RACY, Adam

A glover by trade, Racy was one of the more substantial of Leicester’s representatives during the Lancastrian period, although nothing is known of his origins. No Racys figure in the records of the town before his time. As early as 1414 he appeared in person in the court of King’s bench to sue a Leicester smith for negligence.2 KB27/614, rot. 18. In the same year he purchased two pipes of wine at Leicester from William Payntour of Kingston-upon-Hull, a seemingly routine transaction that later led him into difficulties. Some years later, when his business took him to Bristol, he found himself the defendant in the borough court there when a Bristol man claimed that, in selling the wine, Payntour had been acting as his attorney and that he had not been satisfied of the purchase price. Racy found himself condemned in damages and appealed to the chancellor for redress: C1/69/347. From the early 1420s he makes regular appearances in the records. In Michaelmas term 1421 he was party to a final concord concerning property at Evington just outside the town; and in March 1423 he was named as a feoffee by the Leicester saddler, Thomas Gaddesby, with whom he seems to have been particularly closely associated.3 CP25(1)/126/73/31; Leicester Bor. Recs. ii. 416, 421; KB27/711, rot. 37. By 1427 he was well enough established among the leading townsmen to be named as bailiff and, on 4 Jan. 1431, he was elected to represent Leicester in Parliament.4 C219/14/2.

For the rest of his life Racy was one of the town’s most active administrators. Aside from two mayoralties and three elections to Parliament, he also sat on several important juries. When the justices of assize visited the town on 5 Oct. 1433 and 21 July 1435, he was on juries which found in favour of two prominent townsmen, William Grantham* and Thomas Charite*, allegedly wrongly claimed as villeins.5 CP40/692, rot. 106; 699, rot. 301. Later, on 2 Apr. 1448, he was one of a jury, largely composed of leading townsmen, who laid indictments before royal commissioners of inquiry against several important local figures, most notably Edward Grey, Lord Ferrers of Groby, for the illegal distribution of livery in the town.6 C145/313/13; CIMisc. vii. 213. On one occasion he also acted as an arbiter. In July 1444 he and William Newby* were nominated by William Braunston, one of the deputy bailiffs of Leicester and later mayor, to make an award in his extraordinary dispute with a slater, William Richmond. Among the allegations made by Braunston was that three women, adherents of Richmond, had dressed themselves as men and lain armed in wait to ambush him. The arbiters awarded that Richmond should pay Braunston £10 but added the singular provision that the latter, ‘ob reuerenciam eorum specialis’ for John, Viscount Beaumont, and William Ferrers, the then Lord Ferrers of Groby, should repay £8.7 CP40/738, rot. 338.

Little is known of Racy’s personal affairs. He was one of the few townsmen to be assessed to the income tax collected in 1436, albeit at the minimum assessable wealth of £5 p.a., and he certainly held property outside Leicester. In 1431 he sued a husbandman of Hinckley, a few miles to the south-west, for taking his goods and assaulting his servants there. He may have acquired further property by marriage. By a fine levied in Michaelmas term 1427 and confirmed in the following Easter the couple conveyed a small estate, comprising a toft, part of a messuage and 38 acres of land and meadow in Brooksby, nine miles north-east of Leicester, to four men, headed by the two Thomas Asshebys of nearby Lowesby, father and son. The fact that the quitclaim and warranty clauses in this fine were from the couple and Elizabeth’s heirs raises the possibility that these lands were part of her inheritance, and that the fine marks the sale of the property to the gentry family of Assheby. There is, however, no direct evidence to confirm this supposition.8 E179/192/59; KB27/681, rot. 63d; CP25(1)/126/74/13. Little evidence survives of the location of Racy’s property in the town, although it is known that he held a tenement in the parish of All Saints in the Northgate, and with his wife he acquired from another glover, Roger Leek, a house in the High Street in the parish of St. Peter.9 Leicester Bor. Recs. ii. 426, 428.

One other incident in Racy’s career is worthy of notice. In Trinity term 1446 he and another prominent townsman, Alexander Vyllers, were sued by a yeoman of the Crown, Robert Wylne*, for assaulting him at Bird’s Nest in the forest of Leicester. Wylne was then leasing from the duchy of Lancaster herbage and pannage in Leicester Frith, and it is probable that the alleged assault reflected contention between his rights and those of the townsmen in the forest.10. DL37/53/26; CP40/742, rot. 292.

Racy died between Easter term 1452, when he had a plea of debt pending in the court of common pleas, and late 1455, when his widow, as the administratrix of his goods, was herself facing an action of debt. She was alive as late as the spring of 1464 when she made a conveyance of the property she and her late husband had acquired in the High Street.11 CP40/765, rot. 261d; 780, rot. 71; Leicester Bor. Recs. ii. 428.