DUKE, William

A resident of Horsham,1 There is no evidence that he was the man of this name possessed of land at Chertsey, Surr., or one of the two Williams, nephew and great-nephew of Gilbert Duke of Hawkhurst, Kent, who were party to a suit in Chancery: C1/7/41, 66. Duke was a feoffee of property in the town in the 1430s and 1440s, and served on juries giving evidence at inquisitions post mortem conducted there in 1441 and 1446 (following the deaths of John Weston I* and Sir Hugh Cokesey*).2 Add. 4401, f. 1; CP25(1)/241/88/13; C139/102/5, 122/36. As a member of the fraternity of St. John the Baptist established in the local parish church, he was among the brethren who on Easter Sunday 1445 were robbed of £8 left for safekeeping in a pyx at the house of Thomas Lynd. The alleged burglar was taken before the justices at the next sessions of the peace and then for trial before the King’s bench, where even though he was said to be a ‘common and notorious thief’ he was acquitted.3 KB27/736, rot. 30d. Together with John Donstall of Cowfold, Duke brought a suit in the court of common pleas in Easter term 1450 against men from Chiddingly in east Sussex for debts amounting to £9 3s. 4d., and the suit was still pending in the following Michaelmas term, in the course of which Duke was elected to the Parliament which assembled on 6 Nov. He may well have taken the opportunity of a longer stay at Westminster to press his case.4 CP40/757, rot. 13; 759, rot. 14. When elections were held for the subsequent Parliament (that of 1453), among those party to the indenture was John Duke, one of the constables of Horsham, who may have been our MP’s son.5 C219/16/2. In August 1458 John made a quitclaim to Thomas Hoo II* and others of his title to certain lands in the parish of Horsham, called ‘Forstares’, and in a croft in Rusper, some four miles away, and it may be the case that his putative father was now dead.6 CAD, vi. C4703.

It was probably a younger namesake of our William Duke who held office by appointment of Horsham’s lord, the last Mowbray duke of Norfolk, as ranger of the forest of Worth, from before 1472 until at least three years after the duke’s death in 1476.7 L.E. Moye, ‘Estates and Finances of the Mowbray Fam.’ (Duke Univ. Ph.D. thesis 1985), 440; DL29/454/7312, 7313. It is unlikely that the MP was the esquire of this name, ‘servant’ to the treasurer, Marmaduke, bishop of Carlisle, who was granted in reversion the office of King’s serjeant-at-arms on 24 Feb. 1449, especially as Lumley ceased to be treasurer in Sept. following and his retainer never succeeded to the office: CPR, 1446-52, p. 214; E403/767, m. 11; 769, m. 11. Lumley’s retainer was probably the ‘nobleman’ who obtained a papal indult for a portable altar in Mar. 1450, when living in the diocese of London: CPL, x. 77.