RATHBONE, David, of Whitchurch and Shrewsbury, Salop.

David was probably a descendant of William Rathbone who, as coming from Myddle, Shropshire, had been named on the Shrewsbury guild merchant roll of 1268. He himself was admitted to the freedom of the borough in December 1397, and in the following year was listed among the local weavers. In 1398, in return for an annual rent of £6, he and his first wife procured a lease for life from Agnes, widow of Hugh Donfowe, of two houses in ‘Le Coruyserowe’, save for the ‘little parlour’ next to the garden and another room, both of which were reserved for Agnes’s use. Perhaps his wife was Donfowe’s daughter. During his first bailiffship, on 12 Oct. 1407 Rathbone was responsible for holding the parliamentary election in the common hall of the town; and in January following his son Thomas became a burgess.Trans. Salop Arch. Soc. (ser. 3), iii. 369; v. 41, 48, 50; C219/10/4; Add. 30321, f. 54; Shrewsbury Guildhall, box LXXVI, 2692. Rathbone himself represented Shrewsbury in Parliament while bailiff for the third time, being paid £4 by the borough for his expenses at Westminster and welcomed with a gift of wine on his return. In the same year he sold two dozen lengths of cloth to the authorities for the robes of the six ‘supersedentes’. He died before 1426, by which date his widow, Agnes, had already married John Falk (bailiff of Shrewsbury in 1435). There can be little doubt that his son predeceased him, for alongside David Rathbone’s name on the guild merchant roll of 1397 were later inserted the words ‘mortuus sine herede masculo de corpore suo’.Shrewsbury Guildhall, box VIII, 359; Trans. Salop Arch. Soc. (ser. 3), iii. 81.