Richard came from a junior branch of the family of Lacon of Lacon near Wem, Shropshire, but he was nevertheless occasionally referred to as ‘of Lacon’ or ‘of Wem’. He held little property in his own right, apart from a lease of ‘Bulridges’, an area of pasture on the manor of Condover, and most of his landed holdings came to him through marriage. Lacon’s first wife was the grand daughter of Sir Robert Harley and Joan, daughter of Sir Robert Corbet of Moreton Corbet, and besides bringing him at least six manors (including Willey) in Shropshire, she thus gave him kinship with the Corbet family which had once held the barony of Caus. Indeed, this relationship enabled their son, William, to assert to no less a person than Humphrey, duke of Buckingham, that he was ‘of yor blood not farre worin in degree’. (In fact their kinship was extremely remote.) Through his mother Richard Lacon inherited a claim to the manor of Drayton Parslow in Buckinghamshire, and apparently proved his title, but ‘for dread of displeasure’ of the duke he ‘delayed the execution of his said recovery’, leaving his son to do so.
Lacon figured prominently in the indictments brought before the King’s bench sitting at Shrewsbury in the summer of 1414, along with Wele, the Corbet brothers and others of the Arundel ‘connexion’. Among the charges made against him and Wele in particular was that on 17 June 1409, during the subjugation of Wales, they had shut the gates of ‘Shrewsbury’ (more probably Oswestry) against John Talbot, Lord Furnival, and refused supplies for his force of 200 men on their way to Carnarvon. Their numerous other alleged offences included homicide, theft, assault, breach of the Statutes of Livery and the granting of safe conducts to partisans of Owen Glendower. In one indictment Lacon was described as captain of Clun castle (another Fitzalan stronghold), and in a petition to the chancellor the prior of Wenlock alleged that he had taken the tithes of churches at Clun and elsewhere and usurped his rights of presentation, and that, furthermore, he had attacked the prior’s servants and destroyed a mill, having no regard for the King’s peace and making war with bands of mounted Welshmen. In this petition the prior may well have been alluding to a purported raid made on Much Wenlock by Lacon and the rest with 2,000 men, fully armed and dramatically riding in with ‘clarions and trumpets’. The prior had sought remedy from the earl of Arundel, but the earl naturally supported his own men: when they came for trial at Westminster that autumn he provided bail, and no doubt he was also instrumental in securing their royal pardons. Lacon was returned to Parliament again in November.
In May 1415 Earl Thomas named Lacon among the feoffees of his considerable estates in Surrey and Sussex so that they might be entailed before he embarked with Henry V’s expedition to Normandy. Lacon enlisted as an esquire in the earl’s retinue, and took part in the siege of Harfleur and, most likely, also in the battle of Agincourt. He was knighted before the end of October, when a fellow member of Arundel’s retinue, John Burley I, named him as an executor of his will. The death of Earl Thomas, from dysentery contracted at Harfleur, left Lacon without a patron, although he continued to be employed at Oswestry (serving as steward there between 1422 and 1425), perhaps on the authority of the earl’s widow. It was only after Arundel’s death, however, that Lacon began to be appointed to royal offices. On 1 Dec. 1415 he became sheriff of Shropshire, and the King later allowed him £40 laid to his account, in consideration of his losses while discharging his duties. Sir Richard now widened his acquaintance among the titled nobility of Shropshire, witnessing transactions for Hugh, Lord Burnell, and, in 1417, providing bail for Richard, Lord Strange, then a prisoner in the Tower. On other occasions he acted as a mainpernor in Chancery and the Exchequer for various members of the Shropshire gentry, notably on behalf of George Hawkstone. In February 1419 he took out royal letters of protection as returning to France, this time in Henry V’s own retinue, accompanied by his old friend John Wele and his own ‘leech’. Lacon was back in England for a brief visit a year later, during which he stood surety for another prisoner in the Tower, Sir John Mortimer, and entered into recognizances for 400 marks that John Over, the constable of the former Fitzalan castle of Chirk, would loyally hold it for the King. On 8 Feb. 1420, however, he entered another contract to serve in France for the year beginning in April, with a contingent of five men-at-arms and 45 mounted archers. Wele joined the same company.
After Henry V’s death Lacon returned home to Shropshire, only to put his experience of warfare to other uses. In the Parliament of 1422 Richard Hankford and his wife Elizabeth, the Fitzwaryn heiress, alleged that on the night of 13 Nov. Lacon and William Fitzwaryn at the head of a large armed band of Welshmen, had scaled the walls of Whittington castle and taken it ‘as if in war’. The two were threatened with attainder should they fail to make amends. Yet Sir Richard was elected to the following Parliament, and then, after a gap of eight years, to two more, in the meantime attending the Shropshire elections of 1426. He later witnessed the electoral indentures of 1432, 1437 and 1442.
Lacon died shortly before October 1446, when Richard junior granted his stepmother a life interest in property in Shropshire. He left five sons, of whom two were, confusingly, called Richard and two William. The elder William Lacon inherited the family lands in 1452 and rose to be a j.KB under Edward IV.