PANES, Richard (d.1406/7), of Bristol.

Possibly a descendant of Richard Panes, the Bristol MP of 1328, this Richard was certainly related to the Panes family of Perridge, Somerset, and probably also to John Panes of Wick in that county, for whom he acted as an executor. He was only marginally concerned in the administration of Bristol, holding office as bailiff just once and never as sheriff or mayor, although his name did go forward for the shrievalty on 1 Oct. 1406, shortly before his death. He attested certain local deeds considered important enough for enrolment in the ‘Great Red Book’.CPR, 1405-8, p. 131; CCR, 1369-74, p. 95; CFR, xiii. 47; Great Red Bk. (Bristol Rec. Soc. iv), 235, 245.

Panes’s mercantile activities appear only to have extended as far as Ireland. Between November 1378 and May 1379 he imported 40 salted carcasses worth £8 and 3,000 rabbit skins worth £16; and in 1386-7 he exported 43 cloths and four years later, 4 cloths, in small regular shipments. Irish salmon and skins were his principal and most profitable cargoes, ten pipes of the former being, in August 1391, worth £13 6s.8d. and 1,000 lambskins, £2 10s. The following month he brought to Bristol 12 pipes of salmon worth £18 and several woollen pelts. This trade was seriously disrupted, however, in 1394, when shipments of foodstuffs from Ireland were banned by royal ordinance so that Richard II’s army in the province might be adequately victualled; and it was not until May 1397 that Panes and five other Bristol merchants, after making a formal protest against the continuation of the ordinance, were able to procure a royal licence to trade there as freely as before. Subsequently, his shipments of cloth to Ireland returned to their previous volume, and it may be presumed that his exports from the province did likewise.Overseas Trade (Bristol Rec. Soc. vii), 181, 189, 191, 193-4, 198-9, 201; E122/16/21, 34, 17/1, 10, 40/12; CPR, 1396-9, p. 119.

Panes had taken on the executorship of the wills of John Wyke and Richard Asch, both merchants of Bristol, and in 1396 he was named supervisor of that of John Draycot. A substantial part of his property in Bristol and Somerset had been acquired from Isabel, heiress of John Lyme, a former burgess, who conveyed to him and his heirs in 1385 the reversion of all her lands and buildings on the Quay and in Marsh Street, including some which Panes’s father-in-law, John Roper, held in execution of a statute staple. Panes was to pay Isabel an annual rent of 30s.4d. for the rest of her life. The following year he purchased a hall and a large cellar, again part of the Lyme estate, from the churchwardens of St. Stephen’s. The rest of his property came from his wife’s family, for by the terms of her father’s will of May 1390, she and her husband inherited holdings in ‘Cristemastret’, on St. Michael’s Hill and opposite ‘Gauntysmyll’, as well as receiving bequests for their children, Margaret, John and William.Bristol Wills, 31, 43, 49; Great Red Bk. 192-4, 198-9. Panes, in his own will, drawn up on 17 Dec. 1406, himself provided for his other three daughters, while stipulating that if all his children died without direct heirs the property should be sold, half of the proceeds going to St. Stephen’s church, where he was to be buried. His widow retained the house which had been her father’s on St. Augustine’s Green. Panes died a comparatively wealthy man. He left £3 to provide torches for the funeral, £40 for clothing for 100 poor people, and 40 marks as wages for chaplains holding services on behalf of himself and members of his family. William, his son, received £20 ‘for his advancement’ as well as armour and weapons, his three surviving daughters 28 marks, and his widow 200 marks and the contents of their home. A tenement on the Quay was to be donated to the fraternity of St. John the Baptist to provide alms perpetually in Panes’s memory. He died before 7 Mar. 1407, the date of probate before the borough authorities, but it was not until January 1408 that the Somerset escheator was instructed to make inquiries about his lands in the county, and this order had to be repeated in March.Bristol Wills, 79-80; CPR, 1405-8, pp. 378, 420; CFR, xiii. 119.