TOWKER, Walter

The tucker Walter Clerke (also known under his occupational synonym of Towker – for instance on the occasion of his election to Parliament),3 For the alias, see ibid. 1450-1553, p. 6. was admitted to the freedom of Wells in December 1443, having married a local widow.4 Ibid. 1378-1450, p. 311. The following year saw him in dispute with his neighbour John Frome, one of the wardens of the shambles, over an unspecified debt, but he does not otherwise appear to have been a quarrelsome man.5 Ibid. 314. The extent of his property cannot be established exactly, but it included a tenement and courtyard in the southern part of the High Street, which he rented from the city authorities in September 1451 at an annual rent of 16s.6 Ibid.1450-1553, p. 6.

Not much over a year after his admission to the freedom Clerke began to make his way through the civic cursus of office holding. He served in the city’s most junior office, the keepership of the streets, for a total of six successive years, and then went on to serve a further three as one of the wardens of the shambles. He was regularly present at the guildhall and was periodically charged with the mediation of his neighbours’ disputes. In May 1458 he stood surety at the Exchequer for the former master John Attwater *, who had acquired the farm of the alnage of cloth in Somerset and Dorset.7 Ibid. 14, 17, 18, 22, 46, 50, 52; CFR, xix. 200. Nevertheless, Clerke was still only in the lower ranks of the civic hierarchy, and there has to be a suspicion that his return to the partisan Parliament of 1459, held in the provincial backwater of Coventry, came about simply as a result of the citizens’ inability to find a more prominent candidate willing to sit in return for a reasonable fee.8 It is not possible to tell how much Clerke was paid, as the relevant leaf of the convocation act bk. is missing.

The years following his short spell in the Commons saw Clerke acquiring a more prominent position in Wells. In 1460 he was chosen one of the wardens of the parish church of St. Cuthbert, and two years later he became one of the city constables, securing re-election in 1464. That same year he was also among the citizens charged with the audit of the civic accounts.9 Wells convocation act bk. 1450-1553, pp. 33, 45, 49, 50. Clerke’s progress suggests that he would before long have attained the mastership; and he should certainly have been added to the council of 24 when its membership was replenished in 1467. His failure to achieve either distinction suggests that he had died between his last appearance in the records in the spring of 1465 and the autumn of 1467, although no definite evidence to this effect has been discovered.10 Ibid. 52.