SMOLYN, John

This John Smolyn was probably related to a namesake who had represented Chichester in the Parliament of April 1384, and may even have been his son. Either he or the older John was a parishioner of St. Olave’s church in the city, and as such reported that all was well in the parish when the bishop made a formal visitation in April 1397.3 Reg. Rede, i (Suss. Rec. Soc. viii), 106. Our MP made his mark as a royal official, after being appointed in 1402 as tronager and pesager in the port of Chichester, with authority extending along the whole coast-line of Sussex and Kent as far as Dover. This appointment, initially made during royal pleasure, was confirmed a year later and again in February 1406, so that Smolyn continued to hold the office for a period of six years altogether.4 CPR, 1401-5, pp. 160, 301; 1405-8, p. 145; 1408-13, p. 26. In Chichester itself he was given a less important role. As constable of the city, he was the man who in the first week of Lent in 1409 arrested one Thomas Knight and put him in gaol on a charge of defaming his former master the prior of Hayling. Knight revealed to his captor that he had concealed a bag of gold in the doorway of the chapel at Colworth, and following its retrieval ownership of the valuable contents was disputed between the Crown and the bishop of Chichester.5 E159/186, recorda Hil. rot. 11.

Smolyn was elected constable of the staple in Chichester in May 1410, and from the following Michaelmas he filled both this post and that of mayor of the city. Furthermore, while so engaged in the two offices, in October he received another royal appointment, for in association with Simon Blakebourne, one of the serjeants-at-arms, he was granted the farm of alnage in Surrey and Sussex for a period of three years, the two of them then agreeing to serve as alnagers.6 CFR, xiii. 194. As mayor of Chichester, on 12 Feb. 1411 he obtained a licence for himself and his fellow citizens to grant in mortmain to the dean and chapter of the cathedral a vacant plot of land in West Street, adjacent to the cathedral close, which was held of the King in free burgage.7 CPR, 1408-13, p. 277. The fact that Smolyn attested the shire elections held in Chichester for the Parliaments of May 1413, November 1414 and November 1415 may indicate that he continued to serve as mayor beyond his term of 1411-12, but no evidence survives as to the mayor’s identity during these years.8 C219/11/2, 5, 7. It is possible, too, that he was elected to one or other of the seven Parliaments summoned between 1404 and 1416 for which Chichester’s returns have been lost. His earliest recorded election, to the Parliament of 1425, came late in his career. While up at Westminster in the Easter term he was sued in the court of common pleas by Richard Etlysley for a debt of £20, and the suit continued during the second session of the Parliament that summer. Smolyn was described in the plea as a mere husbandman, but it was as ‘merchant’ that he was allegedly indebted to John Godfrey* of Winchelsea in the sum of five marks. In the Easter term of 1426, while he was attending the Parliament at Leicester, he himself brought a suit against a London vintner for eight marks.9 CP40/657, rot. 255; 658, rots. 51, 89d; 661, rot. 193d. He is not recorded thereafter.