Sir William Hayward Knight

  Information about this person:

• Background Information. ¹⁹⁵
Sir William Howard, judge, was perhaps the son of John Howard of Wiggenhall, Norfolk (alive in 1269), by Lucy, daughter of John Germund. The family, which was probably of Saxon origin, belonged to the class of smaller gentry, and was settled in the neighborhood of Lynn, Norfolk. The name Howard, Haward of Hayward, is said to have been compounded of have of haye (hedge) and ward (warden), and to have denoted originally an officer whose principal duty it was to to prevent trespass on pasture-land. Howard was counsel to the corporation of Lynn, and appears as justice of assize for the northern counties in 1293, and was in the following year commissioner of sewers for the northwest of Norfolk. He was summoned to parliament as a justice in 1295, and on 11 Oct 1297, was appointed a justice of the common pleas. In the following year he purchased Grancourt's manor, East Winch, near Lynn, where he had his principal seat. In 1305 and again in 1307, he was one of the commissioners of trailbaston. He must have died or retired in the summer/autumn of 1308, the patent of his successor, Henry le Scrope, being dated 27 Nov in that year. In or about the reign of Henry VII, a figure of him kneeling in robes with the legend "Pray for the soul of William Howard, chief justice of England," was inserted in one of the stained-glass windows in the church of Long Melford, Suffolk. He does not seem, however, to have held the office of chief justice [Dugdale, Orig. 44, Chron. Ser. 34]

Sir William Howard married, as his 1^st wife, Alice, daughter of Sir Robert Ufford, ancestor of the first earls of Suffolk, with whom he had no children. His 2^nd wife was Alice, daughter of Sir Edmund de Fitton of Fitton in Wiggenshall St. Germains, Norfolk. With Alice de Fitton, he had two sons, Sir John and Sir William.

[Sources cited by the author: Henry Howard's Memorials of the Howard Family, 1834, App. I; Ellis's Letters of of Eminent Literary Men (Camden Soc.); Genealogists, ed. Marshall, ii. 337 et seq.; Dungdale's Baronage, ii, 265; Dugdale's Chron. Ser. pp. 31, 33; Parl. Writs, i. 29 (3); Madox's Exch. Ii. 91; Rot. Parl. I. 178, 218; Collins's Peerage, ed. Brydges, i. 51 et seq; Foss's Lives of the Judges]

~ The Dictionary of National Biography, Vol. 10, 1908, p. 77

William married Alice Fitton, daughter of Sir Edward Fitton Knight and Unknown.¹⁹⁵ (Alice Fitton was born about 1255 in Bolyn, Cheshire, England.)