DENYS, William (d.1479), of Combe-Raleigh, Devon.

There is no evidence that William was related to John Denys* of Orleigh in Buckland Brewer, or that he came from the Denys family of Bradford in Milton Damerel, although the latter remains a possibility. For the Denys fam. of Bradford, see The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 772-3. He may not even have been a Devon man by origin, for nothing certain is recorded about him before his marriage to the St. Aubyn coheiress, who brought him important landed holdings in the county. There is a possibility that he was the man of this name who joined the retinue of John Bourgchier, afterwards Lord Berners, and served under him as a mounted man-at-arms in the expedition led to France in 1441 by Richard, duke of York, Bourgchier’s kinsman by marriage. E101/53/33, m. 8. In the following year that William Denys was enfeoffed by Bourgchier and his wife of their manor of West Horsley in Surrey. CPR, 1441-6, p. 81; CP25(1)/293/70/264. If indeed this was the same man, it might be conjectured that he came to Devon with Bourgchier’s brother William, the future Lord Fitzwaryn. Certainly, the MP was later on sufficiently amicable terms with Fitzwaryn as to make him a feoffee of his estates.

Whatever his origins, in or before 1442 the future MP had the good fortune to marry an heiress, and he took up residence at her manor of Combe-Raleigh in the east of the county. His wife Joan was the elder of two daughters of John St. Aubyn (knight of the shire for Devon in Henry V’s reign), who left them at his death in 1418 not only Combe-Raleigh but also ‘Uppetons Prudhome’ in Devon, Alston Sutton in Somerset and eight lesser manors in Cornwall. Both girls were then under-age and the Crown sold their marriages for 200 marks to Sir William Bodrugan, who promptly married Joan to his own brother, Otto, and her sister Margaret to Reynold, the son and heir of the Cornish esquire John Tretherf*. Cornw. Feet of Fines, ii (Devon and Cornw. Rec. Soc. 1950), 951; The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 272; iv. 276-7; CIPM, xxi. 230. The girls’ paternal grandmother, after whom Joan was named, had taken as her third husband Sir Thomas Pomeroy†, and this couple retained possession of Combe-Raleigh until their deaths, respectively in 1422 and 1426. CIPM, xxii. 259; xxiii. 246-7. After making proof of age, CIPM, xxii. 823; xxiii. 415. the heiresses and their husbands laid claim to the former Pomeroy estates at Berry Pomeray and elsewhere, as direct descendants of this same grandmother Joan, who had been the niece and coheir of Sir John Pomeroy†, and this led to violent altercations with their kinsman Edward Pomeroy† in the 1420s. J.S. Vivian, Vis. Devon, 189; KB27/670, rex rot. 19. Joan and Otto Bodrugan were living at Combe-Raleigh in January 1437, when they received an episcopal licence to celebrate religious services in a chapel in their house, Reg. Lacy, ii (Canterbury and York Soc. lxi), 35. but they seem not to have produced any surviving children, and Otto died at some point before August 1442, by which date Joan was married to Denys. The small Bodrugan dower which she brought to her new husband included land in Trevargh, Cornwall: C139/107/34.

Arrangements were made in October 1443 for Denys and his wife to hold her Somerset manor of Alston together with specified lands in Devon in jointure for term of their lives, with remainder to Joan’s issue. CP25(1)/293/70/279. Four years later she and her sister added to their inheritance the lands of their maternal grandfather, Sir Robert Chalons, following the death of his grandson John. The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 508-10; C139/131/22; CCR, 1447-54, pp. 5-6. This inheritance included the manors of Chalonsleigh, Buckerell and Awliscombe, but they were evicted from Buckerell by John Chalons’s widow, against whom they brought an assize of novel disseisin in July 1451. Here Denys was able to take advantage of the influential connexions he had made among the leading gentry of Devon, for the matter was put to the arbitration of Lord Fitzwaryn (whom Denys had made a feoffee of much of his wife’s moiety of the Chalons estate barely two months earlier), (Sir) Philip Courtenay* and others, who awarded that the St. Aubyn sisters and their husbands should recover the manor. Furthermore, in November 1452 their kinsman Thomas Chalons concurred in a settlement of Buckerell and property at Awliscombe on Denys for life, with successive remainders to his wife and their issue, and to Chalons in tail male. C66/473, rot. 15d; 474, rot. 23d; C140/72/67; C1/988/17-18; SC6/823/30. Buckerell was to pass in its entirety along with the rest of the Chalons estate to the Denys family after the death without issue of the MP’s sister-in-law Margaret Tretherf.

