JURDELEY, John

The Jurdeleys were a Buckinghamshire gentry family of middling status. The MP’s grandfather and namesake, who attested the Buckinghamshire elections of 1413 (May), 1416 (Mar.) and 1421 (Dec.), had served as a tax collector in the county in 1430, and was deemed sufficiently important to be required to take the general oath against maintenance in 1434.1 CFR, xv. 330; C219/11/1, 8; 12/6; CPR, 1429-36, p. 398. His son, the MP’s father, was a townsman of Eton who took a keen interest in Henry VI’s new collegiate foundation from the outset. He played a part in the college’s acquisition of its early endowment, to which he himself contributed, and he later established a chantry for himself and his wife Alice at the altar of St. Katherine (subsequently also known as the ‘Jurdeley altar’).2 Eton Coll. Archs., Bucks. deeds 11-13, 19, 183; SC6/HenVII/1473; M. Williamson, ‘Musicians’, in The Late Med. English Coll. ed. Burgess and Heale, 185-6; CPR, 1441-6, pp. 32, 33; VCH Bucks. iii. 262.

John Jurdeley himself is first heard of in 1455, when he was among his father’s feoffees of property in West Molesey, Surrey, which the older man held in trust for the London ironmonger William Paxman.3 CCR, 1454-61, p. 101; C1/25/92-96. There can be little doubt that he owed his return to the highly partisan Coventry Parliament of 1459 entirely to his father’s connexions at court, for – unusually – the sheriff’s return was explicit in specifying his identity as the ‘son of Thomas Jurdeley of Eton’. It is not known whether Jurdeley played the role assigned to him in the Commons or not, but he took little further part in public life after the Parliament ended. He is known to have been present at the Buckinghamshire county elections held at Chipping Wycombe in 1467, when he set his seal to the sheriff’s indenture, but otherwise may have restricted his activities to his local area. Thus, by the mid 1460s he was among the feoffees of the former lands of the prominent Windsor townsman Roger Fasnam*, and was drawn into the protracted litigation that arose from the injudicious management of the property by Fasnam’s widow.4 C1/31/56-62. The date of his death has not been discovered.