HALIFAX, William

Halifax’s surname is a guide to his antecedents. In July 1426 he took a bond in £20 from a yeoman of Idle near Halifax, and when he sued on the bond the yeoman entered the technical plea that it had been extorted from him by imprisonment at Halifax. Much later, in his will of 1454, our MP made a generous bequest of vestments to the church of St. John the Baptist there.1 CP40/699, rot. 423; Borthwick Inst., Univ. of York, York registry wills, prob. reg. 2, ff. 299v-300v, calendared in Test. Ebor. ii. (Surtees Soc. xxx), 172-3. In short, there can be little doubt that he was born in that town, but early in his career he chose to settle in Nottingham, perhaps because of the greater commercial opportunities it offered. He first appears in the Nottingham records in March 1417 when he had a plea of debt pending in the borough court against a tailor; by Hilary term 1421, when the couple were sued for a debt of five marks by a former Nottingham MP, John Bothall†, he had married one Alice, probably a local woman; and he was well enough established in the town by the autumn of 1423 to be elected as bailiff.2 Notts. Archs., Nottingham recs., ct. rolls CA1311, rots. 12, 13; 1320, rot. 1; CP40/640, rot. 229. In the 1430s and early 1440s, when he was twice mayor and twice MP, few burgesses were more involved in Nottingham’s administration. Further evidence of his high standing is provided by his nomination by the mayor, Thomas Thurland*, in the autumn of 1442 as one of the four ‘upright and lawful men’ to act as a j.p. Thereafter, however, his administrative activity appears to have diminished. He does not appear to have been one of the seven aldermen the burgesses were empowered to choose under the terms of the royal charter of 1449. He was certainly not among their number in 1451, even though the position of his name in the election return of 13 Oct. 1449 – between those of two of the aldermen of 1451 – implies that he was of aldermanic rank.3 C219/14/3-5; 15/1, 7; Nottingham Recs. ed. Stevenson, ii. 408-9, 428-9; iii. 408.

Little trace has survived of how Halifax acquired the property in the town necessary to his prominent role in its affairs. In 1434 Thomas Sutton of Mansfield and his wife, Margaret, daughter and heir of Henry Normanton, a former bailiff of the town, demised and confirmed to him a croft between ‘le Scotbek’ and Dabtun Lane, but this marked only a small addition to what must already have been a significant holding. In the tax assessments of both 1435-6 and 1450-1 his annual income was put at £9.4 Nottingham ct. rolls CA1324, rot. 14; E179/240/266; 238/78, no. 6. According to tradition he had his residence at the north-west corner of a lane between High Pavement and Pilcher Gate. This lane, formerly known as Jack Nutter’s or Nuttal’s Lane, is now called Halifax Place. It may be that he also had some holdings just outside the town at Carlton. On 20 July 1447 he is said to have broken the close of Richard Basage there in what may have been a property dispute.5 T. Bailey, Hist. County Nottingham, i. 305; R. Thoroton, Notts. ed. Throsby, ii. 40; KB27/749, rot. 70.

Direct evidence of Halifax’s commercial concerns is similarly scarce, but these concerns were probably quite extensive. He was an active litigant in both the borough court and the court of common pleas. In Michaelmas term 1430, for example, he had pending in the latter court actions for debts totalling 97 marks against nine individuals, including the Nottingham ironmonger, William Burton*, and Nicholas Meysham*, a butcher of Derby; and in Easter term 1437, described as a merchant, he claimed over £40 from four defendants, three of whom were from Lichfield in Staffordshire. Actions in the borough court were generally for smaller sums, but in November 1431 he recovered against Simon Ilkeston, a local mercer, the large sum of nearly £50.6 CP40/679, rots. 184, 224; 705, rot. 386d; Nottingham ct. rolls, CA1322/I, rot. 4.

Late in his career Halifax unwisely came to the assistance of Sir Henry Pierrepont*, one of the several knights who lived in the immediate environs of Nottingham. Pierrepont was heavily in debt, and among his creditors was the wealthy London fishmonger, John Mitchell I*. With John Plumptre*, his fellow Nottingham MP in the Parliament of 1437, our MP guaranteed the repayment of the considerable sum of £150 to Mitchell on Pierrepont’s behalf. Predictably, Pierrepont proved unable to discharge the debt, and Halifax found himself defending an action for debt sued against him by the creditor’s executors. His failure to appear led to his outlawry, and although, in July 1447, he secured a pardon, it was at the cost of agreeing to pay the executors the original debt of £150 together with costs of 25 marks. If a later petition is to be credited, Pierrepont, as he was bound in honour to do, acted to indemnify Halifax and Plumptre of their loss. He conveyed his manors of Weston in Nottinghamshire and Anston in Yorkshire to feoffees on the condition that they would allow the two merchants to take 25 marks annually from their issues until the sum of £150 together with 31 marks in damages had been discharged. Unfortunately this did not mark the end of our MP’s problems. After Pierrepont’s death in November 1452, he and Plumptre complained to the chancellor that the feoffees, who included two prominent townsmen, Thomas Thurland and the recorder, Thomas Babington II*, refused to allow them to place a charge on the manors. The feoffees replied by denying fault, claiming that Pierrepont’s son and heir, another Henry†, had taken the profits of the manors.7 C1/22/8; C4/4/6; CPR, 1446-52, p. 17. The petition was presented between Nov. 1452 and Mar. 1454.

Halifax made his will at Nottingham on 4 Aug. 1454. Like other leading townsmen he wished to be buried in the church of St. Mary. He bequeathed a missal to the high altar there; the coffer ‘that standes by my bed syde’ was to be set in the chapel of St. Mary; and a blue and white cloth bearing the legend ‘Soli Deo honor et gloria’ was to hang before the altar of St. Mary at Lent. Beyond a bequest of £5 to the repair of Hethbeth bridge, the rest of his will was concerned with the division of a bewildering range of household goods to various beneficiaries. In this way he remembered the Nottingham guilds of St. George and the Holy Trinity, the priories of Newstead, Beauvale and Shelford, and the church of St. John the Baptist in his native Halifax. The chief beneficiary was, however, one Agnes Elowe, who was to have over 50 items including ‘a peyre trestelles that standys in the parlour’ and ‘the croper of my wyves sadel’. Another substantial beneficiary was Elizabeth Neteham, and, since these two were favoured above other legatees, it is tempting to conclude that they were his daughters. There is, however, no direct evidence to support such an identification. Neither an Elowe nor a Neteham appear among the borough records as likely spouses for the children of a leading burgess, so we must assume that Alice and Elizabeth were favoured servants. Indeed, it is a singular aspect of the will that the only reference to Halifax’s family is the bequest of his wife’s saddle and it is a reasonable inference that he died without issue. Other bequests raise the possibility that he had military experience for among his goods were a sword, gloves ‘of plate’, a peitrel (a piece of horse armour) and a buckler. He named three influential men as executors: Thomas Thurland (despite their disagreement over the Pierrepont enfeoffment), Master William Gull, rector of St. Peter’s, who had also been one of the Pierrepont feoffees, and William Wright, vicar of St. Mary’s. Among the properties Thurland later settled on the guild of Holy Trinity was a messuage on the north side of High Pavement once belonging to Halifax.8 York registry wills, prob. reg. 2, ff. 299v-300v; CPR, 1452-61, p. 616.