Denys’s marriage provided him with an income in excess of £69 p.a., As assessed at his post mortem: C140/72/67. and he went to some effort to protect his landed interests in the courts at Westminster. Two years earlier he had accused John Fortescue of Woodlegh, John Serle alias Silverlock* of Plympton Erle and Richard Champernowne of Mamhead of having violated his property at Challonsleigh, Buckerell and Combe-Raleigh, stolen a valuable horse worth ten marks, and allowed their animals to trample and consume his grass and corn worth 40 marks. CP40/758, rot. 42d; 760, rot. 207; 766, rot. 56. The two couples, Denys and Tretherf, brought a suit against the prior of Plympton in the summer of 1452 to render up a box of muniments, CP40/766, rot. 53. and their pursuance of their rights to the former Pomeroy estates continued early in 1453 when, on 8 Feb. an assize of novel disseisin got underway, in which Denys challenged the title of Edward Pomeroy’s widow to a number of properties in Cornwall. C66/476, rot. 16d.

By then Denys had entered the social circle of Sir William Bonville*, Lord Bonville, who like their mutual friend Lord Fitzwaryn proved willing to act as a feoffee of his wife’s estates. Parliament had been summoned to meet at Reading on the following 6 Mar., and Denys attended the elections held at Exeter castle on 20 Feb., there endorsing the return as knights of the shire of two other members of Bonville’s affinity, Walter Reynell* and Walter Ralegh*. Perhaps he himself had sought election for one of the county’s boroughs, but if so he was disappointed. Yet by some unknown means he did secure nomination as a representative for the borough of Poole in the neighbouring county of Dorset. External influence was almost certainly a factor in Poole’s representation. The borough had not sent any Members to the Commons since 1368, and it was listed last on the schedule attached to the Dorset indenture, after the seven boroughs which had routinely made returns throughout the first half of the fifteenth century. It may be conjectured that the names of Poole’s MPs were added to the schedule only when it came to be presented at the start of the Parliament. Denys’s companion, whose name is now illegible, may have been John Skelton III*, the spigurnel of the Chancery, who was to represent Poole on a subsequent occasion. The evidence is circumstantial: on 19 May 1453, during the second session of the Parliament, the two men were associated with the shire-knight Walter Reynell in recognizances in 500 marks made to Thomas Dowrich II*. The transaction concerned possession of the Devon manor of West Ogwell: CCR, 1447-54, pp. 434-6.

This was not the only matter of concern to Denys while he was sitting in the Commons. A few days earlier, on 6 May, he had secured formal revocation of the royal letters of protection granted him as retained in the force of (Sir) John Lisle II*, assigned for the safekeeping and defence of Aquitaine, on the basis that he had not sailed with Lisle’s fleet after all and, indeed, was currently at Westminster (where Parliament had assembled for its second session). At what point Denys had decided not to join Lisle, whose army had embarked in late February and early March, is uncertain, although his decision must have coincided with the Parliament’s initial assembly. CPR, 1452-61, p. 69. Similarly, his motives for declining military service are not known. by doing so he escaped ignominy or death in the English defeat at Castillon.

That same summer of 1453, while the Parliament was yet in being, Denys strengthened his ties with Bonville by arranging for the marriage of his daughter Alice, potentially the sole heiress of his wife’s estates, to John Bonville, Lord Bonville’s bastard son through his liaison with Isabel Kirkby. Denys and his wife made settlements ensuring the young couple’s future inheritance of the manor of Alston, and in his turn at an unknown date Lord Bonville granted them a reversionary interest in the manor of Little Modbury. Som. Feet of Fines (Som. Rec. Soc. xxii), 116; C140/72/67; CIPM Hen. VII, ii. 266; Vivian, 102-3. It may be that Denys undertook to join the force under Bonville’s command expected to depart for Aquitaine in September 1453, but in the event it never sailed. These were extremely troubled times, not only because of the cataclysmic loss of English possessions in France, but because of the mental collapse of the King, which prompted the appointment of the duke of York as Protector in the spring of 1454. Following the dissolution of the Parliament, Denys was among those appointed on 3 June to array the men of Devon for defence from invasion from overseas, but at the same time members of his family were caught up in violent conflicts in the locality, arising from the enmity between Bonville (allied with James Butler, earl of Wiltshire) and Thomas Courtenay, earl of Devon. On 18 June the King’s coroner, viewing the body of John Hoye, a yeoman from the disputed manor of Buckerell (and a former servant of the earl of Devon), heard presentments that he had been murdered at Columpton three days earlier by a man identified as William Denys of Combe-Raleigh ‘gentleman’ and 14 others, who came mainly from the Bonville lordship of Shute and included another Bonville bastard known as John Pynnage. Two months after the homicide, the indicted Denys was required with six others, most notably the notorious Robert Cappes of Pillesdon, Dorset (a retainer of the earl of Wiltshire), and John Bonville ‘of Clopton, Somerset, esquire’, to enter recognizances in 100 marks to the Crown, guaranteeing their appearance in Chancery a month after Michaelmas and ensuring their good behaviour meanwhile. The relationship of this William Denys, the alleged murderer, to our MP is uncertain, but that they were different men is clear, for when at the octave of Michaelmas the defendants in the case came in person to the King’s bench to plead their innocence, bail was offered by another William Denys of Combe-Raleigh, styled ‘esquire’. The eventual outcome was that Denys, the defendant, came to court in the spring of 1456, pleaded a pardon dated 30 Apr. that year (in which he was described as ‘esquire alias gentleman’), and went sine die. KB27/774, rex rot. 1; CCR, 1447-54, pp. 516-17; C67/41, m. 3. Perhaps the defendant was our MP’s son by an earlier marriage. For the wider context of the antagonism between Courtenay and Bonville, see M. Cherry, ‘Crown and Political Community, Devon’ (Univ. of Wales, Swansea Ph.D. thesis, 1981), 293-4.

