NOTTINGHAM, William II

Of non-gentle origin, Nottingham came from a family of weavers long settled at Cirencester. Very likely a relatively substantial tradesman, his father and namesake was not always of irreproachable conduct. At the end of Henry IV’s reign and again shortly after the accession of Henry V, a royal serjeant-at-arms was commissioned to arrest the elder William Nottingham and several other residents of Cirencester and to bring them before the King in Chancery. Early in the following year, however, William and many of his fellow townsmen purchased a royal pardon for any offences they might have committed.27 CPR, 1408-13, p. 478; 1413-16, pp. 33-34, 168-9. He was again accused of misbehaviour at the beginning of Henry VI’s reign when Alice Corsour sued him and Thomas More, another weaver from Cirencester, at Westminster, alleging that they had broken into her close and house at nearby Stratton, assaulted and wounded her and carried away goods and chattels worth 100s.28 CP40/647, rot. 156. The elder William died in the autumn of 1427 and his widow Christine nearly six years later. A brass in their memory, probably placed by their son, survives in the Lady chapel of the parish church at Cirencester. It depicts the elder William in a civilian’s gown and Christine in a mitred head-dress and a long kirtle.29 Trans. Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc. ii. 152-3; l. 185.

Destined for a career in the law rather than trade, their son must have attended an inn of court in London, whether solely with their support or with the assistance of a now unknown patron. Already an attorney in the court of King’s bench at Westminster by 1430, the younger William acted as a surety for a fellow lawyer, John Whittocksmead*, in the spring of 1436.30 Baker, 1169; CFR, xvi. 277. By the end of the same decade he had settled in Gloucester,31 CCR, 1435-41, p. 343. which provided a base for lawyers who made a living serving local religious houses and the gentry of the surrounding countryside. Although he quickly came to outshine his fellow lawyers in the town – most of whom remained attorneys of no great distinction – his association with Gloucester was always more than a passing one. By the mid 1450s he held several tenements and other properties in the town, perhaps always his main place of residence.32 Gloucester Rental 1455 ed. Cole, 19, 75, 77, 79, 91, 105; Trans. Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc. lxxiv. 73. He is also said to have had a house at Cecily Hill, Cirencester: ibid. l. 186. As late as 1468, he was referred to as ‘of Gloucester and London’ in a royal pardon,33 C67/46, m. 32 (16 July). and he attested the return of its burgesses to the Parliament of 1472.

An early associate of Nottingham’s was another Gloucester-based lawyer, John Kendale. In February 1440 he, Kendale and three associates entered into a recognizance for £60, to guarantee that they would pay the Crown certain sums due for 2,000 woolfells recently impounded at Great Yarmouth. Evidently he and his fellows, having become involved in a commercial venture to export the fells, had neglected to pay customs or other taxes for which the merchandise was liable, but it is hard to understand why they should have chosen to use an East Anglian port if the fells had originated from the south-west.34 VCH Glos. iv. 47; E159/216, recogniciones Hil. It was with Kendale’s help that Nottingham made a settlement in November 1441, by which various lands near Cirencester and elsewhere in Gloucestershire, at Great Chelworth in Wiltshire and at Botley in Berkshire, which were assigned to him and his first wife Elizabeth (who may have brought these holdings to their marriage) and her heirs.35 CP25(1)/293/70/256. A few years later he quarrelled with Thomas Cricklade*, another landowner at Great Chelworth, accusing Thomas and others of having trespassed on his close there.36 CP40/738, rot. 382. An obscure figure, Elizabeth was perhaps related to the King’s great almoner John de la Bere, afterwards bishop of St. Davids. A royal pardon she and Nottingham received in July 1446 shows that she was previously married to John Bruys esquire, identifying her as Bruys’s widow and administratrix.37 Trans. Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc. l. 187; C67/39, m. 38. Bruys, who also evades positive identification, was possibly the royal servant of that name who was cofferer of the King’s household early in Henry VI’s reign.38 HP Biogs. ed. Wedgwood and Holt, 642; E403/696, m. 11. It appears that Elizabeth had borne him a child: in the later 1440s she and Nottingham sued Cecily, widow of Guy Whittington*, for abducting her young son, another William (who is described as her heir but not that of the MP), at Gloucester.39 CP40/748, rot. 433d; 749, rot. 449d.

