WALKER, John

Walker is variously described as a ‘yeoman’, as when sued for debt by John Salisbury† in 1427, and ‘husbandman’, as when sued by Thomas Hood* in 1432, but these appear misleading descriptions. Like other Leominster MPs he appears to have had an interest in the cloth trade. In 1432 he sued a dyer of the town for taking a pipe of woad worth as much as £12, and, when sued by Salisbury, his co-defendant was a mercer.1 CP40/667, rot. 235d; 684, rot. 345d; 686, rot. 365d. Whatever his trade, he was one of the town’s more substantial burgesses. In 1434, together with his kinsman, Walter Walker, a former tax collector in the county, he was among the Leominster men considered to be of sufficient weight to take the general oath against maintaining peace-breakers.2 CPR, 1429-36, p. 377; CFR, xiv. 222; xv. 219, 293, 329. Walter had been among the attestors to our MP’s election in 1426: C219/13/4. By January 1437 he was in office as town bailiff, an office to which either his fellow townsmen made election or the borough’s lord, the abbot of Reading, nominated as an assistant to the bailiff of his liberty. Two years later, he was sued for a debt of £10 by a local gentleman, Thomas Brugge of Ivington, but he has not been traced in the records thereafter. He was probably dead by January 1442, when Thomas Kerver was serving as bailiff.3 C219/15/1, 2; CP40/713, rot. 205d.