GILDENEY, Henry

More can be added to the earlier biography.2 The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 184-5.

An entry in the ‘recognizance book’ for the court of orphans at Bristol establishes the identity of one of Gildeney’s first two wives. This records that on 2 Oct. 1420 he and Joan his wife, daughter of the late John Canynges†, came before the mayor and bailiffs to acknowledge having received the sum of £30 from her stepfather Thomas Young†.3 Bristol RO, Bristol recs., ct. of orphans, recognizance bk., BCC/J/Or/2/1, f. 77. Gildeney’s marriage to Joan Canynges, in all likelihood his second wife of that name, was a very significant match since it linked him to two of the most important families of fifteenth-century Bristol and gave him brothers-in-law in Joan’s brothers, William* and Thomas Canynges * and her half-brothers, John* and Thomas Young II* (the sons of her stepfather).

Gildeney’s holdings at Bristol included lands in that town and its suburbs that had once belonged to the Uphille family, but the details and location of these holdings are unknown.4 E159/211, commissiones Mich. More informative is a deed recording that Gildeney and Nicholas Exeter bought the reversions of various properties in Worship Street, Lewin’s Mead and elsewhere at Bristol from the executors of another burgess, John Halewey (d.1405), in 1413.5 Bristol RO, All Saints parish recs., P/AS/D/WSS 26-27. Later, in November 1419, there was a settlement of lands at Siston in Gloucestershire and Bristol on Gildeney and his then wife Joan.6 CP25(1)/291/64/85. The properties purchased with Exeter do not however feature in Gildeney’s will: it is possible either that the MP was a feoffee on Exeter’s behalf (unless he and Exeter were acting jointly on behalf of someone else) or that they were his but he disposed of them at a later date. Whatever the case, Gildeney was evidently on good terms with the Haleweys, since in his will he made bequests to two Thomas Haleweys, one of them a chaplain and the other a fellow burgess. The latter Thomas was a feoffee for Gildeney, who appointed him overseer of the will.7 Bristol Wills (Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc. 1886), 119-21.