JENOUR, Richard (1511-48), of Great Dunmow, Essex.

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. 22 Jan. 1511, s. and h. of John Jenour of Stonham Aspall, Suff. by Alice, da. of John Fincham of Outwell, Norf. educ. ?M. Temple. m.settlement 6 Nov. 1537, Weburgh, da. of Anthony Catesby of Whiston, Northants., 5s. 2da. suc. fa. 17 Sept. 1542.1

Offices Held

Commr. gaol delivery Coventry, Derbys., Leics., Lincs., Northants., Notts., Warws. 1538-43; clerk, ct. gen. surveyors of the King’s lands May 1542; j.p. Essex 1547.2

Biography

Richard Jenour was the son of a prothonotary of the common pleas, and was associated with his father on commissions of gaol delivery from 1538. Presumably, like his father before him and his son after, he received a legal education at the Middle Temple, but the register of admissions between 1525 and 1551 is no longer extant. In 1542, several months before his father’s death, Richard Jenour became clerk of the new court of general surveyors, where legal experience would have stood him in good stead; two years later he was exempted on account of this office from serving in the French war. When Jenour married in 1538 his father gave him and his wife the remainder of the manor of Alfreston in Great Dunmow, Essex, which rather than Stonham Aspall became his residence. In 1543 he bought from the crown the manor of Latchley Hall, Essex; when he made his will, he left this manor, and another in the same county which he had bought from Sir Andrew Corbet, to his executors, his wife and his father-in-law, as provision for his younger children.3

Jenour’s appearance in the House of Commons as junior Member for Weymouth preceded his clerkship in the court of general surveyors and perhaps paved the way to the post. He had no personal link with the town and probably owed his nomination to the favour of Sir Thomas Arundell, who was to procure Richard Duke’s return there to the following Parliament. In favouring Jenour, Arundell may have been obliging an associate, Richard Pollard, a knight of the shire for Devon in 1542; presumably Jenour was the protégé of Pollard, whom he would have known at the Middle Temple. Pollard died in the autumn of 1542 and Jenour was not to sit in either of the two Parliaments summoned before his own death six years later on 26 Nov. 1548, the day on which he made his will. He left as his heir his son Andrew, a boy of not quite ten. The wardship went at first to two Londoners but in November 1550 the custody of the boy was transferred to Richard Weston, whom Jenour’s widow had married.4

Ref Volumes: 1509-1558

Author: Helen Miller

Notes

  • 1. Date of birth given at fa.’s i.p.m., C142/65/70. Vis. Essex (Harl. Soc. xiii), 222; LP Hen. VIII, xiii.
  • 2. LP Hen. VIII, xiii, xiv, xvi-xviii; CPR, 1547-8, p. 83.
  • 3. LP Hen. VIII , xiii, xiv, xvi-xix; C142/65/70, 88/54; PCC 25 Populwell.
  • 4. C142/88/54; PCC 25 Populwell; CPR, 1549-51, p. 208; 1550-3, p. 10.