Catalogue description Lease fr. Ric. Kilbee, mercer; Gil. Toonkes, goldsmith; Joh. Roberts, baker; Joh, baker;...

Lease fr. Ric. Kilbee, mercer; Gil. Toonkes, goldsmith; Joh. Roberts, baker; Joh, baker; Joh. Bowdle, girdler, chw., and Tho. Rowley, corviser, with consent of Chr. Davenport, Hen. Smyth, Joh. Herring, alderman, Sam. Gibson, vicar, Mic. Joyner, Ric. Bayes, Joh. Thomas, Ric. Barker, Tho. Potter, Raph Downes, of a messuage in Cross Cheaping, late in occupation of Tho. Baker, corviser, betw. lands of Widow Pittes and of Tho. Baker, for 21 years, at 10s. a year.

Seal, signatures, or marks of grantees; 2 seals gone. (dorso) Witn. to sealing, Joh. Clarke, Joh. Masters (mark) Sam. Brownell.

B. Counterpart. Sign. and seal (classic head) of Tho. Rowley.

No. 144 is a feoffment from one set of surviving feoffees - their number having been reduced to five - to a fresh set; the other three are leases of church property. Vincent Hewitt (144), husband of Deliverance, belonged, as we have so often said, to the family of Lord Lifford. Hen. Shawell (Sewell, Shewell) represented Coventry in the Parliament of 1606, and his son Richard married Mary, sister of Sir William Dugdale. Members of his family, like countless others, emigrated to America. This deed gives a curious example of the way society was mixed in the seventeenth century when a tenement lay between that occupied by a tinker on the one hand and a gentleman on the other. John Hales was, of course, one of the White Friars' Hales, who came originally of a Kentish stock, and settled in Coventry after the Dissolution. Sir Christopher Hales represented Coventry in the Tory interest in the early seventeenth century, but politics were expensive, and after his death in 1716 his heir sold the White Friars and Whitmore property to pay his debts. Eventually, as everyone knows, Hales' Place became the "House of Industry". Maybe, when workhouses are done away with, the unlovely buildings that surround it will vanish, and White Friars become a pleasant home again.