STONE, William

Stone, who came from Bristol, Contrary to the statement in HP Biogs. ed. Wedgwood and Holt, 813-14, the William Stone, ‘late of Westminster, yeoman and servant of William Norton, one of the ushers of the Exchequer’ who was granted a pardon in 1446 was a different man: C67/39, m. 31. was associated with others in a suit for trespass brought by the Gloucestershire landowner John Greville* in the early 1430s. Then described as a ‘merchant’, he was also a shipowner, and in May 1436 was licenced with Clement Bagot to fit out their ship the James for naval warfare against the King’s enemies. A particular anxiety was the safeguard of the force about to cross the Channel under the command of the duke of York, the newly-appointed lieutenant of France, so it is significant that at the same time Stone obtained royal letters of protection as a member of York’s retinue. How long he remained in the duke’s company is unknown, but he resumed his trading ventures within a few months, and in February 1437 he was permitted to send the Trinity of Bristol to Bergen laden with 400 quarters of flour, barley and beans. CPR, 1429-36, pp. 440, 515; DKR, xviii. 310; Overseas Trade Bristol (Bristol Rec. Soc. vii), 70. The Trinity was subsequently confiscated by the Crown for trading in ports other than Bergen, contrary to the statute of 1430: CPR, 1436-41, p. 236. While he continued to trade in grain and other commodities in later years, Stone’s employment by the Crown led to his adoption of the designation ‘esquire’, and this armigerous rank to the acquisition of his own seal. Whether Stone had ever served Henry V, as he later asserted, cannot now be proved, but it was for good service at sea and in Aquitaine that in February 1438 Henry VI granted him, the King’s serjeant, the office of provost of Bayonne, to hold for term of his life, either in person or by deputy. What precisely he had done to deserve this generosity is not specified. Stone was commissioned in the following year to requisition vessels in Bristol and sail them to Plymouth for the passage of the earl of Huntingdon’s army to Aquitaine, and in May 1440 he was among those instructed to find 20 large ships and ten smaller vessels, barges or ballingers, for the fleet commanded by Courtenay and Bonville. CPR, 1436-41, pp. 193, 412.

So far, Stone had had little contact with the townspeople of Southampton. He had shipped some wine into the port in March 1440, but appears only to have taken up residence there after his appointment as controller of customs and subsidies in the following year. Port Bk. 1439-40 (Soton. Rec. Ser. v), 36; CPR, 1436-41, p. 476. This appointment prompted his resignation or removal from his post in Bayonne, which was granted jointly to the merchant Stephen Forster* and King’s esquire John St. Loe*. There is no record of Stone’s formal admission to the freedom of Southampton, nor of any election to borough office. Nevertheless, he gained acceptance by the community. William Soper*, outstanding among the burgesses not only for his mercantile ventures but also for his prominent position as keeper of the King’s ships and long-term collector of customs in the port, asked him to offer pledges in support of a petition to the chancellor, and he acted likewise for John Serle† in the latter’s suit in Chancery against his father-in-law, Peter James*. C1/16/301; 73/145. Furthermore, in April 1442 Stone was made a feoffee of the lands and rents both within the town and in the counties of Hampshire, Cornwall and Surrey belonging to the childless merchant William Nicholl. There may have been some duplicity attached to the arrangement for much later, in 1468, a former servant of Nicholl’s claimed that it was only when Nicholl was ‘deadly sick’ that his friends remembered that the properties situated outside Southampton would not be covered by his will (which stiplulated that his heir, after the death of his widow, was to be his kinsman and factor, Richard Thomas), and that when the deeds of enfeoffment were read to Nicholl lying in bed his ‘wittes were past away’ and he could not hear, speak or make any sign. Despite this, the evidences were sealed with the dying man’s hand, and Stone accompanied the servant to South Stonham, where he acquired seisin of the manor in the name of his co-feoffees, before returning to Southampton to take formal possession of property there. Nicholl died the same day. Southampton City Archs., Soton. recs., SC4/2/271, 273, 308. Subsequently, Stone fell out with Richard Thomas, who had promptly married Nicholl’s widow, but arbiters between them awarded that he should receive five obligations each in £10 whereby Sir Godfrey Hilton† had been bound to the deceased. The lawyer Thomas Haydock* and another of the arbiters discovered later that Hilton had in fact honoured one of the bonds prior to Nicholl’s death, so this money (£10) was due to Stone from Thomas’s estate: he petitioned the chancellor to summon Thomas’s executor to settle with him. C1/16/560.

