BOMEL, John, of Dorchester, Dorset.

Although Bomel was elected to Parliament for Dorchester on only one occasion, so far as is known, he was evidently a burgess of some standing in the town. Not only was he four times bailiff (admittedly at well spaced intervals) but on five occasions (in 1417, 1419, 1420, December 1421 and 1422) he was one of the four burgesses chosen to convey the result of the borough’s election of its parliamentary representatives to the county court, where in December 1421 he also assisted at the election of the knights of the shire. He is not known to have held land outside Dorchester but his property within the town was quite substantial. In 1396, for example, he exchanged a burgage in ‘Puselane’ for a tenement on South Street. This he sold in 1405; but in the same year, and again in South Street, he acquired a burgage from the executors of John Syward, and in 1408 he obtained another two buildings there.C210/12/2-4, 6; Recs. Dorchester, 123, 160, 162, 173. Meanwhile, in July 1406, Bomel had acted as feoffee of three tenements in Dorchester on behalf of Thomas Gardener, to whom, with his wife Petronilla, he immediately regranted them. It was possibly one of these dwellings, in ‘Puselane’, which the couple conveyed to Bomel two years later, and in 1410 Gardener’s widow made him a further grant of two shops in High Street. In that year, too, he finally acquired from Richard Styl yet more property in the immediate vicinity.Recs. Dorchester, 164, 175, 184-6. The last mention of Bomel occurs in 1423.