page_title: Maurice Denys
section_title: Barrister
hierarchical_section_title: Maurice Denys / Barrister
caption_attribution_description: English: Armourials of Sir Maurice Denys(1516-1563) sculpted on Siston Court, Gloucestershire: "3 leopards' faces jessant-de-lys over all a bend engrailled"
context_page_description: Sir Maurice Denys of Siston Court, near Bristol, Gloucestershire, and of St John's Street, Clerkenwell, Middlesex, was an English lawyer and property speculator during the Dissolution of the Monasteries, at which time he served as a "powerful figure at the Court of Augmentations". He served as a Member of Parliament for Malmesbury in Wiltshire and as Treasurer of Calais. He was the builder of Siston Court in Gloucestershire, which survives largely unaltered since his time. His excessive speculation and borrowing caused the ruination of the Siston branch of the Denys family.
context_section_description: Denys entered the Inner Temple in London, where he trained as a barrister. He was appointed Marshal (1542-44, 1546), Steward (1545-46) and Bencher (1547).
  In 1537, King Henry VIII granted Denys the Receivership of the former Order of Saint John, suppressed in England during the Dissolution of the Monasteries. This considerable preferment may have been due to his eldest brother, Sir Walter Denys, having married Margaret Weston, a daughter of Sir Richard Weston, of Sutton Place, Surrey, the elder brother of Sir William Weston, the last Prior of the Order before its dissolution. Denys took up residence at St John's Gate, Clerkenwell, which had been the Order's headquarters, the chief residence there being the house by the Gate formerly occupied by Thomas Docwra, the last-but-one Prior. This had a great hall, a chapel, gardens and an orchard, and was later the residence of Lionel Cranfield, 1st Earl of Middlesex. Denys also resided at St John's Jerusalem, the Order’s former Commandery at Sutton-at-Hone in Kent. He continued as sole Receiver of the Order until 1544, and after that acted jointly with Thomas Poley.
  Denys later bought the ancestral Denys manor of Siston from his elder brother, Sir Walter, who had inherited it. This was perhaps in the year 1542, when his brother needed to obtain a Royal licence to sell him Kingston Russell, and one of the brothers went on to build a new country house there, known as Siston Court. The evidence for Sir Maurice being the builder comes from a letter dated 1607 to Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury from an agent offering him the  property for sale, which is summarised in the Cecil Papers:
  
  "Offers for sale the manor of Siston Glos., 6 miles (9.7 km) from Bath & from Bristol, heretofore the land of Sir Morris Dennis, present owner Mr Weeks. There is a new house of stone which cost £3,000 built by Dennis; a park which will keep 1,000 fallow deer & rich mines of coal which yield almost as great revenue as the land". 
  Siston was built at about the same time as two of Denys’s connections were also building nearby in Gloucestershire: Sir Nicholas Poyntz, the husband of his first cousin Jane Berkeley, at Newark Park near Wotton-Under-Edge, and Sir Richard Berkeley, his nephew at Stoke Park, Stoke Gifford. Denys borrowed heavily to buy not just Siston, but also other nearby estates,  including Barton Regis, a former Royal manor in Kingswood Forest, a large part of the Forest itself, and Abson and Pucklechurch from the Earl of Pembroke, who had obtained Pucklechurch at the Dissolution, as well as other manors in Gloucestershire and other counties.
caption: Arms of Denys, sculpted in stone on Siston Court
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