Sir Thomas Parr Knight of Kendal, Sheriff of Westmorland

  General Notes:

~Ancestral Roots of Certain American Colonists Who Came to America before 1700, 8th Edition, 41:34, Sir Thomas Strickland married Agnes Parr, daughter of Sir Thomas Parr by Alice Tunstall, daughter of Thomas Tunstall of Lanceshire. ¹⁶⁰

  Information about this person:

• Background Information. ⁵⁹⁹
Sir Thomas Parr, of Kirby-Kendal and Parr, Westmorland, Knight of the Shire for Westmorland and Cumberland, he also had been Sheriff of Westmoreland and Escheator of Cumberland and Westmorland. He married Alice Tunstall, daughter of Sir Thomas Tunstall, of Thuland, Lancashire, by his wife Isabel daughter of Sir Nicholas Harrington, of Farleton, Lancashire. Sir Thomas and Alice had three sons, Sir William, Sir John and Thomas. They also had six daughters, Margaret, married to Sir Thomas Radclyffe; Anne, married to William Harington; Elizabeth, married to Sir Christopher Moresby; Agnes; Mable; and Eleanor, married to Sir Henry Agard. Sir Thomas Parr, Sheriff was sued by Henry Bellingham in 1441, for an attack on Bellingham's house at Burneside, Westmorland. In 1446, he and his servants were assulted by Robert and Thomas Bellingham as they were traveling to the House of Commons. He on the Yorkist side at the Battle of Blore Heath, 1459. He also fought at the Battle of Wakenfield, 1460. Sir Thomas Parr died 24 Nov 1464.

The children listed by Richardson in Plantagenet ancestry are:

William Parr, K.G.
Agnes Parr, m. Sir Thomas Strickland, of Sizergy, Kendal, Westmoreland
Mabel Parr, m. Sir Humphrey Darcy, second Lord Darce of the North

~Richardson's Plantagenet Ancestry, pg. 188, 565-566

• Background Information. ⁹³⁷
Upon his father's death in 1408, Thomas's wardship was granted to his mother, Agnes, Sir Thomas Beauford and Sir Thomas Brounflete. Some time in the following nine years, Agnes Parr married John Merbury. On 9 July 1413, probably about the same time as the marriage, she surrendered the wardship of her son and his lands to Sir Thomas Tunstall of Thurland Castle, Lancs. William Torvar and James Harrington for 200 marks (£133. 6s. 8d.). Parr lived at Thurland Castle during his minority and Tunstall married him to his daughter, Alice. The Tunstalls were ardent Lancastrians throughout the fifteenth century, but this had little lasting influence on Parr, whose Westmorland estates bordered those of the Nevilles, earls of Westmorland. When he reached his majority and assumed his Kendal inheritance, a mutually supportive relationship arose between the politically aggressive Nevilles and the aggressively ambitious Parr. Parr's value to the Nevilles depended on his own importance as a local magnate and his future advancement on his ability to furnish aid and support to a patron when needed.

The first Sir William did little to extend his wife's de Roos holdings, preferring to act as an absentee landlord, but Thomas Parr had both the time and the need to consolidate and extend them. Much of the estate was held in dower by three relicts of the Parrs until 1436 when his mother Agnes Parr, the last dowager, died. She had signed her dower portion over to her son in 1429 in exchange for a yearly forty-mark allowance. At her death, Parr took the oath of fealty and received full seisin of the dower third of his estate for a fine of two marks.

Finally, at the age of twenty-eight, in law as well as in fact, Parr could enjoy his full income, amounting possibly to £80-£100 yearly. The estate totalled at least 5083 acres of land, 700 of them arable, and 57 messuages and presumably Thomas also held the small Lancashire estate which was the first Sir William Parr's patrimony. This included lands in Parr and Sutton and a toft in Wigan, a parcel held of the Earl of Derby by knight's service, and a yearly rent of 15d. "being thus identified with the quarter of a moiety held by the above-named William in 1370 . . .". Parr, himself, made only one known purchase: a plot called "le Groute by le Howes" from one Baldwin Scheppesshed, which he bought to extend his holdings in Helsington.

~Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian & Archaeological Society, Vol. LXXXI, pp. 16-17

Thomas married Alice Tunstall, daughter of Sir Thomas Tunstall Knight of Thurland Castle and Elizabeth Harington.⁵⁹⁹