BOVY, Nicholas, of Barnstaple, Devon.

Few details of Bovy’s career have been discovered, but he was evidently a local man. Nicholas’s connexion with the Durnefords, a prominent family from the far south-west of Devon, may indicate that he was a kinsman of the Bovys of Plymouth, but no definite evidence of such a relationship has been discovered: CIPM Hen. VII, i. 1184. Similarly, there is no evident connexion between our MP and the Cornish family of the same name, from which had descended Nicholas Bouy†, MP for Bodmin in 1419: CCR, 1422-9, p. 372; The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 317. Although he was prominent enough to be elected mayor of Barnstaple not long before his sole recorded return to the Commons, he is otherwise rarely heard of. In October 1443 he was among the burgesses who attested the veracity of the record of an inquisition taken at Barnstaple nine years earlier, and in December 1459 he was among the feoffees of the Holman chantry in St. Anne’s chapel in the churchyard of the parish church. C147/150; HP Biogs. ed. Wedgwood and Holt, 96; Reprint of Barnstaple Recs. ed. Chanter and Wainwright, i. 181, 182, 187; HMC 9th Rep. pt. 1, p. 208.

The date of Bovy’s death has not been discovered, but both he and his wife were apparently still alive in September 1471, when the feoffees of James Durneford leased the reversion of the property in Barnstaple that they held from them to their daughter Juliana. Edgcombe mss, ME737.