ALBON, Walter

Walter may have been a kinsman of John Albon, who sold the manor of Draughton, a dozen miles north of Northampton, to Sir John Seyton† in 1394, but his own interests were much more limited.2 Add. Chs. 21794, 21801. A barker or tanner by trade, he enjoyed a lengthy but obscure career. He first appears in the records when the court of King’s bench came to Northampton at Easter 1421. The county grand jury indicted him, along with others of his trade, for selling tanned hides at an excessive profit, a charge of which the defendants were acquitted before the justices of assize.3 KB27/641, rex rot. 10. As with many of his fellow MPs of the town, he served as bailiff and in Parliament but once and that relatively early in his career. Thereafter the surviving records provide only occasional glimpses of him. In 1437 he stood as surety when Robert Rous* was elected to represent the borough in the Parliament. Ten years later he brought an action in the court of common pleas which shows that he had landed property outside the town at Silverstone in the far south of the county, for he claimed that several local men had broken into his house there and taken goods worth 40s. He last appears in the records in 1455 when he had an action of trespass pending in the court of King’s bench against a weaver of Rothwell in the north of the county.4 C219/15/1; CP40/745, rots. 215d, 299; KB27/776, rot. 1d.