MILL, John II (by 1533-62 or later), of Melcombe Regis, Dorset and Chard, Som.

John Mill of Melcombe Regis, merchant, bought in 1554 a house and garden in St. Edmund’s Street and a garden in St. Nicholas Street, Melcombe. In March 1556, as one of the bailiffs of the town, he witnessed a charter granted by the mayor and corporation. Mill imported wine through the port of Weymouth at this time but his name does not appear frequently in the customs accounts. He had moved to Chard in Somerset by 1562, when he sold the house and gardens which he had purchased eight years earlier. No later trace of him has been found unless it was his widow who married Edward Reynolds, a Member for Weymouth and Melcombe Regis in 1601.3Ibid. M4, ff. 2-3, 5; E122/121/121.

Perhaps because Melcombe was not a wealthy port and its inhabitants were unwilling to forego payment of their parliamentary expenses, the borough rarely returned townsmen to Parliament. In 1558, however, the corporation was anxious that Melcombe should be fortified and, although it agreed to Sir John Rogers’s nomination of Richard Shaw, it chose as senior Member John Mill, a man whose municipal experience and commercial interests probably well qualified him to put the town’s case before the Commons; the project was debated in both Houses but it was never enacted.4Harvard, pf. ms Eng. 757, p. 17; CJ, i. 48-49.