MYDDELTON, Richard (by 1509-77/78), of Galch Hill, nr. Denbigh.

Published in The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1509-1558, ed. S.T. Bindoff, 1982
Available from Boydell and Brewer

Constituency

Dates

Family and Education

b. by 1509, 3rd s. of Fulk Myddelton of Llansannan by Margaret, da. of Thomas Smith of Chester, Cheshire; bro. of Robert Smith. m. Jane, da. of Hugh Dryhurst of Denbigh, 9s. inc. Hugh , Robert and Thomas 7da.1

Offices Held

Gov. Denbigh castle by 1553-d.2

Biography

Of ancient Welsh descent, the Myddelton family had anglicized its surname after a 15th-century marriage across the border. Richard Myddelton’s father, a younger son of David Myddelton, receiver of Denbigh in the reign of Edward IV, was for many years governor of Denbigh castle, an office to which Richard Myddelton may have succeeded on the father’s death before March 1534 and which was to be held by one of his own sons. Apart from the standing which this may have given him, Myddelton had the advantage of being related to the sheriff who returned him to the Parliament of 1542, John Salusbury II having married his first cousin, while the knight of the shire was the sheriff’s uncle John Salusbury I. Although he was not to sit again, his brother Robert Myddelton was returned in 1547, and in 1555 he was one of the witnesses to the election for the Denbigh Boroughs.3

In 1530 Myddelton had been joined with his parents and his brother John in a lease of the manor of Ystrad, near Denbigh, as formerly held by David Myddelton, and after his father’s death the widow and sons were involved in a dispute with Thomas Salusbury over the father’s lease of 40 acres of land in the hundred of Isaled. In 1546 Myddelton and his brother obtained a further lease for 21 years of Ystrad, Galch Hill park and other lands, and shortly afterwards a kinsman sued him in Chancery over land in the township of Gwaenynog, near Denbigh. In his will, made at Galch Hill on 8 Feb. 1577 and proved a year later, Myddelton stipulated that his interest in that property should be sold for the benefit of six of his children. He had never been wealthy—in 1544 he was assessed for subsidy within the commote of Isaled on lands worth £6 a year—and his widow complained that he left her ‘very poor with a great number of children’; yet the boast made on his brass in Whitchurch church, Denbigh, that ‘his sons and daughters left behind shall blaze on earth his fame’, was to prove no empty one, for two of the sons became leading entrepreneurs in London and one of them, Sir Thomas Myddelton, the greatest of Denbighshire landowners.4

Ref Volumes: 1509-1558

Author: P. S. Edwards

Notes

  • 1. Date of birth estimated from first reference: aged 67 at death according to MI where date of death is given as 1576, Arch. Camb. (ser. 5), i. 97. Griffith, Peds. 285; Dwnn, Vis. Wales, ii. 335; W. M. Myddelton, Ped. Fam. of Myddelton, 57, 61.
  • 2. J. Williams, Denbigh, 148-9.
  • 3. Myddelton, 57, 62-64; DWB (Myddelton fam.); C219/24(i)/238.
  • 4. C1/882/20, 1247/32-34; Augmentations (Univ. Wales Bd. of Celtic Studies, Hist. and Law ser. xiii), 70; LP Hen. VIII, xxi; CPR, 1549-51, p. 3; PCC 7 Langley; E179/220/166; St.Ch.5/M19/13.