COGGESHALL, Sir William

More can be added to the earlier biography.2 The Commons 1386-1421, i. 616-18.

In 1394 Coggeshall was proclaimed an outlaw in the hustings court in London, having failed to answer a suit the Somerset knight, Sir John Rodney†, and John Sparowe had brought against him in the court of common pleas. Rodney and Sparowe alleged that he owed them £40, but their action does not reveal the circumstances of the alleged debt. Having surrendered to the Marshalsea prison and secured bail in November 1394, Coggeshall set about challenging the plaintiffs with a writ of error. In Michaelmas 1396, he appeared in the court of King’s bench, where he demonstrated that at one point in the records of their case against him he was mistakenly referred to as ‘Sir Thomas Coggeshall’. Technically speaking, this meant that the process against him had been discontinued, so the King’s bench overturned his outlawry.3 KB27/542, rots. 58, 58d.

Coggeshall’s name features in a draft petition to Richard II from later in the same decade. The purpose of the petition, in which his co-petitioners were the archbishop of Canterbury, the bishop of London, the abbots of Waltham Holy Cross, Colchester, St. Osyth and Walden, the earl of Oxford and Sir John Howard*, was to seek a pardon for the spiritual and temporal ‘gentry’ and commons of Essex. Presumably, it was an application for inclusion in the general pardon granted by the King just before the dissolution of the Parliament of 1397-8.4 Westminster Abbey muns. 12705, 12228.

Later in his career, Coggeshall received at least one other royal pardon, dated 25 Jan. 1415.5 C67/37, m. 58.

It may well be that he owed his appointment to a commission of gaol delivery at Gloucester in 1424 to the interests he acquired in south-west England through his second wife.