PERSON, Walter

Person was a local man, although the exact extent of his property in Tavistock, where he was in debt to the wardens of the parish church for several years in the early 1420s, has not been established.1 Tavistock Parish Recs. ed. Worth, 80; Devon RO, Tavistock parish recs., 482A/PW4-6. He seems to have lived the life of a minor landowner, and was normally styled a gentleman, but on occasion also as a mere yeoman, or even a husbandman. Few details of his career have been discovered, but his interests clearly extended beyond Tavistock and its hinterland, for at some point in the reign of Henry V he was said to have been associated with the abbot of Dunkeswell in forcibly taking a horse worth £10 from the Wiltshire landowner John Westbury the elder, an offence for which he secured a royal pardon in June 1423,2 CP40/647, rot. 48; CPR, 1422-9, p. 30. and it was thus probably also he, rather than a namesake, who in 1418 had been among the feoffees (also including John Bailey I* of Cricklade) who unlawfully deprived Sir John Reynes and John Turvey of the Wiltshire manor of Upton Scudamore.3 C1/5/33; CPR, 1416-22, p. 321; The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 103. Not long before Person was pardoned for his failure to answer Westbury in court, he had come into conflict with the powerful Sir John Dynham of Nutwell, one of the greatest landowners in Devon. The background to their clash are uncertain, but in Hilary term 1426 Dynham (by then an ageing man of more than 68) personally rode to Westminster to accuse the Tavistock gentleman Walter Maundevyle and three associates, Person among them, of physically attacking him.4 KB27/648, rot. 34; 649, rot. 84; CP40/660, rot. 147.

Person’s clash with Dynham is just one of several indications that his interests extended beyond his own locality. It would thus seem that Person owed his election for Tavistock in 1432 to his standing in his own community, but it is uncertain whether he ever took his seat, for in the schedule that accompanied the sheriff’s election indenture recording his election his name was erased and replaced by that of the more prominent local lawyer John Fitz*. It is impossible to tell which of the two men eventually made the journey to Westminster, but in the light of Fitz’s superior standing and the probable compilation of the schedule after the indenture, it seems likely that it was Fitz.5 C219/14/3. It is just possible, but seems improbable, that it was the same man who, described as ‘of Clanville, Somerset’, in Apr. 1438 sued out letters of protection in order to go to France in the retinue of Edmund Beaufort, earl of Dorset. This Walter Person attested the Som. elections in 1435, and had a wife called Mary and two stepdaughters, who respectively married Richard Rawlyn of Cary and William Trent: DKR, xlviii. 321; C219/14/5; C1/33/270. Person for his part lived on for some years and is last heard of as a witness to a property deed sealed at Tavistock in 1442.6 CCR, 1441-7, pp. 18-19.