At the beginning of the 1440s Nottingham had little to distract him from his private work as a lawyer, since there is no evidence of his holding office, whether under the Crown or any other authority or individual, before the middle of the same decade. His public career began in earnest with his inclusion on a commission of gaol delivery in early March 1445. In the middle of the same month he was placed on the commission of the peace for Gloucestershire, on which he remained – as a member of the quorum – for the rest of his life, and later that year he began a term as escheator of the county. Nottingham’s first appointment of particular significance was that of attorney-general, to which he was appointed for life in mid 1452, following the death of John Vampage*. Perhaps reflecting the growing importance of the office, he was the earliest of its holders to take the title attorney-general rather than King’s attorney, and his letters patent were the first to include the right to appoint clerks and other officers in all royal courts of record. The position of attorney-general gave him a political and legal role at the centre of the realm’s affairs, and it demanded considerable personal energy in return. His main role was to represent the King’s interests in the central courts at Westminster, but he also carried out many other miscellaneous tasks on the Crown’s behalf.40 Law Offs. (Selden Soc. supp. ser. vii), 41, 288-9; Sel. Cases in Exchequer Chamber, i (Selden Soc. li), 117, 123-4, 163; C1/25/218; 26/558. On one occasion in the later 1450s, for example, he accompanied the King’s justices on a tour of Herefordshire and other counties, and it was perhaps at the behest of the authorities that he was nominated to arbitrate in a quarrel between John Carpenter, bishop of Worcester, and Sir Maurice Berkeley I* in early 1460. 41 E403/810, m. 8; CCR, 1454-61, p. 431. Presumably his nomination was at the behest of the bishop, whom he had served as a steward for at least a decade.

While making considerable demands on Nottingham’s time, the office of attorney-general also brought important rewards. As its holder he received a comparatively modest fee of £10 p.a., but he also benefited from frequent ad hoc payments from the Exchequer and from ready access to royal patronage. He appears not, however, to have exploited his position to the same extent as had John Vampage as King’s attorney. Although he secured the reversion of a duchy of Lancaster stewardship in Wiltshire, Dorset and Gloucestershire in October 1457 it was scarcely a grant of major significance. The reversion was dependent upon the death or surrender of another, far less distinguished, Gloucester-based lawyer, John Edwards*, who survived until January 1462. Evidently the stewardship was intended as a sinecure since, under the terms of his grant, Nottingham was to hold it for life once the reversion had vested, with licence to exercise it through a deputy if he so wished. When the grant was made he was already associated with the duchy, which had retained him for his counsel in the same year he became attorney-general. For his office as one of its apprentices-at-law, which he held until 1481, he received a fee of 40s. p.a. It was certainly no sinecure: for example, it was as such that he was commissioned to inquire into any activities of the farmers and officers in the south parts of the duchy which were damaging the King’s interest in May 1458.42 DL37/26/2, 7, 16.

Even if Nottingham failed to exploit the possibilities of royal patronage as fully as Vampage had done, the influence and prestige attached to his office of attorney-general also ensured that he won retainers from non-royal patrons, both institutional and individual. In October 1453, for example, the mayor and aldermen of London retained him as an attorney for the City, with a fee of 20s. p.a.;43 Corp. London RO, jnl. 5, f. 126v. in the mid 1450s he was steward of the manor of Oxenton, Gloucestershire, for the important East Anglian knight, Sir John Fastolf; and a decade later he was providing counsel to Laurence Booth, bishop of Durham, in return for a fee of 66s. 8d. p.a.44 Baker, 1169. Nottingham was certainly steward of Oxenton (a lordship that Fastolf held in the right of his wife) by 1455, although he entered Sir John’s service before that date, providing him counsel in a suit heard at Gloucester’s Lammas assizes of 1453.45 Add. 28206, f. 124. Another, more important, patron secured Nottingham’s services before his appointment as attorney-general, for he had certainly become a councillor of John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, before 1451. One of Talbot’s executors following his patron’s death on a French battlefield in 1453, he must have remained in the service of the widowed countess of Shrewsbury. During the mid 1450s his Gloucester residence was a house in Eastgate Street which he held for life by her gift.46 A.J. Pollard, ‘The Talbots’ (Bristol Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1968), 237, 419; E13/146, rots. 23, 32; Gloucester Rental 1455, 90.

