PEKKE, William, of Bedford and ‘Le Hoo’ and Cople, Beds.

Almost certainly a lawyer, Beds. Historical Rec. Soc. xxxviii. 18 states that Pekke was a governor of L. Inn. ‘Pek’ was indeed one of the inn’s governors in 1425-6, but this term clashes with the MP’s term as a bailiff of Bedford. The governor was probably Richard Pekke, a member of the inn in the early 1430s. It is also unlikely that ‘William Pece’, the inn’s auditor in 1477-8, was the MP: L. Inn Black Bks. i. 2, 4, 62, 65. It is assumed that the MP was not the William Pekke whom the cathedral priory at Ely made steward of its estates in the soke of Somersham, Hunts. and most of the Isle of Ely in 1448. The priory also granted this William a corrody for life, in return for his legal counsel, and appointed him its attorney in the King’s courts: Add. 5826, ff. 164v, 165v. the long-lived Pekke was both a burgess of Bedford and a member of the Bedfordshire gentry. Having spent most of his early career in the town, he came to play a significant role in the politics of the county as a servant of Sir John Cornwall, Lord Fanhope, and he was normally accorded the style of ‘gentleman’. CFR, xvi. 128; CPR, 1436-41, pp. 246-7; CAD, i. C1006; CP40/800, rot. 177. But it is possible that his social status was not altogether unambiguous: in the mid 1440s, for example, John Haukyns and his wife sued William Pekke of Bedford, ‘yeoman’, for breaking into their house and close in the town: KB27/731, rot. 16d. Perhaps a son of John Pekke of Cople, lying immediately to the east of Bedford, CFR, xiv. 85, 120. But the MP’s contemporaries included more than one John Pekke of Cople, as well as a Richard Pekke from the same parish: CP25(1)/6/78/15; 79/9, 15; CAD, i. C865; Beds. and Luton Archs., deeds, 1430, 1449, W43, 171. he himself owned property at Cople, as well as in Bedford and several other parishes in the vicinity of the town. CAD, i. A552; CCR, 1435-41, p. 127; Beds. and Luton Archs., deeds, 1449, W171, 173. In Mar. 1439 he was referred to as of ‘Le Hoo’: CPR, 1436-41, pp. 246-7. It appears that he also possessed lands in Hertfordshire, where he was party to several land transactions as a feoffee, since he was probably the William Pekke who witnessed the election of that county’s knights of the shire to the Parliament of 1437. CAD, i. C865, 1006; CCR, 1435-41, p. 127; 1441-7, p. 288; VCH Herts. ii. 439-40; iii. 224.

Pekke is first heard of in 1416-17 when he and other residents of Bedford were assessed for subsidies which Parliament had granted the Crown. The assessments show that he was one of the wealthiest inhabitants of the town, since the sums he was expected to contribute (7s. 6d. and 5s.) were at the top end of the scale. He had come to prominence in the affairs of the borough by the mid 1420s, when its freemen were quarrelling with its non-burgesses over the expenses of Bedford’s MPs. In February 1425 he and others represented the freemen at Westminster, where they argued that all the residents of the town, even those who were not enfranchised, should contribute to those expenses. Beds. and Luton Archs., Bedford bor. recs., subsidy rolls, 1416-17, BorBD1/2, 6; award of William Babington c.j.c.p. and John Cokayne, 1425, BorBG1/1. He was elected one of the bailiffs of Bedford later that year, although he is not known to have held any further office there after this term came to an end.

It is likely that Pekke’s interests and activities outside the borough curtailed his career as a municipal office-holder. It was ‘of Bedfordshire’, rather than Bedford, that he stood surety for Robert Martin and George Trome when the Crown granted them the farm of revenues pertaining to the honour of Chester in Suffolk in November 1432. CFR, xvi. 128. He was also one of the residents of Bedfordshire required to take the oath to keep the peace administered throughout the country in 1434, CPR, 1429-36, p. 374. although this was sworn by several other burgesses as well as the gentry and more substantial freeholders of the wider county. Of greater significance for his career outside the borough, Pekke was appointed to the commission of the peace in Bedfordshire in the late 1430s, when local politics were dominated by tensions between the county’s most important magnates, Reynold, Lord Grey of Ruthin, and Sir John Cornwall. By this period Pekke was one of Cornwall’s retainers, and he was closely involved when his patron and Grey confronted each other in the spring of 1437. On 16 May that year, the date of his first appointment as a j.p., he and another of Cornwall’s men, William Ludsopp*, were placed on a commission instructed to inquire into all felonies, trespasses and other offences committed in Bedfordshire. It was presumably at Cornwall’s bidding that he arranged for the commissioners to sit at Silsoe, where Grey’s main residence in the county lay, a mere five days later. To add to the provocation, he and Ludsopp arrived at Silsoe accompanied by Cornwall and his ‘meyny’. Angered by this incursion into his neighbourhood and fearing that the commissioners intended to procure indictments of his own followers, Grey also appeared at the head of a large band of men. There was a real danger of serious violence until the sessions were deferred (in the end, they were probably never held). The government took alarm over the incident and in the following weeks Pekke, Ludsopp and their fellow commissioners were summoned to London for questioning by the King’s Council. P. Maddern, Violence and Social Order, 206-9; R.A. Griffiths, Hen. VI, 570-1; PPC, v. 35-39, 57-59.

