November 1361 to 1362 shows Simon of Bradstede, clerk of the works, then expending £1773, of which £100 was received by the hands of William of Wykeham at the exchequer, and that from 1369 shows Bernard Cokles, clerk of the works, expending £2306. The chief evidence cited in support of the theory that Wykeham owed his advancement to his skill as an architect is the remark in a tract Why Poor Priests have no benefices that “Lords will not present a clerk able of cunning of God's law and good life and holy ensample … but a kitchen clerk or a fancy clerk or wise in building castles or worldly doing, though he cannot well read his psalter.” This tract has been attributed to Wycliffe, but without adequate authority, and it is thought to be of later date, and if Wykeham is meant by the castle-building clerk it only shows that popular repute is no guide to fact. That Wykeham, who was clearly an extremely good man of business, should, when clerk of the works, have played a considerable part in determining what works should be done and the general character of the buildings with which he was connected, we may believe; but to think that this attorney and notary, this keeper of the king's dogs (20th Aug. 1356, Devon's Issues of the Exchequer, 163) and of the king's forests, this carrier of rolls and paymaster at the exchequer, was also the architect of Windsor and Queenborough Castles, of Winchester Cathedral and College, is to credit Wykeham with a superhuman combination of knowledge, of training and of functions.
That he gave great satisfaction to the king when once he was appointed surveyor at Windsor in 1356 is unquestionable. He is first called king's clerk on the 14th of November 1357, when he was given 1s. a day, beyond the wages he was already receiving for his offices at Windsor and elsewhere, “until peacefully advanced to some benefice.” Ecclesiastical benefices were the chief means by which, before the Reformation, the civil servants of the crown were paid for services which, being clerical, were also ecclesiastical, and for which the settled stipends were wholly inadequate. In his accumulation of benefices Wykeham seems to have distanced all his predecessors and successors, except perhaps John Maunsell, the chancellor of Henry III., and Thomas Wolsey, the chancellor of Henry VIII., the latter being a pluralist not in canonries and livings but in bishoprics.
Wykeham's first benefice was the rectory of Pulham, the richest in Norfolk, worth £53 a year, or some £1600 of our money, to which he was presented on the 30th of November 1357. But this was not a “peaceful” advancement, for it was only in the king's patronage by reason of the temporalities of the see of Ely having been seized into the king's hands the year before, on account of the bishop being implicated in certain murders and robberies, which he denied, contesting the king's action in the papal court. On the 16th of April 1359 the king gave Wykeham a pension of £20 a year from the exchequer until he could obtain peaceful possession of Pulham. On this, and what may have been a similarly contested presentation to the canonry and prebend of Flixton in Lichfield cathedral on the 1st of March 1359, repeated on the 22nd of August 1360, and supported by a mandate to the new bishop on the 29th of January 1361, Wykeham's latest biographer (George Herbert Moberly, Life of Wykeham, 1887, 2nd ed., 1893) has built an elaborate story of Wykeham's advancement being opposed by the pope because he was the leader of a national party against papal authority in England. The baselessness of this is clear when we find that Wykeham had obtained from Innocent VI., on the 27th of January 1357, an indulgence to choose his own confessor (Cal. Pap. Reg.), and on the 8th of July 1358 (Cal Pap. Pet. i. 331) asked and obtained a papal provision to this very church of Pulham on the ground that it had passed to the pope's patronage by the promotion of its former possessor to the see of London. In spite of papal and royal authority, it is doubtful whether Wykeham obtained peaceful possession of Pulham till again presented to it by the king on the 10th of July 1361 after the bishop of Ely's death. The difficulty as to the prebend of Flixton was no doubt something of the same kind. Between bishop, pope and king the next vacant prebend in every great church was generally promised two or three deep before it was vacant, and the episcopal and chapter registers are full of the contests which ensued.
Wykeham's civil offices rapidly increased. On the Ides (15th) of March 1359 a French fleet sacked Winchelsea, carrying off the women and girls. On the 10th of July 1359 Wykeham was made chief keeper and surveyor, not only of Windsor, but of the castles of Dover, Hadley and Leeds (Kent), and of the manors of Foliejohn, Eton, Guildford, Kennington, Sheen (now Richmond), Eltham and Langly and their parks, with power to repair them and to pay for workmen and materials. On the 20th of February 1360, when another French invasion was feared, the bailiff of Sandwich was ordered to send all the lead he had to Wykeham for the works at Dover. In April the sheriffs of four batches of counties were each ordered to send forty masons to Wykeham at Windsor. This secular activity was rewarded by presentation to the deanery of St Martin-le-Grand, with an order for induction on the 21st of May, on which day he was commissioned to inquire by a jury of men of Kent into the defects of the walls and tower of Dover (Pat. 34 E. III. pt. i. m. 12). On the 15th of August he was directed to hand over £40 given him for the purpose, to a successor, the treaty of Brétigny having been made meanwhile and confirmed at Calais with Wykeham as one of the witnesses on the 24th of October. In January 1361 building work at Windsor was vigorously resumed, and again the sheriffs were ordered to contribute their quotas of 40 freestone masons and 40 cementarii to Wykeham's charge. On the 13th of February, on the joint petition of the kings of England and of France, the pope “provided” Wykeham to a canonry and dignity at Lincoln, notwithstanding his deanery and a prebend at Llandaff. On the 2nd of April four commissioners were appointed to superintend the construction of the new castle ordered in the Isle of Sheppey, which when finished was called Queenborough, the purchases and payments, not the works, being under the beloved clerk, Wykeham. In this year came the second visitation of the Black Death, the Second Plague, as it was called, and carried off four bishops and several magnates, with many clerics, whose vacated preferments were poured on Wykeham. The bishop of Hereford being dead, on the 12th of July 1361, the king presented Wykeham to a prebend in Hereford cathedral, and on the 24th of July to one in Bromyard collegiate church; the bishop of St David's being dead, prebends in the collegiate churches of Abergwilly and Llandewybrewi were given him on the 16th of July. On the 11th of August the pope, on the king's request, provided him with a prebend in St Andrew's Auckland collegiate church. This Mr Moberly curiously misrepresents as action against Wykeham. He in fact never obtained possession of it, probably because the pope had already “provided” it to Robert of Stretton, a papal chaplain, who, however, asked in January 1362 for a canonry at Lincoln instead, because he was “in fear and terror of a certain William of Wykeham.” On the 24th of September 1361 the king gave Wykeham a prebend in Beverley Minster, on the 1st of October the prebend of Oxgate in St Paul's (which he exchanged for Tattenhall on the 10th of December), on the 22nd of November a prebend in St David's cathedral, on the 20th of December a prebend in Wherwell Abbey, Hants. So far the Patent Rolls. The Salisbury records show him also admitted to a prebend there on the 16th of August, which he exchanged for other prebends on the 9th and 15th of October. All these clerical preferment's Wykeham held when he was a simple clerk, who had no doubt undergone the “first tonsure,” but was not even ordained an acolyte till the 5th of December of this golden year. He added to his civil offices during the year that of clerk (officium cirograffie) of the exchequer on the 24th of October. On the 9th of October he acted as attorney to the king in the purchase of the manor of Thunderley, Essex. Next year, 1362, he entered holy orders, being ordained subdeacon on the 12th of March and priest on the 12th of June, and adding to his canonries and prebends one in Shaftesbury Abbey on the 15th of July and another in Lincoln cathedral on the 20th of August. Wykeham meanwhile was acting as keeper of the forests south of Trent and as a trustee for Juliana,
