SONBACHE, William

Nothing is known of Sonbache’s origins, but his name implies they lay in Sandbech in Cheshire. If so, it may be that he was a kinsman of Philip Sonbache, one of Richard II’s Cheshire bodyguard in 1398. E101/42/10, m. 2d. However this may be, he began his own career as a servant of the lawless Staffordshire esquire, Hugh Erdeswyk*. When the King’s bench came to Lichfield in the early summer of 1414, he, described as ‘of Uttoxeter, yeoman’, was among the many indicted for illegally taking Erdeswyk’s livery. KB9/113/2. He was also named among those who, in Sept. 1413, participated in Erdeswyk’s raid on the property of Sir Edmund Ferrers at Chartley, but his name was crossed out by the jury: KB9/113/4. Although the identification cannot be certain, it is possible that he is to be identified with the archer who undertook to serve under Erdeswyk’s local rival, Sir John Blount, in the campaign of 1417, perhaps doing so as a means of purging this offence. E101/51/2, m. 6.

The young Sonbache was also associated with another resident of Uttoxeter, Erdeswyk’s ally, John Mynors*, with whom, in Hilary term 1419, he acted as a surety in the court of King’s bench. KB27/631, rex rot. 5; M. Jurkowski, ‘John Fynderne’ (Keele Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1998), 442-3. This association with Mynors provides the probable context for his election to Parliament for Newcastle-under-Lyme, a borough with which he had no other traceable connexion. Mynors had himself been returned for the borough in 1419 and 1422 and, as a local official of the duchy of Lancaster, was well placed to influence the representation of a borough where the duchy’s influence was strong. With regard to Sonbache’s election in 1423, it is significant that both Mynors and Erdeswyk attested the corresponding county return. C219/13/2.

By this date Sonbache had either married or was about to marry a minor heiress of a junior branch of the Derbyshire family of Fitzherbert settled at Roston, a few miles to the north of Uttoxeter. The couple were married by June 1424, when they surrendered her claim to certain lands in Hornby (Yorkshire) to Christopher Conyers. CP25(1)/280/155/22. Thereafter no more is known of him until 1428, when he acted in a final concord by which Erdeswyk acquired a small estate near Stafford from Richard Knightley*. Three years later, on 11 Jan. 1431, he attested Mynors’s election to represent Staffordshire in Parliament. Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. xi. 229-30; C219/14/2. More interestingly, in the following November he was named during pleasure as forester of the ward of Uttoxeter, a minor office in the local administration of the duchy of Lancaster. It is likely that he owed this modest grant to the patronage of the young Humphrey, earl of Stafford. Indeed, he was probably already among the earl’s annuitants. By Michaelmas 1433 the earl was paying him £2 p.a. As Erdeswyk was one of earl’s councillors, it is likely that he was responsible for introducing him to the earl’s service. DL42/18, f. 134; C. Rawcliffe, Staffords, 237; The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 31.

This promising advancement had little recorded sequel. In 1434 Sonbache was among those returned by the county’s MPs as of sufficient standing to be required to take the parliamentary oath not to maintain peace-breakers, and in 1439 his grant of the forestership was extended to life CPR, 1429-36, p. 400; DL42/18, f. 134.. He also seems to have taken another wife.

According to a later ex parte plea at the Cheshire assizes in the great dispute between his master, the earl of Stafford, and (Sir) Thomas Stanley II*, over the manor of Bosley, by 13 Dec. 1443 Sonbache was, in right of his wife, Elizabeth, the joint hereditary bailiff of the King’s hundred of Macclesfield, in which the disputed manor lay. CHES29/149, rot. 16d; Rawcliffe, 237. He makes no other certain appearance in the records. There is, however, one curious reference to either him or a namesake. According to indictments taken before a Leicestershire coroner, William Sonbache, described as ‘of London, soldier’, was one of two principals in a murder committed at Sileby on 5 Oct. 1444, an offence for which he was outlawed. The description ‘soldier’ makes it unlikely that this William was the MP – the only evidence of his military service is an uncertain one and dates back to 1417 – but it is not impossible, particularly because his co-accused, Christopher Draycote of Draycott-in-the-Moors, was from Staffordshire. KB9/247/45, 46; KB29/77, rot. 25.