BRIDGES, Richard I

Despite his four elections to consecutive Parliaments, sitting alternately for the Wiltshire boroughs of Great Bedwyn and Ludgershall, very little is known about Bridges, whose name was a fairly common one. He may have been the former yeoman of the Household of Henry IV who was appointed by Henry V as warden of the gaol at Ilchester in Somerset. The warden petitioned the Commons in the Parliament of 1422 to ask the King and Lords to grant him a pardon for the escape of certain prisoners, in consideration of his long service and the fact that six of those who escaped had been recaptured. He was willing to surrender his letters patent for the office. The petition was delivered to the Lords, and it was decided that the process against him would be suspended for ten years.1 SC8/96/4756A.

Precisely where the MP usually resided is not known. It was as ‘of Wiltshire, esquire’ that in November 1430, a few months after the dissolution of his first Parliament, he offered sureties in the Exchequer for the keepers of the alien priory of Llangennith in Glamorgan, one of whom was the Somerset lawyer Robert Halsewell*; although more specifically as ‘of Salisbury, gentleman’ in February 1439 he was a mainpernor for Richard Welles, given the keeping of a messuage in the suburbs of Canterbury.2 CFR, xvi. 24; xvii. 74. Nevertheless, no man of this name has been found among the extant records of Salisbury, save in 1436 when a Richard Bridges was listed among the men-at-arms and archers sent by the city to join the royal army despatched to resist the forces of the duke of Burgundy at the siege of Calais. He was named next after the leader of Salisbury’s contingent, Richard Ecton*.3 First General Entry Bk. Salisbury (Wilts. Rec. Soc. liv), no. 317. There is nothing to suggest that the MP was the Richard Brigge who held a corrody from Cerne Abbas abbey in Dorset until his death shortly before March 1439: CCR, 1435-41, p. 274. Nor that he was the lawyer closely associated from 1449 to 1469 with the Chokke family of Stanton Drew, notably with Richard Chokke (d.1483), the serjeant-at-law and j.c.p.: CCR, 1447-54, pp. 199, 242, 436-7, 478-9, 484; 1461-8, p. 146. The latter Bridges was an attorney in cts. at Westminster on behalf of litigants from Wilts. in the late 1450s and early 1460s (CP40/792, rot. att.; 805, rot. att.; Tropenell Cart. ed. Davies, i. 360), and acted as a receiver of writs for the sheriffs of Bristol and Som. in 1461-3 (CP40/802, rots. 103, 104d, att. 2; 805, rots. 144d, 301d, 310d; 808). Not recorded after 1469, he died bef. 1496: CFR, xxi. no. 874; CCR, 1468-76, no. 231; 1476-85, no. 1090; CIPM Hen. VII, i. nos. 1152, 1216.