Family and Education

1st s. of Sir Ralph Dodmer by his w. Margaret née Townsend. educ. L. Inn 1546. m. Helen, da. of Augustine Hynd, alderman of London, 1da. suc. fa. 1536.2

Offices Held

Biography

Dodmer probably gained his seat for St. Albans through the influence of his step-father Sir Thomas Pope^†, who had acquired property there at the dissolution of the monasteries and was a close friend of Sir Nicholas Bacon^†, high steward of the borough. His return at a by-election for Grampound was probably due to the 2nd Earl of Bedford, whose religious views he shared.

Dodmer inherited from his father, a brewer, alderman and lord mayor of London, a number of ‘brewhouses’ and other property in Thames Street and the parish of Allhallows. Through Pope he acquired land in Compton, Gloucestershire, and the reversion to monastic estates in Oxfordshire, but he lived at Putney. He is not known to have been called to the bar or to have been in legal practice. He died 9 June 1571. His will, made in April and proved in August the same year, asked ‘my good lord Burghley ... according to his accustomed and most godly disposition’, to help the widow to gain the wardship of the heiress Elizabeth, who was only five years old. Dodmer left detailed instructions about the disposal of his London and Surrey property and its furnishings, down to the wainscoting at Putney, ‘fixed with sixpenny nails’. Hogsheads of ‘double double beer’ in his ‘greatest beer brewhouse’ in London were to be shared among his friends. In a long religious preamble he attacked the ‘usurpation, supremacy and power’ of the ‘pope, high bishop of Rome’, that ‘little horn which shall spring out of the ten horns’ of Daniel’s prophecy, and the Catholic doctrines of purgatory and prayers for the dead. His hope for salvation was founded on the love of God ‘without any desert of man or saint ... according to the doctrine of St. Paul’.3

Ref Volumes: 1558-1603

Author: N. M. Fuidge

Notes

• 1. Did not serve for the full duration of the Parliament. Folger V. b. 298.
• 2. T. Warton, Life of Sir T. Pope, 161, 185; A. B. Beaven, Aldermen, i. 191, 207; ii. xlviii; LP Hen. VIII, xv. 170; C142/161/108.
• 3. DNB (Pope, Sir Thomas); mayor’s ct. bk. of St. Albans from 1586, f. 80; C142/160/75, 161/108; LP Hen. VIII , xv. 170; Extracts from the Ct. Rolls of Wimbledon (anon. 1866), pp. 109, 135; Surr. Musters (Surr. Rec. Soc. x), 148; PCC 35 Holney; E150/385/1.