These Brandons, then, had lived on their farm near Brandon for about four centuries, deriving, no doubt, a very considerable income from the produce of their fields and from their cattle. It is certain that they sent several members of their family to the Crusades; that one of them followed the Black Prince to Poitiers, and that yet another, a trooper, it is true, died on the field of Agincourt.[10] Somewhere in the last quarter of the fourteenth century, William, the then head of the family, apprenticed his son Geoffrey to a rich mercer of Norwich, a great commercial centre in those days, next to London and Bristol in importance, and doing what we should now call a “roaring trade” with Flanders, and through Flanders, with Venice and Florence, and even with the East. This Norwich Brandon having made a fortune, was seized with an ambition to attain still greater wealth and station for his son and heir William; and hence it came about, that near the time King Henry VI ascended the throne, young Brandon arrived in London, apprenticed to a firm of mercers established near Great St. Helen’s, Bishopsgate Street. He was a pushing, shrewd, energetic, and very unscrupulous knave, who soon acquired great influence in the city and amassed corresponding wealth. Finally, he became sheriff, and was knighted by Henry VI. He purchased a large property in Southwark, and built himself a mansion, later known as Suffolk Court. During the Wars of the Roses he allied himself at first with the Yorkists, and lent Edward IV considerable sums of money, which, according to Paston, that monarch dishonestly refused to repay. This drove William to cast his fortunes with the Lancastrians and largely assist Henry VII, then simply Earl of Richmond, both with money and men, and so was held in high esteem by that monarch till his death, in the twelfth year of Henry’s reign. William Brandon married Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Robert Wingfield of Letheringham, whose mother was the daughter and co-heir of Sir Robert Goushall, the third husband of the dowager Duchess of Norfolk, widow of the first duke, who, dying in exile in Venice, was buried in the magnificent church of San Giovanni e Paolo. Even thus early, we see a Brandon, the great-grandson of a Suffolk farmer, connecting himself with the noble houses of Wingfield, Fitzalan and Howard.[11]