BAKER, Richard

A very obscure figure, Richard had an occupational surname since a lawsuit that John Martyn brought against him in the court of common pleas at Westminster in the mid 1420s shows that he was a baker by trade. Martyn alleged that Baker had wrongfully employed Agnes Frost, a maidservant who had left the plaintiff’s service at Cirencester in Gloucestershire without leave.1 CP40/658, rot. 470d.

Apart from this lawsuit, the schedule recording the names of those returned for Cricklade to the Commons in 1427 provides the only definite reference to Baker, the very ubiquity of whose name makes him difficult to identify. For example, in the first decade of the fifteenth century a Richard Baker and his wife held a messuage and 24 acres of land in the south Wiltshire parish of East Knoyle, but it is not known whether this Richard was the MP. The identity of the Richard Baker who served on the jury at the Wiltshire inquisition post mortem for Reynold West, Lord de la Warre, in the autumn of 1450, is likewise not established, as is that of the juror of the same name who was summoned to sessions of oyer and terminer at Salisbury in May 1462. Two years later, a Richard Baker of Wiltshire received a pardon for the outlawry he had incurred for failing to answer a suit for debt that Henry Rycard had brought against him at Westminster, but this Richard was a tanner from Marlborough.2 Wilts. Feet of Fines (Wilts. Rec. Soc. xli), 293; C139/142/21; KB9/135/57; CPR, 1461-7, p. 316. There was also a Richard Baker of Garsdon, Wilts. (a few miles from Cricklade) whom the clerk Richard Goldsmyth sued in the Chancery (either in 1433-43 or 1467-72) over a messuage and land in Garsdon, but he is referred to as a mere ‘husbandman’ in Goldsmyth’s bill: C1/38/290.