KENNINGTON, John

The most anonymous of all the known MPs for Oxford of Henry VI’s reign, Kennington sat in the Commons alongside the scarcely less obscure Reynold Skyres*. Neither of them was from the ranks of the most established burgesses of the town, where members of the civic oligarchy were probably reluctant to stand for a Parliament summoned as the country was sliding towards civil war. Skyres was a ‘gentleman’ but it is possible that Kennington was a mere taverner. In the early 1450s John Kennington, ‘hospes’, rented the Black Bell in the north Oxford parish of St. Mary Magdalen from New College, although he seems to have relinquished his lease by 1458. In about 1451, this taverner journeyed on an errand to Bangor in north Wales. He carried with him in cash £11 8s. 4d., which he delivered to William Sander, archdeacon of Anglesey, for safekeeping. The money was owed to an unidentified person or persons by assignment of Master Hugh Wycombe, presumably a scholar of Oxford university for whom Kennington was acting.1 Registrum Cancellarii Oxoniensis, i (Oxf. Historical Soc. xciii), 232; If a member of New College, the institution from which the taverner leased the Black Bell, Hugh was possibly a kinsman of its founder, William of Wykeham.