TERRINGTON, William (d.1409), of Aspley Guise, Beds.

The sketch biography of William Terrington given in Beds. Hist. Rec. Soc. xxix. 93-94, confuses the Bedfordshire MP with a crown servant of the same name, an error which is perpetuated by A. Goodman in Trans. Essex Arch. Soc. (ser. 3), ii. 275-6; and which leads him to assume, wrongly, that our Member must have been Thomas Walsingham’s informant about events in Queen Isabella’s household in January 1400. The subject of this biography may well have known the St. Albans chronicler, since he was intimate with his friend, Thomas Pever† of Toddington, Beds., but it is quite clear that he never held office at Court. The other William Terrington married Ellen Swinford in 1398 (at which time the MP’s wife, Joan, was still alive), and can usually be distinguished from his namesake because of the description ‘servant of the King’. He outlived our William by at least five years (CPR, 1413-16, p. 214). He appears to have come from Northants. where he was living in 1405 (ibid. 1401-5, p. 445), although his wife brought him extensive estates in Lincs. and Yorks. (Feudal Aids, vi. 480).