BISHOP, John I

The John Bishop who, it is presumed, sat in six Parliaments for boroughs in Dorset, is difficult to identify. There was a man of this name living in Dorchester in 1423, when our MP first entered the Commons, for in January that year John Bishop took possession of a tenement on the south side of West Street in the town. However, that John, called ‘of Fordington’ (just outside Dorchester) made his will on 2 Sept. the following year, leaving this same property to his widow Joan, and died before July 1425.1 Dorchester Recs. ed. Mayo, 243, 252. We are on firm ground in identifying the MP for Lyme Regis with the John Bishop who in 1433 was a feoffee of estates in Dorset, Somerset and elsewhere when a marriage settlement was made on the daughter of Sir Thomas Brooke*, for Brooke’s mother Joan, who was also party to the settlement, held the borough of Lyme at farm from the Crown.2 Som. Feet of Fines (Som. Rec. Soc. xxii), 191. This raises the possibility of a connexion between the Dorset MP and his namesake John Bishop III* of Taunton, for the latter’s wife leased a burgage in Taunton from the same Joan Brooke. Yet the lack of continuity between the parliamentary careers of the two men makes it unlikely that they were one and the same.

It is also possible that John Bishop I was he who at some point in the late 1430s or early 1440s married Lucy, widow of William Everard of Castleton, near Sherborne. During Everard’s long minority in the years 1413 to 1431, his inheritance had been held by his guardian Richard Fitton*, but following the deaths first of Everard himself and then of Fitton (in 1437), the latter’s executor William Browning I* refused to pay the widowed Lucy the sizable profits of 316 marks which had accrued from the estate. She and her second husband Bishop brought a petition in Chancery against Browning.3 C1/15/90. Even if this was the former MP, he remains a surprisingly obscure figure.4 There is nothing to suggest that he was the John Bishop held in Dorchester gaol early in 1446 (CPR, 1441-6, p. 422), or the juror at the inquisition post mortem held in the town in 1451, following the death of John Cammell, esquire (C139/143/32). Another John Bishop m. by 1453, Juliana, da. of Stephen Crull and wid. of John Hunte, who held land in Walditch, Dorset, by a settlement made on her first marriage. She died bef. Easter 1459, when Bishop was sued for the property by her son William Hunte: Dorset Feet of Fines (Dorset Recs. x), 375; CP40/793, rot. 406.