HAYROFE, William

In conformity with the pattern common among Northampton’s burgesses, Hayrofe was elected as bailiff and then to Parliament in quick succession when still young. For long thereafter he remained one of the town’s most important men. In 1465 he joined with three other leading townsmen, including Thomas Hunt* and Thomas Braunfeld*, in advancing the sum of 200 marks to (Sir) Thomas Tresham* (who was repurchasing his estates after suffering attainder in 1461), taking as security a lease of Tresham’s property in Northampton for a term of five years. On 1 Apr. 1472 he attended a meeting of the fraternity of ‘the Holy Rode in the Walle’ in the church of St. Gregory the Pope.3 Add. Ch. 22374; HMC Hastings, i. 141-2. A dyer by trade, the surviving alnage accounts of the 1470s show that he was then the most active of Northampton’s cloth merchants. For example, between February and Michaelmas 1472 he was a member of a number of syndicates who sealed 96 cloths; in the next financial year he was responsible on his own account for the seal of 53; and from June 1476 to Easter 1478 he was the leader of a syndicate of five which sealed as many as 139.4 E101/343/19.

By this latter date Hayrofe had greatly increased his resources by a marriage, probably his second, to the widow of a very wealthy merchant of Stratford-upon-Avon. In his will made in April 1473, her husband John Hannys had left as much as 460 marks to his four children and he treated his widow with similar largesse. She was bequeathed as many as 1,500 sheep with a moiety of all his jewels and given a life interest in property in Stratford-upon-Avon worth 10 marks p.a.5 PCC 9 Wattys (PROB11/6, ff. 70v-71). Hayrofe may not have lived long to enjoy this augmentation of his resources. His second term as mayor is his last appearance in the records, and he had been dead for some years by 1491 when his son and heir, also William, presented a petition to the chancellor. This provides an indication of the family’s standing in that the petitioner claimed he had been offered 200 marks to marry one Joan Justice and that his property in the town was worth as much as £20 p.a.6 C1/97/69, 70.