Family and Education

b. by 1495. ?m. poss. 1s.2

Offices Held

Biography

On election to the Parliament of 1523 Robert Lord discharged Great Grimsby of his expenses in journeying to Parliament and agreed to take wages of 16d. a day. As the town only paid Members who were inhabitants, Lord must have been the draper active in municipal affairs during the 1520s and not his better-known namesake, the London goldsmith whose daughter Alice was to marry Henry Polsted in 1539. Lord’s fellow-Member John Heneage, the son of a Lincolnshire gentleman who had represented the town in the previous reign, agreed to serve without wages.3

According to the 19th-century writer George Oliver, Lord was to sit in the following Parliament as the replacement for Sir William Askew, but the town records upon which the statement allegedly rests do not bear this out. Askew outlived the Parliament for four years and Heneage, who had been re-elected with Askew, by 31 years. Since Heneage shared the same baptismal name as his father who died in 1530, Oliver’s statement may rest on a conjecture that Lord replaced the elder Heneage in the House, and not Askew as is printed, but if this was Oliver’s conjecture it overlooked the designation ‘junior’ given to Heneage at the election in the previous year.4

Lord’s parentage has not been established. He was admitted a freeman of Grimsby and elected bailiff in 1516 but obtained his discharge from the office on payment of 20s. In 1518 he gave 13s.4d. toward making a pair of ‘claves’ (?winches) for the haven and in 1531 he was one of a group made responsible for the maintenance of a gun in the town’s arsenal. He may have died not long afterwards as his name disappears from the list of townsmen attending the mayor’s court in the early 1530s. Either he or a namesake (possibly a son) buried a wife Elizabeth in 1544 and a year later married a Jane Jackson by whom he had two sons. This man was assessed at 4d. on 40s. in goods for the subsidy of 1545, marking him among the less prosperous townsmen: he was paid 6s.8d. in wages and 12d. in expenses for services to the borough in 1553 and was buried at Grimsby on 12 May 1570.5

Ref Volumes: 1509-1558

Author: T. M. Hofmann

Notes

• 1. Great Grimsby AO, oldest ct. bk. f. 230.
• 2. Date of birth estimated from admission as freeman.
• 3. Great Grimsby AO, oldest ct. bk. f. 230; CCR, 1485-1500, pp. 213, 256; LP Hen. VIII, i, iii, iv, vi-xii, xiv, xvi, xix; CPR, 1548-9, p. 148; 1549-51, p. 232; PCC 15 Coode.
• 4. G. Oliver, Grimsby, 118-19.
• 5. Grimsby AO, oldest ct. bk. ff. 98, 172v, 173, 227, 230, 233, 233v; mayor’s ct. bk. 1523-4, f. 1; chamberlain’s accts. 1553; E. Gillett, Grimsby (1961 ed.), 46; Reg. St. James’s Church, Grimsby, ed. Stephenson, 4, 33, 47, 51, 56; E179/137/387, m. 17.