STRAUNGE, Robert (c.1587-1630), of Cirencester, Glos. and Somerford Keynes, Wilts.

Straunge came from a long-established Cirencester family.7 E.A. Fuller, ‘Cirencester Guild Merchant’, Trans. Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc. xviii. 51. His grandfather, the last bailiff appointed by the abbot of Cirencester before the Dissolution, purchased the nearby manor of Somerford Keynes in 1554,8 E.A. Fuller, ‘Cirencester: the manor and the town’, Trans. Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc. ix. 340; CPR, 1553-4, p. 476; Vis. Glos. (Harl. Soc. xxi), 222; PROB 11/72, f. 33. and a cousin sat for the borough in 1572. Straunge trained as a lawyer and was called to the bar while representing Cirencester in the Addled Parliament, upon whose records he left no mark. He did not sit again, but in 1620 headed the list of signatories to the Cirencester return,9 C219/37/112. and in 1624 testified that (Sir) Maurice Berkeley*, an unsuccessful candidate in that years’s contested election there, had ‘to his seeming the greater number of the generality’.10 ‘Earle 1624’, f. 152v.

Straunge made his will on 25 Nov. 1630, in which he asked to be buried in Somerford Keynes with his parents, and left 20 nobles to the poor of Cirencester, where he owned ‘a great house’ and other property. He had made a settlement of lands on his daughters, but ordered that if he should yet have a son, ‘my wife Jane now being with child as I believe’, they should have portions of £800 each. He named his wife as executrix and Sir Edward Hungerford* and his cousin Robert Oldisworth (son of William†) as overseers.11 PROB 11/159, ff. 326-7. His lands were subsequently valued at £500 a year by the time his death in December 1630.12 E134/1651-2/Hil11. His only son, born five months later,13 Abstracts of Wilts. IPMs, 116-18. died unmarried at the age of 23 and never sat in Parliament.14 Aubrey, Wilts. 159. However, a son-in-law, Richard Southby, who inherited Somerford Keynes, sat for Cirencester in 1659.