MEYE, William

William is likely to have been the son and heir of Richard Meye, a mercer who served as mayor of Northampton in 1427-8. He certainly followed the same trade. His putative mother is named in a Chancery petition as Julian, and she survived long into his majority.2 C1/28/157. He began his career when elected as bailiff in 1443 and was probably still a young man when returned to the Parliament of 1450. His attendance at that assembly occasioned his absence from his native county when assessments were made for the subsidy on income voted in the previous Parliament, and in Trinity term 1451 he was one of the many Northamptonshire landowners distrained to appear in the Exchequer for their failure to appear before the subsidy commissioners. It is not known whether he was eventually assessed, but the significant point is that he was deemed wealthy enough to qualify for assessment.3 E159/227, retornabilia Trin. rot. 3. Indeed, there can be no doubt that he was one of the wealthiest men to represent the borough in the Lancastrian period. Meye claimed in a Chancery suit that, on his sister Emma’s marriage to another leading townsman, Henry Stone*, he gave her the large portion of £100 in cash together with household goods worth a further £40.4 C1/28/157. Such an endowment would not have shamed the daughter of a county esquire.

This settlement, however, later gave rise to litigation. When Stone came to make his will on 10 Dec. 1464 he chose to disinherit his only child, Alice, Meye’s niece, of his property in the town, compensating her with a payment of £100. Meye, who claimed to have paid more than that for the marriage, was understandably unhappy about what he saw as refutation of his sister’s marriage contract. Under the terms of that contract he and his mother were feoffees in a significant part of Stone’s property, empowered, at least in his contention, to make estate on the couple in fee tail. Thus, when Stone died in early 1465, Meye refused to convey the property to the executors, and they sued him in Chancery. Soon after, our MP brought an action of his own in King’s bench to recover against the executors goods worth as much as £45 7s. 8d. which, he claimed, had been given to him by Stone. It is not known how these matters were resolved.5 C1/28/156-7; KB27/818, rex rot. 133.

Meye’s wealth and standing is reflected in the three terms he served as mayor between 1451 and 1469. Had it not been for the borough ordinance of 1437 against a repeat election to the office within a term of seven years, he would no doubt have served even more frequently. His service as one of the four town coroners from at least 1456 to 1460 and probably beyond is further evidence of his enthusiasm for administrative office. None the less, despite his prominence and the length of his career, little else is known of him. His most frequent appearances in the records is as a witness to borough charters, appearing on the last occasion as late as 8 Mar. 1480, when he must have been an old man.6 CP40/817, rot. 599; Northants. RO, Charity of St. Giles mss, 14, 16-17, 39, 58. More interesting, at the parliamentary elections held in April 1467, he stood as mainpernor for both a shire knight, (Sir) Thomas Tresham*, and a borough MP, John Ashburn†, and, ten years later, he sat on a county jury to inquire into Tresham’s lands.7 C219/17/1; C145/328/5. In the meantime, on 1 Apr. 1472, he was present, as one of the brethren, at an assembly of the newly-founded fraternity of ‘the Holy Rode in the Walle’ in the church of St. Gregory the Pope, a fraternity to which most of the leading townsmen seem to have belonged. He last appears in the records during the first mayoralty of Henry Humfrey in 1486-7 when a bowyer of the town recovered a debt of four marks against him in the borough court. He was dead by 28 Dec. 1497 when his widow, as the executrix of his will, granted to a local esquire, Thomas Hasilwode, and others a tenement in College Lane alias ‘Golafrelane’ for resettlement upon herself for term of her life.8 HMC Hastings, i. 141-2; Northampton Recs. i. 385-6; Finch Hatton mss, 1703; Add. Ch. 22375.