PARKER, Richard

The evidence relating to this MP’s career is sketchy and unsatisfactory.2 Nothing has been found to identify Parker with his namesake from Great Waltham in Essex, a retainer of Prince Henry of Monmouth, by whose appointment he served as parker of Byfleet in Surr. from 1409 to aft. 1442, and whose army he joined for the Agincourt campaign. That Richard Parker†, who represented Lyme Regis in 1421 (Dec.), saw further military action across the Channel in Hen. VI’s reign: The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 13-14. In 1366 a Richard Parker of the Isle of Wight, together with his wife Juliana and son, another Richard, had been granted a lease of the manor of Cosham by the master of God’s House in Southampton, to hold for term of their lives for £6 13s. 4d. p.a. It seems likely that the son named in the lease, or a descendant of his, was the Richard Parker ‘of Winchester’ who from 1404 held a tenement on the west side of English Street, Southampton, also as a tenant of the God’s House. In this instance he neglected to pay the rent, so that by 1407 he owed 4s. The sheriff of Hampshire was ordered to seize this money and all other arrears owing from him, and make restitution to Queen’s Hall, Oxford, to which God’s House pertained. The same Richard Parker later, in 1425, possessed a garden off Southampton’s French Street.3 CCR, 1405-9, pp. 178-9; Cart. God’s House pp. xcviii, 351; Black. Bk. Southampton, ii (Soton. Rec. Soc. 1912), 39. Yet these glimpses of Parker’s property interests hardly explain how he came to be elected by Portsmouth to the Parliament summoned to Leicester in the following year, for the Southampton resident had no recorded connexion with the smaller port.

Parker was not the only MP for Portsmouth in our period to have links with the Isle of Wight, as is clear from the career of John Garston*, who represented the borough in 1429. His own continued concern with the affairs of the island’s inhabitants is indicated by his association with the former shire knight John Lisle I* of Wootton in transactions regarding the manor and advowson of Mottistone there in July 1426, just after the dissolution of his Parliament. Interestingly, Garston’s son-in-law John Roucle was a beneficiary of the settlements.4 CCR, 1422-9, pp. 320-1, 343. Association with another member of the gentry, Thomas Ringwood of Fordingbridge (for whom Parker had earlier, in 1410, acted as a feoffee of property settled on Ringwood by his wife’s family), was most likely behind instructions sent from the Chancery to him and three others in February 1428. They were to cut down as much wood in the New Forest as seemed advisable, sell it and apply the proceeds to repairing royal lodges under the supervision of the verderers of the Forest, of whom Ringwood was one. In due course Parker accounted at the Exchequer for sales of timber amounting to more than £45.5 CPR, 1408-13, p. 136; 1422-9, p. 460; E364/63, m. B. At Fordingbridge in June 1434 he and Ringwood both testified at the proof of age of Joan, daughter of Sir Thomas Romsey, both of them stating that they knew the date of her birth, which had occurred at Rockbourne in May 1418 – in Parker’s case because he had then been staying with her father.6 CIPM, xxiv. 268.

In 1431 Parker had appeared as a juror at Winchester for the collection of subsidies from the Hampshire hundreds of Fordingbridge, Titchfield, Sutton and Andover, and he was among the men of the county required in 1434 to take the generally administered oath not to harbour malefactors.7 Feudal Aids, ii. 369; CPR, 1429-36, p. 396. His income from land was given as £5 p.a. to the assessors of the subsidy of 1436, but his place of residence at that date is not stated.8 E179/173/92.