SPICER, Robert

Despite his representation of two Wiltshire boroughs in consecutive Parliaments, Spicer remains difficult to identify. There is a possibility that he was the minor royal servant of this name, although even the career of that man lacks coherence. In February 1437 a Robert Spicer was committed at the Exchequer a seven-year lease of the King’s fair of ‘Southecroke’ in north Wales. As he was associated in the lease with William Hall*, who like one of their sureties, John Basket*, was a retainer of the chancellor, Bishop John Stafford of Bath and Wells, it may be the case that Spicer was also attached to Stafford’s service. Stafford was still chancellor when our MP’s two Parliaments assembled. Before then, the lease had been exchanged in 1442 for a grant in survivorship to Spicer and Thomas Aldenham, one of the grooms of the King’s chamber, of the ferries of ‘Southcroke’ and Portheitho crossing the Menai straits.1 CFR, xvi. 318; CPR, 1441-6, pp. 38, 63.

A Robert Spicer ‘of Dogmersfield’, Hampshire, had stood surety in 1441 for the recipient of custody of land in Middlesex which had once belonged to the king of Scotland.2 CFR, xvii. 191. Dogsmerfield lay close to estates later held as dower by Queen Margaret of Anjou at Odiham (where Basket held office), so there is a possibility that the MP was he who rented property in Marlborough, forming part of the queen’s demesne, in the years 1447-51.3 SC6/1055/17-19. The same or another Robert Spicer served briefly as bailiff of the liberties of Bishop Waynflete of Winchester in Hampshire in 1452-3.4 E368/225, rot. 3d, 226, rot. 3d. Yet even if all these scattered references concerned the same person, they would not present a clear picture of the MP’s career.