CLEMENT, John (by 1502-51/56), of Bath, Som.

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

Constituency

Dates

1539

Family and Education

b. by 1502, ?s. of John Clement by Isabel. m. 1s.2

Offices Held

Collector subsidy, Bath 1523, churchwarden, St. Michael’s without the North Gate 1532-5, 1541-2, alderman by 1538-d., mayor 1550-1, commr. relief 1550.3

Biography

The identity of John Clement is not beyond doubt; one of his name was a yeoman of the guard, and another a leading physician, a staunch Catholic and a son-in-law of Sir Thomas More. Although it was not unknown for Bath to return gentlemen or royal servants, an alderman of the city is the most likely person to have been its Member in 1539; as no returns survive for the Parliaments of 1536 and 1542, Clement could also have sat in either or both of those Parliaments.4

Although two John Clements were assessed for subsidy in Bath in 1540 and again in 1551, it is to the elder of them, who was mayor and subsidy commissioner in 1551, and who on both occasions had the higher assessment (£20 in goods against £10), that we should look as the Member, with the other, styled ‘the younger’, as perhaps his son. Either could have been the witness of wills, and the legatee of one, in 1540, but it was presumably the elder who was a churchwarden of St. Michael’s without the North Gate between 1535 and 1542. When in 1547-8 the younger man filled the same office he was so described. In 1556-7 a John Clement (without the epithet) did so again, perhaps a sign that the older man was dead. Presumably Clement was a clothier since in 1538 he and his son obtained the reversion of a fulling mill from Bath abbey. A later reference records the payment in 1544-5 by Isabel, formerly wife of John Clement, and her son John of fines in the manor and hundred of Keynsham, Somerset, the property of Catherine Parr; Clement’s fellow-Member in 1539 had been John Reynold, probably of Keynsham.5

Ref Volumes: 1509-1558

Author: D. F. Coros

Notes

  • 1. E159/319, brev. ret. Mich. r. [1-2].
  • 2. Date of birth estimated from first reference. SC6, Hen. VIII, 6615.
  • 3. E179/170/24, 24v, 282 iv; Harl. 3970.
  • 4. LP Hen. VIII, xx; DNB (Clement, John).
  • 5. E179/169/178, 170/189, 246; Som. Med. Wills (Som. Rec. Soc. xxi), 65, 106; Churchwardens’ Accts. St. Michael’s, Bath, ed. Pearson, 111-12, 114, 117, 122; Harl. 3970; SC6, Hen. VIII, 6615.