OVERTON, William (d.1483), of Helmsley, Yorks. and Brancepeth, co. Durham.

The Overtons had been established at Helmsley in the North Riding for at least two generations before our MP, but they were a family of very modest resources. This is apparent from the inconsequential bequests made by his father in a will dated 20 Sept. 1435. Our MP’s three sisters were bequeathed variously amber beads, a cow and an acre of corn; and William himself, as the eldest son, was left his father’s best new ‘murra argento parata’. Test. Ebor. iii (Surtees Soc. xlv), 262n. By this date, however, the young William, who was clearly a man of ambition and energy, had already ensured that he would leave such modest beginnings behind by entering the service of the lord of Helmsley, Thomas, Lord Roos. He served under Roos in France in 1427 and his lord rewarded him with appointment for life as bailiff, parker and keeper of his important Northamptonshire estate at Stoke Daubeney. E403/677, m. 18; CPR, 1436-41, p. 219; CIPM, xxv. 229. Roos’s death in August 1430, leaving an infant heir, was no doubt a setback to Overton, yet it was only a temporary one. He retained his place in the administration of the Roos estates during the minority: on 13 Nov. 1438 the Crown either confirmed or reappointed him in his Northamptonshire offices with their fees of 10s. p.a. as bailiff and a further 2d. a day as keeper. CPR, 1436-41, p. 219. His tenure of this office makes it possible that he is to be identified with the attestor of the Northants. parlty. election of Dec. 1441, but this is much more likely to have been a namesake in the service of the Catesbys: C219/15/2; E40/4403, 4477, 4537. More importantly he found a new master in a higher-ranking northern peer, Ralph Neville, earl of Westmorland. In 1443 and 1445 he acted as the earl’s attorney in the arrangements made for the division of the Holand inheritance of the earl’s mother, and he may already have been (as he certainly was by Michaelmas term 1458) acting as the earl’s receiver-general. There can be little doubt that the earl’s patronage is the main explanation for his election to represent the borough of Appleby in the Parliament of November 1449. CCR, 1441-7, pp. 100, 256, 259; CIPM, xxvi. 65-66; CP40/808, rot. 148; C219/15/7. It is possible that he had the additional recommendation to the Appleby electors of lands in the borough’s vicinity. A namesake, described as a yeoman of Great Asby (a few miles south of Appleby) and servant of the abbot of Byland in north Yorks., appears as a defendant in an action of forcible entry in 1440: CP40/716, rot. 338. The proximity of Byland to Helmsley suggests he may have been our MP.

Soon after this parliamentary service Overton, eager for further advancement, claimed a place in the royal household. He was in receipt of household robes in 1451-2, the last year of Henry VI’s reign for which the recipients are known, and in the ordinances of 1454 he was named as yeoman of the wafery. E101/410/9, f. 44v; PPC, vi. 231. It is possible that the Household esquire was our MP’s namesake from a minor gentry family established at Swineshead in Lincs. or the servant of the Catesbys mentioned above, but our MP is the much more likely candidate. His appointment, in October 1456, as one of the customs collectors in Newcastle-upon-Tyne was a reward for this service. So too was the more contentious grant made to him in the aftermath of the rout of the Yorkist lords at Ludford Bridge. On 12 May 1460, described as ‘King’s servant’, he had a life grant of the keepership of the meadows, fishery and royal swans within the lordships of Warwick and Barford and of the warren by Guy’s Cliffe, at the heart of the confiscated estates of Richard Neville, earl of Warwick. CFR, xix. 169; CPR, 1452-61, p. 586.

The accession of Edward IV in the following spring more or less ended this promising career, although it did provide Overton with an opportunity of another sort. Early in the new reign he married the widow of a wealthy merchant of Kingston-upon-Hull, Richard Anson, who may have fallen on the Yorkist side at the battle of Wakefield in December 1460. He also continued to serve the earl of Westmorland, a marginal figure in the 1460s and beyond. In Easter term 1463, as the earl’s former receiver-general, he sued for arrears of rent against a gentleman of West Cliffe near Dover in Kent, lessee of the earl’s manor there. His close connexion with the earl is also reflected in the general pardon he sued out on 20 Apr. 1464: he described himself as formerly resident at Brancepeth in county Durham, one of the earl’s residences. CP40/808, rot. 148; C67/45, m. 8. This pardon provides important evidence to distinguish the MP’s career from that of his namesakes. He gives his other aliases as ‘of Helmsley, late customs collector in Newcastle-upon-Tyne’, and ‘late of London, gentleman’ clearly showing that the career described here was that of earl’s servant.

Thereafter very little else is known of Overton even though he lived for nearly another 20 years. In the early 1460s he appeared in person to pursue actions of debt against the executors of Sir William Lancaster, late of Lowther in Westmorland, a yeoman of Hertfordshire and a gentleman of Crofton near Wakefield in Yorkshire; and in 1470 pardons of outlawry were granted to two yeomen of Northamptonshire and Kent who had been outlawed for failure to answer his debt pleas. These actions suggest a range of geographical interests, but it is likely that some of them were brought as the representative of the earl of Westmorland. CP40/808, rots. 91, 375; CPR, 1467-77, pp. 147, 203. Occasionally he was himself a defendant. In January 1469 he and his wife were sued by Edward Gower† of Beverley (Yorkshire) on a bond entered into by her first husband to the late John Curteys, a London stockfishmonger, once the husband of Gower’s wife, in November 1460. CP40/831, rot. 117; 840, rot. 336d.

Overton made his will on 27 Apr. 1481. Describing himself as an esquire resident at Helmsley, he wanted to be buried in the parish church there before the altar of St. Nicholas. He remembered his sister, Alice, and her four children, and it appears that he had none of his own. The will was not proved until 7 Mar. 1483 and a month later William Egremond, bishop of Dromore, acting as a suffragen bishop in the diocese of York, was commissioned to veil Overton’s elderly widow. Test. Ebor. iii. 261-3.