Given his connexion with Gloucester, it is scarcely surprising that Nottingham came to represent the town in Parliament. Unlike some of the other members of the legal profession based at Gloucester in this period, he never served in the municipal administration but he was still involved in local affairs. In April 1456 its burgesses nominated him to arbitrate in a dispute between them and the prior of Llanthony by Gloucester,47 Cal. Regs. Llanthony Priory, 26. and during the 1450s and 1460s he was a party to property transactions there, both on his own account and as a feoffee for others. Among his acquisitions in the town was a house which had belonged to a fellow lawyer, John Doding*, murdered by a mob of peasantry in October 1463.48 Gloucester Corporation Recs. ed. Stevenson, 403-4, 406-7; Glos. Archs., cath. deeds, D1609/9/16; Gloucester bor. recs., list of Gloucester landgavel rents, temp. Edw. IV, GBR, J5/2; J. Rhodes, ‘Anarchy at Gloucester in 1449 and 1463’, Glevensis, xxv. 39; C.L. Kingsford, English Historical Literature, 356. Following Doding’s death, Nottingham and William Hampton† of London had sought a debt of £20 from his estate; possibly the MP acquired the house, the ‘place þt Doding Dwellyd Inn’, in settlement of this claim.49 CP40/815, rot. 53d.

It may well have particularly suited the burgesses of Gloucester to return Nottingham, the most prominent lawyer in their midst, to the Commons of November 1449, given the poor state of relations then existing between them and Reynold Boulers, abbot of Gloucester, an influential courtier. It was at some stage in 1449 that a mob of townsmen, supposedly angered by the abbot’s association with an unpopular government and court, ransacked his manor and vineyard at nearby Highnam.50 Rhodes, 39. Whatever the extent to which he was concerned with the affairs of Gloucester during the Parliament, Nottingham was no doubt simultaneously advancing his own interests. Such an assembly must have provided plenty of opportunity for an able and ambitious lawyer to win patronage, whether by actively seeking it or by attracting the attention of those in a position to offer it.

When returned to his second Parliament in 1453, Nottingham still lacked estates of any significance outside Gloucester. He must therefore have owed much to his standing as a law officer for his election as a knight of the shire for Gloucestershire to a Parliament in which the Commons included a high percentage of royal servants. By virtue of his office of attorney-general, he also received an individual writ of summons to this and subsequent assemblies, meaning that in 1453 he waited upon the Lords as well as sat in the Lower House. Parliament was not the only royal assembly to which he was summoned during his career, since he was called to attend a great council at Leicester in the spring of 1455. In the event, the council never met because its summoning prompted Richard, duke of York, and his allies to take up arms and to confront a hastily raised royal army at the first battle of St. Albans.51 PPC, vi. 341; R.L. Storey, End of House of Lancaster, 160-1. As attorney-general, Nottingham subsequently attended the Parliament of 1455, which met in the wake of the Yorkist victory at St. Albans; that of 1459, called after the rout of the Yorkists at Ludford Bridge; and that of 1460, which marked yet another dramatic change in political fortune. During the notorious Coventry Parliament of 1459 he played a part in the attainder of the Yorkist lords. Along with the King’s serjeants, Richard Chokke, Thomas Lyttleton and Thomas Billing*, he spent 36 days riding from London to Coventry and there giving ‘diligent attendaunce aboute [the King’s] matiers’.52 E404/71/4/20.

Ironically, one of the Yorkist lords attainted at Coventry was Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, who had acted as a feoffee for Nottingham a little over a year earlier.53 Glos. Archs., cath. deeds, D1609/9/16. While the country was sliding into civil war, Nottingham found time for his own affairs and entered the land market. In the summer of 1458 he obtained the manor of Matson and Sneedham, just to the south-west of Gloucester, from John Crofton, a transaction to which Warwick was a party.54 Ibid.; Trans. Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc. xlvi. 347; l. 186. Matson and Sneedham is his first known manorial purchase: at that date he already held Elmbridge, another manor at nearby Hucclecote, but only as a tenant of John Bradstone and Elizabeth his wife, who had granted it to him for the term of her life in 1455. Over the following years he acquired Elmbridge on a permanent basis and purchased several manors and other holdings in and around his native Cirencester as well as elsewhere in Gloucestershire. Across the county boundary, he bought the manor of Little Chelworth and lands at Shorncote in Wiltshire.55 VCH Glos. iv. 433; Trans. Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc. xlviii. 302; E210/2602; CAD, i. B1058, 1061; ii. B3187-8, 3190; CCR, 1461-8, pp. 180-1; CP25(1)/79/94/31, 42; C141/3/37; C1/57/239. As for specific purchases, he is known to have paid £200 to John Lisle (son of Robert Lisle*) and Margaret his wife (daughter of Nicholas Poyntz*) for the Lisle moiety of the manor and advowson of Sapperton near Cirencester in 1463; 200 marks to Walter Grey and Margaret his wife for their interest in Elmbridge in 1467; another 200 marks to Thomas Whittington and his wife Margaret for the other moiety of Sapperton in 1480; and 300 marks to the same John and Margaret Lisle for a moiety of the manor of Great Rissington in 1481.56 CP25(1)/79/93/5, 13; 94/54; VCH Glos. iv. 100, 433; xi. 91; Trans. Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc. l. 157-8, 171, 187-9, 195, 198.

