Go To Section
PARRY (AP HARRY), William (by 1517-69 or later), of Carmarthen.
Available from Boydell and Brewer
Constituency
Dates
Family and Education
b. by 1517. m.1
Offices Held
Bailiff, Carmarthen 1555-6; escheator, Carm. 1565-6; sheriff 1567-8; j.p. in 1568; under sheriff 1568-9.2
Biography
William Parry may have been related to John Parry, with whom he leased the former Franciscan friary in Carmarthen. Described as of Londoner named Edward Blacknoll over a messuage and 20 acres of land in the town and fields of Cardigan. It was while serving as one of the town’s bailiffs that he was summoned, with the mayor and his fellow-bailiff, to the Exchequer in Trinity term 1556 on an information laid by the attorney-general that they had taken it upon themselves to collect customs at Carmarthen and were wrongfully detaining a sum of L100; the case was one episode in a long drawn-out dispute between the merchants of Carmarthen and the crown searcher. Less impersonal was the grievance which Parry himself made the subject of a Star Chamber action when he was sheriff. He then charged a number of Carmarthen men with staging an armed incursion into St. Peter’s church on Whit Sunday 1568, while he was attending divine service in company with the mayor, aldermen and justices of the peace, assaulting him and disrupting the service; according to Parry one of the justices, Jenkin Dafydd ap Ieuan, was privy to the affair. The defendants claimed that Parry, who was a widower, had himself provoked the attack by threatening Dafydd and others when his suit to marry one of Dafydd’s daughters was refused, and that they had gone to the church to protest to the mayor after Parry had harassed them earlier in the day.3
His mention as under sheriff in a Star Chamber case of 1569 is the last reference to Parry which has been found.4