PARYE, Thomas

As is the case with several of the MPs for the impoverished borough of Lyme Regis in this period, Parye is difficult to identify, especially as the men returned to Parliament were often outsiders not only to the town but also to its county. The Commons in the brief Parliament of 1447, assembled at Bury St. Edmunds and notorious for the arrest and death there of the King’s uncle the duke of Gloucester, contained an unusually high number of obscure individuals, several of whom were low-ranking members of the royal household. It may therefore be the case that the MP for Lyme was the Thomas Parys, who had earlier served in the royal catery. His fellow representative, Robert Brunyng*, was well known to the current treasurer of the Household, (Sir) John Stourton II*, whose brother-in-law, William Carent*, was the sheriff who returned MPs from Dorset and Somerset.2 It is worthy of remark that on the schedule accompanying the Dorset indenture the name of this MP for Lyme was written over an erasure and squashed into too small a space: C219/15/4.

Even if he did hold a household post, Parys’s background remains obscure. If he was the man from East Anglia who served as searcher of ships in Bishop’s Lynn in 1425-7,3 CFR, xv. 112; E122/183/7. he is perhaps to be identified with the namesake who lived at Sawston in Cambridgeshire. That Thomas Parys took the oath not to maintain law-breakers in that county in 1434,4 CPR, 1429-36, p. 386. having been engaged for some time in the service of the lord of the manor of Sawston, Sir Walter de la Pole* (d.1434). Since 1423 he had been a feoffee of de la Pole’s London house in the parish of St. Dunstan in the East, and from May 1428 of a remainder interest in the manors of Sawston and Dernford, which was to fall in after the death of Sir Walter’s second wife, Margaret, and in the event of the couple’s lack of male descendants. Parys relinquished his fiduciary interest in June 1435,5 CIPM, xxiv. 208, 212. and no record has been found of a continued association with the widowed Margaret or de la Pole’s grandson and heir (Sir) Edmund Ingoldesthorpe*. A last reference to the MP may be the enrolment in the close rolls of a London leather-seller’s gift of goods and chattels made in June 1448. The recipients were two other Londoners and Thomas Parys ‘of the Exchequer’,6 CCR, 1441-7, p. 58. but no official or clerk of this name has been discovered among the Exchequer records.