BOLEPYT, Stephen

The Bolepyts took their name from the family seat of Bullapit in Werrington, where they are documented by the 1220s.1 Cornw. RO, Arundell mss, AR1/1056. No details of Stephen’s parentage have been discovered, but it is probable that he was related to the Launceston wool merchant William Bolepyt.2 SC11/968; CP40/727, rot. 419; Reg. Lacy, iii (Canterbury and York Soc. cxxxiv), 238, 243. A branch of the Bolepyt fam. was resident in this borough by 1337, when another William Bolepyt was one of the stewards: Cornw. RO, Launceston bor. recs., B/Laus/117. Another putative kinsman, Robert Bolepyt, was a tenant of the Dynham family in their manor of Cardinham in the reign of Henry IV.3 Arundell mss, AR1/410. Of his own career little is known, but any suggestion that he owed election to the Parliament of 1447 to connexions with the royal court (rather than the desperation of the burgesses to find anybody willing to ride to Bury St. Edmunds) must be questioned in a the light of an acrimonious clash with the leading Cornish courtier John Trevelyan* in May 1451, when Bolepyt was said to have been guilty of breaking into Trevelyan’s property in Holborn, Middlesex.4 KB146/6/30/4. There is no evidence to support the identification of the MP with the later tax collector Stephen Bolden of Temple, Cornw., as given in HP Biogs. ed. Wedgwood and Holt, 90.