LANGLEY, William

The MP for Shoreham has not been identified to any satisfactory degree.1 There was a Suss. family of this name, but it was based at Ifield, several miles to the north of Shoreham, and in any case was of little consequence in our period: CAD, vi. C3798. It is just possible, albeit unlikely, that he was the man of this name who came from east Kent. In 1412 that William’s annual income from land (at Eastry, Whitstaple, Faversham and elsewhere) had been said to amount to as much as £58 6s. 8d.,2 Feudal Aids, vi. 465. and in accordance with his standing as a landowner he served in his home county as a commissioner of array in May 1415, before being appointed sheriff six months later. Further ad hoc commissions of array followed in April 1418 and March 1419, and he was assigned to raise loans for the Crown in 1420. That William Langley was known to the Sussex landowner Robert, Lord Poynings, for whom he witnessed a deed near Faversham later that year, and, having the status of an ‘esquire’,3 CCR, 1419-22, p. 126; CPR, 1422-9, p. 440.was distrained to take up knighthood in 1430. He was the father of Walter Langley of Knowlton, j.p. Kent in 1440s and 1450s, whose wife Isabel (d.1474) brought to the Kent family the substantial estates of her uncle John Langley II* (d.1458) of Siddington in Gloucestershire.4 CPR, 1446-52, pp. 159-60; 1467-77, p. 271. Their eldest son, another William Langley, died in 1483: CIPM Hen. VII, i. 362, 447, 450; iii. 676.