PAK, Nicholas

A namesake of the MP stood as godfather at the baptism of William Ringbourne* in the church at Marsh on the Isle of Wight in February 1407, and, described as a resident of the island, was named as a tax collector in Hampshire three times in Henry V’s reign.3 CIPM, xxiii. 421; CFR, xiv. 27, 151, 221 (July 1413, May 1416 and Dec. 1417). It might be thought unlikely that a man from the Isle of Wight would come to represent a Wiltshire borough, yet circumstantial evidence suggests that the possibility should not be ruled out. Ringbourne’s mother was the daughter and coheir of the influential Sir William Sturmy* of Wolf Hall in Wiltshire, from whose circle many of the parliamentary representatives of his county and its boroughs were drawn in the early fifteenth century. It is also pertinent that Pak, the MP for Wilton, first entered the Commons in 1422 as the companion of John Whithorne*, a man with whom he was already closely associated who was himself a native of the Isle of Wight. It could have been through acquaintance with Whithorne, the most prominent burgess of Wilton in the reigns of Henry V and Henry VI, that Pak first came to the town.

Pak was living in Wilton by 1420. In May that year he and Alice his wife received back from their feoffees (Whithorne and a clerk named Elias Puse), a building in Kingsbury Street, which was now settled on them in tail.4 Wilton gen. entry bk. G25/1/21, f. 9. Six months later Pak joined Whithorne, the recently-elected mayor of Wilton, as a witness to a local conveyance, and at the elections to the Parliament summoned to assemble on 2 Dec. he stood surety for the mayor’s attendance in the Commons.5 CCR, 1419-22, p. 127; C219/12/4. Pak himself was chosen mayor at Michaelmas 1422, and shortly afterwards, on 20 Oct., he attested the indentures for the knights of the shire elected in the county court at Wilton to the Parliament summoned for 9 Nov. This coincided with his own first return to the Lower House. Towards the end of his mayoralty, on 1 Sept. 1423, he again attested the shire elections and once more stood surety for Whithorne, on the occasion of the latter’s ninth return to Parliament for their town.6 C219/13/1, 2. Pak witnessed the electoral indentures for the county again in 1425 and 1427, the latter occasion marking his own final return for the borough.

Pak died at an unknown date before Hilary term 1431, when as his widow Alice was sued in the court of common pleas for a debt of £2 by William Warwick*, the wealthy Salisbury mercer who had also sat in the Parliament of 1427. Eleven years later she was pursued in the same court by another citizen of Salisbury, William Pakyn*, for the sum of £3.7 CP40/680, rot. 372; 724, rot. 225. Whether Pak himself had been responsible for these debts, perhaps incurred in the course of commercial dealings, is not stated.