Stone may have been elected by the burgesses of Southampton to the Parliament at Bury St. Edmunds in 1447 because of his contacts with the royal court. Clearly, he was still favoured there, as extraordinary grants of privileges reveal. In 1442 he had been granted for life licence to trade with aliens or denizens, in person or by factors, in all kinds of merchandise, and also to host foreign merchants, even though his office as controller of customs barred him by statute from so doing. No record was made in the customs’ accounts at Southampton of his subsequent trading activities, but it appears that he dealt principally in wine and grain. In 1449-50 he paid the local authorities £1 16s. 8d. for storage for two months of 160 quarters of wheat and 60 quarters of malt in the garners of the ‘Longhouse’, and at other times he sent consignments of wine by road to Salisbury and London. Furthermore, he established friendly relations with Genoese merchants, for in October 1445 he had joined with three such living in London, in offering mainprise in £200 that their compatriots Simone Spinola and Adorado Cattaneo would appear in Chancery to answer charges laid against them. (This may have had something to do with Cattaneo’s dispute with Southampton’s mayor, John Fleming*.) CPR, 1441-6, p. 170; Soton. recs., stewards’ bk. SC5/1/7, f. 2; CCR, 1441-7, p. 357; Brokage Bk. 1443-4, ii (Soton. Rec. Ser. vi), 315; Brokage Bk. 1447-8 (ibid. xlii), 60-63, 128-9. A few months earlier, Stone’s office as controller of customs had been made subject to good behaviour, instead of royal pleasure as hitherto, but on 27 June 1447, after the dissolution of his first Parliament, he was granted the office for life, taking in addition to the normal wages, fees and rewards, an annuity of 40 marks (£26 13s. 4d.) from the wool subsidies collected at Southampton, all this notwithstanding the fact that a life-grant of the controllership was entirely without precedent. To add to all this, on 11 Nov. following he was appointed for life constable and keeper of Southampton castle, a prestigious position which for most of the century had been held by Sir John Popham* and his father. CPR, 1441-6, p. 341; 1446-52, pp. 65, 109.

Stone’s personal reasons for seeking election to the next Parliament, that of February 1449, are quite clear. As a consequence of the severe financial crisis affecting the Exchequer, and over-assignment on the Crown’s revenues from customs and subsidies, he was having trouble securing payment of his annuity. He petitioned the King in Parliament to consider his long service, claiming to be of ‘right grete age and full ympotent’ and in receipt of no other income for his sustenance save this annuity. Surprisingly, the petition won the support of his fellow Members, even though another petition from the Commons resulted in an Act to the effect that all such grants from the wool subsidies were to be suspended. Similarly, in the next Parliament (the third running to which Stone was elected), he again looked to his own interests. During the second session, at London on 11 Feb. 1450, he obtained a pardon of outlawry in Middlesex for his failure to answer an action of debt for £2 in the court of common pleas, and he successfully petitioned to be exonerated from the Act of Resumption passed in the course of the final session, held at Leicester that summer, with regard not only to his annuity but also to his tenure of office as controller of customs. The exemption referred to his ‘olde long contynued service, hadde and doon to the most victorious Prince oure Fader’ (Henry V) and to the present King in Guyenne and elsewhere. It noted the grant of his petition in the previous Parliament, and stated that preferential treatment was to be accorded him with regard to payment of the annuity. E368/223, recorda, Hil. rot. 29; CPR, 1446-52, p. 293; PROME, xii. 118. Even so, Stone continued to encounter difficulties, both with the officials at Southampton and at the Exchequer, in turning promises into cash. E368/224, recorda, Hil. rot. 1. Whether he received adequate recompense for his parliamentary service is also doubtful. Before the second session of this same Parliament the mayor of Southampton had drunk ‘good ale’ with him before he set off ‘to London ward’, and he and his fellow MP John Fleming each received 23s. 8d. as part payment of their wages and 1s. 8d. for their costs for the session at Leicester, as well as £5 just before they left home. However, it was not until June 1452 that Stone received the sum of £8 still owing to him for parliamentary wages. Soton. recs., SC5/1/7, ff. 7, 8, 11v; petty custom bk. 5/4/7, f. 115v.

Stone was among the 16 burgesses of Southampton who attested the parliamentary indenture of 5 Mar. 1453, and the 13 who did so on 23 June 1455. C219/16/2, 3. Although by then he owned a house in the parish of All Saints, he let it out to tenants and most likely continued to reside in the castle, there asserting the King’s right to two small gardens on its south side. Southampton Terrier 1454 (Soton. Rec. Ser. xv),. 408-9, 514. Yet Stone received no further signs of royal favour after the onset of Henry VI’s mental illness, and sank into obscurity. In 1456 he took out another pardon, but in the autumn of 1457 he was removed from the controllership of the customs and his post as constable of the castle, despite his appointments for life. C67/41, m. 6; CPR, 1452-61, pp. 328, 390.. He died at an unknown date before Michaelmas term 1461, when his executor, Thomas Stone, a ‘gentleman’ from Highworth in Wiltshire, was summoned to the court of common pleas to respond to a suit of the litigious John Payn I* of Southampton and London. Payn produced in court a paper sealed by the late MP on 22 Mar. 1451, recording that he owed Payn £10, which he promised to repay on the following 1 May. He had failed to satisfy his creditor. CP40/802, rot. 178.