RYVES, John (1567-1634), of Ranston, Iwerne Courtney, Dorset and Downton, Wilts.

Ryves was descended from a junior branch of an ancient Dorset family. He is difficult to differentiate from two namesakes to whom he was related: an uncle based at Damory Court, Dorset, and a cousin who served as the county’s sheriff in 1606.7List of Sheriffs comp. A. Hughes (PRO, L. and I. ix), 39; Hutchins, iv. 96-7. Ryves himself trained as a lawyer and was called to the bar in 1584; however, he does not seem to have sought further advancement in the legal profession, and was fined in October 1601 for refusing to serve as a reader at the Middle Temple.8MTR, 416. He had probably taken up residence at Downton prior to his election there in 1614. Once in the Commons, he made no impression upon the records of the brief Addled Parliament. One of his younger sons, also John, was certainly living at Downton in 1629, and the family possessed a considerable estate in the parish by the time Sir Giles Eyre†, a judge in King’s Bench, married Ryves’s granddaughter in 1662.9Wilts. RO, 914/1; R.C. Hoare, Hist. Wilts. ‘Frustfield’, 39.

Ryves died intestate on 23 Oct. 1634. During the Civil War his sons became royalists, the eldest of whom, George, compounded for £100, while another was stripped of several ecclesiastical posts as a delinquent in 1646.10A. Bayley, Civil War in Dorset, 413; C. Herbert Mayo, Min. Bk. of Dorset Standing Cttee. 88; Wilts. N and Q, i. 77; J. Le Neve, Fasti Ecclesiae Angicanae, iii. 37. Ryves’s grandson, George, represented Wareham in the 1685 Parliament.