William of Hereward was elected abbot in 1335. On 3 January 1343 he was called before another commission of oyer and terminer to answer the complaint of John of Shardelow, John le Stouford, William le Thorpe and John le Roche, who sued the abbot in the king's courts ‘for recovery of the kings rights usurped and withdrawn by the abbot of Ciceter’. The abbot seized and imprisoned them until they ‘made very grievous fines with the abbot for their ransoms’. To secure freedom they paid up, but Abbot Hereward was not satisfied. The spokesmen for the commonalty complained that he ‘daily procure(d) them to be indited of felonies and trespasses and in other ways the abbot strives maliciously to vex them who would sue for the king's right dare not for fear of him’. The outcome of the case is not recorded, perhaps because it merged into a case involving larger claims for the status of the commonalty of Cirencester.

In 1343 a group described (once again) as ‘the poor men of Cirencester’ produced a copy of a charter by which, they claimed, Henry I had granted Cirencester ‘the same privileges as the burgesses of Winchester’. Such men counted themselves ‘poor’ in ‘estate’, a term that implied possession of lands, wealth, status and institutional power: the leaders of the ‘poor men of Cirencester’ had wealth, but no formal institutional status and power. They claimed the original charter had been destroyed ‘in 1292 (when) the abbot bribed the burgess who had custody of it, got possession of it and burned it.’