DAGVILE, William

A member of a well established Oxford family, Dagvile was one of wealthiest inhabitants of the town. He styled himself a ‘gentleman’, and contemporaries recognized him as such, but he must have derived most of his income from his business activities. Like his father, he was a brewer, but he also traded as a grocer, importing fruit, dates, rice and cotton through Southampton on at least one occasion in the mid 1440s. It is likely that he also had business dealings with London, since at the beginning of 1449 he gave a bond for £60 to Henry Hale, a grocer from the City.10 Green, 64; Top. Oxon. c. 396, ff. 24-26, 138; Cart. Oseney Abbey, i. 155-6; Registrum Cancellarii, i. 148-9; 369-70, 396-7; Brokage Bk. 1443-4, i. (Soton. Rec. Ser. iv), 109.

The earliest definite reference to Dagvile is provided by a deed of July 1442,11 The identity of ‘William Daghill’, among those in Oxon. expected to swear the oath to keep the peace administered throughout the realm in 1434, is uncertain: CPR, 1429-36, p. 393. through which his father settled two messuages and a couple of shops in the parish of All Saints upon him and his bride Joan, the daughter of a minor landowner from Chalgrove, a parish to the south-west of Oxford.12 Top. Oxon. c. 396, f. 147. Joan’s father William Quatermayns was not a figure of any great significance. He was only a very distant relative of the influential Richard Quatermayns*: W.F. Carter, Quatremains of Oxon. 65. Following his father’s death, Dagvile inherited many other properties in Oxford and its suburbs, as well as holdings at Abingdon in Berkshire. Among these was ‘Dagvile’s Inn’ in the High Street, a chief messuage in his home parish of All Saints, although it is not clear whether it was ever his personal residence. In the early 1450s at least, it was the dwelling place of his tenant Richard Spragat*.13 Wood’s Surv. Antiqs. Oxf. i (Oxf. Historical Soc. xv), 125; Cart. Oseney Abbey, i. 155-6; Surv. Oxf. i (Oxf. Historical Soc. n.s. xiv), 112; Grey Friars in Oxf. (ibid. xx), 204, 224; Top. Oxon. c. 396, ff. 136, 236, 277, 311, 312, 313.

Dagvile augmented his inheritance by acquiring another messuage in the parish of All Saints, an inn in Magdalen Street called The Christopher and various holdings in the parish of St. Mary Magdalen and the town’s northern suburbs. He also obtained a long lease of Chimney Hall, a tenement in the High Street, from Osney abbey in February 1451. For the lease, granted to him and two of his children, his son William and daughter Agnes, for a term of 80 years, he agreed a rent of 13s. 4d. p.a. In the event, the Dagviles were to relinquish it well before the end of this term since it was no longer in their hands in the late 1470s.14 Cart. Oseney Abbey, i. 155-6; iii (Oxf. Historical Soc. xci), 241, 250, 261. The abbey was not Dagvile’s sole institutional landlord, for he also paid rent to University College. His dealings with the college were not always harmonious, for in August 1450 the university chancellor’s court referred a quarrel between him and its master to arbitration.15 Registrum Cancellarii, i. 211; Acct. Rolls Univ. Coll. Oxf. i (Oxf. Historical Soc. n.s. xxxix), 538, 552, 684.

By the following April Dagvile was also quarrelling with William Witteney, a fellow of New College, and in May 1451 his wife Joan appeared in the same court to acknowledge that she had detained goods belonging to John Harrys, a beadle of the university, although why is not recorded. Such quarrels notwithstanding, Dagvile must usually have enjoyed a cordial relationship with the university. On other occasions, he arbitrated in disputes that had come before its chancellor’s court, and he was a benefactor of Lincoln College, to which he left property in his will. His friendship with Lincoln, then a poor institution, probably long predated this endowment, given that one of its fellows, John Shyrburn, bequeathed him a silver knife in October 1452.16 Registrum Cancellarii, i. 234, 240-1, 292-3, 349-50, 370-1; ii. (Oxf. Historical Soc. xciv), 150-1; Green, 64; Top. Oxon. c. 396 ff. 24-6; Oxf. DNB, ‘Rotherham, Thomas’; Biog. Reg. Univ. Oxf. ed. Emden, iii. 1690-1.

