Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Barking, Richard de
BARKING, RICHARD de (d. 1246), judge, was for some years prior of the abbey of Westminster, and on 14 Oct. 1222 was elected abbot in succession to Humeto or Humez, receiving the benediction from Peter de Rupibus, Bishop of Winchester (Dugdale, Monasticon, i. 271). He became successively a privy councillor, a baron of the exchequer next in rank to William de Hareshull, the treasurer (Madox, Exchequer, ii. 318), and, according to Dugdale and Weever, chief baron; but it is very doubtful whether such an office existed at the time (Foss). In 1242 mandates to the sheriffs of counties to collect scutage money for the king’s expedition to Gascony are tested in his name, and he appears then to have been a favourite and attendant upon the king. In 1245 he, with the Bishop of Carlisle, is the king’s deputy or lord justice of the kingdom during the king’s absence in the Welsh wars, and on that ground he is excused from attendance at the pope’s general council in that year. He died 23 Nov. 1246, having increased the revenues of his abbey by 300 marks per annum (Matt. Westm., Flor. Hist. 330), by the addition of the churches of Ocham, Aschewell, and Strengesham, the manor of Thorpe, the castle of Morton Folet, the village of New Morton, Gloucestershire, and one half the manors of Langdon and Chadesley, in Worcestershire. (Sporley’s manuscript copy of inscription on his second tomb; Cotton MS. Claud. A 8, fol. 496). He was ‘prudens et competenter literatus’ (Matt. Westm., loc. cit.), and was buried in a marble tomb before the altar of the Virgin in the lady chapel built in Humeto’s abbacy; but his tomb was destroyed in the time of the Abbot Colchester, and the same fate has befallen the slab that succeeded it.
[Foss’s Lives of the Judges; Dugdale’s Monasticon; Dart’s Westminster, ii. p. xx; Madox’s Exchequer, ii. 318; Weever’s Funeral Monuments.]