Little is known of the man who represented Bodmin in the Parliament of 1447, but it seems that like many Members of that assembly he was an outsider to the constituency that returned him. Evidently, the townsmen of Bodmin, like those of many other south-western boroughs, experienced some difficulty in finding men prepared to travel to the provincial backwater of Bury St. Edmunds which (after some dalliance with the university town of Cambridge) had been chosen as the meeting place of Parliament. A number of boroughs responded pragmatically and returned as their representatives men who were prepared to undertake the onerous journey in return for only modest remuneration, irrespective of their provenance.
Unlike his parliamentary colleague, William Denbold*, a lawyer from Okehampton with links to the Courtenay earl of Devon, Pay was at least a Cornishman who hailed from Trencreek in Creed, a manor belonging to the courtier Thomas Bodulgate*. It was in Bodulgate’s company that in the summer of 1452 Pay allegedly attacked the servants of Henry Bodrugan†, and three years later he found sureties for his patron in the court of Chancery.
If Pay held any lands in Cornwall, he successfully avoided assessment for the income tax of 1451, and their extent or location cannot be established with certainty. It is possible that Pay practised the law at least in a small way, for in early 1455 he acted as a mainpernor in Chancery for the daughters of Richard Trelawny, as well as for Bodulgate.
Few other details of Pay’s career have come to light. It is impossible to tell whether it was the same man who, along with the other members of a jury from the vicinity of East Looe, in late 1469 was accused of perjury by Joan Facy and Edward Hydon. This lawsuit represented a minor skirmish in a larger legal battle between Hydon and Thomas Trethewy†, the deputy steward of the duchy of Cornwall, and Pay alone among the jurors appeared in King’s bench in person, before the matter was referred back for settlement at the next assizes at Launceston.