There is no evidence that Nottingham acquired any property in London – and none is mentioned in his will – even though he spent a great deal of his working life in the City, served its corporation as an attorney, acted as an arbiter and trustee on behalf of its residents and helped to found a fraternity in the church of St. Bride, Fleet Street. He did however receive a quitclaim of all lawsuits from the prioress of St. Helen’s Bishopsgate in February 1473, a release which covered real as well as personal actions, so raising the possibility that he held property in London at one stage.57 CCR, 1441-7, p. 352; 1447-54, p. 402; 1454-61, pp. 143, 170, 306; 1468-76, no. 1019; CPR, 1467-77, p. 553. By 1473 Nottingham had already disposed of at least one part of his estates, for on 1 Aug. 1470 he leased out Matson and Sneedham to Gloucester abbey for a term of 60 years, an arrangement which he converted into an outright grant to the monks just 12 days later.58 Glos. Archs., cath. deeds, D1609/9/12, 14. In return for the grant, the abbey undertook to find two chaplains to pray daily for him and his then wife Cecily after their deaths, and for the souls of his first wife, of John de la Bere, late bishop of St. Davids, of Master Richard Ewen (a former archdeacon of Lincoln who had named Nottingham as one of his executors before he died in 1464) and of his parents, William and Christine Nottingham. Shortly after Nottingham’s death, it was claimed that the estate he had created for himself – or at least the greater part of it – was worth £132 p.a.59 PCC 7 Godyn (PROB11/5, f. 56); CCR, 1461-8, p. 332; CPR, 1461-7, p. 449; 1467-77, p. 81; C1/57/239. This valuation bears testimony to his success as a lawyer, since it was thanks to his legal earnings that he was able to invest so substantially in land.

Notwithstanding his professional talents, Nottingham lost the position of attorney-general soon after Edward IV took the throne. It is very unlikely that his removal from office had political connotations, for his role in the attainder of the Yorkist lords in 1459 was clearly that of a functionary rather than a political partisan. Initially reappointed attorney-general during pleasure on 8 Apr. 1461, he was replaced by Henry Sotehill just 12 days later.60 CPR, 1461-7, pp. 4, 6. In spite of his loss, Nottingham was soon busy serving the new King at a county level and associating with the prominent Yorkist John Wenlock*, Lord Wenlock. Retaining his membership of the commission of the peace in Gloucestershire, in the summer of 1461 he was placed on two ad hoc commissions for the county, including one providing for its defence against Lancastrian rebels. In the following autumn he and Wenlock were among those to whom John de la Bere, by now no longer bishop of St. Davids, conveyed the manor and advowson of South Moreton and other lands in Berkshire, an estate in which de la Bere had acquired an interest as a feoffee of Robert Aubrey*.61 E210/5593; CCR, 1447-54, pp. 342, 510; CAD, iii. D1114. In February 1462 Nottingham was commissioned to inquire into the lands of an indicted traitor, and in July the same year he was included on a like commission regarding the estates forfeited by Sir William Mille. Sir William, who had died two days after fighting for Henry VI at the battle of Towton, was the son of the late Thomas Mille, with whom Nottingham had worked as a j.p. and arbiter.62 CPR, 1452-61, p. 227; 1467-77, pp. 453-4; Cal. Regs. Llanthony Priory, 26. During the early years of the new reign Nottingham also remained active in a legal capacity at Westminster. In January 1464, for example, he was one of the attorneys who represented John Paston* in a lawsuit heard in King’s bench.63 Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 294.

