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LEWIS, George, of Llystalybont, nr. Cardiff, Glam.
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Biography Detail
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Constituency
Dates
Family and Education
2nd s. of Thomas Lewis† (d.1594), of The Van by his 1st w. Margaret, da. of Robert Gamage of Coity. m. (1) Katherine, da. of Miles Mathew of Castell y mynach, 3s., (2) Mary, da. of Francis Zouche, 1da.; (3) Mary, da. of William Gore of Wilts., 3s. 4da.
Offices Held
Sheriff, Glam. 1610-11.
Biography
At the time of Lewis’s return the Cardiff group of boroughs included Swansea, whose records include a receipt ‘for the portion rated upon the town towards the expenses of George Lewis, a burgess of Parliament’.
The Lewis family were close allies of the Earl of Pembroke. Though a younger son, Lewis inherited considerable property from his father, and increased it by his marriages. His total estate was estimated in 1645 at £400 per annum. The manor of Llystalybont was reckoned at half a knight’s fee in the middle ages. The estate was scattered among five parishes near Cardiff. The lords of the manor from 1542 to 1622 were the Carnes of Ewenny, Thomas Carne being Lewis’s county colleague in the Parliament of 1586. The manor house, a former monastic grange now represented by a thatched farmhouse on the outskirts of Cardiff, passed through a variety of hands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; there is no evidence of Thomas Lewis’s occupancy before and it passed out of the family after his son’s tenure. It is not included among George Owen’s list of the principal Glamorgan houses in 1602, nor is the householder’s name given in Rice Lewis’s Breviat of 1596-1600. Lewis himself is not known to have taken any conspicuous part in local affairs, except in January 1596 when, according to the evidence of a Star Chamber case, the Lewises and their supporters marched through Llandaff in warlike array, flinging defiance at the Mathews faction, but they were routed, and Mr. George Lewis had to fly for his life from Llandaff Bridge to Mynachdy, pursued by an armed rabble. The date of his death is unknown.
Clark, Limbus, 47, 55; Lansd. 47, f. 118; Williams, Parl. Hist. Wales, 106; Ll. B. Jones, ‘Parl. Rep. Glam. 1536-1832’ (Univ. Wales MA thesis, 1929), pp. 5, 6; Cardiff Recs. i. 309, 316-331; ii. 18-22; CPR, 1558-60, pp. 455-6; R. Comm. on Land in Wales (1896), pp. 461-2; G. Owen, ‘Desc. Wales’, Desc. Pemb. iv. 311-15; Rice Lewis, ‘Breviat of Glam.’ S. Wales and Mon. Rec. Soc. iii. 127.
