John Rochford, Mayor of Boston, Lincolnshire

Abt 1352 - 1410  (~ 58 years)

• Name	John Rochford  [1, 2]
  Suffix	Mayor of Boston, Lincolnshire
  Birth	Abt 1352	of Boston, Lincolnshire, England   [3]
  Gender	Male
  Death	Between 20 Oct 1410 and 14 Dec 1410  [4]
  Alternate death	Aft 20 Oct 1410  [5]
  Alternate death	13 Dec 1410  [6]
  Person ID	I14366	Ancestry of PNH, TNH, and others | Ancestor of AP, Ancestor of JTS
  Last Modified	30 Sep 2020

  
  

  Father	Saier de Rochford,   b. Bef 1295, of Fenn near Boston, Lincolnshire, England d. Aft Aug 1372 (Age > 78 years)
  Mother	Joan Hillary
  Marriage	Bef May 1348  [3]
  Family ID	F8956	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart

  
  

  Family	Alice   d. 1409
  Marriage	Between 1375 and 1376  [3]
  Children	+ 1. Margaret Rochford,   b. Abt 1380   d. Aft 10 Feb 1443 (Age ~ 63 years)
  Family ID	F8955	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart
  Last Modified	28 May 2018

  
  

• Notes

  Mayor of Boston, Lincolnshire, 26 Jul 1386. Sheriff of Lincolnshire 20 Oct 1391 to 18 Oct 1392, and 4 Nov 1409 to his death. Knight of the shire for Lincolnshire 1390, 1394, 1397, 1399, and for Cambridgeshire 1407. Steward of the Duchy of Lancaster honour of Bolingbroke, 1399-1407. Constable of the Bishop of Ely's castle of Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, 1401-10. Alderman of the Corpus Christi guild in Boston from 1381 to 1386, 1391 to 1394, 1397 to 1399, 1409. "Rochford also compiled historical digests of two popular historical works and made an index of a third. His extracts from a copy of the Polychronicon of Ranulf Higden, with a continuation to 1410, were once in the now burnt British Library manuscript, MS Cotton Vitellius D.xii, and were presumably made in 1410. His extracts from the Antiquitates Judaicae of Josephus were made in 1406–7, and survive in Oxford, All Souls College, MS 37, together with his index of the Westminster Flores historiarum up to 1307. This volume, which also contains Nigel of Canterbury's Speculum stultorum and Hugh of St Victor's De sacramentis legis naturalis, may have belonged to him." [Oxford Dictionary of National Biography] Not to be confused with the John Rochford who was the son of his father's first wife. The claim in his entry in the History of Parliament that he cannot have been a son of Joan Hillary appears, from evidence presented by John Watson, to be based on a confusion between these two John Rochfords.

  
  

• Sources

  [S1351] John Watson, 15 Feb 2013, post to soc.genealogy.medieval. [S4342] Norfolk Families by Walter Rye. Two volumes, 1911-13. [S1988] "Sir Saier de Rochford and His Two Sons Named John" by John Watson. 8 Jul 2016. [S76] The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2004-ongoing. [S47] The History of Parliament. Some citations point to entries from the printed volumes not yet added to the online site. [S142] Royal Ancestry: A Study in Colonial and Medieval Families by Douglas Richardson. Salt Lake City, 2013.