LYMPANY, John.

John Lympany’s father was probably the John Lympany of Exeter who was mayor in 1508-9 and commissary of the lord admiral in the west. The son, ‘intending to live prodigally’, sold his lands and possessions and left Devon. His connexion with the customs suggests that, like his fellow-Member Richard Watkins, he owed his return for Bridport in 1545 either to the lord admiral, John Dudley, Viscount Lisle, or to Lisle’s precursor, the local magnate Sir John Russell, Baron Russell. Nothing further has come to light concerning Lympany unless he was the gentleman who in 1548 petitioned the Protector Somerset against (Sir) Thomas Cawarden who had dispossessed him of a tenement in Stockwell, Surrey. Lympany had acquired this property on leasehold about two years previously in order to sub-let and it was his only ‘living or stay to live’.3Ibd. i, xxi; E122/36/8; J. Hoker, The description of the citie of Excester (Devon and Cornw. Rec. Soc. xi), 792-927 passim; Guildford mus. Loseley 891.