PILTON, William (d.1471), of Bishop’s Lynn, Norf.

Originally from Northamptonshire, a county in which he retained property interests, PCC 1 Wattys. These included lands at Pilton, perhaps his home parish. Robert Reynold of Pilton, s. and h. of William Reynold, was probably the brother who features in Pilton’s will: CCR, 1429-35, p. 92; C1/18/107-8. Pilton was hiring a cellar and chambers from Lynn’s Trinity guild by the late 1430s, King’s Lynn recs., acct. scabins Trin. guild, 1437-8, KL/C 38/12. and in February 1440 he paid the customary fine of 40s. to obtain the freedom of the borough. KL/C 7/3, f. 119v. Described as a merchant in a royal pardon of 1452, C67/40, m. 7, where his alias of Reynold is also noted. he possessed trading interests in northern Europe, from where he imported a variety of goods, including timber, tar and horseshoes. E122/96/41, m. 6. During the early 1440s he was one of 24 merchants from Lynn who complained about illegal charges and extortions imposed upon them by officials in the king of Denmark’s territories, prompting the borough to appoint envoys to negotiate with that king. KL/C 7/3, f. 153v. Conceivably a fellow Lynn merchant, John Nicholasson (father of William†), whose executor Pilton was in the early 1460s, was a business partner. CP40/806, rots. 328, 329d; 807, rot. 139. Among Pilton’s customers was (Sir) John Howard*, to whose manor at East Winch (a few miles south-east of Lynn) he sent three hogsheads of ale in 1464. Howard Household Bks. ed. Crawford, i. 546.

Soon after becoming a freeman of Lynn, Pilton was involved in local administration, serving a term as chamberlain in 1440-1. Later in the same decade, he helped to choose the chamberlains and other officers of the borough, being among those who nominated its officials for the years 1444-5, 1445-6 and 1449-50. KL/C 7/3, ff. 190v, 205v, 264. He himself joined the common council, or 27, in 1444 and became a constable in October 1449. Evidently this latter appointment was not to his liking. In the following March he obtained permission to surrender the office and an exemption from ever serving in it again, having contributed 40s. towards the repair of a communal building. Ibid. f. 279v. In July 1455 Pilton was elected to the 24, the dominant body at Lynn, although he was offered the chance to pay a fine of £10, should he not wish to accept the nomination. KL/C 7/4, p. 56. It is possible that he took up that option, since he appears not to have begun service on the 24 until Michaelmas 1457. Early in the following decade, he was elected mayor, an office in which he served a second term in the late 1460s.

Like other leading burgesses, Pilton sometimes performed duties not necessarily associated with any particular position at Lynn, aside perhaps from that of councillor. In 1446 he and others were nominated to negotiate with the local guilds for contributions towards the costs of entertaining the King, just before Henry VI arrived in the town in August that year. A much more frequent visitor was the borough’s feudal lord, the bishop of Norwich. In June 1447 Pilton was among the burgesses involved in preparing for a visit by the then bishop, Walter Lyhert, and in the late summer of 1450 he was a member of the delegation which the borough sent to the bishop for discussions about its fee farm. KL/C 7/3aHallHa, ff. 217v, 235, 286v. During the last few months of Henry VI’s reign the corporation was understandably concerned about the disorder afflicting the country, and in early January 1461 Pilton helped to site guns for the borough’s defence. In the same period Lynn faced royal demands for troops, and on 12 Jan. its council responded by assigning 24 local men to attend the King. To raise the money needed to support them, it imposed a tax on Lynn’s inhabitants, a levy which Pilton, himself required to contribute 10s., helped to administer. KL/C 7/4, pp. 145-7.

At that time Pilton was a Member of the Parliament of 1460, then in recess; it reconvened on 28 Jan. His third Parliament, it was summoned by a government controlled by the Yorkists, in sharp contrast to the previous Parliament. Upon their election in 1459, he and his fellow Member, Simon Pygot*, had obtained £5 from the borough before setting out for Coventry, the venue for the notoriously anti-Yorkist assembly of that year. Perhaps they had been mindful of the difficulties that Lynn’s MPs had encountered in trying to secure their parliamentary wages in the past, but it is unclear if they ever received the further £3 4s. they had claimed on their return. M. McKisack, Parlty. Repn. English Bors. 91. Following his election to his last Parliament in 1467, Pilton and his fellow burgess, Henry Bermyngeham*, took the borough’s most recent charters to Parliament, with the intention of acquiring a renewal of Lynn’s liberties from the Crown. KL/C 7/4, p. 242. Apart from sitting in four Parliaments, on several occasions Pilton was also involved in the process by which the borough selected its parliamentary representatives prior to the making of the return into Chancery. While his name does not feature in any of those formal returns still extant, the borough’s records show that he was among the burgesses who chose Lynn’s MPs for the Parliaments of 1447, November 1449, 1450, 1455 and 1470, as well as the aborted assembly of 1469. In 1469 he presided over these proceedings, which occurred during his second term as mayor. KL/C 7/3, ff. 231v, 269v, 294v; KL/C 7/4, pp. 54, 268, 286-7.

