MASON, William

Mason was a draper of Hereford: he is so described when, in 1454, he offered surety for the payment of a fine by a brasier, Henry Man, one of the city’s wealthier residents. His assessment to contribute to the subsidy of 1450-1, albeit on the minimum income of 40s. p.a., shows that he too ranked among the leading citizens, as does his nomination by the Crown, on 14 Nov. 1454, as joint-surveyor of the murage that the city authorities were licensed to collect for the term of eight years.1 KB27/774, fines rot. 1d; E179/117/64; CPR, 1452-61, p. 199. His first Parliament, to which he was elected on 29 Sept. 1460, met in the wake of the Yorkist victory at the battle of Northampton. His fellow MP, John Welford*, was a committed adherent of the duke of York, and it is possible that Mason shared the same political conviction. The evidence is, admittedly, very indirect. In 1440 a chapman of Hereford, Hugh Mason, had taken a tenement at Weobley. If this tenement descended to our MP, he may have had a connexion with Walter Devereux II*, lord of Weobley and a prominent Yorkist.2 C219/16/6; CAD, iv. A9583.

In the next decade Mason makes only two appearances in an active role, witnessing a Hereford deed in 1464 and attesting the city’s parliamentary election indenture of 1467.3 Herefs. RO, Hereford city recs. MT/VIII/15; C219/17/1. None the less, the loss of the Hereford indentures for the Parliaments of 1461 and 1463 leaves open the possibility that he was returned to one or both of them, a possibility made the stronger by his election to the only two Parliaments of the 1470s for which the city’s returns survive. Again, however, little is known of him in the 1470s: on 13 Mar. 1472, six months before the first of these elections, he offered surety in a royal grant to Welford, and on 31 Aug. 1478, six months after the conclusion of the second Parliament, he was a juror at a view of frankpledge held before the mayor in the guildhall.4 C219/17/2, 3; CFR, xxi. no. 114; Hereford city recs. BG11/3/1. As he sat in at least three Parliaments, this obscurity reflects not his inactivity but the loss of sources.

There is some small evidence to illustrate Mason’s landholdings. Local deeds show that by 1464 he held a tenement in the suburbs of the city in Widemarsh Street, just outside Widemarsh Gate and near ‘le Townediche’. He also had an interest in a nearby tenement, although only as the feoffee of John Parsons, who served several times as mayor. He was dead by 1496 when the former tenement was in the hands of Richard Browne.5 Hereford city recs. MT/III/28; V/27; VIII/15, 16, 18; XI/4.