"In depth" Thomas Jones (c. 1568 – 1642 ) of Jones’s Mansion Under the Wyle

Thomas Jones (image) [+]
Portrait of Thomas Jones c1615 (Image courtesy of Shrewsbury Museums Service and www.darwincountry.org)

Jones’s Mansion at the bottom of Wyle Cop, known in Tudor times as ‘Under the Wyle’, was a large timber-framed house built close to the north end of the English or ‘Stone’ Bridge. It took its name from Alderman Thomas Jones (c. 1568-1642) who bought the property in 1617. (1) Known as ‘the rich Jones’, Thomas’s wealth was estimated by Government sources in 1623 and 1638 at £30-£40,000 – enough to put him in the top rank of provincial merchants. (2) That fortune had been made in the Welsh cloth trade by now dominated by the Shrewsbury Drapers’ company, to which Jones had been admitted in 1592. On several occasions he served as master (senior officer) of the company and as one of the two Shrewsbury bailiffs. He was also appointed sheriff for Shropshire in 1625. After a donation towards the re-building of old St. Paul’s cathedral in London, Jones was made Shrewsbury’s first mayor in 1638 (a single mayor now replacing the two bailiffs). (3) A portrait exists of him in Shrewsbury Museum, painted in 1615 when he was 47 years of age, prosperous and dressed in his aldermanic robes. It is paired with a portrait of his wife Sarah, aged 41 and daughter of a Chester alderman Richard Bavand. How Jones had met her, and what his connections with Chester were, is unclear.

Jones’s personal prosperity was symptomatic of one of the great periods in Shrewsbury’s commercial history. His own ancestors, originally from Holt in the old Marcher lordship of Dyffryn Clwyd, were examples of the Welsh diaspora, and it was actually his father William Jones (d. 1612), also a Shrewsbury draper, who established the family fortunes, obtaining a grant of arms in 1607. William almost certainly built the house at the east corner of Grope Lane and High Street where he and his wife Eleanor raised five children. Their fine tomb, once in St. Alkmund’s, with which parish the Jones family was so closely associated, now lies at the back of the abbey church. The eldest son Richard (d. 1638), who evidently inherited the house in High Street, (4) also became a draper and alderman. Thomas himself was the second son, followed by Edward (d. 1648) who became a lawyer and the borough Steward (chief legal advisor). Both Edward’s sons were also successful lawyers, the most distinguished being Sir Thomas Jones (1614-1692), who became a Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas at Westminster. The word ‘trimmer’ aptly describes Sir Thomas’s political career, although in the end he was sacked by James II for questioning the king’s prerogative. William Jones’s only daughter Sarah (d. 1641) married Sir Thomas Harris of Boreatton (nine miles north-west of Shrewsbury), while the youngest son Isaac (who married Elizabeth, a daughter of Richard Prynce of ‘Whitehall’, Abbey Foregate), migrated to London and also made a pile there, purchasing the Berwick estate just north of Shrewsbury in 1619. In turn his son Sir Samuel Jones, twice MP for Shrewsbury, made a colossal fortune in the City, buying estates in Essex and Northamptonshire. Samuel died childless in 1673, leaving money to found the almshouses at Berwick, just north of Shrewsbury, and the fate of his great estate has been entertainingly described by the historian Lawrence Stone. (5)

Few contemporary provincial families in fact can have fared as well as William’s descendants, even if Thomas Jones himself died childless, leaving most of his lands to his brother Edward. Although local histories and guide-books of Shrewsbury have often stated that Thomas lived at Jones’s Mansion in Dogpole, incorporating the ‘Old Mansion’ and now part of the Prince Rupert Hotel, it was in fact Edward who did so. This is clearly shown by deeds (6) and by the borough suit lists, which record by streets the names of adult males who in theory were obliged to attend the Great Court twice a year. (7) (The court dealt with communal offences.) Thomas’s abode after 1617, as already mentioned, was the mansion house at the bottom of Wyle Cop which afterwards became the town house of his nephew the judge Sir Thomas Jones. ‘Rich Jones’ also acquired a country seat at Carreghofa near Llanymynech, just over the Shropshire border in Wales, and his will shows that he was an important money-lender to Welsh people from the county of Montgomeryshire. (8) Carreghofa also passed in due course to Thomas’s nephew, as indeed did most of the estates of Thomas and his brother Edward. Afterwards this large inheritance descended through three sets of cousins (one of which also brought by marriage Stanley Hall near Bridgnorth), and eventually passed to Thomas Tyrwhitt (d. 1811), son of a Royal Navy captain from Somerset, but only after he had taken the name of Jones in 1790. Both he and his son Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt-Jones (d. 1839) resided at Stanley Hall, and both renewed social and political connections with Shrewsbury, as monuments on the walls of St. Alkmund’s church, re-built in the 18th century, amply demonstrate. Today the Tyrwhitt-Jones deeds and papers, now kept at Shropshire Archives, Castle Gates, provide valuable clues to Shrewsbury’s topographical history.

