William Ayloffe (c.1535 – 17 November 1584), was an English justice of the

Queen's Bench The King's Bench (), or, during the reign of a female monarch, the Queen's Bench ('), refers to several contemporary and historical courts in some Commonwealth jurisdictions. * Court of King's Bench (England), a historic court court of common ...

Biography

William Ayloffe was descended from a very ancient family settled originally in Kent and subsequently in Essex, whose origin has been traced to Saxon times. Ayloffe's father, William Ayloffe of

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, married Anne Barnardiston, the daughter of Sir Thomas Barnardiston of

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. On 14 February 1553-4 Ayloffe was admitted a student of

Lincoln's Inn The Honourable Society of Lincoln's Inn is one of the four Inns of Court in London to which barristers of England and Wales belong and where they are called to the Bar. (The other three are Middle Temple, Inner Temple and Gray's Inn.) Lincoln ...

, where two other near relatives, bearing the same name, distinguished themselves in the sixteenth century, and in 1560 he was called to the bar. After being appointed "reader" at his inn of court in Lent term, 1571, he was made

serjeant-at-law A Serjeant-at-Law (SL), commonly known simply as a Serjeant, was a member of an order of barristers at the English and Irish Bar. The position of Serjeant-at-Law (''servientes ad legem''), or Sergeant-Counter, was centuries old; there are writ ...

in 1577, at the same time as Sir Edmund Anderson, afterwards the well-known lord chief justice of the

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. A notice of a banquet in the

Middle Temple The Honourable Society of the Middle Temple, commonly known simply as Middle Temple, is one of the four Inns of Court exclusively entitled to call their members to the English Bar as barristers, the others being the Inner Temple, Gray's Inn an ...

hall, given by Ayloffe with other barristers upon whom a similar distinction had just been conferred, to celebrate their promotion, is preserved among the ''

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'' at Oxford. No record is known of Ayloffe's elevation to the bench, but he is found acting as judge in the court of Queen's Bench in 1579, and his judgments are reported by Dyer, Coke, and Savile after that date, which may therefore be regarded as the probable year of his appointment. He was present in 1581 at the trial of

Edmund Campion Edmund Campion, SJ (25 January 15401 December 1581) was an English Jesuit priest and martyr. While conducting an underground ministry in officially Anglican England, Campion was arrested by priest hunters. Convicted of high treason, he was h ...

and other seminary priests, and special attention is called to the part he played on that occasion in a pamphlet published by English Catholics at Pans shortly afterwards, and bearing the title , 12mo. On page 202 it is there stated, on the evidence of eyewitnesses, that while sitting in court after the other judges had retired, and while the jury were considering their verdict, Ayloffe took off his glove and found his hand and ring covered with blood without any apparent cause, and that, in spite of his endeavours to wipe it away, the blood continued to flow as a miraculous sign of the injustice that polluted the judgment-seat. Some letters that passed between Ayloffe and the lord mayor of London with reference to the appointment of his brother as town clerk, are preserved among the city archives for the years 1580 and 1581. ''Remembrancia'', pp. 149, 150, 271 Ayloffe died on 8 November 1585.

Marriages and issue

Ayloffe married, about 1560, Jane Sulyard, the daughter of Sir Eustace Sulyard, by whom he had three sons and at least one daughter. In 1612 the baronetcy of Ayloffe was conferred by

James I James I may refer to: People *James I of Aragon (1208–1276) *James I of Sicily or James II of Aragon (1267–1327) *James I, Count of La Marche (1319–1362), Count of Ponthieu *James I, Count of Urgell (1321–1347) *James I of Cyprus (1334–13 ...

upon his eldest son,

William William is a male given name of Germanic origin.Hanks, Hardcastle and Hodges, ''Oxford Dictionary of First Names'', Oxford University Press, 2nd edition, , p. 276. It became very popular in the English language after the Norman conquest of Engl ...

(d.1627), who had been knighted in 1603. The baronetcy continued in the family till 1787. Sir William, the first baronet, married three times and a large family survived him.

Notes

References

* * ;Attribution * {{DEFAULTSORT:Ayloffe, William 1584 deaths 1530s births 16th-century English judges Members of Lincoln's Inn Serjeants-at-law (England)