Cyriac and Florence Petit

Date of Brass:

1591

Place:

Boughton under Blean

County:

Kent

Country:

Number:

IV

Style:

Southwark

Description

September 2020

 

The late-Elizabethan brasses at Boughton under Blean in Kent form an interesting group. The inscription on Thomas Hawkins's brass of 1587 emphasises his age, 101, and his service to Henry VIII. The inscription of the Petit brass of 1591 is more concerned with family. The inscription for Elizabeth Driland, d.1591, records her marriage to John Driland of Faversham, gentleman. There are also family links between them. Thomas Hawkins' son Thomas married Anne, one of the daughters of Cyriac Petit, and Elizabeth Driland was another daughter. Her figure is lost but her inscription now appears beneath her parents' figures after a Victorian restoration placed it under them and left their inscription on its own. 

Like Thomas Hawkins, Cyriac Petit served Henry VIII. He was feodary of Kent, recording land tenure in the county and leaving behind a written Feodary of Kent that updated a book compiled in Edward III's time, as Petit recorded:

'This is the Book of the Reasonable Aid levied in the time of King Edward III on the occasion of knighting his eldest son in the 20th year of his reign, and now remaining in the Exchequer. This book of the knight’s-fees in Kent has been amended and renovated with greater freshness and clearness as to the names of all the possessors and proprietors of those lands, and also the names by which the lands themselves are now called or known, by Cyriac Petit, the King’s Feodary in Kent, as well from the testimonies, relations, and admissions of the possessors and proprietors in those times and the present, as from the evidence and declarations of divers trustworthy persons in each hundred throughout the county of Kent in the 35th year of King Henry VIII.'

Petit was born in the early 1510s and by 1543 is recorded working for John Baker, a Kent MP. He was under-steward of a number of Kent manors in 1545, a commissioner of relief in 1550, and in Mary's reign was involved in the persecution of those of the reformed religion as a a commissioner for heretical books in the diocese of Canterbury, working with John Baker.

During this reign he became an MP, initially in April 1554 as member for Winchelsea, then in November of the same year as member for Chippenham in Wiltshire. He also served in Kent as a justice of the peace. Further commissions about the division of crown lands in Kent in 1557, as surveyor of lands for Cardinal Pole in 1556-7 and lastly surveying lands of the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1560 probably kept him too busy to pursue a parliamentary career any further. He had benefited from the Dissolution of the Monasteries, acquiring the lease of the tithes of Borden and Stockbury, formerly of St Augustine's Abbey, Canterbury, in November 1538.

He became a freeman of Canterbury in March 1539 and was excused paying for that privilege. He acquired further former monastic property in Canterbury and London in September 1544, paying £476. In November 1554 he and John Webbe paid £80 for the remainder of a lease at Boughton under Blean which had been forfeited to the see of Canterbury, then in Queen Mary's hands, following the suicide (then a felony) of Sir James Hales. Hales' widow brought an action against Petit to recover the lease but was unsuccessful, the point of law contested being whether the felony was committed during Hales' lifetime. 

Petit was around eighty years old when he died, outliving his wife Florence by over twenty years after her death on 19 March 1568. He left five sons and four daughters. The brass of the sons is lost but that of the daughters survives, as does a shield showing the arms of Petit impaling those of Chernock, Florence's family, He willed to be buried next to his wife at Boughton, leaving his manor of Colkins and other lands to his eldest son Henry and his wife Mary.

Henry and Mary appeared on a list of recusants alongside Elizabeth Driland and Anne Hawkins in 1588. It is ironic that Petit, named as one of the oppressors in John Foxe's Book of Martyrs, should be commemorated by a brass from the same Southwark or London workshop as that book's printer, John Daye.

 

References:

http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1509-1558/member/petyt-cyriak-1517-91

Charles I Elton, Tenures of Kent (1867)

Jon Bayliss, 'The Southwark Workshops, 1585-1605', TMBS vol XIX, part 2 (2015), 111-130.

 

Copyright: Jon Bayliss