ANTONY, Jocelin, of Barnstaple, Devon.

Antony is known to have traded in wine, honey, wax and iron as well as in Barnstaple’s principal manufacture, cloth. He witnessed deeds executed in Barnstaple between 1366 and 1393, and had become a leading figure there by 1378 when he joined the mayor and ten other burgesses in granting a lease of the town’s ‘Bakhouse’. It was during his third mayoralty that he was returned to Parliament for the borough. As a member of the merchant guild of St. Nicholas he was party in 1388 to a grant of property in ‘Barre’ Street, in which an annual rent was reserved for the chapel of St. Nicholas, and of which the issues were subsequently spent on repairs to the Long Bridge and the Causeway. Antony rode to Exeter for the assizes held in August 1390 for a suit concerning Barnstaple, but it was on his own account that he made the same journey three years later, then seeking to recover rents due from land purchased long previously in ‘le Smalepark’ and ‘Cobbatonpark’ at South Molton.E122/40/14, 102/14A; North Devon Athenaeum, deeds 631, 639, A7, 3972, f. 1; JUST 1/1502 m. 137. He died before August 1396 when his widow, by then surnamed Josse, took possession of a close called ‘Castelhay’, situated between the Strand and the castle at Barnstaple, by gift of Stephen Durneford, a prominent merchant of Plymouth.North Devon Athenaeum, deeds 439, 932-3.