By the early 1450s, Dagvile had already embarked upon his career as an office-holder. He served a term as one of the chamberlains of Oxford during the lifetime of his father, with whom he received a call to do jury service at Westminster in June 1448.17 Cart. Hosp. St. John the Baptist, ii. 387. Thomas Dagvile was still alive in early January 1449, so it is quite possible that he lived to see his son returned to the Parliament that opened a few weeks later. In the decade following this assembly, the younger man exercised the municipal offices of bailiff and surveyor of nuisances and became one of Oxford’s aldermen. Following the accession of Edward IV, he served no fewer than six terms as mayor. The first three of these terms were consecutive, and he was mayor of Oxford when he sat in his second Parliament.

During Dagvile’s penultimate term as mayor, his first wife died. She was buried in the Lady chapel in All Saints, a parish church belonging to Lincoln College, and on 9 June 1473 he paid the parish burial fees of 6s. 8d. He had remarried by the following February, when he had Dagvile’s Inn, The Christopher and two tenements, one in the parish of St. Martin and another with a garden at Grandpont, settled on him and his new wife Margaret, and any issue of their marriage. Presumably, his second marriage and the consequent need to reorganize his affairs prompted him to make his will just a few months later. Dated 2 June 1474 and written in his own hand, it bears testimony to his wealth and local status.18 Top. Oxon. c. 396, ff. 24-26, 102, 148; c. 400, f. 51. By now, he had ruled out the possibility of having any children by Margaret, since he modified the settlement of the previous February. He did so by directing that after her death Dagvile’s Inn and the two tenements should revert to his only surviving child Joan, one of his daughters by his first marriage,19 It is not known when William and Agnes, the children associated with Dagvile in the lease of 1451, died. Yet William may have survived until the early 1470s, for in 1471 (or early 1472) William Dagvile and Ellen his wife obtained the lease of a brewhouse in the parish of St. Mary Magdalen. ‘William Dagvale’, a tax collector at Oxford in the late 1480s, is unidentified, although it is likely that he was a member of the MP’s family: Top. Oxon. c. 399, f. 73; Oxf. City Docs. (Oxf. Historical Soc. xviii), 107. and that Lincoln College should have The Christopher and the garden. In return for its endowment, he asked the college to establish an annual obit for the good of his soul. He further directed that Joan, by now the wife of Edmund Gille, an affluent man of business and an occasional supplier of earth and gravel to the college,20 Green, 66. should succeed to all the rest of his real estate. Should she die without heirs, the college was to have all his properties in the parishes of All Saints and St. Martin and at Abingdon, and Rewley abbey all those in the parish of St. Giles. Dagvile also bequeathed many fine doublets and gowns to his friends and servants, among them his ‘cousin’, John Hyde, to whom he left his best scarlet gown, Master William Withers, a former fellow of Lincoln to whom he assigned his ‘last weddyng gowne with the furre’, and his son-in-law Edmund Gille, who was to have his best crimson gown.

John Hyde was an esquire from Berkshire, and Dagvile had featured in a Hyde family settlement of 1448, by which he would succeed to the Hydes’ manor at Denchworth in that county in the event of the deaths without issue of more immediate members of the family during his lifetime, an eventuality that never came to pass.21 W.N. Clarke, Parochial Topography Hundred of Wanting, 99; VCH Berks. iv. 281. Among other bequests that Dagvile made were gifts of a psalter to Osney abbey and a set of vestments to the parish church of St. Giles, suggesting that he owned a private chapel. He named two executors, his wife and son-in-law, and he asked Withers to oversee their activities.