By the late summer of 1465 Nottingham had another reason to spend time at Westminster, for it was as one of the King’s councillors that he was granted an annuity of £40 for life on 28 Aug. that year. The grant stipulated that half of the annuity should come from the fee farm of Gloucester and half from a farm the Crown received from the abbot of Gloucester. It was confirmed in the following spring, when the King issued further orders to ensure that the burgesses of Gloucester paid £20 of their fee farm to Nottingham forthwith, along with all arrears dating back to the same 28 Aug.64 CPR, 1461-7, pp. 467, 519; CCR, 1461-8, p. 345. Later in the decade, Nottingham acted to safeguard the annuity by securing an exemption from the Act of Resumption passed by the Parliament of 1467.65 PROME, xiii. 291. No doubt his new-found standing as a councillor helped him to attract further offices and patrons. In late 1465 Llanthony priory made him steward of its estates in Gloucestershire and Wiltshire (with a fee of 40s. p.a., cloth for a gown and a reward of 20s.); by 1468 he was a feoffee of the King’s brother-in-law Sir John Wydeville and his elderly bride Katherine, dowager duchess of Norfolk, and of John Beauchamp, Lord Powick; and by the early 1470s he was an estate officer of Anne, dowager duchess of Buckingham, whom he also served as a legal adviser.66 Cal. Regs. Llanthony Priory, 48; CCR, 1468-76, no. 142; Notts. Archs., Foljambe of Osberton mss, DD/FJ/4/27/8; Rawcliffe, 226.

In all likelihood, Nottingham’s role as a royal councillor was confined to legal matters but there is little evidence for his activities as one of the King’s advisers. He is known to have attended the council at least twice between mid 1467 and the Readeption of Henry VI but he was probably present on other occasions as well.67 L.S. Woodger, ‘Hen. Bourgchier’ (Oxf. Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1974), 110; C.L. Scofield, Edw. IV, i. 441; CPR, 1467-77, pp. 131-2. Whatever the extent of his participation in the Council, he made himself useful to Edward IV in other respects. In 1468 he contributed £100 of the £10,000 which a group of royal servants and Londoners lent towards the dowry of the King’s sister Margaret, and in June 1469 he was awarded 20 marks in consideration of the ‘great costs’ he had incurred as a justice of oyer and terminer in East Anglia.68 E404/74/1/45; 2/32; E405/48, rot. 1d; E403/840, m. 11; C.D. Ross, Edw. IV, 111-12.

In the same period Nottingham was associated with one of the most important men in the land, the King’s brother Richard, duke of Gloucester. In November 1469 he witnessed the transfer to Gloucester of the castle and lordship of Sudeley, Gloucestershire, wrested by the Crown from the unfortunate Ralph Butler, Lord Sudeley.69 CCR, 1468-76, nos. 198, 409; C.D. Ross, Ric. III, 15. During the early 1470s Nottingham and the duke were feoffees of the London goldsmith William Floure. Among the properties which Floure conveyed to them and other important trustees was a manor at Theydon Bois, Essex. Floure’s choice of such prominent feoffees (who also included several of Gloucester’s servants) was deliberate, since his hold on the manor was far from secure. It was likewise claimed by one John Prince who suffered several assaults at the hands of Gloucester’s men. There is no evidence that Nottingham himself was implicated in any lawless behaviour on Floure’s behalf, although he was also a feoffee of another London goldsmith, Thomas Wythiale, both an ally of Floure and a servant of Gloucester. In the end Prince was able to make good his title, thanks to the fact that he was a servant of Cecily, duchess of York, since Gloucester withdrew his support from Floure once he realized that the dispute was pitting him against his own mother.70 CCR, 1468-76, no. 955; 1476-85, no. 673; VCH Essex, iv. 254; R. Horrox, Ric. III, 4, 76-77, 253.

