YEO, William (d. 1686), of Totnes, Plymouth, Devon, St Stephen by Saltash, Cornw. and the Middle Temple, London.

The Yeo family of Totnes was linked by the antiquary John Prince to the more distinguished and more traceable clan at Heanton Satchville, in mid-Devon. That branch of the family produced a noted high sheriff of Devon in 1358. From the Yeos of Heanton Satchville descended a cadet line seated in the same parish, Huish, but the Totnes family was regarded rather vaguely by Prince as ‘another graft of this ancient stock’.14Prince, Worthies (1701), 595-6. Leonard Yeo† was a leading figure in the government of Totnes in Elizabethan times, after moving there from a career as a London merchant. He served as mayor twice and representing the borough in three Parliaments of the 1550s.15HP Commons, 1558-1603. It was presumably his wife and his son, George, whose graves in Totnes church were marked by an epitaph that concluded ‘Here lieth the Aged and the Youth/The Race of all approved Truth’.16Prince, Worthies, 596. Four generations of Totnes seventeenth-century Yeos bore the name William, of which this MP was the third.17PROB11/196/120; Plymouth and W. Devon RO, 1/720/66. They were, or had been, prosperous. When William Yeo’s grandmother died in 1646, she left spoons, rings, tankards cups and goblets of gold and silver.18PROB11/196/120. Whether much land and money descended to the third generation after her is doubtful, to judge from her will and its many beneficiaries.

William’s father had died before 1639, the year that he was admitted to the Middle Temple. One of his sponsors at the inn was Gilbert Yarde, of the Yardes of Bradley, near Newton Abbot; one of that family had sat with Leonard Yeo in the Parliament of 1559.19MTR ii. 880; HP Commons 1558-1603. The Middle Temple was for Yeo no finishing school. Through the civil war he worked at the law; by 1641 he found a place in Yarde’s chambers, and in June 1647 took a pupil of his own.20MTR ii. 903, 952, 957. In October that year he was appointed town clerk to the corporation of Plymouth, and six weeks later was called to the bar. By the following year he had bought a property in St Stephen by Saltash, Cornwall, just over the Tamar from Plymouth: probably Burraton, which became his home. His ancestral mercantile background doubtless appealed to Plymouth corporation, as would the strain of puritan piety running in his family. His first cousin, also William Yeo, was a graduate of the distinctly puritanical Emmanuel College, Cambridge, who served as chaplain to the garrison of Plymouth under Colonel William Gould, commander of St Nicholas island during the siege. Gould died in 1644, and by December 1645 his chaplain had left to minister at Brighton, but he was back in Devon by 1648, when he signed the Presbyterian Testimony orchestrated by the Plymouth minister George Hughes.21Al.Cant.; Calamy Revised, 552; S. Midhope, Death’s Advantage (1644, E.13.21). These connections may have well have secured his cousin and namesake the town clerkship.

Yeo’s work as town clerk included excursions to London as a legal representative of the corporation. During 1648-9 he made a journey to the capital, probably to Parliament but certainly to the leaders of the army, to negotiate the payment of soldiers and disbandment of the garrison at Plymouth. On this trip his horse died, and his replacement mount was paid for by the town.22Plymouth and W. Devon RO, 1/132, f. 271. Part of his annual calendar was attendance at the four quarter sessions and two assize sessions at Exeter, and he regularly undertook record-keeping activities on behalf of the corporation, such as rewriting the town rental. In 1653, his signature appeared on one of the orders agreed by the mayor and common council, suggesting that his standing within Plymouth corporation was greater by this time than that simply of a legal officer in attendance.23Plymouth and W. Devon RO, 1/132, f. 271; 1/48 ff. 109v, 288, 290.

Like Christopher Ceely*, a senior member of the corporation, Yeo was named a commissioner to eject scandalous ministers in the ordinance of August 1654, and in September he accompanied Ceely to the first Protectorate Parliament as MP for the town. Yeo sat on five committees in this assembly. On 27 October he was added to the committee revisiting the legislation of the Nominated Assembly on debtors in prison, and when four days later the brief of the committee on exports of foodstuffs was widened to include a review of weights and measures, Yeo was added to its number. This was a topic that would interest any Member with official, municipal interests, as would the work of the committee enabling towns to raise local rates to establish a preaching ministry, another of Yeo’s appointments (7 Dec.). With Ceely, he sat on the committee for enumerating ‘damnable heresies’ (12 Dec.) and his legal training accounted for his inclusion in the investigation into abuses of writs (3 Nov.).24CJ vii. 379a, 380a, 381b, 397b, 400a. On 1 January 1655, Yeo acted as a teller in a division on the franchise to be enshrined in the Government Bill, drafted by critics of protectorate to replace the Instrument of Government. With the Cornish Presbyterian, Thomas Gewen, he supported what seems to have been a compromise, extending the franchise to copyholders worth £10 a year.25CJ vii. 411a; supra, ‘Thomas Gewen’. This motion was defeated by 14 votes, and as a result the traditional 40 shilling freehold qualification was retained in the proposed constitution, to the chagrin of the army and its supporters.26Little and Smith, Cromwellian Protectorate, 59. The corporation awarded him £45 for his services in this Parliament, but he did not serve in another.27Plymouth and W. Devon RO, 1/132, f. 290v.

Yeo continued to act as town clerk of Plymouth until the Restoration and beyond. He gave up his chambers at the Middle Temple in 1654, and took leases of Plymouth corporation property in the town from 1656.28MTR iii. 1067, 1070; Plymouth and W. Devon RO, 1/636; 1/720/66. He may have been a sub-commissioner for prize goods in the mid-1650s, as in 1655 Henry Hatsell* was confident of a promise that ‘Mr Yeo’ would have money to dispose of after the sale of a prize ship.29CSP Dom. 1655, p. 393. In the last days of the protectorate and commonwealth, in 1659-60, Yeo began to be named as a tax and militia commissioner in the county of Devon as well as in Plymouth. When the Restoration took place, he appeared initially to negotiate the transition in public affairs. He continued to act as town clerk, attending meetings as late as April 1662.30Plymouth and W. Devon RO, 1/48, f. 112v. But in August that year he was included with Christopher Ceely among those to be removed from the corporation, and he left public life entirely.31Plymouth and W. Devon RO, 1/13. He retired for good to Burraton, although in 1678 he still enjoyed the lease of a property in Plymouth that he had first acquired in 1656.32Plymouth and W. Devon RO, 1/267/77; 1/192. Yeo drew up his will in 1684, and died in 1686, being buried at St Stephen by Saltash on 5 October. The goods and money in his house were valued at £598, of which books in his study accounted for £20.33West Country Studies Lib., Exeter, Moger transcripts, will of William Yeo, 1687. None of his descendants is known to have sat in Parliament.