Meanwhile, our MP had once more attested the electoral returns of the shire knights for Devon on 10 June 1455, for the Parliament meeting in the wake of the battle of St. Albans. There is no evidence that he himself had taken part in that conflict, although he saw fit to purchase a pardon on 21 Oct. that year. C219/16/3; C67/41, m. 28. He remained closely linked to Lord Bonville and his circle. In November 1456, when Walter Ralegh had to find heavy securities for his appearance in Chancery to answer charges, Denys and his brother-in-law Tretherf joined Bonville among those standing surety for him. CCR, 1454-61, pp. 171-2. Denys served as a juror at the inquisition post mortem on Avice, countess of Wiltshire, the wife of Bonville’s ally the earl, at Exeter on 11 Oct. 1457. C139/164/16. Just a few days later, on the 25th, he took out letters of attorney in preparation for going on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. DKR, xlviii. 422. He may well have made the journey, for his whereabouts over the course of the next few years are not recorded. Denys’s patron Bonville was executed on Queen Margaret’s orders after the second battle of St. Albans in February 1461, but whether or not he had been present in Bonville’s company on that occasion, he is next heard of in the following July as a commissioner appointed by the new government under Edward IV to requisition ships in east Devon. He purchased another pardon, as ‘of Combe-Raleigh and Challonsleigh, esquire’, on 3 Feb. 1463. C67/45, m. 17.

Thereafter, Denys concerned himself primarily with local affairs. In about August 1463 he was pricked as a juror in the lawsuit between Richard Drayton* and Alice his wife and Richard Fortescue*. C47/37/22/90. He had brought an action in the court of common pleas against a neighbour, John How, for a debt of £25 6s. 8d. incurred in London, which resulted in How’s outlawry for failing to answer his charge. Presumably, the two men settled their differences before How was able to obtain a pardon on 4 Nov. 1466, CPR, 1461-7, p. 506. the day before Denys was appointed sheriff of Devon. Ex officio, he conducted the shire elections held at Exeter castle on 26 May 1467, when his old opponent Thomas Dowrich was one of those returned. A year after the end of his term, on 14 Oct. 1468, he purchased yet another pardon, as former sheriff and of Combe-Raleigh, but also, curiously, as ‘late of London esquire’. C219/17/1; C67/46, m. 16. Denys’s last public appearance was as a witness to a deed dated at Newton Ferrers in March 1474, once more in the company of Walter Ralegh. C103/20 (pt. 2).

Denys died on 27 Apr. 1479. Nine days later as well as the customary writs de diem clausit extremum directed to the escheators a special commission of inquiry was set up, whereby William Huddesfield† and others were instructed to find out who should inherit his estates. Jurors at the inquests stated that Denys’s wife had predeceased him, and their heir was their daughter Alice Bonville. CFR, xxi. no. 512; CPR, 1476-85, p. 182; C140/72/67. Several years later Huddesfield’s wid. had to testify whether he had executed the comm.: C254/159/6, 7. Denys and his wife were probably buried in the chancel which they had built in the church at Combe-Raleigh, and where Alice and her husband John Bonville later founded a chantry by royal licence granted in 1498. The chantry, dedicated to St. Mary and St. Erasmus the Martyr, was to be called the chantry of William and Joan Denys, and prayers were to be said there for members of their family, including Alice’s maternal grandparents and great-grandparents, and Gilbert and Margaret Denys, who were probably her paternal grandparents. Her relationship to Hugh and William Denys, named with her as co-founders, is not explained. CPR, 1494-1509, p. 136; C1/381/4-9. Alice survived her husband who died the following year. CIPM Hen. VII, ii. 266.