The Parliament of 1469, intended to open at York on 22 Sept. that year, was summoned in dramatic circumstances. Edward IV had lost control of his kingdom, having fallen into the hands of the rebellious earl of Warwick and duke of Clarence, in the wake of uprisings in northern England. In the previous March, a few weeks before the troubles began and several months into his second term as mayor, Pilton consulted with several other leading burgesses of Lynn about how to receive the King if he visited their town. KL/C 7/4, p. 264. In the event, the borough had to contend with his sudden arrival the following June, after the outbreak of the northern revolt headed by ‘Robin of Redesdale’. Initially Edward, ignorant of the seriousness of the situation, had proceeded with an already planned pilgrimage to the shrines of East Anglia. (It appears likely that word of the proposed pilgrimage had prompted Pilton’s consultations of the previous March.) It was not until after the royal entourage had reached Norwich on 18 June that Edward appreciated the need to deal with the rebellion in person. Having sent to the royal wardrobe for banners, armour and other accoutrements, he left the city on 21 June, heading for the north by way of west Norfolk and his castle at Fotheringhay in Northamptonshire. Reaching Walsingham later on the same day, by the 26th he was at Lynn. How long he stayed there is unclear, although he had certainly left Norfolk by the 30th. C.E. Moreton, ‘Anthony Woodville, Norwich and the Crisis of 1469’, in Much Heaving and Shoving ed. Aston and Horrox, 62-63.

Pilton died within 18 months of completing his second term as mayor. In his will, dated 24 Jan. 1471 and proved the following 13 Feb., PCC 1 Wattys. he asked to be buried beside his already deceased wife, Christine, in St. Nicholas’s chapel at Lynn. He made bequests totalling £22 to the chapel and left sums to other religious institutions, including every friary in Lynn and South Lynn and the leper hospitals at Lynn, Gaywood, Hardwick and Setchley. For the good of his soul, he requested the friars’ prayers, as well as those of two local anchorites and the monks of Blackborough, Shouldham, Marham and Crabhouse. He also provided for two chantry priests, one in St. Nicholas’s chapel and the other at Cambridge, to pray for his and Christine’s souls. Among Pilton’s bequests to members of his family and other close connexions were gifts of three silk belts (two with silver buckles and the other with gold) to his sister-in-law, Edith, and various items of plate to his daughters, Elizabeth, Agnes and Margaret, and to his godson, William Thoresby. He named as his executors Thomas Thoresby (the son of Henry Thoresby*), Walter Cony* and Edmund Westhorpe, to each of whom he awarded 40s. As for his lands, Pilton left his house in Lynn with its appurtenances to his eldest daughter, Elizabeth, for life, but ordered his executors to dispose of the remainder of his real property immediately after his death. This consisted of a tenement in the borough once owned by William Mollesworth, a messuage there formerly held by Thomas Spicer*, property in South Lynn and lands at Pilton, Stoke Doyle and Wadenhoe in Northamptonshire. He intended the money raised from the Northamptonshire lands to provide annuities of 40s. each for his brother, Robert, and sister-in-law, Edith, for the rest of their lives, and that from the sale of his other holdings to be spent on good works. He also directed that Simon Pygot should have first option of purchase (for £60) of the messuage formerly held by Spicer, and that Thomas Thoresby should likewise have the opportunity to buy his property at South Lynn for £20. As Pilton’s executor, Thoresby was well placed to bid for other lands which had belonged to the MP, and in his own will of 1510 he referred to holdings at Pilton, Stoke Doyle and Oundle in Northamptonshire, properties which he had almost certainly acquired from Pilton’s estate. PCC 34 Bennett (PROB11/16, ff. 265v-267v). Thoresby’s executorship was far from trouble free, since it involved him in Chancery litigation in 1477. The plaintiff, John Haliday of Lynn, said that he had entered into several bonds with Pilton, securities which Thoresby was now using against him at law, although Pilton had, while on his deathbed, ordered their return. The bonds related to the MP’s handling of merchandise which Haliday had entrusted to him before embarking on a pilgrimage to Rome. C1/50/354.