In spite of his links with Gloucester and service on the Yorkist Council, the essentially apolitical Nottingham suffered no interruption to his career as a servant of the Crown at the Readeption of Henry VI or the subsequent restoration of Edward IV. A j.p. and ad hoc commissioner during the brief second reign of Henry VI, he was also member of a commission sent, shortly after Edward recovered the throne, to deal with those who had participated in Fauconberg’s rising in south-east England. Having resumed his place on that King’s Council, he secured an exemption from the Act of Resumption passed by the Parliament of 1472 with regard to his annuity of £40.71 PROME, xiv. 183-4. In 1473 he served at Calais as a member of the quorum on two ad hoc commissions headed by William, Lord Hastings, the King’s lieutenant there. Back across the Channel, from 1472 onwards he was increasingly included on the commission of the peace in counties throughout southern England, the Midlands and East Anglia. By no means were these all nominal appointments. He is known, for example, to have attended the sessions of the peace for Hampshire at Winchester during the three days 30 Nov.-2 Dec. 1475, probably as ‘capitalis iusticarius’ since it was he who tested the writs and sent the records to King’s bench.72 SC1/57/107-10, 112; CPR, 1467-77, pp. 299, 300-3; B.H. Putnam, Procs. J.P.s, 238, 245, 251, 253, 256-7, 260-1, 263, 268, 270-4. His legal expertise was also called upon in the spring of 1478, when he and the serjeant-at-law Thomas Brydges† arbitrated between the abbots of Westminster and Tewkesbury, then quarrelling with each other over lands and rights of lordship in the vicinity of the latter’s abbey. Arbitration awards commonly involved an element of compromise between the parties at dispute, but on this occasion Nottingham and Brydge found conclusively for the abbot of Westminster.73 Westminster Abbey muns. 32833.

A year later Nottingham’s legal career culminated with his appointment as chief baron of the Exchequer, in succession to the late (Sir) Thomas Urswyk II*. He was granted all the usual fees associated with that office, along with a customary annuity of 110 marks and two robes. 74 CPR, 1476-85, p. 154; E405/43, rot. 3d. HP Biogs. 642, mistakenly speculates that he had previously served as a puisne baron. Shortly afterwards he was awarded a knighthood, an honour he had declined over a decade earlier, and in 1480 he began work as a justice of assize. His appointment fitted an emerging pattern, for every chief baron who took office between 1471 and 1553 had previously served either as attorney-general or as recorder of London. Both of the latter offices gave their holders the political experience which the chief baron, the head of a government department particularly concerned with the King’s fiscal rights, was evidently felt to need.75 E.W. Ives, Common Lawyers: Thomas Kebell, 87. For the same reason, Nottingham’s service as a royal councillor must also have recommended him as a candidate for such an office. As chief baron, he acted in a private as well as a public capacity for the Crown’s financial wellbeing, since he lent the King £100 in the spring of 1482.76 E405/70, rot. 6. Among his ex officio privileges was the right to pursue all lawsuits at the Exchequer, an entitlement which also extended to his servants. In Michaelmas term 1480, for example, he was involved in suing a yeoman from Lingfield, Surrey, in that court, apparently in the capacity of one of the feoffees of John Gaynesford†. A year later, he and the London mercer, John Colyns, began a suit in the Exchequer against William Byrkhed, a gentleman from the City, over a bond for just over £10 which they had taken from him in February 1480. They won their case in Trinity term 1482 after Byrkhed had proved unable to gainsay their plea. The suit against Byrkhed coincided with another which Nottingham’s servant Bartholomew Westby brought in the same court against William Bate of London for an alleged trespass in Hertfordshire.77 E13/165, rots. 22d, 23; 166, rots. 15, 22.

Readmitted as chief baron at the accession of Edward V, Nottingham formally surrendered the office just a few weeks later, by means of letters of 12 June 1483.78 Judges of Eng. comp. Sainty (Selden Soc. supp. ser. x), 94; CCR, 1476-85, no. 1043. In all probability, he was prompted to resign by old age and infirmity, although he remained on the commission of the peace for Gloucestershire and was included on at least two more ad hoc commissions before his death on the following 7 Sept. He was buried in an unidentified chapel in Gloucester abbey where Cecily, his late second wife, already lay. It is thanks to a Chancery suit of the late 1470s that we know she was one of the daughters of the Gloucestershire esquire John Cassy. The suit was brought against Cassy by another of his daughters, Margaret, and her husband Richard Barnby, who complained that he had failed to pay them her marriage portion. According to them, Nottingham had helped to advance the match between the couple by agreeing to forgo 100 marks of a debt of £100 Cassy owed him, provided that Cassy gave the same 100 marks to the couple for Margaret’s portion. The bill refers to Nottingham as Margaret’s brother-in-law, although without naming her sister. The lady in question must, however, have been Cecily, given the date range of the bill and the fact that the maiden name of Nottingham’s third wife was Goldwell.79 C1/60/25. Whatever Nottingham’s standpoint with regard to the Barnby-Cassy dispute, he and his father-in-law were associated with each other in this period as feoffees of John Lisle, the esquire from whom the former acquired some of his estates.80 W. Suss. RO, Wiston mss, WISTON/2209. Nottingham’s third wife, another Elizabeth, was one of the three daughters and coheirs of the London mercer John Goldwell. She was also a relative, perhaps a niece, of James Goldwell, bishop of Norwich.81 Trans. Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc. l. 192; CCR, 1461-8, p. 190; 1468-76, no. 855; C1/44/1; 105/1.

