TRACY, William

It is not always easy to distinguish Tracy, the fourth member of his family in as many generations to share the same Christian name, from his grandfather and father. The latter sat as a knight of the shire for Gloucestershire in the Parliament of 1419 and served a term as escheator for that county soon after leaving the Commons, but it appears he held no other offices during a career remarkable only for its lack of distinction. Perhaps he owed his obscurity to the longevity of his own father, the MP’s grandfather, whom he may have survived by no more than a few years.3 The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 638. The subject of this biography is conflated with his father in HP Biogs. ed. Wedgwood and Holt, 864-5. The subject of this biography did not hold public office until after his father’s death, and it is unclear which of them was the ‘William Tracy the younger’ of Gloucestershire sworn to keep the peace in 1434.4 CPR, 1429-36, p. 373. While much more active as an office-holder than his father, the MP of 1442 was himself a somewhat obscure figure who had a relatively uneventful career.

Upon succeeding his father in 1440, Tracy paid homage to Humphrey, earl of Stafford and subsequently duke of Buckingham, the feudal overlord of his Gloucestershire manor of Doynton.5 NLW, Peniarth mss 280, p. 10. He also inherited the manors of Toddington and Southwood in the same county and another at Worminghall in Buckinghamshire. For lack of reliable evidence, it is hard to tell how much these properties were really worth, although the income of the three Gloucestershire manors had been estimated at £60 p.a. for taxation purposes in 1412, and his son and heir Henry possessed estates in the county valued at some £100 p.a. (almost certainly an underestimate) following his death at the beginning of the sixteenth century.6 The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 638; VCH Bucks. iv. 126; CIPM Hen. VII, ii. 495. Tracy would dispose of at least part of his inheritance, selling Worminghall to William Browne in 1455.7 CP25(1)/22/124/12. It is not known what lands Tracy may have acquired through his marriage to Margery Pauncefoot although the match was an extremely respectable one, in so far as the Pauncefoots were an old established family in Gloucestershire and elsewhere in south-west England and the Welsh borders.8 The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 26.

The date of the marriage is unrecorded although it had certainly occurred before the spring of 1446 when the Papal Curia granted the couple an indult permitting them to keep a portable altar.9 CPL, ix. 586. Whatever its date, Tracy was certainly active as a feoffee for his father-in-law Sir John Pauncefoot by 1444. It was with the aid of Tracy and others that in the autumn of that year Sir John made an entail of his castle and lordship of Crickhowell in Brecon, which he held of Richard, duke of York. By means of this arrangement, the knight had Crickhowell settled on himself and his son Thomas* in survivorship, with remainder to the descendants of his father, Hugh Pauncefoot. As it stood, the entail should have caused York little concern, but a few weeks later Tracy and his co-feoffees made a grant to the King of the reversion of Crickhowell, contingent upon the default of any Pauncefoot heirs. York reacted furiously, accusing Sir John of conspiring to disinherit him. He petitioned the Parliament of 1445 to have this latter arrangement overturned, although apparently without pursuing matters to a formal conclusion.10 The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 27; P.A. Johnson, Duke Richard of York, 13; SC8/85/4247.

One of the Pauncefoots’ associates was John, Lord Beauchamp of Powick, whose niece Margaret Swynford married Thomas Pauncefoot.11 The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 27. In turn, Powick was a distant relative of Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, and a member of the panel which had controlled the earl’s estates following his death in April 1439. The Crown had appointed Powick’s cousin Ralph Butler, Lord Sudeley, to the same panel and both men had become feoffees of the widowed countess of Warwick, who had survived her husband by just eight months.12 Oxf. DNB, ‘Beauchamp, John’. They were still fulfilling their duties as such in the mid 1440s, and Tracy witnessed a deed between them and the abbot of Tewkesbury in November 1446.13 CPR, 1494-1509, pp. 99-102. He had more than passing links with both peers. In 1453 and 1455 he acted as a witness on Powick’s behalf,14 CCR, 1447-54, p. 445; Add. Ch. 73444. and in the later 1450s Sudeley, from whom he held his manor of Toddington, arbitrated in a minor dispute between him and Thomas Darston over property at Toddington and Little Wormington.15 The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 638; KB27/788, rot. 4d; Glos. Archs., Sudeley mss, D2153/5/1. It is also possible that Tracy was a member of the affinity of his other feudal lord, Humphrey Stafford, for he was certainly a feoffee of the Warwickshire manor of Bramcote on behalf of Stafford’s retainer Thomas Burdet*.16 Derbys. RO, Burdett of Foremark mss, D156 M/T 5/1. As such, he was drawn into the prolonged dispute which Burdet waged with William Charnels of Leicestershire over that property, being a party to a lawsuit brought against Charnels at Westminster on Burdet’s behalf.17 CPR, 1452-61, p. 523.

There is no evidence that Tracy held any office in local government before becoming an MP. While in Parliament, he may have taken a particular interest in (and perhaps helped to promote) a petition presented to the Commons of 1442 in the name of the ‘commons’ of Herefordshire, Gloucestershire, Shropshire, Somerset, Cheshire and Bristol. This complained about the abduction and holding to ransom of people and property from the first three of those counties by the Welsh, who had engaged in such activity for years, in defiance of legislation passed in the Parliament of 1401. To counteract the problem, the petitioners sought an ordinance making any Welshman who committed such outrages over the next six years guilty of high treason, a request to which the King acceded.18 PROME, xi. 361-2; Statutes, ii. 128-9. In the year after leaving Parliament, Tracy was pricked to serve a term as sheriff of Gloucestershire and he was appointed to its commission of the peace in the later 1440s. It would appear that his first term as sheriff ended up lasting for two years rather than the normal one, as there is no evidence that Robert Lisle*, who was supposed to have succeeded him in November 1444, ever took up the office. In any event, it was Tracy who accounted for the two years 1443-5.19 PRO List ‘Sheriffs’, 50. In the autumn of 1446 the MP purchased a royal pardon in which he was referred to as ‘late sheriff of Gloucestershire’, but the pardon cannot have related to his recent tenure of the office since it applied only to offences committed before September 1441.20 C67/39, m. 20.

