Family and Education

b. c.1530, 2nd s. of Henry Poole of Poole by Anne, 1st da. of Sir Edward Baynton^† of Bromham, Wilts. m. Margaret (d.1597), o. da. and coh. of Thomas Walton of Kemble, Glos. and Crudwell, Wilts. by Margaret, da. of John Earl of Wilts., 3s. inc. Henry 3da. suc. bro. 1556.

Offices Held

Biography

The Pooles of Oaksey were a younger branch of the family seated at Sapperton, Gloucestershire. Poole himself resided in the hundred in which the borough of Malmesbury was situated and his wife was the daughter of a local landowner actively concerned in property transactions in the shire. Poole’s own property was not extensive; what appear to be the same lands consisted in 1591 of 776 acres, paying a crown rent of £21 6s.3d., and he himself paid 26s.8d. on an assessment of £10 towards the subsidy of 1576. Yet even a modest estate situated so near the borough would have recommended its owner, who was moreover allied with many local families. Poole’s grandmother was a Danvers, and he was to appoint John Danvers overseer of his will; his mother was a Baynton; and although his sister Anne married ‘a man of small wealth’, the other sister Cecily allied herself with George Fettiplace of Gloucestershire, who was acquiring land in Wiltshire in the year of Poole’s election. Most germane to Poole’s return for Malmesbury, however, was his relationship to Sir James Stumpe^†, who had married Bridget Baynton. That Stumpe was a friend as well as a kinsman is shown by his having made Poole one of his two feoffees to uses in September 1559; and although he died in April 1563, the writs for the Parliament of that year had gone out in the previous November, when his influence could still have been exerted in Poole’s favour. There is no evidence of any activity by Poole in the two sessions of the 1563 Parliament, and he was not to sit again during his remaining 15 years of life. As the reign advanced, Malmesbury could find more important people to return.

Poole’s eldest son and heir, Henry, a boy of 13 at his father’s death, was to be an assiduous parliamentarian, as was the grandson Nevill. By the time that Henry and Nevill came to represent Malmesbury the family was rising in the world; in the course of the seventeenth century it was to acquire the manors of Oaksey, Poole and Kemble. In his will, made 16 Mar. 1578, Edward Poole, although ‘now of Cirencester’, asked to be buried by the side of his good father in Poole parish church, where a rough freestone monument in the north wall recorded his death at the age of 48 on 28 Apr. 1577. That the year should have been given as 1578 appears both from his will and from the inquisition post mortem on his manor of Chelworth.

Wilts. Vis. Peds. (Harl. Soc. cv, cvi), 7; Vis. Glos. (Harl. Soc. xxi), 125-6; St. Ch. 4/5/4, 4/7/21; Wilts. N. and Q. i. 330-1; iii. 166; iv. 264; v. 27, 176; vii. 211, 553; viii. 447, 522; Aubrey and Jackson, Wilts. Topog. Colls. 276 n. 1, 278, 279; Two Taxation Lists (Wilts. Arch. Soc. recs. br. x), 49; Req. 75/48 Eliz.; Williams, Parl. Hist. Glos. 153; C142/183/85.

Ref Volumes: 1558-1603

Author: S. T. Bindoff

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