Family and Education

s. of William Trelawny by Joan, da. of Richard Doyngull. m. Maud, da. of Robert Menwenick, ?3s. John II* and poss. John III* and Richard*.

Offices Held

Commr. of inquiry, Cornw. Nov. 1400 (piracy);1 array Nov. 1405.

Biography

That three members of the Trelawny family in successive generations were called John makes distinguishing between them largely a matter of conjecture. This MP, the eldest of the trio, was still a minor in 1382 when Sir Ralph Carminowe*, his guardian, presented an incumbent to Menheniot, a property which Trelawny had inherited from his maternal uncle five years previously. However, he had come of age by 1386, when he sold a tenement in Launceston to the local priory. At the assizes held in the same town two years later he was bound over, in sureties of 500 marks, to keep the peace, but he himself stood bail for Nicholas Broomford*. This may well have had something to do with a serious incident in which he and others, including Roger Menwenick* (no doubt a kinsman of his wife), had assaulted Sir Humphrey Stafford I* at ‘Thurlaton’, by shooting at him with a ‘gunne’. Trelawny was often associated with Menwenick, who represented Launceston in the same Parliament he himself attended for Bodmin, and on the occasion of their election he was one of Menwenick’s mainpernors. Moreover, in 1393, they had together been accused at the assizes of taking lands in ‘Northbuketon’ and ‘Redaland’ by force. Trelawny and his wife owned houses at Woolston, Trelawny and ‘Tregarrick’, and in 1400 they were granted an episcopal licence to have an oratory at each place.2

The date of this John Trelawny’s death is not known, but he may have been the man whose interest in a third part of the manor of Tregondale in Menheniot was the subject of a settlement made in 1407, and who, in the same year, stood surety for John Hawley I* of Dartmouth.3 It is even possible that it was he and not his son, John II, who served as a knight of the shire in 1413.

Ref Volumes: 1386-1421

Author: L. S. Woodger

Notes

Variants: Trelauny, Treleweny, Trelouny.

• 1. E143/19/1.
• 2. Reg. Brantingham ed. Hingeston-Randolph, 37, 49, 80; CIMisc. vi. 376; JUST 1/1502 mm. 171, 171d, 189d; CPR, 1388-92, p. 134; C219/9/13; Reg. Stafford, 281.
• 3. Cornw. Feet of Fines (Devon and Cornw. Rec. Soc. 1950), 862; CCR, 1405-9, p. 247.