It is not known when or where Nottingham’s will, made just six days before his death, was proved, and it survives only in the form of an incomplete copy.82 Trans. Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc. l. 194-9. Apparently transcribed in the mid sixteenth century, this was probably commissioned by the weavers company of Cirencester, amongst the records of which it was preserved. Following an opening invocation, in which he bequeathed his soul to God, the Blessed Virgin Mary and all the saints, Nottingham asked to be buried beside his second wife at Gloucester. Much of the will is taken up with the elaborate arrangements he made for the welfare of his soul. He left 20s. to the parish church of St. Michael, Gloucester, and the same sum to each of its fraternities of St. Mary the Virgin, St. Anne and St. John the Baptist, asking all the parishioners of St. Michael’s and every fraternity member to pray for the souls of himself, his parents and his first two wives. He also bequeathed £8 to the Franciscan friary at Gloucester, to supplement the £12 which he had previously donated to that house for the maintenance and building of their church, as well as a further 18 marks in gifts to its friars. In return, he asked the friars to pray daily for himself, his parents, his late wives and others, including Bishop John de la Bere and Richard Ewen, the former archdeacon of Lincoln. Next, Nottingham set aside certain lands at Down Ampney and elsewhere in Gloucestershire and at Shorncote, Wiltshire, so that they might be placed in the hands of a panel of trustees jointly nominated by the wardens of the weavers’ company, the wardens of the parish church at Cirencester, and the wardens of chapels in the town dedicated to the Holy Trinity and Our Lady. The trustees were to use the lands in question to support a priest at the altar of St. Thomas the Martyr in the same parish church and to provide for the maintenance of four poor men already living in a house he had built in ‘Batell Street’ (now Thomas Street), Cirencester. Each of these almsmen, whose successors the overseeing wardens were to appoint, was also to receive the weekly sum of 8d. Both they and the priest were expected to pray for the souls of himself, his parents and first two wives. Known as St. Thomas’s hospital, Nottingham’s foundation was subsequently used for the benefit of the weavers of Cirencester, with the almsmen being drawn from the poorer members of that trade in the town.83 Ibid. viii. 184. Again for the good of his soul, Nottingham also bequeathed sums totalling £125 to Cirencester abbey, to Llanthony priory, to St. Bartholomew’s hospital, Gloucester, to the poor people served by the same hospital and that of St. John the Evangelist, Cirencester, to the parish church of St. John the Baptist, Cirencester to the poor maidens of Gloucester and Cirencester for their marriages and towards the repair of highways in Gloucestershire. For his funeral procession, he ordered 25 torches and nine wax candles, directing that 25 poor men should bear the torches. Each torch bearer was to receive a black gown and hood to wear at the funeral, as well as 4s. on the day of the funeral and a further 4s. at the month’s mind. After the completion of the funeral, month’s mind and all other masses and ceremonies, the torches were to be distributed among various parish churches in Gloucestershire and the chapel of St. Cecilia in Cirencester.

