PARKE, Walter

Long established at Upton Scudamore, the Parkes had possessed the main freehold estate held of the capital manor there since Henry III’s reign or earlier. Of local importance, this holding came with at least quasi-manorial rights since their own tenants were obliged to pay them suit of court.2 VCH Wilts. viii. 79, 82; HMC Hastings, i. 221-3. They were however very much of the minor gentry. Parke is an obscure figure and in all probability he owed his seat in the Commons to Sir Walter Hungerford†, Lord Hungerford. An influential presence in the Parkes’ part of Wiltshire, Hungerford acquired the reversion of the manor of Upton Scudamore at some stage before the mid 1430s,3 VCH Wilts. viii. 81. and he was the most important manorial lord at Chippenham.

No less obscure was Parke’s father and namesake, who in the late fourteenth century had the misfortune to tangle with Richard II’s henchman, Sir Henry Green†. Through his marriage, Green had come into lands at Warminster, immediately to the south of Upton Scudamore, and elsewhere in Wiltshire, and he unjustly occupied the elder Walter’s lands at Upton and ‘Horchiston’ (perhaps Orcheston) in the late 1380s. Powerless to resist him, the unfortunate Parke did not gain redress until Green’s final hours as a fugitive at Bristol in July 1399. Facing execution on the orders of Henry of Bolingbroke, the conscience-stricken Green admitted the wrong he had done to Parke, confessing as much in the Bristol guildhall to Thomas Calston† and Thomas Malverne, one of the burgesses of that town. He requested that his victim should recover his lands, goods and crops and, by way of compensation, bestowed his best ox team at Upton upon him. Similarly, just before his execution, Green asked another townsman of Bristol, John Westbury, to see to it that Parke had his property restored.4 Huntingdon Lib. San Marino, California, Hastings mss, HAM box 70 no. 23; The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 227. Appointed a subsidy collector in Wiltshire in 1410, the elder Walter survived into Henry V’s reign, and he witnessed a minor land transaction at Warminster, of property lying next to a tenement belonging to Sir Walter Hungerford, in July 1417.5 CFR, xiii. 180; Add. Ch. 26718. It is not clear if he was also the Walter Parke who was party to a lease of lands at Shaftesbury, Dorset, a year earlier: Som. Archs., Walker-Heneage mss, DD\WHb/2083. It appears that he died not long afterwards, for he was not involved in a quitclaim of the spring of 1418 by which his wife Alice and their son, the subject of this biography, received a quitclaim of lands in Upton Scudamore that he had enfeoffed on a neighbouring landowner, Sir William Cheyne†, evidently a Parke trustee. In late 1420, Alice granted a messuage and land to a tenant at Upton, an arrangement in which she acted alone rather than in association with her husband, a further indication that the elder Walter was no longer alive. By 1425 Alice was the wife of John Osbarne; and in February that year, she, Osbarne and her son, Walter Parke the younger, made a lease of lands at Upton to John Persones and his wife. Possibly Alice had found her new husband within the Hungerford nexus, since in 1450 and again in 1459 ‘John Osbourne’ acted as an attorney in settlements made for Lord Walter’s son and successor, Robert, 2nd Lord Hungerford, and the latter’s wife Margaret.6 HMC Hastings, i. 221-4; Hungerford Cart. ii (Wilts. Rec. Soc. lx), nos. 1471, 1474.

Following the lease of 1425, the younger Walter disappears from view until in July 1439, when he, his mother and others received a bond for £40 from John Farley of Stockton. Four years later, this time alone, he took a like bond from Farley but the purpose of these securities is unknown.7 Wilts. Hist. Centre, Yeatman-Biggs mss, 906/S.14, 15. Given the likelihood that he was associated with the Hungerfords, it is possible that Parke had spent some of the later 1420s and the 1430s campaigning with either Lord Walter or his two elder sons in France. A connexion with the Hungerfords is certainly the most plausible explanation for his election to the Parliament of 1442, since there is no evidence that he had any links with Chippenham before the early 1440s. Sir Walter Hungerford (as he then was) had acquired two thirds of the borough in 1424 and the remaining part a decade later, and there is little doubt that his servants and feoffees dominated its parliamentary representation between 1424 and his death in the summer of 1449.8 The Commons 1386-1421, i. 692.

A month after the dissolution of Parliament, Parke witnessed a conveyance of the manor of Smallbrook at Warminster and a few months later, in June 1442, he received a papal indult (in which he was referred to as a ‘nobleman’) to keep a portable altar. In April the following year Lord Hungerford, whether in the capacity of a feudal lord or feoffee, made a release to Parke and his mother of lands at Upton Scudamore formerly held by the elder Walter Parke. Parke did not survive long after 1443, for he was referred to as ‘deceased’ in a deed of 3 Dec. 1447, by which Sir Robert Hungerford (the future 2nd Lord Hungerford) relinquished all his right to the lands at Upton that had once belonged to the elder Walter. The Alice Parke who was a free tenant of the manor of Upton Scudamore in 1445 and 1450 was probably the MP’s widow rather than his mother but it is possible that the latter was still alive at this date. In February 1451, subsidy commissioners assessed Alice Osbarne for taxation (under ‘Warminster’), finding that she held estates worth £20 p.a. If she was Parke’s mother, it seems likely that the MP never came fully into his own. By 1471 the Parke estate at Upton Scudamore was in the hands of the lord of manor (at that date the King, owing to the attainder ten years earlier of Lord Walter’s grandson Robert, Lord Hungerford and Moleyns), perhaps by escheat following the extinction of the MP’s family for lack of heirs.9 Add. Ch. 26720; CPL, ix. 316; HMC Hastings, i. 224-5; VCH Wilts. viii. 83; SC2/209/62; SC6/1061/14; E179/196/118.