Although disorder was averted in 1437, there were violent scenes when the Fanhope and Grey retinues clashed at the sessions of the peace in Bedford in January 1439. Cornwall himself was a member of the commission of the peace for the county, and he arrived at the sessions accompanied by a large number of his followers, including his fellow j.p.s, Pekke and Ludsopp. The elderly Grey did not attend but his supporters, headed by Sir Thomas Waweton*, also came to Bedford in considerable force. At the sessions, held in an upper chamber of the shire-house, there was a heated exchange of words between Cornwall and Waweton. Weapons were then drawn, provoking panic and a stampede for the stairs in which 18 men were crushed to death. Later that day Waweton, in association with three other j.p.s and the under sheriff, Thomas Stratton, drew up a certificate which they returned to the court of King’s bench. Cornwall, Ludsopp and Pekke responded by means of a like certificate, dated 24 Jan., addressed to the same court. In February Waweton and his associates were examined by the Council, which concluded that both accounts were biased and untrustworthy. On 7 Mar., after Cornwall had agreed to pay a fine at the Exchequer, the Crown issued a general pardon to him and 55 of his followers, including Pekke and Ludsopp, and on the following 30 May Waweton and his fellows were likewise pardoned. The quarrel ended more favourably for Cornwall (himself a councillor and one of the King’s kinsmen) than it did for his opponents, since Waweton and several other Grey retainers were excluded from the commission of the peace issued on 12 Mar. Pekke was also dropped from the commission, but it was he and John Wenlock*, another of Cornwall’s men, who were returned as the knights of the shire for Bedfordshire to the first Parliament to meet after the Bedford riots. He was reinstated as a j.p. in July 1440, some six months after the Parliament of 1439 was dissolved, while Waweton did not regain his place on the bench until after Lord Fanhope’s death in 1443. Grey was already dead by this date, and the removal from the scene of the quarrel’s two principal figures effectively assuaged the tensions afflicting the county. In subsequent years it was possible for Pekke to co-operate with John Fitzgeffrey*, one of Grey’s followers in 1439. In the autumn of 1450 both men were parties to the settlement of a manor in Edlesborough, Buckinghamshire, on Fitzgeffrey’s stepson, Robert Rufford*, and his wife, and by 1470 Pekke was acting as a Fitzgeffrey feoffee. Maddern, 209-22; Griffiths, 571-2; CPR, 1436-41, pp. 246-7, 282-3; KB27/711, rex rot. 22; 713, rex rot. 3; C140/38/49; 75/53.

When Lord Fanhope died it was without legitimate issue, and Pekke is not known to have found a new patron. During the following three decades, he continued to serve as a j.p. and a member of other commissions and to sit in at least one other Parliament, although as a Member for Bedford rather than as a knight of the shire. There is little evidence of his private activities in the same period although early in Edward IV’s reign he pursued a suit at Westminster against Agnes, widow and executrix of John Pekke of Cople, over an alleged debt of 40 marks. CP40/810, rot. 26. In common with most other lawyers, the civil wars and other political upheavals of his time did not interrupt his public career, and he was appointed as a j.p. as late as April 1476. He is last heard of in September 1476, when he and his son John (perhaps the John Pekke who had served as escheator in Bedfordshire in 1456-7) agreed to lease most of their holdings at Bedford, Goldington and Clapham to the prior of Newnham, a house of Austin canons, for a term of eight years beginning at Christmas 1477. In return, the prior undertook to pay them £8 immediately and a rent of 40s. p.a. once this term had begun. Excluded from the lease were several properties in Bedford and Goldington, including the Pekkes’ ‘principal hall’ in St. Cuthbert’s parish, Bedford, and ‘Bysshope’s House’, one of their tenements in the town. Pekke and his son also reserved for themselves access to a garden to the north of the hall, so that they had somewhere to take recreational walks. CAD, i. A552. An old man when the lease was agreed, Pekke is unlikely to have lived much beyond the mid 1470s. By the beginning of the sixteenth century the priory had purchased the hall and other properties in Bedford excluded from the lease, as well as over 70 acres which the MP had held in the town’s fields. Beds. Historical Rec. Soc. xxv. 16, 73, 75, 77, 79, 81.