Family and Education

s. of John Studley of Studley. m. bef. 1412, Denise, s.p.1

Offices Held

Tax collector, Wilts. July 1413.

Biography

A member of a family long established at Studley, two miles east of the borough of Calne, Walter was confirmed in 1407 in possession of the local manor, this being a part of the family holdings which, all of them in Wiltshire, included another manor at Cadnam and property at Haydon and Calne. Five years later he and his half-sister Alice, along with her husband, Thomas Cricklade*, an influential lawyer, placed Studley in the hands of Valentine Pompe, vicar of Calne, and other trustees, apparently with a view to entailing it on the Cricklades, while Walter received other lands in the neighbourhood in lieu.2

In July 1413 Studley was appointed a tax collector in the county at large, but nothing is known of him between then and his return for Calne to the Parliament of May 1421. Two years later his brother-in-law, Thomas Cricklade, was his surety for attendance in the Commons of 1423, as Member for Malmesbury. In March 1428 Studley witnessed a grant of land in Chippenham to Robert Long* and others, and three months later he served as a juror at an inquiry held in order to assess the contribution due from the hundred of Chippenham to a parliamentary subsidy. Studley was one of the Wiltshire gentry certified in 1434 as liable to take the oath not to maintain anybody who broke the peace.3

Nothing is recorded about him after that date, and he had certainly died by 1449. Like his three younger brothers, he died childless, so all the Studley lands passed to their half-sister Alice, and so to the Cricklade family.4

Ref Volumes: 1386-1421

Author: Charles Kightly

Notes

• 1. Wilts. Arch. Mag. xxxiv. 409 (from C1/44/94); Wilts. Feet of Fines (Wilts. Rec. Soc. xli), 275, 301; The Gen. n.s. xiii. 148 (although his mother was not Joan Walsh as stated there).
• 2. Wilts. Feet of Fines, 275, 330-1; C1/44/94. Walter’s father had paid 3s.4d. towards the hundred of Calne’s share of the poll tax of 1379: E179/196/52a.
• 3. C219/13/2; Tropenell Cart. ed. Davies, i. 115; Feudal Aids, v. 251; CPR, 1429-36, p. 371.
• 4. C1/44/94.