DALBY, Richard, of Gloucester.

Published in The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1386-1421, ed. J.S. Roskell, L. Clark, C. Rawcliffe., 1993
Available from Boydell and Brewer

Constituency

Dates

Dec. 1421

Family and Education

m. Margaret, 1da.

Offices Held

Bailiff, Gloucester, Mich. 1423-4, 1425-6, 1428-9, 1437-8;1 steward 1432-3.

Master of St. Margaret’s hospital, Gloucester Oct. 1430, July, 1441.2

Biography

Dalby attended the parliamentary elections held at Gloucester in November 1420, then standing surety for Thomas Stevens. The following year he himself was chosen as parliamentary burgess for the town. He was one of the electors of the knights of the shire for the Parliaments of 1422, 1431, 1432 and 1433. At the end of his first term as bailiff of Gloucester, he and John Bisley II* compiled burgess rolls on which he himself figured as providing security for four strangers trading in the town. It was during this year of office that he and Bisley were prosecuted by the abbot of St. Peter’s, Gloucester, for illegally condoning the befouling of Grace Lane, near the abbey, with the entrails of animals. In 1428-9 Dalby was associated as bailiff with John Strensham*, who was to become his fellow again in 1437-8; and it was they who, in August 1438, drew up an agreement with the Franciscan friars for a regular water supply to the town, running from ‘Mattesknoll’. Dalby regularly witnessed local deeds between 1428 and 1440, and later, in 1445, he attested a conveyance of the manors of Long Marston and Pebworth, Gloucestershire. Earlier he had been appointed master of St. Margaret’s hospital, then under the town’s control, and as such had authorized leases of the hospital’s water-mill at Swindon. Dalby may have made a living by trade: at all events, in June 1442 one of his debtors, who came from Ashburton, Devon, took out a royal pardon for failing to appear in court to answer his charges.3

Dalby died before 1455, by which date his tenement at the corner of the Bareland and Walkers Lane had passed to his widow and from her to Robert Leadon. Another of his holdings, one in Lich Lane, went to his son-in-law, John Cook, the husband of his daughter Ellen. The Margaret Dalby who appears in the rental of was probably his widow. She had held property near the quay, in Ebridge Street, and near the Mercery.4

Ref Volumes: 1386-1421

Author: L. S. Woodger

Notes

  • 1. Gloucester Corporation Recs. ed. Stevenson, 1085-7, 1092, 1096, 1112; E372/271 m. 14d; VCH Glos. iv. 373-4.
  • 2. Gloucester Corporation Recs. 1097, 1102-3, 1118.
  • 3. C219/12/4, 13/1, 14/2-4; Gloucester Guildhall, roll 1353; C1/4/176; Trans. Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc. xiii. 241-2; xxiv. 294; Gloucester Corporation Recs. 1091, 1100, 1112, 1115; CCR, 1441-7, p. 295; CPR, 1441-6, p. 16.
  • 4. Gloucester Rental 1455 ed. Cole, 32, 40, 48, 112; Gloucester Corporation Recs. 1150.