Family and Education

b. by 1487. m. Joan, ?wid. of one Bunting, 2s. 2da.2

Offices Held

Jurat, New Romney 1510-d., chamberlain 1519-20; bailiff to Yarmouth 1514; commr. subsidy, New Romney 1523, 1524.3

Biography

Richard Stuppeny, who was born at ‘Kenerton’, probably Kenardington, Kent, was admitted to the freedom of Romney on 22 Mar. 1512. His parentage is unknown but he was probably related to Robert Stuppeny who had been made a freeman in 1474 and to a namesake, admitted in 1509, from whom he was generally distinguished by the suffix ‘senior’ or ‘the elder’. Richard Stuppeny, senior, was already a jurat and had begun his regular attendance at the meetings of the Brotherhood of the Cinque Ports.4

At the election held on 26 Dec. 1514 for the Parliament of 1515 Romney first chose Clement Baker and William Wodar, but Wodar was evidently unable or unwilling to go to Westminster—a few years later he was described as old and poor—and his name was crossed out in the record and Richard Stuppeny’s substituted. Stuppeny received £3 5s.6d. wages for an unspecified number of days’ attendance in two payments of 26s.8d.and 38s. 10d. He may have been returned again in 1523 when the name of only one of the Members for Romney is known. In 1524 the Brotherhood employed him with Edmund Jacklin alias Bocher* on a mission to seek exemption from the loan by way of a gift: at Easter 1524 they were each allowed 20s. for the ten days they had spent travelling to Leeds castle to enlist the support of the comptroller of the Household Sir Henry Guildford and then to London and to the court at St. Albans.5

Elected a jurat for the last time on 25 Mar. 1540, Stuppeny made his will on the following 4 May as Richard Stuppeny the elder of the parish of St. Nicholas, New Romney: it was proved on 28 Nov. 1540. He left his wife £20, a silver goblet and spoons and half the goods in his house called ‘Clyderowes’, the other half going to his unmarried daughter. His son Clement was to receive at 21 all the belongings in his messuage and brewhouse in Lydd and his second son Lawrence all his sheep and all the profits of his farm lands. Among the minor beneficiaries were his wife’s daughter Margaret Bunting and several members of the Stuppeny family, whose relationship to the testator was not given: Richard Bunting was one of the witnesses. Stuppeny asked to be buried in St. Stephen’s chancel on the south side of the church of St. Nicholas and willed his executors to ‘buy a stone to lay upon my grave, pictured with me, my wife and my children; and to be laid so that it may be two feet above the foundation’. Such a tomb survives, ‘new erected for the use of the ancient meeting and election of mayor and jurats of this port’ by Stuppeny’s great-grandson in 1622, but without the engravings and with the inscription of 1622 recording the death in 1526-7 of Richard Stuppeny, ‘jurat of this town in the first year of King Henry VIII’: the date of death may be that of Stuppeny’s younger namesake, although it appears that he was never a jurat.6

Ref Volumes: 1509-1558

Author: Helen Miller

Notes

• 1. Romney assessment bk. 1492-1516, f. 183.
• 2. Date of birth estimated from that of younger namesake (born by 1488). Canterbury prob. reg. C17 f. 68.
• 3. Romney assessment bk. 1448-1526, ff. 162 seq.; 1516-22 ff. 87 seq.; chamberlains’ accts. 1528-80, ff. 20 seq.; Cinque Ports White and Black Bks. (Kent Arch. Soc. recs. br. xix) 156; LP Hen. VIII, iii, iv.
• 4. Romney assessment bk. 1448-1526 ff. 70, 117, 119v; Cinque Ports White and Black Bks. 145-222 passim.
• 5. HMC 5th Rep. 550, 553; Romney assessment bk. 1492-1516 f. 183; 1516-22, f. 91v; Cinque Ports White and Black Bks. 191.
• 6. Romney chamberlains’ accts. 1528-80, f. 38v; Canterbury prob. reg. C17 f. 68; Arch. Cant. xiii. 475n.