The remainder of what survives of Nottingham’s will is concerned with the arrangements he made for his third wife, Elizabeth Goldwell. He provided generously for this lady, who was probably considerably younger than him. First, he awarded her a life interest in all of his estates, save for the lands he had set aside for his foundation at Cirencester, the advowsons of the Gloucestershire parishes of Coates, Sapperton and Great Rissington and all wood and underwoods. By Nottingham’s own calculations, the lands he had assigned to her were worth £90 p.a. The will indicates that he had not fathered any surviving children, since he ordered his executors and feoffees to sell the reversions of these estates immediately after his death to the highest bidders (who would take possession when Elizabeth herself died), and to spend the money so raised on good works. Secondly, Nottingham directed that his widow should receive certain debts, totalling over £1,800, which were owed to him by Gherardo Caniziani, a prominent Florentine merchant and financier settled in London. The will shows that Caniziani was Elizabeth’s stepfather since it identifies him as the husband of her mother, another Elizabeth. Following the death of John Goldwell, the elder Elizabeth had married first one of his fellow mercers, Sir John Stocton, who had died in 1473, and then Caniziani, who had become her husband by January 1474.84 Ibid. l. 200; C1/60/17; Oxf. DNB, ‘Canigiani [Caniziani], Gherardo’; PCC 9 Wattys (PROB11/6, ff. 71v-75). Thirdly, Nottingham bequeathed to his wife an extensive collection of plate and jewelry, all her bodily ‘apparell’, and all his household ‘stuff’ at Gloucester and elsewhere, save for his own personal wardrobe and ornaments (which he assigned to his servants) and the contents of his private chapel in the town. The last mentioned bequest in favour of his wife marks the end of this copy of the will, which breaks off in mid sentence at this point. It is impossible to tell how much of the original is missing, but it may have included a bequest towards the upkeep of Rochester bridge as his name featured in a list of benefactors kept in the bridge’s chapel in Tudor times.85 J. Leland, Itin. ed. Toulmin Smith, iv. 44.

The incomplete version of Nottingham’s will which has survived does not reveal the names of his executors, although the pardon rolls show that he appointed at least two, for both John Keke, a ‘gentleman’ from Cirencester, and Thomas Hancheche† were pardoned in their capacities as his feoffees and executors on 15 Nov. 1484.86 C67/52, m. 8. By then the escheator in Gloucestershire had already held an inquisition post mortem for him. Dated the previous 30 Oct., this falls some way short of reflecting the true extent and value of Nottingham’s Gloucestershire estates, although it does show that his feoffees also included John Alcock, bishop of Worcester and later of Ely, and John Trye†. Alcock, Trye, Keke and Hancheche feature as Nottingham’s feoffees in other sources as well, as do the well-known (Sir) Reynold Bray†, the Londoners Ralph Verney* and William Hampton and the unfortunate John Doding.87 C141/3/37; C1/57/239-40; CCR, 1461-8, pp. 180-1; 1468-76, no. 270; CPR, 1485-94, pp. 189-90; VCH Glos. vi. 100; CP25(1)/79/92/142, 93/5; Glos. Archs., cath. deeds, D1609/9/16.

Before 1485 Nottingham’s widow married again, becoming the third wife of Richard Pole†, an esquire of Richard III’s household. She and her new husband soon fell into dispute with the common clerk of London, William Dunthorne, who had in his custody bonds relating to Gherardo Caniziani’s debts to the late chief baron, and with John Alcock and his co-feoffees. According to a bill brought by the Poles in Chancery, Alcock and his associates were denying Elizabeth her right to the lands assigned in dower to her. The Poles also claimed that, while on his deathbed but before making his will, Nottingham had given a verbal undertaking that he would allow her an annual landed income of £132 rather than the £90 p.a. he had actually assigned her. The purpose of their bill was to demand that the feoffees should permit Elizabeth to receive the latter sum, along with an extra £42 p.a. to bring it up to the promised £132. The feoffees responded by asserting that Nottingham’s estates had proved less valuable than previously thought and that, in any case, Elizabeth was well provided for with the large amount of cash her late husband had bequeathed her. The parties appear to have come to terms with a compromise, by which the Poles lowered their demands, agreeing that Elizabeth should have £100 p.a. from Nottingham’s estates. In spite of this dispute, Pole took the opportunity offered by the late chief baron’s will to purchase the reversion of the manors in which his wife possessed a life tenancy, although he and Elizabeth were not to retain the manorial moiety at Great Rissington. In 1498 John Greville, the owner of the other moiety sold it to Nottingham’s surviving trustees, to whom the Poles then conveyed their share, and from whom Sir Reynold Bray afterwards acquired the whole property. Elizabeth died before mid October 1505 and was buried in the church of St. Vedast in London. She had not borne Pole any children, and after Richard’s death in 1517 the properties he had bought from Nottingham’s feoffees were shared among the sons of his previous two marriages.88 C1/60/17; 57/239-40; Trans. Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc. l. 193-4, 201-5; VCH Glos. iv. 433; vi. 100; xi. 91; CFR, xxii. no. 828.