SNELLING, William

The Snellings had long been settled in Shoreham, and a namesake of this MP had represented the borough in five Parliaments of the mid fourteenth century. CP25(1)/239/71/5. He himself was among eight men of the town (including John Wryther*) who were accused in 1407 of taking or buying the goods of a Portuguese merchant, which had been seized illegally in the Channel by the crews of two English balingers. Orders were issued for their arrest and appearance in Chancery to answer the charge. Cal. Signet Letters ed. Kirby, 692; CPR, 1405-8, p. 354. The incident may indicate that, like Wryther, Snelling made a living partly from trade, although a suit for trespass, pending against him in 1425, noted his occupation as ‘smith’, as too did a plea begun later by Richard Dammer*, who alleged that he had unlawfully taken crops worth £2 from fields at Old Shoreham in the three years from October 1426. CP40/657, rot. 228; 680, rot. 258. Meanwhile, since the early 1420s Snelling had been kept busy as an executor of John Purple of Midhurst, Sussex, and together with Purple’s widow had brought suits in the central courts at Westminster to recover debts owing to the deceased. CP40/651, rot. 207d; 691, rot. 635d.

Snelling represented his home town in Parliament in 1429, while holding office as bailiff of the borough of Steyning, some five miles inland. Yet he remained resident at Shoreham, where he witnessed conveyances in the early months of 1432, CCR, 1429-35, p. 170; E40/4084. and when he served on a jury at a coroner’s inquest at Steyning in 1436 he was said to have come from a ‘neighbouring township’. Suss. Arch. Collns. xcv. 54. He served as bailiff of Bramber, adjacent to Steyning, in the mid 1440s, probably by appointment of Bramber’s lord the duke of Norfolk. The MP died before Easter term 1449, when as his executor John Snelling of Steyning was sued for a debt of £2 in the court of common pleas. CP40/753, rot. 445. John, who may have been his son, was then occupying the post of bailiff of Steyning, while Peter Snelling, another kinsmen of theirs, numbered among William’s successors as bailiff of Bramber. SC6/1036/7, 9; Arundel Castle mss, A362. Clearly, the family made its mark as minor officials in their locality.