The Falks were an eminent Hereford family whose main industrial concern was the manufacture of cloth. There were two other John Falks living in the city in the first half of the 15th century: John ‘junior’, who was a bailiff in 1399-1400, 1403-4, 1405-7, 1408-9 and 1410-12, and a coroner of Herefordshire up to his death in the autumn of 1413, and another, sometimes described as ‘junior’, but more often as ‘draper’. Certainly it was the MP, generally described as ‘the elder’, whose father Richard had been three times a bailiff of the city and was mayor in 1389-90.
Falk regularly witnessed local deeds from 1398 and attended no fewer than 11 parliamentary elections held in the guildhall between 1397 and 1426, on the first occasion and in November 1414 standing surety for the appearance in Parliament of Hugh Wigan and Henry Chippenham, respectively. During this same period he held office as mayor for no less than six annual terms. He appears to have been a man of some means, for in August 1404 he joined three other Hereford citizens in forwarding a loan of £100 towards financing the government’s military activities over the Welsh border. In the following year he granted three houses in the city to the chantry of St. John in St. Peter’s church, to provide masses for the souls of John Fromward and his own relatives, and it may well have been the effigy of this John Falk which was depicted in glass in the church at about this time. In the spring of 1421, not long after his only return to Parliament, Falk was among the 12 citizens who lent £40 to the treasury during Henry V’s visit from Normandy.
Probably long before the end of the reign Falk made a profitable marriage to the sister of Philip Bockleton, esquire, who died in September 1420, leaving to her not only lands in Herefordshire but also in Shropshire, within the liberty of Shrewsbury, and in addition the manor of Bockleton, Worcestershire, and parts of those of Henhurst, Kent, West Tilbury, Essex, and ‘Pountfret’, Middlesex, which together had an estimated worth of more than £25 a year. It may well have been in order to establish his title to this inheritance that Falk sought election to the Parliament due to assemble at Westminster the following month. In November 1422 he and his wife conveyed some of these estates to feoffees, who included the future Speaker (Sir) John Tyrell and two retainers of Anne, countess of Stafford, and of her son, Humphrey, later duke of Buckingham, namely Robert Whitgreve and John Harper, although they were not to be formally granted livery of the remainder until May 1424.