Oldhall also acquired estates in Ireland, and in July 1444 the King licensed him to retain them as a non-resident landlord.
The duke of York remained continuously in Ireland until September 1450, but Oldhall is known to have visited England earlier that year.
Shortly after Oldhall returned to Ireland in the spring of 1450, Cade’s rebellion broke out in south-east England. The rising was the most dramatic manifestation of popular discontent with the failures of Suffolk’s administration and the rebels demanded a role in government for York. Surrounded by Oldhall and other old soldiers who had lost their French estates and were bitterly critical of the mishandling of the war, and aware that the defeated lieutenant-general of France, his rival Edmund Beaufort, had returned to England, York needed little prompting to leave Ireland. In early September 1450 he landed in North Wales, and before the end of the month he came before the King at Westminster. Upon his return, he assured Henry VI of his loyalty and complained about the machinations of his opponents. According to one of two bills he submitted to the King, there had been attempts to waylay him and his retinue, both as he travelled to take up his appointment in Ireland and on his return. The bill also referred to a plot to execute Oldhall and to imprison himself and two other leading retainers, Sir Edmund Mulsho* and (Sir) Walter Devereux I*, in Conway castle as soon as they landed back in Wales.
Once back in England, York canvassed for the return of his supporters to the Parliament of 1450, not least in East Anglia, a region he visited a few weeks before the assembly opened. Before he arrived those local gentry who looked to him for redress of their grievances made plans to wait upon him in the ‘most wurchespfull wyse’ and to ‘cherse and wurchep well’ his chamberlain.
When Parliament opened York was at Ludlow and the duke of Norfolk in East Anglia, and it is possible that the assembly went into recess until the two lords, each at the head of a large personal retinue, arrived in London just over two weeks later.
As the political pendulum swung back in favour of Somerset and the Court, life became increasingly difficult for Oldhall. It is commonly accepted that York was behind Young’s petition, but it is possible that it was the Speaker who had prompted Young to present it,
A few weeks after Oldhall was restored to sanctuary, the duke of York was obliged to submit to the King at Dartford, having failed to shake the government by a show of force. In political terms the confrontation at Dartford confirmed Somerset and the Court in the political ascendancy, and in the Easter term of 1452 Oldhall was the subject of several indictments in the court of King’s bench. He stood accused of having assembled with other traitors at Westminster Hall in July 1451, in order to plan a rebellion in September of the same year. He was also charged with inciting men from Kent and elsewhere to murder the King and his lords and to destroy the courts and laws of the land, a reference to disturbances at a meeting of the lords at the Hall on 1 Dec. 1450, the day on which Somerset’s property in London was spoiled. Oldhall was even accused of organizing rebellions after he was restored to sanctuary, although such accusations probably reflected the shift in the political balance of power and Somerset’s personal hostility towards him, rather than the reality. He was supposed immediately prior to Dartford to have helped plan an uprising in support of York, with the aim of seizing the great seal and discharging the chancellor, a conspiracy which led to 1,000 men assembling at Hounslow. Further indictments for treason implicated him in conspiracies said to have occurred in the weeks after Dartford, namely plots to raise rebellion in Wales and the marches and to depose the King.
In spite of obtaining royal pardons in April and June 1452,
Although physically safe, Oldhall was stripped of his possessions after taking sanctuary. In about June 1452 the King’s half-brother, Jasper Tudor, received a grant of all his estates, and in the following December the Crown granted Walter Bergh the arrears of rent Oldhall was owed by his stepson Sir William Skipwith in Lincolnshire, the annuity of £80 p.a. Sir William had received from Lord Willoughby and all his goods and chattels in Hertfordshire (including building materials at Hunsdon) and Norfolk. In the same month the escheator of Norfolk and Suffolk impounded 430 of Oldhall’s sheep at Little Ryburgh in west Norfolk, although Edmund Clere, probably acting on Oldhall’s behalf, seized them from the escheator shortly afterwards.
In spite of his attainder, Oldhall’s fortunes began to change while the Parliament was still sitting, a development arising from the King’s mental collapse in the summer of 1453. In the following autumn the Lords reacted to the resulting political vacuum by summoning York back to the Council and Somerset was sent to the Tower. In the final session of the Parliament York assumed office as Protector of England, a position he held until the King recovered his faculties at the end of 1454. By then Oldhall had acquired a writ of error to begin the process of reversing his outlawry, but he remained in sanctuary until after York’s victory and Somerset’s death at the first battle of St. Albans. He left St. Martin’s at the beginning of June 1455 and surrendered himself to the court of King’s bench, where he produced his letters of pardon of June 1452 and pleaded that he had been outlawed while confined to sanctuary and unable to defend himself. At the same time he submitted a petition to the Council seeking the overturning of all outlawries, forfeitures and other measures taken against him. In the petition he asserted that he had always served all three Lancastrian kings as a ‘trewe faithfull liegeman’ and complained that certain ‘undisposed’ persons, desiring to obtain grants of his lands and goods, had maliciously accused him of involvement in Cade’s rebellion. He also protested about his confinement in sanctuary under ‘streyte kepyng’. The Council heard the petition on 6 June and decided it should be granted, provided the King agreed. Oldhall’s plea in King’s bench was admitted before the end of the same month, and by 7 July the news of the quashing of his outlawry had reached Sir John Fastolf’s servant William Worcestre, who reported to John Paston that ‘Ser W. Oldhale ys processe yn the Kynges Bynche reuersed’.
