PERKINS, William

More may be added to the earlier biography.6 The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 53-54.

Perkins’s marriage to Margaret Paynell, grand-daughter of Sir Thomas Paynell† and heiress of his property in Berkshire, probably took place before 1411, when he first acted as patron of the church at Ufton Robert. Margaret’s mother or stepmother, Alice, had been left in possession of part of her inheritance, and in the Michaelmas term of 1423 Perkins and his wife brought a plea against her and her then husband William Westcote, alleging that they had wasted Margaret’s property at Buscot. At the same time they were engaged in suits over other holdings at Buscot, Snowswick and ‘Westonwick’, and for the manor and advowson of Ufton, in which the principal claimant appears to have been Elizabeth, wife of John Collee. Perhaps Elizabeth was another Paynell widow. The settlements of the following year presumably resolved these difficulties, and thereafter the former Paynell estates remained in the possession of Perkins and were passed on to the next generation after his death. At the same time as the lawsuits over his wife’s inheritance, Perkins, as ‘of Ufton, gentleman’ was being sued by Sir Thomas Wykeham* for a debt of £40.7 CP40/651, rots. 23, 65, 588.

Perkins’s career as a lawyer and his membership of Lincoln’s Inn naturally often took him to the central law courts, and on one of his visits to the capital, in 1421-2, he joined the popular London fraternity of St. John the Baptist, founded by the city’s tailors.8 Guildhall Lib. London, Merchant Taylors’ Co. accts. 34048/1, f. 126v. Pleas entered on his own account sometimes coincided with his service in the Commons, as when in 1435 he sued a husbandman for a debt of £10.9 CP40/699, rot. 4d. On another occasion, ten years later, he alleged that men from Pamber and Silchester had broken his closes at Ufton and stolen 600 rabbits from his warrens as well as hares, pheasants and other game.10 CP40/737, rots. 77d, 158. Certain other legal actions were brought in his capacity as an executor.11 CP40/744, rot. 191. He was named as a potential juror at the important trial for treason of Thomas Kerver of Reading in 1444,12 KB9/245/44. and his knowledge of the law qualified him in the last years of his life to be a member of the quorum on the Berkshire bench.

Perkins had been employed by the earl of Stafford at least from February 1428, when he acted as the earl’s agent at the Exchequer, collecting assignments on his behalf, and later on he held office as one of the stewards on his estates, in return for the remuneration of an annual fee of ten marks.13 E403/683, m. 15; 686, m. 3; Rawcliffe, 234. Undoubtedly, however, his employment by Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, was of greater significance at the time of his four elections to Parliament in the 1420s and 1430s. As well as his stewardship of Duke Humphrey’s lordships of Cookham and Bray, mentioned in the earlier biography, he also served as his deputy in conducting pleas subject to the laws of the forest, for instance holding sessions in Feckenham forest in Worcestershire in 1434. He is last recorded in the summer of 1447, as a feoffee and witness for John Norris* of Bray, the influential esquire for the King’s body who immediately after the duke’s death earlier that year had been appointed to the stewardship of Cookham and Bray, which had now reverted to the Crown.14 CP25(1)/85/6; CCR, 1441-7, p. 496.