GIFFARD, William

The only definite reference to Giffard is the return naming him as a knight of the shire for Gloucestershire in the Parliament of 1449-50 and, assuming that it was he who attested the elections and held the offices listed in the cursus above, his public career was a short one. Possibly, he was a cadet member of the Giffards of Weston Subedge in north-east Gloucestershire, a family which numbered Walter Giffard (d.1279), archbishop of York, among its ancestors and held manors at Weston Subedge and Aston Subedge in Gloucestershire, at Sherston Pinkney in Wiltshire and at Crondall in Hampshire.2 VCH Hants. iv. 7-8; CCR, 1405-9, p. 348; 1441-7, p. 419; CFR, xvii. 205-6; CP25(1)/79/90/86; CPR, 1441-6, p. 344; CIPM, xxvi. 240, 501; Lambeth Palace Lib., Reg. Stafford, f. 145; VCH Oxon. viii. 62; C140/67/44. There is no evidence to connect the MP with William Giffard of East Ginge, Berks. and ‘Rodenhurst’, Wilts. Born c.1401, that William was the s. and h. of Walter Giffard of ‘Rodenhurst’ by Alice, h. to a moiety of a manor at East Ginge. Alice, who appears to have survived her husband, died in the spring of 1431 when her son succeeded to her estate at East Ginge. William was succeeded by his s. Edward, who by 1496 had been succeeded by his own s. Maurice Giffard of Frome Selwood, Som.: CIPM, xxiii. 432; VCH Berks. iv. 305; CFR, xvi. 45; E159/209, brevia Easter rot. 9; C67/53, m. 40.

It is also conceivable that the MP was William Giffard esquire of Leckhampton, just south of Cheltenham. During the late 1440s, the executors of Richard Skernyng, a draper and tailor from London, pursued a suit for debt at Westminster against William of Leckhampton in his capacity as the executor of John Giffard, but it is impossible to ascertain whether John was the early fifteenth-century knight of the shire for Buckinghamshire of that name.3 CP40/755, rot. 369. It is likewise not possible to prove a family connexion between the Leckhampton William and the Giffards of Weston Subedge. Presumably a relative (perhaps the son) of the early fifteenth-century John Giffard of Leckhampton,4 CCR, 1409-13, p. 80; CFR, xiv. 27. this William is a very obscure figure. A trustee for Sir Thomas Wykeham* in March 1440,5 KB27/718, rot. 34d. he died before the end of Henry VI’s reign, having made a will (no longer extant) in which he appointed his wife Margaret as his executor.6 A William Giffard esq. was party to a conveyance of property in London in Aug. 1438 – apparently as a feoffee of Elizabeth, wid. of Thomas Rickhill – but it has proved impossible to ascertain whether he was William of Leckhampton. It is likewise unclear whether the Leckhampton William was the landlord at Cromhall in south Glos. (where Sir Gilbert Giffard (d.1373) had once held a manor) in the mid 1440s, or the esq. who sued a husbandman in 1455 for pasturing livestock on his lands at ‘Durstyswalton’ in the same county: CCR, 1435-41, p. 240; Glos. Archs., Church House, Cromhall, deeds, P104 CH 1/3; CIPM, xiv. 29; KB27/776, rot. 8d. Margaret found a new husband in the person of the prominent west-country lawyer, Richard Chokke, to whom she was married by the beginning of 1461. In June 1468, she and Chokke, by then a knight and j.c.p., received a pardon from the Crown for all alienations and ‘perquisitions’ they had made of her former husband’s lands, whether acquired or inherited. She also survived Chokke, who died in mid 1483, and in early 1484 she received licence to take possession of Long Ashton, a manor near Bristol in which he had awarded her a jointure interest. By then she had made her will, in which she left directions relating to her livestock at Leckhampton, made provision for the welfare of her soul and those of both her husbands and ordered a window depicting their arms for the parish church at Long Ashton. She died on 22 Sept. 1484.7 CCR, 1476-85, no. 1073; Order of Serjts. at Law (Selden Soc. supp. ser. v), 505; Som. Med. Wills (Som. Rec. Soc. xvi), 244-5; C141/7/38. Her heir was her sister ‘Joan Mau’s’ [?Mauris]. J.T. Rosenthal, ‘Sir Richard Chokke’, Som. Arch. and Nat. Hist. cxxvii. 111, assumes that Margaret’s maiden name was ‘Morres’. Intriguingly, a John Morris, chapman, resided at Weston Subedge in the early 15th cent.: C241/197/35.