Welcome New Team Member
We are pleased to announce that Darrell Larocque has formally joined the project's trail development team. Darrell has been working tirelessly on developing profiles since joining the project in September as a member of the Post-1500 Team and, after earning the pre-1500 badge, a member of the Pre-1500 Team. Thank you Darrell!
Profile of the Month: John Cornwallis
John came from a moderately well-off East Anglian family. Like many gentry who lived in the first half of the 16th century, he had an eye out for opportunities to improve his fortunes, and took advantage of the dissolution of monasteries in the 1530s.
He first comes to attention as a participant in a military expedition to Brittany - one of Henry VIII's expensive overseas adventures - at the start of the 1520s, serving under Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk and Earl of Surrey. He was knighted in 1523. After Thomas Howard's death in 1524, John seems to have maintained close ties with his son, another Thomas Howard, who succeeded his father as Duke of Norfolk.
This Howard association helped him to prosper. Thanks to it, John was an early participant in the despoliation of monasteries: in 1531, before the general process of dissolving them had commenced, the Duke of Norfolk, John and others were, by royal letters patent, granted property of a dissolved monastery at Rumburgh in Essex. The next year the Duke, John and others were given lands that had been held by the disgraced and deceased Cardinal Wolsey, at the Duke's request.
Profiteering in this way was what lots of respectable gentry did, but John established a reputation as being someone who could be trusted. A few years later, in January 1536, immediately after the death of the Bishop of Norwich, John and the treasurer of the Duke of Norfolk did what they could to safeguard the Bishop's property. They arrived too late to stop all the contents of the episcopal residence from being carried away by opportunistic servants, but a letter from courtier Richard Southwell to Thomas Cromwell, then Henry VIII's chief minister, said that they had managed to save most of the contents, and that £400 in monies - a large sum at the time - had been entrusted to John and the treasurer, "whose honest dealings it were too long to declare."
This reputation for honesty, and the favour of the Duke of Norfolk, doubtless helped John acquire the position of steward of the household of the future Edward VI. He died on 23 April 1544, at Ashridge in Buckinghamshire, where Edward was in residence. Among his assets was the advowson of the archdeaconry of Norfolk, and in his will he instructed his executors to present his younger son William to be archdeacon if he became a priest, or, if William did not take holy orders, to enable William to nominate someone else to the post - an example of the extent of lay power over appointments to relatively senior church positions.
Team News
The trail development team badged the following trails in December 2021:
Best wishes for a productive and Happy New Year!