Jones’s Mansion itself was not built by Thomas – he only purchased it in 1617 – but by the previous occupants, the Weale family. It was, however, probably Thomas who was responsible for embellishing the ‘great chamber’ with plaster ornaments, and for an elaborate carved chimney piece, described with other parts of the house in the early 19th century. (9) Earlier, before the Dissolution, the site had belonged to Brewood monastery in Staffordshire, though rented to William Weale, a Shrewsbury dyer. (10) In 1581 the property was bought outright by his son William Weale junior (d. 1587), probably a lawyer, (11) who described it as ‘my dwelling house’. It was William jnr. who almost certainly erected the fine oriel over the rear of the entrance to the back yard, which prior to demolition in the 19th century bore the date 1575. During the 16th century the Weales had also acquired the plots lying between their house and the English (Stone) Bridge. These included what had once been an empty piece of ground, known as Crump’s Yard (after a 15th century owner), which lay immediately adjacent to the Stone Bridge and is clearly shown on the ‘Burleigh Map’. William Weale jnr. had bought the yard in 1561 and the site was later built over, (12) part of the in-filling that was so typical of this period in the town’s history. All of this range was in due course bought by Thomas ‘the rich’ Jones. The rear of the principal property, however, still retained an important dye-house, associated no doubt with the occupation of the earlier owner William Weale snr. In Jones’s time it was rented out. Eventually, in the early 19th century, the whole range was acquired by the ironmaster William Hazledine of Shrewsbury who in addition to his own foundry business dabbled in local property development. And in 1829 Jones’s Mansion was pulled down and replaced by the range of brick buildings which still stands today. (13)

Sources
1 Except where stated, details of the Jones family are taken from George Morris’s genealogical notes, Shropshire Archive [SA] 6001/2792, pp. 474-5; Rev. J.B. Blakeway, The Sheriffs of Shropshire, Shrewsbury (1831), 108; Transactions Shropshire Archaeological Society [T.S.A.S.] 2nd ser. viii. (1896), 168-9.
2 T.C. Mendenhall, ‘The social status of the more prominent Shrewsbury drapers, 1560-1660’, T.S.A.S. liv (1951-3), 167.
3 Calendar State Papers Domestic, 12 (1638-9), 306, 337-8.
4 See notes on that property.
5 L. Stone, An Open Elite? (1986 edn.), 84-6.
6 The principal source is the Tyrwhitt-Jones collection, SA 840.
7 The main series is SA 3365/1842, boxes 1-4; 3365/1843.
8 National Archives [NA] Prob 11/191, 22 Crane.
9 T.S.A.S. 3rd ser. vi. (1906), 380-1; Brit. Lib. Add. 21,016, fo. 24r.
10 For this and other deeds to the property in Under the Wyle, see the series SA 840/26-62.
11 William Weale (jnr.) described himself in the 1550s as ‘student at the law’, and was said in 1559 to be late of Clifford’s Inn: National Archives NA C1/1395/28; Calendar Patent Rolls, 1558-1560, 161. In his will he is described as ‘gent’: NA Prob 11/71, 62 Spencer.
12 SA 3365/163 (Wyle taxpayers, 1474), 840/39; NA Req 2/186/151, E134/9 Geo 2/Mich 20.
13 Brit. Lib. Add. 21,016, fo. 24r; SA Watton’s Newspaper Cuttings, Vol. 1, 303; SA 901/1.