TAILOR, William III

Few details of the career of the man who represented Plymouth in Parliament in 1447 and 1453 have been discovered, but he was evidently a local man, for he is encountered in early 1451 in association with John Page, a former mayor of Plymouth, in a suit for debt against Robert Hilling* and a Plympton baker. CP40/760, rot. 207.

Tailor’s origins are less certain, but – although no definite evidence of interference by the earls of Devon in the borough’s elections in the reign of Henry VI has been discovered – it is possible that he was descended from a family of Courtenay clients of the same name who lived at Topsham on the Exe estuary. SC8/338/E1212. Even if so, on chronological grounds it must have been a younger namesake who served as the earl of Devon’s beadle at Topsham in the later 1490s: SC6/HenVII/1096, rot. 16d. As ‘Tailor’ was a common name in fifteenth-century England, it is not always possible to distinguish the MP’s activities from those of the various namesakes active in the south-western region during the period. These included a tailor from Ashburton, as well as other men with landholdings at Bridestowe and Butterleigh. CPR, 1441-6, p. 291; C1/126/34; Plymouth and W. Devon RO, Calmady mss, 372/3/5/13.