RANDALL (RENDALL), Richard (by 1520-58 or later), of London.

Published in The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1509-1558, ed. S.T. Bindoff, 1982
Available from Boydell and Brewer

Constituency

Dates

Family and Education

b. by 1520. educ. I. Temple. m. by Aug. 1555, Isabel Beake of Haddenham, Bucks., wid. of Edward Weldon (d. 25 May 1551) of Bray, Berks.2

Offices Held

Biography

Richard Randall was a London lawyer, possibly a relative of the Robert Randall who was living in Dorchester in 1547. He obtained a lease from augmentations of some property in Gloucestershire in 1541, and four years later he and a colleague in the Inner Temple, Robert Keilway II, bought a manor in Kent. In August 1548 Randall received a large grant of monastic and chantry land in Dorset, London and Wiltshire, for which he paid £661; the grant included two burgages in Dorchester which had formerly belonged to the fraternity of St. Mary. When in the same month the rest of the property of this chantry was granted to the freemen of Dorchester, it is likely that Randall, then the town’s junior Member, negotiated the deal.3

Randall probably owed his seat in the first Edwardian Parliament to Keilway, who was known to the high steward of Dorchester, Sir Thomas Trenchard, and who also stood close to the Protector Somerset. If Randall enjoyed Seymour support for his election in 1547, he may have been similarly favoured on the previous occasion, from which many returns do not survive. By 1553 the Seymour family was in eclipse, and Randall is not known to have sat in the second Edwardian Parliament. He was active in the affairs of his inn during the 1550s although he had refused to be elected a bencher in 1541. Since he last appeared at the Inner Temple parliament on 26 June 1558, he may have died in the epidemic of that year.4

Ref Volumes: 1509-1558

Author: Helen Miller

Notes

  • 1. Hatfield 207.
  • 2. Date of birth estimated from first reference. PCC 31 More.
  • 3. C. H. Mayo, Recs. Dorchester, 333; LP Hen. VIII xvi, xx; CPR, 1547-8, p. 309; 1548-9, pp. 44-46.
  • 4. Cal. I.T. Recs. i. 129 seq.