Following a subsequent term as sheriff in 1450-1, Tracy was sued in separate Exchequer suits by Henry Percy, Lord Poynings, warden of the east march, and John Merston, treasurer of the King’s chamber. In their suits, both men alleged that he had failed to pay them the sums the Crown had assigned to them from the issues of his bailiwick. Percy sought £50 from him by means of a bill of February 1452 and Merston £28, through another bill of the following May. In response to Percy, Tracy obtained licence to negotiate with his opponent out of court. The suit was still pending in the middle of the following year when, by writ of error, it was referred to the chancellor and treasurer sitting in ‘le Counsell Chambre’ next to the Exchequer. Whether the matter was ever formally resolved is open to question, for an identical writ was issued in June 1454. Merston’s suit certainly reached a conclusion, although not in favour of Tracy, who was ordered to pay his opponent the sum demanded and a further £1 in costs and damages at the beginning of 1453.21 E13/145A, rots. 33, 41. The Exchequer was also making demands of Tracy in this period, for having failed fully to account properly for the same term as sheriff. Initially, he was required to answer for himself in person at Westminster in accordance with Exchequer procedure, but in the spring of 1453 he successfully petitioned the Crown for special permission to appear through an attorney.22 E159/229, brevia Trin. rot. 5d, Easter rot. 16; 230, brevia Easter rot. 13. He was not finally free of all such demands until January 1458 when the Crown issued him with a pardon and directed the Exchequer to cease its actions against him.23 C67/42, m. 37; E159/235, brevia Mich. rot. 5d.

Earlier in the same decade, Tracy was drawn into a quarrel between his uncle and aunt of the half-blood, John and Margery Tracy, over a moiety of a manor at Coughton, Warwickshire, which had been part of the inheritance of their late mother Alice (the MP’s step-grandmother). In 1449 John Tracy had agreed to surrender the moiety to Alice’s sister and coheir, Eleanor, and to Eleanor’s son Thomas Throckmorton*, in exchange for lands in Worcestershire. Unfortunately for him, Margery and her husband Thomas Mille* had refused to release her interest in the property, of which Alice had made the MP a feoffee before her death in 1441. At some stage in the first half of the 1450s, John took action against the Milles in Chancery. According to his bill, William and another of Alice’s feoffees, Lord Sudeley, were on his side, having declared their willingness to release it to him. He must have won the quarrel in the end, for the Throckmortons were to take possession of the moiety in question.24 VCH Warws. iii. 81; C1/22/139. Even if he did take his uncle’s side over Coughton, the MP managed to remain on good terms with Mille, for whom he was likewise a feoffee. Like Tracy, Mille acted in the same capacity for the Pauncefoots, as did John Cassy*, another Gloucestershire esquire for whom the MP performed that role in the mid 1450s.25 CP25(1)/79/92/129; CPR, 1441-6, pp. 320-1; 1467-77, pp. 453-4; CCR, 1441-7, p. 272; SC8/85/4247.

A likely cause of concern for Tracy later that decade were the activities of his sons Henry and Richard, both of whom had reached their majorities by that date.26 The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 638 asserts, on the basis of inconclusive evidence provided by Peds. Plea Rolls ed. Wrottesley, 454, that Henry was the MP’s brother. In fact, he was the latter’s son: Sudeley mss, D2153/5/1. The Whittington pedigree (admittedly far from completely accurate) made at the time of the heraldic visitation of 1623 identifies Richard as Henry’s brother: Vis. Glos. (Harl. Soc. xxi), 165. In the spring of 1457 Richard and two accomplices were indicted for the murder of one Laurence Martyn while he was labouring in the fields at Aston Somerville (a few miles north of Toddington) on 22 Mar. that year. It was said that they had attacked Martyn with a stick and a ‘langedebeef’ (a spike or halbert with a head shaped like an ox tongue) and beaten him to death. Edmund Cowper, a cooper from Winchcombe, and others were also indicted, for having assisted them immediately after the murder. In the following Michaelmas term Martyn’s widow began an appeal in the court of King’s bench against the alleged killers and their accessories, one of whom she named as Henry Tracy. Whatever the truth of the matter, Cowper was subsequently discharged on the basis of a legal technicality and the Tracy brothers and all but one of their co-defendants (who had been outlawed) were acquitted at a trial held in the autumn of 1458.27 KB27/786, rot. 9d, rex rot. 27d; 788, rots. 70, 70d, rex rots. 5, 8.

Still alive in December that year, Tracy probably died not long afterwards. Neither a will nor an inquisition post mortem for him has survived but, having served continuously as a j.p. for Gloucestershire since his first appointment to that office in 1448, he was omitted from the commission of the peace of December 1460 and nothing more is heard of him. His son and heir Henry was in turn succeeded by his own son, another William Tracy, in 1501.28 Sudeley mss, D2153/5/1; CIPM Hen. VII, ii. 495; iii. 939.