BATHE, William

One of the leading burgesses of Melcombe Regis in the 1420s and 1430s, Bathe was chosen as bailiff of the town at least once, and as mayor for two or more terms. At Michaelmas 1424, at the end of his year of office as bailiff, he came to the Exchequer by attorney to answer for forfeitures of Scottish coin. He was one of the select number of townsmen who attested Melcombe’s parliamentary returns, doing so on seven occasions. Five of these were before his own election to Parliament in 1432, an election which took place during his first recorded mayoralty. During his second mayoralty, in the spring of 1434, Bathe presided over the Hockday tourn hearing the indictment of John Bartelot, the parson of Buckland Ripers, for scandalously breaking into the house of John Bowell at Melcombe and raping his wife.3 KB9/996/34, 35.

Melcombe had long been suffering from depopulation and the decline of its trade, causing a crisis in the town’s economy which reached a peak in 1433 when it was demoted as a head port in favour of Poole. The townspeople had petitioned Parliament several times in the previous two decades protesting that they were unable to pay the fee farm and parliamentary subsidies, and were becoming increasingly vulnerable to sea-borne attack from France. Factors such as these, coupled with financial difficulties of his own, may have led Bathe to move to the county town of Dorchester at the close of the 1430s. It was as ‘of Dorchester, merchant’, that in Michaelmas term 1439 he was sued in the court of common pleas for a debt of £40 by John Mone* esquire, and that in Hilary term 1441 Thomas Martin*, the future shire knight, brought a plea of debt of £3 13s. 4d. against him. Nor was this all: another leading Dorset landowner, John Filoll*, alleged later that year that Bathe owed him £15 6s. 8d.4 CP40/715, rot. 39d; 720, rot. 254d; 723, rots. 36d, 498.