PALMER, William

More may be added to the earlier biography.1 The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 6.

When Palmer was elected to the Parliament of 1420 one of his mainpernors was ‘John Nicol’, probably John Nicoll II*, and when returned to his last known Parliament in 1437 his sureties included John West*.2 C219/12/4; 15/1. Evidently a figure of some consequence, given that he sat in at least 11 Parliaments, Palmer was very likely the William Palmer calculated to receive £25 p.a. in lands and fees for the purposes of the subsidy of 1436. Part of this income came from holdings in Wiltshire, Dorset and London, and part from an annuity (of unknown amount) from Henry IV’s widow, Joan of Navarre. He was therefore probably a servant of the dowager Queen Joan, whose dower included the fee farm of Malmesbury, where she also possessed various jurisdictional privileges by grant of the Crown.3 E159/212, recorda Hil. rot. 14 (vii)d; The Commons 1386-1421, i. 703.

It is nevertheless impossible to link the taxpayer with the William Palmer who acted as a feoffee-to-uses of estates in Wiltshire and Essex for Anne, dowager countess of Stafford, in the early 1430s,4 CP25/1/292/67/117. or with any of the William Palmers active in Wiltshire during the mid fifteenth century. In 1445 a plaintiff of that name brought lawsuits in the court of common pleas against two yeomen from Salisbury, John Smyth and John Lampart. In one of these actions he accused Smyth of having broken into his house there and taken goods and chattels worth 40s.; in the other Lampart was alleged to have committed waste in other houses in Salisbury that he held of Palmer.5 CP40/739, rot. 291. There were also two William Palmers, one of them styled ‘junior’, who served as jurors when an inquisition post mortem was held in the county for Sir William Palton* in May 1450. Three years later, a juror of the same name took part in a like inquisition for the Wiltshire lawyer, John Lye*, while one or more William Palmers served on juries at sessions of oyer and terminer held at Malmesbury in 1452 and at Salisbury in 1453 and 1462.6 C139/140/28; 149/25; KB9/134/1, m. 4; 2, mm. 12, 77, 155; 135, m. 57. The juryman of 1453 was from the hundred of Whorwellsdown but there was also a William Palmer who was bailiff of another Wilts. hundred, Calne, in 1469: KB9/320/33.