GEBONS, Hugh (by 1516-62 or later), of Hereford.

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 1516. m. da. of Hugh Welshe of Hereford, at least 1s.1

Offices Held

Recorder, Hereford temp. Hen. VIII; under collector of relief 1550.2

Biography

It is likely that Hugh Gebons was a son or younger brother of the Thomas Gebons who was mayor of Hereford four times between 1512 and 1539; in February 1546 Hugh Gebons was assessed for subsidy in the Wyebridge ward of Hereford on goods worth 20 marks and a Thomas Gebons in a different ward on goods worth 40 marks. Gebons’s civic career is not easy to trace. In an undated letter of Henry VIII’s reign he is described as recorder of Hereford. If it was in this capacity that he witnessed confessions made in the city, two occasions on which he did so, 1 Oct. 1537 and 11 June 1542, would help to date his tenure of the office, which he would also have been holding when in 1541 he signed an indenture relating to the suppression of Stone priory, Staffordshire, presumably in connexion with its property in Hereford. In 1549 he appears as the tenant of two plots of former chantry land in Hereford, one of them perhaps the small garden once belonging to the chantry of St. Catherine in Hereford cathedral of which he was the tenant in August 1557.3

Gebons’s election to the Parliament of 1555 took place during the mayoralty of his father-in-law and followed the city’s receipt of a letter from the council in the marches requiring it to choose men of goodwill ‘and especially of Catholic religion’. That both he and his fellow-Member Morgan Owgan satisfied the second criterion is implied by the omission of their names from the list of those who opposed one of the government’s bills: they were themselves doubtless involved in the passage of a less contentious Act for the rebuilding of four mills near Hereford (2 and 3 Phil. and Mary, c.14).4

Gebons and his son and namesake were remembered in Hugh Welshe’s will of 30 Nov. 1562, but the absence of his name from Bishop Scory’s report of 1564 on leading figures in Hereford suggests that he was by then dead. If he himself made a will it has not come to light.5

Ref Volumes: 1509-1558

Author: P. S. Edwards

Notes

  • 1. Date of birth estimated from first reference. PCC 31 Morrison.
  • 2. HMC 13th Rep. IV, 315; E179/117/207.
  • 3. R. Johnson, Anct. Customs, Hereford, 88, 139, 233; E179/117/162; Hereford pub. lib. city muniments 942, ff. 7, 52-53; LP Hen. VIII, xvi; CPR, 1549-51, pp. 25, 158; 1557-8, p. 135.
  • 4. HMC 13th Rep. IV, 322-3.
  • 5. PCC 31 Morrison; Cam. Misc. ix(3), 14-15.