A few months after making the will, Dagvile began his final term as mayor, during which he assisted Lincoln College by issuing a charter supporting its appropriation of a chantry dedicated to St. Anne in the parish of All Saints.22 VCH Oxon. iii. 165. He died a little over a year after standing down from that office for the last time and was buried with his first wife in All Saints church. In the seventeenth century his brass was viewed by the antiquary Anthony Wood, although by Wood’s day it had been moved from the Lady chapel to the chancel. The brass, no longer extant, recorded that he died on 29 Oct. 1476 and depicted a man in a gown between two wives. It also bore the following inscription:

Oxonie maior, Dagfeld Willelmus ab orbe

Hic bonus et paciens mitis [?intus] vir dapsilis ede

Tollitur et tumulo presenti clauditur ere

Sic vixit mundo quod sit salvus bene crede.23 Wood’s Surv. Antiqs. Oxf. iii. 147-8. In spite of Wood’s evidence, Green states that he died on 20 Oct., although he also records that Lincoln College held an obit for him every 26th Oct.: Green, 66n, 106n.

Within seven months of Dagvile’s death, his widow remarried in the same church.24 Top. Oxon. c. 401, f. 22. Margaret’s new husband, surnamed Parker, was a wool merchant from Faringdon in Berkshire and a member of the Calais staple. A pardon that Margaret, by then a widow again, obtained from the Crown after the accession of Henry VIII provides the evidence for this later marriage, although Parker’s Christian name is lost, owing to damage to the pardon roll in question.25 LP Hen. VIII, i. no. 438 (3), m. 34. Margaret received her pardon as of Chipping Faringdon, Berks. and ‘Faryngton’, Wilts., and as the wid. of […] Parker, late merchant of the Calais staple. In all probability, he was John Parker, a stapler of the 1470s and early 1480s who was buried at Faringdon beside his former wife Elizabeth in 1485, for Margaret was certainly a widow again by February 1489. During her second widowhood, Margaret participated in the wool trade on her own account. She became a creditor of the stapler, Richard Pontesbury, whose own widow was to refer to her as ‘a woman of great and myghty substaunce’. Another of her debtors was the London mercer John Heron, who owed her over £250 for wool when he left the realm to join Perkin Warbeck.26 SC1/57/111; C143/453/21; CPR, 1476-85, pp. 306-7; Cely Letters (EETS, cclxxiii), no. 290; VCH Berks. iv. 497; Top. Oxon. c. 396, f. 243; C1/127/66; 155/44; I. Arthurson, Perkin Warbeck Conspiracy, 110, 189-91.

The long-lived Margaret also survived her stepdaughter, Joan Gille, who died some time early in Henry VII’s reign. Like her parents, Joan chose to be buried in the Lady chapel of All Saints. It is not known when she made her will since only an undated extract from it, relating to her real property in Oxford and recorded in the town’s ‘Liber Albus’ has survived. She left all of her holdings in Oxford to her husband to hold for life, directing that these properties, save for a brewhouse which she assigned to their two daughters, were to pass to their son Richard Gille after his death. She also stipulated that Lincoln College was only to succeed to the holdings assigned to it by her father if all of her children died without issue, so altering the arrangements he had made in his will. Possibly her husband had persuaded her to modify her father’s bequest, since she is known to have made her will with Edmund Gille’s ‘advice’.27 Liber Albus Oxoniensis ed. Ellis, no. 289. Whatever the case, these alterations caused both Margaret and the college considerable anxiety. The college sent William Withers and others to Faringdon to consult her, and its fellows entertained her and her lawyer at Oxford on other occasions. During 1487, various Lincoln men made a series of payments to Gille, presumably to encourage him to acknowledge their claims, and the college ordered copies of both wills in the following year. In February 1489 Margaret took the step of assigning to the college her whole life interest in the properties which she held by reason of the settlement of 1474, in return for an annuity of £5 6s. 8d., but the controversy probably dragged on for some time yet since Joan’s will was not proved at Oxford until 1501. Ultimately, the college was able to secure possession of the holdings Dagvile had specifically assigned to it, along with other properties like Dagvile’s Inn, which he had not.28 Green, 67-70; Top. Oxon. c. 396, f. 243. In 1513 Margaret Parker gave Lincoln the substantial sum of £133 6s. 8d., upon condition that its rector and fellows maintained two chaplains in the Lady chapel of Faringdon parish church, where they were to sing daily masses for her soul during the decade following her death. She died in 1523. Although depicted on the MP’s now lost brass, Faringdon was probably her burial place. The college respected her wishes by appointing and supporting a pair of chaplains in the church there.29 Green, 70; Wood’s Surv. Antiqs. Oxf. iii. 148.