WATYR, William

Watyr is obscure, but he resided at and probably hailed from Kendal. When, on 20 Aug. 1446, he offered surety in Chancery for a yeoman of Maulds Meaburn (Westmorland), he is described as ‘of Kendal’; and he was thus, in all probability, a near-kinsman of John ‘del Water’, who held property there early in the fifteenth century, and Thomas ‘del Water’, a Kendal draper and a litigant in the court of common pleas in the 1420s.1 C237/42/16; Recs. Kendale ed. Farrer and Curwen, i. 37, 39; CP40/656, rot. 469d; 665, rot. 396. His residence at Kendal provides the context for his election to Parliament. His return is to be attributed to the lord of Kendal, (Sir) Thomas Parr*, who represented Westmorland in the Parliament in which Watyr sat for the county’s borough. This, at least, is the conclusion to be drawn from the only other certain reference to him: on 7 July 1451, five weeks after the end of the Parliament, he offered surety for the renewal of the royal lease to Parr of Kendal’s market tolls and herbage. Some slight irregularity attached to his return in that the Appelby MPs are not, as they generally were, named in the county’s electoral indenture, but appear only as an endorsement of the electoral writ.2 CFR, xviii. 209-10; C219/16/1. Watyr may have been alive as late as 1486, when he or a namesake was party to a final concord concerning property in Kendal.3 CP25(1)/249/9/1. It is possible, but improbable, that he was the William Water appointed on 11 Jan. 1471 bailiff of the royal lordships of Cookham and Bray in Berks.: CPR, 1467-77, p. 234. Only the patronage of the Parrs could have obtained such an office for him, and it is unlikely that Sir Thomas’s son, Sir William†, was then in a position, as he certainly was to be soon afterwards, to obtain such a grant for a servant.