BARRY, Walter

The Barrys were an old established north Devon family who held the manor of Eastleigh by feudal tenure from the duchy of Cornwall, but also possessed lands at Winscott near Barnstaple.1 CIPM, xvi. 106-7. The family pedigree in the first half of the fifteenth century is confused, but it seems that Walter was a younger scion who lived at St. Giles in the Wood to the south of Barnstaple,2 CP40/752, rot. 79. for he is not known to have succeeded to the property of the main line.3 The descent of the Barry lands has not been traced in full, but at some point in the late 1440s some of them became the subject of a protracted lawsuit in Chancery between the important Barnstaple merchant Walter Gayncote* and the prominent lawyers John Vampage* and William Boef*, acting as guardians and counsel for Joan, the under-age heir of Robert Barry, on the one part, and Robert Barry’s feoffees, the lawyers Thomas Brown III*, William Hyndeston* and John Wydeslade* on the other: C1/17/237, 315-20; C254/145/274; CP25(1)/46/83/122. Few details of the MP’s career beyond his two returns to the Commons have been discovered, but it was probably he who a few years before the first of his elections had quarreled with John Ash I* over property in Morchard Bishop, and it may still have been he who in early 1449 was suing a husbandman from Huntshawe for the purported abduction of a female servant from St. Giles.4 C1/16/84.

The date of Barry’s death is not known, but it was evidently a younger kinsman and namesake, the son of Richard Barry, who succeeded to the family estates on his father’s death at some point in the reign of Edward IV and who survived until 1495.5 KB9/304/98; Devon RO, Dayman mss, Z16/1/3/7; C1/513/2; CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 704; C142/25/135. Barry’s relationship, if any, to Thomas Barry† who represented Plympton Erle in 1413 (May) has not been established: The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 135.