TREWINT, John, of Trewint in Blisland, Cornw.

Published in The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1386-1421, ed. J.S. Roskell, L. Clark, C. Rawcliffe., 1993
Available from Boydell and Brewer

Constituency

Dates

1419
Dec. 1421

Family and Education

Offices Held

Tax collector, Cornw. Dec. 1417, Nov. 1419, Dec. 1421, Oct. 1422, Mar. 1442.

Coroner, Cornw. up to 6 July 1421.1

Biography

Trewint in the parish of Blisland had long ago given its name to a Cornish family of some distinction. The ‘de Trewents’ possessed land there in King John’s reign, and in 1296 Stephen de Trewint’s property was assessed at £20 a year or more. In 1333 another Stephen, a leading Camelford burgess, held substantial properties at Trewint and Lostwithiel and in the parishes of Lanteglos-by-Camelford, Bodmin and St. Endellion, as well as farming some 200 acres and running two corn mills on the duchy manor of Helstone-in-Trigg. These holdings seem to have been depleted by the MP’s time, but the family home was still at Trewint, and John is also known to have occupied land at Pennance in the parish of St. Budock.2

In February 1412 an episcopal inquiry was ordered into the pollution by bloodshed of the churchyard at Blisland, during a violent quarrel between Trewint and John Langston. Following each of the Parliaments of 1417, 1419 and 1421 (Dec.), two of which he had himself attended, Trewint was appointed one of the four collectors in Cornwall of the tenths and fifteenths granted by the Commons. Meanwhile, writs had been issued in July 1421 for his suspension from office as a coroner in the shire, on the ground of insufficient qualification. The length of his term as coroner has not yet been ascertained, but it is quite possible that he had been occupying the post at the time of his second election to Parliament in 1420. In 1429 and 1435 he procured royal pardons of outlawry for his failure to appear in court to answer for debts together amounting to over £18, which he owed to John Polruddon (a fellow Member of the Commons of 1423), among others. In July 1432 a royal commission of oyer and terminer was issued following a complaint by the prior of St. Stephen’s, Launceston, of breach of his closes and assaults and threats against the canons and tenants, in which Trewint was implicated, but the background to the affair remains unclear. Trewint served as a juror at the inquest, held at Lostwithiel in January 1437, into the suspected suicide of Edward Burnebury*. In June that year, described as donzell (esquire) he obtained a licence from Bishop Lacy of Exeter to have a private oratory in any suitable place in the diocese. Five years later, in January 1442, he was present at the shire elections at Launceston.3 It was only two months afterwards that he was again appointed as a collector of parliamentary subsidies in the locality, but this is the last notice of him that survives.

Ref Volumes: 1386-1421

Author: L. S. Woodger

Notes

  • 1. CCR, 1419-22, p. 168.
  • 2. Maclean, Trigg Minor, i. 47; Cornw. Feet of Fines (Devon and Cornw. Rec. Soc. 1914), 527; Feudal Aids i. 222; J. Hatcher, Rural Economy Duchy of Cornw. 245.
  • 3. Reg. Stafford ed. Hingeston-Randolph, 24; CPR, 1429-36, pp. 12, 198, 307; C145/306/7; C219/15/2; Reg. Lacy (Canterbury and York Soc. lxi), 46.