It is claimed that he is the same Sir William Hawte who was a composer of liturgical and devotional choral music (who flourished c. 1460–1470), represented in a number of manuscript choirbooks that survive to this day.
[7] He was therefore, by affinity and probably by blood, nephew of the 1st Earl Rivers and first cousin to Elizabeth Woodville, Queen Consort of King Edward IV.
William therefore grew up, probably at Bishopsbourne, with an elder half-sibling and with three younger brothers and various sisters, one of whom, Alice, was by 1462 married to Sir John Fogge (as his second wife).
Among other things William inherited from his father the residue of his interesting collection of religious relics, after some of the choicer items had been allocated to selected recipients.
[19] By the partition indentures of 1480 Sir William received the old family manors of Bourne, Ford and Wadenhall, and the de Marinis lands of Otterpool, Blackmanstone and Elmsted, while Hastingleigh, Alderlose and Ightham Mote fell to Richard, their brother Edward taking the manor of Crofton, lands in Hougham near Dover and rents in Canterbury.
[25] He was (with Lord Rivers) commissioned to arrest rebels in 1471, to investigate fees owing to the king's progenitors in 1473, and to survey walls and ditches in 1474 and 1479.
[47] Following the Battle of Bosworth Field, Richard Haute of Ightham was then included in the general act of restitution which was issued in the first year of King Henry VII.
His cousin Sir Richard Haute died at the end of 1492, leaving his lands to his wife and little son Henry at Swerdling (in Petham), and providing that his mother Margaret should have convenient lodging there, with £5 rent to be paid at Warehorne: he left several riding horses to his servants, and "maister Thomas Haute" (perhaps Sir William's son) was among the witnesses.
[52] Sir Richard's widow was Katherine, daughter of Thomas Boston, whom he had married after the death in 1486 of her second husband John Green of Wicken Bonhunt, Essex.
[53]) Katherine Hawte died in the following year,[54] and Sir William in 1495 made an agreement with Edward, his brother Richard's son, that Swerdling should be held to his use in tail.
[56] In 1496 Sir William was commissioned to participate in taking a muster of Kentish soldiers for the defence of Berwick against attack by the Scots.
His inquest, for which the writ was issued on 7 September 1499, showed that he died seised of the manors of Wadenhall, Bishopsbourne, Elmsted, Blakmanston, Otterpool, Warehorne and Snave, in fee.
[58] In 1512 Sir William's sister Dame Alice Fogg made a grant from lands at Ashford[59] to provide for an Obit of 10s.
[61] It is also remarked that the only surviving manuscript copy of the English version (attributed to Anthony Wydeville) of Christine de Pizan's Livre du corps de policie has an opening embellishment of the Haute family arms;[62] and that a volume of French vulgate romances in the British Library (from the English Royal Library), including Estoire del Saint Graal, La Queste del Saint Graal, and Morte Artu, belonged to Sir Richard Roos ("my grete book called Saint Grall bounde in boordes covers with rede leder and with plates of laton"), who in 1482 bequeathed it to his niece Eleanor Haute (née Roos),[63] the first wife of Sir Richard Haute.
[64][65] Related interest attaches to the books of John Goodere the elder (whose grandson Thomas married William Hawte's granddaughter Joan), who possessed print copies of Dives et Pauper[66] and Knight of the Tower (presumably William Caxton's[67]), a parchment Canterbury Tales, 'an old boke of the cronycls of yngeland', 'an olde boke of Bonuauentur' (more likely pseudo-Bonaventure), and 'a queyr of phisik of the secrets of women' (De Secretis Mulierum, of pseudo-Albertus Magnus[68]).