SHIRLEY, Walter

More may be added to the earlier biography.3 The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 368-9.

Shirley was elected for Salisbury to every single one of the 15 Parliaments meeting between 1411 and his death, and in that period was almost continually employed in the service of the city. It is entirely apposite that he should have appointed as supervisor of his will John Frank, the former clerk of the Parliaments.

More has been found out about Shirley’s mercantile dealings. As suggested by the trade of his former master, John Canmell, he too was a grocer. On several occasions he sued debtors who had entered bonds to him under the statute merchant at Salisbury and failed to pay on the appointed days. Among them were various merchants of Somerset, Dorset and Wiltshire and the sums sometimes amounted to £40.4 C241/205/20-22; 206/22-24, 53; 213/42; 217/4, 5; 252/4. More too is known about his property in Salisbury. In 1414 Canmell’s son confirmed to Shirley and his wife two tenements in Brown Street, and shortly afterwards they purchased a cottage in Scots Lane.5 Wilts. Hist. Centre, Salisbury city recs., Domesday bk. 2, G23/1/214, ff. 11v, 16v. From the same year Shirley owned ‘Balle’s Place’, which occupied a large site at the south-west corner of Three Cups Chequer, with Winchester Street on the south, and he extended it by taking over the tenement next door on the northern side. Although he sub-let ‘Balle’s Place’, in his will of 1425 he left the capital messuage for his widow to hold until she died, with reversion to John and Anne Estbury for their lives; the rest being left to tenants, usually for term of their lives, and finally to be sold by his executors and the money given to the local college of St. Edmund. This sale took place before 1455, by which date the capital messuage and next-door tenement were held by John Whittocksmead* the bishop’s bailiff. By 1463, however, it had come into the possession of the city.6 Wilts. Arch. Mag. lix. 161-2.

Shirley’s wife Joan had stood as godmother in St. Edmund’s church in 1411 to Agnes, grand-daughter and heiress of John Levesham† of Salisbury.7 CIPM, xxii. 828. She and her co-executors of Walter’s will (their son Richard and Thomas Hayne of Winchester) pursued his debtors in the court of common pleas in the late 1420s – a task which Richard’s executors in turn had to undertake when he died before the summer of 1436.8 CP40/669, rot. 202d. Walter and Joan Shirley and their son Richard were long remembered in the prayers of the inhabitants of Salisbury as benefactors of their city.9 Salisbury ledger bk. 2, G23/1/2, f. 2.