PACHET, John

In Michaelmas term 1430 a John Pachet began a suit in the court of common pleas at Westminster against a husbandman from Belne for trespassing on his close at Fairfield in north-east Worcestershire,1 CP40/679, rot. 42. but it is far from clear whether this plaintiff was the man elected to Parliament a quarter of a century later. The MP of 1455 was almost certainly related to Thomas Pachet*, who sat for Worcester in the Parliament of 1460. In his will of December 1470 Thomas referred to three John Pachets, his son, his brother and his cousin (a son of his uncle Richard Pachet).2 PCC 12 Godyn (PROB11/5, ff. 90v-92). John the son cannot have been the subject of this biography, since he was still a child in 1470, although it does not necessarily follow that either of the other Johns was the parliamentarian. In the will Thomas directed that the boy should go to London to serve as an apprentice under the mercer Henry Newman, who was to receive a ‘stock’ of 100 marks once the apprenticeship was completed. Should young John die before finishing his apprenticeship, the executors were to reassign that sum to the use of priests praying for the souls of the testator, his wife, his parents and his brother John. It is not clear from the will whether the latter had already died, although Cousin John, forgiven a sum of 40s. he owed Thomas for ‘iron’, was certainly still alive.

There was once a stained-glass window to the memory of Margaret, wife of ‘John Pachette’ in the church of All Saints, Evesham. Now gone but observed in a damaged state by the 18th-century antiquary Treadway Russell Nash, it bore no visible date in Nash’s day,3 T.R. Nash, Worcs. i. 415. making it impossible to say that the John in question was the MP.