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Sir William Trussell
Junior was the second son of Sir
William Trussell, of Kibblestone (near Oulton) in Staffordshire and
Billesley, Warwickshire, and his wife, Maud, the daughter of Warin
Mainwaring. The younger Trussell's biography is difficult to disentangle
from that of his father.
William, like many ambitious younger sons, sought to make
his fortune in Royal service. However, it was not always easy to know which
horse to back during the many Royal squabbles of the era and the both
Trussell junior and senior seem to have been particularly unwise in their
choice of loyalties. They took up arms for Thomas of Lancaster against King
Edward II at the Battle of Boroughbridge on 22nd March 1322. After
Lancaster's overthrow, the two fled beyond the seas; but, like his father,
William had probably returned by 1326, when he entered the household of Edward,
Prince of Wales
It appears to have been the son who had to flee the
country for a second time after King Edward II's murder in 1327 and stayed
away at least for the first two years that Roger Mortimer remained in power;
for the father acted as an ambassador and seems to have retained his
escheatorship between the failure of Henry of Lancaster's movement of
insurrection, at the end of 1328, and the fall of Mortimer in October 1330.
William Junior was, however, back in England in 1329,
acting as an esquire of the Royal household before being promoted to
Constable of the Odiham Castle in Hampshire. Soon afterwards, he was
appointed to the Royal chamber and, for two years from 1333, served as
receiver of that office. 1335 saw the commencement of his military
adventures abroad, although his duties with the English army appear to have
been largely administrative. He accompanied Edward III first on his big push
into Scotland where he appears to have been knighted for his trouble Later,
during the Hundred Years' War, he travelled with the Royal entourage to the
Low Countries in 1338, and protections were issued in his favour the
following year. In the Autumn of 1342, he was campaigning with King
Edward in Brittany and, in 1346, he reached the peak of his career,
taking part, with his brother, Warin, in the great Crécy campaign and the
Siege of Calais where he commanded a company of four knights, nine esquires
and eighteen archers.
At home in England, William Trussell had been appointed
Admiral of the Fleet, west and north of the Thames, in 1339 and 1343; and he
held his post at Odiham Castle for the best part of a quarter of a century.
It is no surprise that King Edward III, whom he entertained there several
times, called William his "beloved and faithful a servant". In
January 1347, he became the custodian of the great Scottish warriors,
William De Ramsey and Walter De Halyburton who had been captured by the
English at the Battle of Neville's Cross the previous year. Their fellow
prisoner, King David Bruce of the
Scots was initially sent to the Tower of London, but by early 1355, he too
was transferred to Odiham after the collapse of ransom negotiations. The
monarch remained under William Trussell's charge for the next three years
and lived in comfort, if not luxury, within the castle walls. The two appear
to have become good friends, though William was not always in residence. He
was often with the King's army in France, for example at the Battle of
Poitiers in 1356, where he was granted £40 a year for his services to the
Black Prince. Trussell did accompany King David to London to address both
the English and Scottish Royal Councils concerning his release and also
attended King Edward at Ludgershall (Wilts) to discuss the matter. When
David was finally set free, he specifically requested that the Constable of
Odiham accompany him to the North. It appears that William was a little
reluctant to travel so far, for the English King wrote to him insisting that
he not only to go to Scotland, but first he was to journey to London and on
pilgrimage to Canterbury. The party left for London on 8th September 1357 -
stopping the night at William Trussell's manor at Shottesbrooke
in Berkshire on the way. Following their pious detour, the journey to
Berwick took just eleven days.
William was the step-son and chosen heir of King Edward
II's old favourite, Oliver De Bordeaux,
and it was through this man that he inherited his Berkshire estates. These
were originally centred around the manor of Foliejon
in Winkfield, very close to
the Royal Court at Windsor.
However, the King insisted he swap these for Eaton Hastings in the north of
the county in order that he could extend the Great
Deer Park. It was in 1335 that William purchased Shottesbrooke from
a London Vintner and it is here that he mostly resided, along with his wife,
Isabelle (died pre-1348), and two children, John (who predeceased his
father) and Margaret, subsequently the wife of Sir Fulk Pembridge of Tong
Castle (Shropshire) and her father's eventual heiress. William's nephew and
namesake also appears to have moved south in order to gain preferment
through his uncle's influence at court. However, he became quite an
embarrassment to the family when, in 1347, he helped Sir John Dalton with
the abduction of Lady de La Beche from Beaumys
Castle in Swallowfield!
William returned from Calais to find himself standing guarantor for his
nephew's surrender, which, fortunately, occurred soon afterward.
Close Berkshire associates of William included the father
and brother of his sister-in-law, both John, Lord St. Philibert, of Bray
and Sulham; and Sir John Brocas, a
fellow knight of the Royal household who lived in nearby Clewer.
It is not known what they thought of his nephew's tomfoolery, but they must
have been considerably impressed when, in 1337, William had founded an ecclesiastical
college at Shottesbrooke and built
a church there for the attendant warden, five chaplains and two
clerks. This survives completely intact to this day and a highly elaborate
unmarked double-tomb there is said to be that of William and his first wife,
though he did remarry in later life. He also appears to have been a patron
of the church at Warfield,
possibly in association with his mother's residence at adjoining Foliejon.
William had little connection with the family of his new
wife, Ida, the sister and co-heiress of Edward, Lord Boteler of Wem; and it
is generally supposed that the union was arranged by the King so that
William might inherit a large part of the Boteler estates. In the event,
however, Lord Boteler outlived Trussell by some eleven years and the latter
never did acquire more than his three manors of Shottesbrooke, Eaton
Hastings (both in Berkshire) and Brucebury (in Bedfordshire), despite
holding others - like the vast estates of John Philibert's brother-in-law,
Edmund Lord St. John of Basing - temporarily in wardship. At the time of his
death in 1364, William's annual land income probably didn't exceed £200. |
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