PERSONS, John (d.1424), of Hindon, Wilts.

Little is known about Persons’s background and family, although his description as ‘junior’ in 1417, when he appeared as an arbitrator in a matter of ownership of land at Hill Deverill and Maiden Bradley in Wiltshire, and in 1420 on the electoral return for the shire, suggests that his father was then still living. Save for a tenement in Hindon, rented in succession by the father and by John’s brother, William, nothing is known about the family property.1Tropenell Cart. ed. Davies, ii. 14, 74, 97-98.

It was probably the older John who attended the county elections at Wilton for the Parliament of 1414 (Apr.). In the year before his only return to Parliament John junior served as escheator of Wiltshire, as such being cited in Chancery by the prioress of Amesbury for the unjustified seizure of the temporalities of the priory into the King’s hands.2C219/11/3; C1/4/174, 69/343. Persons’s only known connexion of any note was with John Arundel, Lord Mautravers (and de jure earl of Arundel), who before his death in April 1421 demised to him for life a rent of £20 a year from the Wiltshire manors of Sherrington, Codford, Orcheston and Elston. In May Persons and William Ryman (a Sussex lawyer who for many years had been an administrator of the estates of the earldom) were granted custody of the greater part of Arundel’s lands during the minority of the heir, at a farm of 500 marks p.a. Persons later assigned his right in the wardship to Sir John Cornwall (afterwards Lord Fanhope).3CFR, xiv. 419; CPR, 1422-9, p. 291; CCR, 1419-22, p. 236.

Persons died on 7 Apr. 1424. His heir was his brother, William.4C139/20/45.