The Yorkist-dominated Parliament of 1455 provided Oldhall with the opportunity to begin the process of recovering his estates, and he presented to the Commons a private petition demanding the restitution of these lands. Similar in content to his petition to the Council and probably passed in the first session, it referred to his record of service to the Lancastrian kings in France and elsewhere,
Presumably Oldhall had relinquished his position as the duke’s chamberlain during his confinement in St. Martin’s and it is unclear whether he ever resumed the office after leaving sanctuary. It appears he devoted much of the later 1450s to personal affairs, particularly to quarrels with his stepson, Sir William Skipwith, and the family of his son-in-law Walter Gorges. The dispute with Skipwith was ostensibly over a debt of £40 which Oldhall claimed his stepson owed him, but it is unlikely that relations between the two men were ever particularly easy, and it is hard to dispel the impression that Skipwith was unfairly treated by his stepfather. In 1439, shortly after reaching his majority, the younger man had been prevailed upon to agree to a settlement of the manor of South Ormsby to Oldhall’s heirs in the event of a failure of heirs in the Skipwith line, and in the following year his grandmother, Alice Skipwith, had begun a suit against Oldhall and his wife for detaining £152 17s. from her. In May 1441 Skipwith had made a release to the couple of all actions for waste in the Skipwith estates in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire in Margaret Oldhall’s hands, although later in the same month the Oldhalls had consented to his taking possession of the Lincolnshire manor of Calthorpe.
Whatever his disagreements with Skipwith, Oldhall’s quarrel with the Gorges family was far more acrimonious. Originally he and Sir Theobald Gorges* alias Russell, a fellow veteran of the war in France and retainer of the duke of York, were on friendly terms with each other, a relationship which had culminated in a marriage between his only child Mary and Gorges’s eldest son Walter. A settlement for this match was agreed in November 1443, although the marriage ceremony, held at Southwark, did not take place until 16 Aug. 1446. The couple were still minors at this date, and Oldhall undertook to provide them with board and lodging in his household for the first seven years of their marriage.
At some stage during the quarrel Oldhall also clashed violently with his son-in-law, a fracas which arose when he and his servants rode to Little Fransham, where Walter was farming the rectory. According to a petition Walter subsequently submitted to the Crown, two of these servants had seized and held him while Oldhall went for him with a dagger, and he had escaped death only because his wife had intervened and managed to restrain her father. Oldhall had then held him prisoner until he had bound himself in 50 marks to submit to his father-in-law’s judgement in all matters between them. Having secured the bond, Oldhall had subjected him to such unreasonable demands that he could not agree to them and had then gone to law against him with the bond for non-compliance. Condemned in 500 marks as a result, he had ended up in the Marshalsea prison, and while he was in custody Oldhall had sued a feigned action against him for detinue of certain writings and evidences, leading to his further condemnation in another 300 marks.
During his quarrels with Skipwith and the Gorges family, Oldhall involved himself in other, unrelated disputes. Shortly before he was arrested by the sheriffs of London at the suit of Sir Theobald Gorges, he began an action in King’s bench against the clerk Richard Broun for committing a burglary on his property at St. Giles Cripplegate while he was in sanctuary. Following his arrest, the King’s bench ordered the sheriffs to deliver him up to that court so that he might pursue this suit. He was subsequently transferred to the Marshalsea, from where he began another action against Thomas Knyston of Dartford, although on what basis is unknown.
As the country slid towards civil war Oldhall remained embroiled in private disputes. By the spring of 1459 he was again in the Marshalsea, this time in connexion with a quarrel with an old enemy, Walter Bergh. He was granted bail after he and two sureties, Thomas Depden of Newmarket (who had served him as an auditor on his estates) and Thomas Saunder (the London brewer) pledged that he would do Bergh no harm and would subsequently reappear in court.
In spite of Oldhall’s attainder, the King’s bench had neither finished with the suit he had brought against Gorges nor with the process between him and Walter Bergh. In Hilary term 1460 his mainpernors in his suit against Gorges – Humphrey Bourgchier*, Thomas Young and Roger Malmesbury – formally told the court that he could not appear because, as was common knowledge, he was a prisoner at Kenilworth. In the following Easter term Thomas Depden likewise came to Westminster, to explain that for the same reason Oldhall was unable to appear in accordance with the terms of his bail. On both these and subsequent occasions the mainpernors asked the court to send a writ to Lord Sudeley ordering him to bring Oldhall to Westminster, but no action was taken while the justices, faced as they were with such a politically delicate matter, enquired into the exact manner and causes of his detention. It was not until the following 19 Oct. that Butler appeared with his prisoner, even though the Yorkists had recovered control of the government three months earlier.
In his lavish last will and testament, completed just two days before his death,
Even though the registered copy of Oldhall’s will bears no date of probate, his executors are known to have set about their business. At some stage before 1471 Hunsdon was sold to Edward IV, who agreed to pay Archbishop Bourgchier 2,000 marks for the manor.